(author here) I believe I had checked first in this case, which is why it was surprising. Sorry not to mention that in the post. This was in San Francisco, and there were multiple cars shown on the map.
In my experience, I usually don't see this kind of price change before the request has actually been confirmed - and I have seen Lyft change the price between showing me the estimate and confirming the request (with an apologetic confirmation dialog, possibly only after some holding period has timed out).
Maybe in my case where the high quote came first, the opposite scenario happened - a glut of drivers appeared between my request and hers, raising supply.
Opaque pricing is powerful partly because we don't know. This enables people to construct a plausible story to explain any price.
Well, whichever one checked first, the point still holds. Checking is not a free operation and you should expect it to have consequences and it to affect Uber's demand forecasts etc., and affect other price quotes. You do not have independence here and so the comparison is not as meaningful as it seems. As the Roman wit said, "when two people do the same thing, it's not the same thing."
(The right way to do this is to randomize multiple independent occasions - wait until one of you was about to call an Uber, immediately flip a coin to decide who does, each time checking you or your wife's Uber, and never both, and compare the long-run average.)
> with an apologetic confirmation dialog, possibly only after some holding period has timed out
Right. I've seen the same thing myself. They would prefer not to apologize to the customer because they changed the price, because it is in fact annoying and a bad customer experience. So the prices are surely carefully set in many ways with an eye towards not changing as much as possible.
> This enables people to construct a plausible story to explain any price.
Indeed. So you should mention one of the most plausible stories if you're going to list a bunch of them.
Too humble to mention that you're the creator :) thank you Ben! In my opinion, Slack is the application that really popularized the command bar/palette in the mainstream.
Popularized, probably true. But now I wonder which (maybe default?) keybinds I had for this in tiling window managers before Slack existed. And no clue when and how OS X introduced cmd-space.
(author here) Thanks for posting! I need to update/post a follow-up with a couple of notes since I wrote that post:
* Ben van Enckevort, the original creator of the Slack quick-switcher with Ctrl/Cmd-K, showed up in the StackOverflow thread to tell us the choice of "K" was fairly arbitrary: https://ux.stackexchange.com/a/153937 . Thanks AJ Montoya for pointing it out too :)
* Dean Jackson pointed out TextMate as the predecessor to Sublime, including fuzzy search jump-to-file
* Amit Patel suggested Emacs as a potential originator, which led us to find Richard Stallman's manual for Emacs 150 (1980) which does have the Meta-X "extended command" that is very similar to today's command palette. A 1978 TECO manual doesn't mention this, so right around 1980 would be the right time frame.
I'm very excited to be interviewing people who are creating interesting things with software for upcoming blog stuff at digitalseams.com !
As I've grown older, I've found myself more interested in people and their stories and motivations - especially as I know a bunch of people who are technically skilled, but feel unable or unworthy to create instead of consuming. So it's inspiring to hear really great creators talk about those same burdens and how they overcome them.
If this sparks your interest shoot me an email at bobbie @ (site above in comment)
Back when I was applying to college, there was the idea of "yield protection": a college might decline overqualified students to optimize for their "yield" (the percentage of admitted students who accepted). The yield might affect college rankings.
I'm not sure whether yield protection is actually practiced vs. just a paranoid student meme, but it was the first thing I thought of here and I'm surprised it wasn't mentioned in the article.
My thought as well - the infra already exists through MTurk, as well as the ethical and societal questions. You can already pay people pennies per task to do an arbitrary thing, chain that into some kind of consensus if you want to make it harder for individuals to fudge the results, offer more to get your tasks picked up faster, etc.
I'm a mise en place hater personally, since I make a lot of things that are essentially stir fries or stews where some ingredients need significantly more time. Sure, go for it on more complicated recipes, but it's really overkill for lots of daily cooking.
I hear ya there, it’s not necessarily time-optimal when you’re not multi tasking and one step takes much longer than others. I’ll often start my onions and then go get my mise on.
But there’s something zen and satisfying about good mise.
There are lots of people pretending to be Google and friends. They far outnumber the real Googlebot, etc. and most people don't check the reverse DNS/IP list - it's tedious to do this for even well-behaved crawlers that publish how to ID themselves. So much for User Agent.
User agent has been abused for so long, I forget a time when it wasn't.
Anyone else remember having to fake being a Windows machine so that YouTube/Netflix would serve you content better than standard def, or banking portals that blocked you if your agent didn't say you were Internet Explorer?
In my experience, I usually don't see this kind of price change before the request has actually been confirmed - and I have seen Lyft change the price between showing me the estimate and confirming the request (with an apologetic confirmation dialog, possibly only after some holding period has timed out).
Maybe in my case where the high quote came first, the opposite scenario happened - a glut of drivers appeared between my request and hers, raising supply.
Opaque pricing is powerful partly because we don't know. This enables people to construct a plausible story to explain any price.
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