I personally just want a minimalist TKL without a ridiculous key font, which doesn't seem to be too common. The 4C Das Keyboards seem nice but apparently they aren't Cherry keys, so based on what I've heard, I'm wary.

"Now, this does require one huge prerequisite: every candidate must have a side project that they wrote, all by themselves, to serve as their calling card.

I don’t think that’s unreasonable. In fact, I think you can very happily filter out anyone who doesn’t have such a calling card. (And lest I be accused of talking the talk without walking the walk: I am very happily employed as a full-time software engineer; I travel a lot, and I write books, along with this here weekly TechCrunch column; and I still find the time to work on my own software side projects. Here’s my latest, open-sourced.)"

The usually spoken requirement of having side projects in 2015 is the job posting's equivalent of the bachelor's degree being the new high school diploma/GED. If every programmer did it, then every programmer would in theory be far more qualified for the interesting jobs where more difficult things happen, but then ultimately fall into the same trap where they've still not done enough compared to the people with the side-project programming equivalent of their master's.

This will become a vicious cycle until companies with more experienced programmers realize that life is not about programming, and most of the stuff you're working on is not all that important, with even your average (or slightly below average) programmer being capable of doing the work. In most cases, it's a job like any other. I fear that this may never happen.

I think some of these average companies should recognize themselves for what they are and be more accepting of average candidates. Give some new people in the industry a chance, train some entry-level people, especially if the work you're doing is not really cutting edge tech but just web apps or data analysis stuff that bright but not world-class people can learn with practice.

Also, companies should just focus more on candidate experience. I have interviewed and been rejected by Facebook a few years back. They did expect me to jump through hoops, but in general, they had a few original questions, I felt like they had a great candidate experience with polite recruiters, they put me up in a nice hotel and expensed it instantly, and I knew that if I did get through those hoops they were going to pay me a lot of money. I didn't get it, but I felt fine afterwards. I'm angry at all the average companies that don't do any of that but think they're entitled to put you through the same grinder. My only big criticism of companies like Facebook is they should give more feedback so you feel like you got something to improve upon. Also, I know Zuckerberg campaigns hard for H1Bs, but when Facebook is paying people what they're paying, I assume he genuinely does want to find the world's best and is not just trying to undercut labor. Although most H1Bs are in fact about undercutting labor, and the simple solution is to change it to an auction rather than a lottery and give them more time to look for new jobs before they have to leave. (note, I do not work for Facebook, I interviewed there once and got rejected but had a massively more positive experience with them than most companies. Google is also an excellent company to interview for, I'm sure there are some others but not many).

While I can't speak for San Francisco's bus system, everything about this product video screams to me that the solution that is being provided here does not actually solve a problem other than "I am white, privileged, and want to ride on a fancy looking bus where I can buy a Vita Coco. I also want to pay as much as $6 per ride, which is egregiously more expensive than something that amounts to little more than public transit needs to be."

This whole thing is basically the epitome of the tech bubble and offers little to nothing of real value.

Wanting to be at work on time without allotting an extra 30 minutes for public transit shenanigans is hardly the epitome of privilege.

Addendum: this is a private company that technically speaking does not have to adhere to any schedule and isn't liable for various things (according to the TOS posted in this tree), so if anything you're more likely to be on the wrong end of things compared to an organized public transit system.

The problems in Toronto result in 30-60 minute waits for a bus or a streetcar in the wintertime (during -20°C weather too). Then you will get about 5-10 in a row, all within a few seconds or minutes of each other.

This happens because Toronto does not schedule its transit very well (or at all). So everything is late and miserable.

If Leap schedules things correctly, in part because they are a private company and have incentive to do so, they may be able to beat public transit solutions - in terms of reliability of service - without breaking a sweat.

Again, I don't know how much this info is relevant here or for SF. But there are multiple ways that a private company can improve on the timing and scheduling of existing public transit.

I don't know what you think the TTC does all day, but it's not sit around and say "if only we had competition, we'd make the busses better". It may not be possible to schedule to avoid busses bunching up during peak times, if that's how traffic behaves. The only way to fix it might be to run an excess of under-utilized busses, which cuts into profit margins. Which is something a private company with higher rates might be able to do, but the TTC is limited because service has to be accessible to everyone.

The risk of a private company like this showing up is that it'll decide to focus intensively on the 20% of routes that yield 80% of profit. This bleeds the public transit service of funds needed to run less profitable services at off times that are used by people without 9-5 jobs, or people in less privileged areas. So the rich get better bus service, and no longer subsidize the service for the poor.

In Seattle the buses have posted times on a schedule at each stop and they pretty much nail it in my experience. If a bus is more than about three minutes late people start looking around and checking their watches.

There are two sides to on schedule performance - what the bus does, and what the schedule says. You are probably right that the bus can't move any faster just because it is private. On the other hand, I bet a tech savvy company can do vastly better at predicting what the actual bus schedule will be as well as communicating any deviations from the schedule in real time.

It's mainly traffic issues, or a single wheelchair/baby carriage clogging up the exits and requiring more time than anticipated. It's hard to make useful predictions for that.

> as well as communicating any deviations from the schedule in real time.

The municipal public transits in many European cities already have real-time schedule updates (and replacements) delivered via smart phone apps and digital signage posts at the bus stops. Big IT (I think Siemens, e.g.) has been offering and deploying solutions for this for years now.

It's worth a shot. I like seeing experiments like this that public transit can't do, even if it ultimately ends up failing.

I simply don't have time to fight with professional bureaucrats when something sucks, and the professional bureaucrats know it.

Basically, the TOS disclaims pretty much everything claimed by their marketing material (ie. they are not a transportation company, don't claim to be one, don't make any guarantees or promises about what they do, etc; also, you are dependent on the bus driver to actually transport you because the driver is the 'third party' you are actually contracting with and they won't refund you if they fail to transport you [which they most definitely won't, because they aren't a transport company]).

This isn't a subsidiary of M & M Enterprises, by any chance?

In general I'm completely bearish though on these new types of public transportation options. We're about 10 - 15 years away from self driving electric cars that could fit 2 - 4 or 8 people based on design that will optimize route choices and pick you up from your door and drop you at the door you want to go whether that's 3 miles away or intercity. And the economics are already there ($6 probably gets you a long way is a Lyft rideshare right now) Leap could pivot to support that new model but I think super large vehicles on fixed routes is going the way of the dinosaur.

What if busses had no seats at all? What if they were 100 degrees? What if they didn't have shock absorbers? What if they smelled bad (worse)?

Rider comfort IS real value. You've just anchored your perspective at the current level and decided that anything above that is "pretentious" which is itself kind of pretentious.

Also, it seems tautological that luxury services benefit the wealthy. What's the alternative? Socialism?

In this case, the Leap is doing what someone else already alluded to: giving you a Lexus version of a bus. It's not like it's providing air conditioning where it didn't exist, or needed room where it didn't exist [in fact, it does the opposite].

Added value is when you get more for your money. Like when you get a free bag of peanuts with your ride, or your ride costs less, or introduces air conditioning. Adding luxury changes the value, but while also increasing the cost. And things introduced purely as a luxury tend to be pretentious.

As it's designed now, there are less seats, higher prices, and increases the amount of traffic on the roads. If this service became popular they'd either have to raise the price (ala Uber/Lyft surges) or increase the number of buses, which forces you to choose between increased cost or increased traffic, neither of which improves transportation.

I wasn't trying to suggest we shouldn't have luxury items. Just that when it comes to an alternative bus [transportation means], what we don't need is a luxury bus. We need a more efficient bus. Less seats, higher prices and a potential increase in traffic does not seem more efficient to me.

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Let's be honest. This service is intended to cater to people who are "too classy" for the bus, but too cheap for an expensive car service. It's not getting them there faster, and definitely not cheaper, but it is giving them fancy drinks and a space to open up their laptops away from the poor, unwashed masses. It's the upper-middle-class bus service. "Tired of looking at poor people? Need a place to USB charge your phone? Like the idea of going to work in a mobile coffee shop? Try Leap!"

Now that's pretentious.

Say there response is to recommend to their friend, "Oh, I only use Uber when I come back home after a night out, but when I go to work I use Leap, I love that I can put my feet up on the leather seat across from me while typing away!"

Your user seems to have issues rooted in self-identifying through external means. Why is it that they feel compelled to compare Leap to Uber? To note I think it increases their socio-economic status (in their mind) for that brief moment thus generalizing them to the specific core of typical Uber users. This is a self-transformation expectancy that keeps them coming back to the product, Leap! They're not happy with themselves to a certain (obviously monetary) extent. As a business it should follow a categorical imperative to come up with a way to (a) accept the pretentious user (b) be pretentious product (c) BUT help user keep some measure of progress, allow them to get rid of that maladaptive urge >> make them begin a drawing, everytime they ride have them sketch one line at a time. Over the course of a month if they're active then they will have become a amateur artist in that timeframe -- a transformation. (d) feel good.

Uh, lets not place the race card here. In all major US cities we have 100+ years of political corruption, union protectionism, bad planning, kick the can mentality, etc that have led to a shitty level of public services. A non-government competitor can help to keep the government honest as people see how much better things can be. As a Chicagoan, my advice is, don't become like Chicago. We ran full tilt towards the "don't challenge the government, we know best" approach which just led to the corrupt machine politics that is driving the city into bankruptcy. I would love to take a non-CTA bus to work. I can't see how anyone could possibly do worse than the CTA bus system.

>Some critics have raised worries that these bus startups, like Chariot and competitor Leap Transit, will cause the broader public to disinvest in the city’s municipal transit system.

This is a feature, not a bug. I mean, should universities and hospitals give up on their private bus system because it "threatens" the public one? If the public system is so terrible, continuing to prop it up makes no sense.

Personally, the idea that we need to build this ultra-egalitarian society is highly hypocritical, especially on an entrepreneurial forum like HN. Yeah, I'm willing to pay to not ride with crackheads and criminals. There's nothing wrong with that, the same way I bought a house far away from crackheads and criminals.

I don't know where you are in Chicago, but tooling around Streeterville/Gold Coast/Lincoln Park, I always found the CTA buses clean and punctual. I don't think CTA is a great example of union protectionism or bad planning in Chicago (I'd level those at CPS/CPD).

If you can't see how anyone could do worse than CTA, try riding the public transit in the Rust-belt east coast cities (Philly, Baltimore, Wilmington). It can get so much worse.

To be fair, those are the three wealthiest parts of the city, so there's incentive to make them work properly. I think when you leave the high-income bubble you'll see the CTA isn't like that normally.

>Philly, Baltimore, Wilmington

Those aren't remotely tier-1 cities with the budget we have. Its not a fair comparison. Not to mention, in places like Baltimore, driving and parking to work are feasible and economic options. In Chicago that's not going to work out.

I regularly waited 45 minutes for the 55 Garfield or X55 Garfield Express (years ago, before budget cuts killed it). It's supposedly on a 10-15 minute schedule.

I would love to see the public transit systems improved, busses included. The issue here is that the privatized system and frills that the Leap busses have, which for all intents and purposes are mostly unnecessary, scream upper class while coming across as if the goal is to improve the entire public transit system, when in reality it isn't anywhere near the case.

Where? In their website, all the copy seems direct at the potential customer; I saw nothing about the goal being an improvement to the entire transit system.

Also, The "white privileged elite" seema to act as early adopters, willing to pay for the extra bucks. Eventually, the technology gets cheaper and accessible to more users.

The only issue is a non issue: Richer people can afford private drivers(Uber/Lyft/Whatever). It's nothing new, it just became more affordable in the past years. And public transportation isn't suppose to be profitable. It's about letting everyone move around a city for a very affordable price.

I think it would indicate that the city isn't making enough of an effort on the mass transit side of things.

Overall it would be great if people could start up private bus lines that they believe are underserved which the city would then later take over. If you structure it so that the city paid a royalty to the entity which established the line for a few years, they could probably do a fair amount of good.

Now, how would you prevent this from turning into a tollway that's only going to charge for 20 years but 50 years later it's still for-pay? By making the city pay an external entity rather than keeping the revenue. They'll keep their word -- at least when it comes to paying the bus startup -- very rigidly if it's an outflow. How would you ensure that they then lower the price once the royalty is done? That's harder. I guess at least the scam would be more transparent that way.

This is very much how the UK's rail franchising system fails to work.

Rail is complex because you have obvious economies of scale when you have the same entity managing rolling stock, tracks, other resources, and R&D.

The UK's rail franchising is the worst of all possible worlds. Economies of scale are impossible because separate companies own the rolling stock, run the rolling stock, and maintain the track. And no R&D happens at all now.

Worse, companies regularly scam the gov by collecting subsidies while they can and giving up franchises early when they're expected to start repaying some of their profits.

So this is not necessarily a good model.

>I think it would indicate that the city isn't making enough of an effort on the mass transit side of things.

Why should public transport be profitable? It provides a valuable economic service, in that it moves employees to and from work.

Demanding that it should make a profit is like demanding that pedestrian walkways or the freeway system should make a profit.

Infrastructure is a public and corporate good. You can certainly debate who benefits from it the most, and who should pay for it on the basis of the economic value of those benefits.

You can also debate if perhaps it's not as innovative as it could be - something which is often true of both public and private transport systems.

But there's no obvious non-ideological need for it to be run on a for-profit basis.

This would enable the people starting the bus route to then do market analysis and use the same buses to go start yet another new route which could then either be profitable or not, and then get taken over or not. So you're organizing the company to take the risk and that means the city doesn't have to, which means that some kind of progress might get made in less than a person's lifetime.

Yes I do realize that profit != socially useful in all contexts. But I think in this case if a bus route can be run profitably there's going to be a substantial correlation with useful, because I can't think of a way that buses have been able to hack capitalism to extract rents without doing any useful work.

This open layout is vastly better than the traditional US bus layout. Feels safer, less trapped. This is the right direction to be going, as public transportation in most of the rest of the world has already proven long ago.

It must be wonderful to be so young and healthy and not have any issues that keep you from standing 60+ minutes on a moving and uneven platform.

I'll admit that this line actually made me angry.