Ask HN: Confused about a dead comment - <AUTHOR>

Some time ago on this item:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1833203
which asks about algorithms that blew one's mind, I replied with a comment that mentioned that high-dimensioanl spheres should be thought of as "spikey":
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1834273
Someone asked why:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1834508
and I promised a write-up.
I've now produced that write-up:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1846682
As so often happens, whether it's timing, luck or disinterest, that submission has sunk from the "New" page and will probably never be seen again.   That happens, no surprise, no problem.
However, to tidy up I went back to the original to point at the new item and say that I'd produced the write-up that people had asked for.  No problem there.
But it's dead.  Here, look for yourselves:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1847180
When I'm logged in that item is there.  When I'm not logged in it's dead.  Further more, it was dead almost instantly, without time for people to flag it.
Any ideas? <comment><AUTHOR> Clickables:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1833203> <\- Asking about algorithms

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1834273> <\- High-D spheres are "spikey"

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1834508> <\- Why?

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1846682> <\- The write-up

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1847180> <\- The inexplicably dead cross- reference.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Added in follow-up - I may have worked out what happened, but I'd still be interested in people's thoughts.

<comment><USER3> In general, I don't understand why links and submissions on HN go dead. Is it always due to admin intervention?

<comment><AUTHOR> In general there are a few very good reasons:

\+ It gets flagged by sufficiently many people who believe it to be inappropriate

\+ It comes from a known blacklisted site

\+ It falls foul of behavior most commonly associated with spam.

The case in question here is in the last of these. I submitted the comment, realised I'd put it in the wrong place, deleted it, and immediately reposted in a different comment. That's behavior adopted by spammers - <USER2> identical comments in several places in a very short time span.

Spending long enough here, and thinking about it carefully, most cases can be analysed and understood.</comment></comment></comment>


See You in Court. It's Time to Fight - <AUTHOR> https://action.aclu.org/secure/timetofight <comment><USER2> I'm not American, but thankyou ACLU. I appreciate your efforts and promise of vigilance. I fear it will be necessary in the coming years

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> This was on the front page but now not on the first six pages. Was it flagged off?

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't trust the ACLU

<comment><USER4> Honest question: why?

<comment><USER3> For one, I know people who personally have been let down by them. Secondly, their leader resigned after making "jokes" about shooting Trump supporters.

<comment><USER5> At least it was a joke, some Trump supporters recently have been _actually_ attacking Muslims and black people.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Launch HN: Carry (YC S19) – We Book Travel for You on Slack - <AUTHOR> Hey HN! We're Tejas and Kashish, co-founders of Carry (https://carry.travel).
Carry is your executive assistant for travel. Just message us (i.e. "I need to be in Boston for a meeting at 2pm on July 1st"), and we'll get everything done for you— flights, trains, cars, hotels, Airbnbs... you name it. Carry is not a chat bot— we function like a traditional agency with in-house travel agents, but unlike traditional travel agencies that use terminals (similar to Bloomberg in Finance) or manually search websites like Expedia, we're building in-house tools to make our agents' jobs easier and help them work faster. Imagine automatically going from a customer message ("I need to be in Boston Tuesday for a 10am meeting and return for a 9am meeting Friday") to parsed trip requirements (from: SFO, to: BOS, arrive by: 10am, return by: 9am) that are then merged with your calendar and user preferences to search all data sources. Our agents then interpret the results and propose options to the user. Over time, we want to add more automation and intelligence using each user interaction as training data (but first we need volume... lol).
We built Carry because we hate booking travel— it's just way too time-consuming and inefficient. It's tedious to check multiple sites (Skiplagged, Google Flights, Skyscanner, etc.) before finding the cheapest price, filling out all of the airline information, and then, searching for a place to stay. And, even when you have all the information, choice paralysis prevails.
9 months ago, we set out to build a chat bot because we asked ourselves "Why can't Siri book travel?" Working backwards, we quickly realized why bots don't work— they're robotic, formulaic, and take lots of back and forth to convey what you want. We also realized that consumers don't know what they want, which makes it really hard to choose travel options for them. With these learnings in mind, we looked to corporate travel agencies for inspiration.
It turns out 70% of corporate travel is booked without any tool or agency— employees book their own travel and expense it. The other 30% uses tools at two ends of the spectrum— 1 old school travel agencies (think phone calls) 2) new-age corporate travel portals (imagine a clunky, worse Google Flights). We found that no one actually wants to use these tools— they just have to, and that the only people who were satisfied with the state of things were folks who had assistants they could offload the work onto.
Thus, we decided we'd create an assistant for everyone. Carry is the first travel tool built for employees-first. Employees get all the points, all the options, and the ability to save time an assistant provides. So far, we've been working with corporations directly, but today, we're doing a soft launch of Carry for individuals with a waitlist at https://carry.travel. That said, for the HN community, just email me (tejas [at] carry [dot] travel) if you want to start using us for work immediately.
If you travel frequently (or even if you don't!), we'd love to hear about the inefficiencies and pain points you've experienced while traveling that you wish a product like Carry could solve. We want to hear your feedback on the product and work with you all to develop features to save even more time. <comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN! We've been impressed with the response here. Y'all must love travel.

If you use Slack and want to get started using Carry for your team, we've created a temporary link while we're on the front page to go ahead and install Carry. Here's the flow:

\- Go to [https://carry.travel/hnpromo](https://carry.travel/hnpromo)

\- Select your team's workspace in the top right

\- For "Post to", select "Slackbot" or anything (this step is annoying, sorry-- we'll fix)

\- Click "Install" (You may have to ask an administrator depending on your settings)

\- Send a _direct message_ to @Carry on Slack saying anything

If your team uses another platform or wants to get in touch, schedule a demo (under the request access button, [https://carry.travel/](https://carry.travel/)) or email tejas [at] carry [dot] travel, and we'll be in touch.

<comment><USER2> Hi ! Congrats on the launch ! If anyone finds it helpful, I've created a guide with screenshots for how to signup for carry: [https://flowshare.io/flow/how- to-signup-for-carry-for-hacker...](https://flowshare.io/flow/how-to-signup- for-carry-for-hackernews)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> "70% of corporate travel is booked without any tool or agency"

That always bothered me. We used this middle man agency ... there was no savings, I still just booked it myself for the most part. I just had to use their crappy site.

I did not understand the point of that, but man it was policy.

<comment><USER4> At my previous company, I was once told the reason was integration with their accounting systems and enforcement / guidance around travel policy. e.g., don't spend more than $X / night at a hotel in a certain city.

Definitely seemed like these middleman agencies were a solution to a problem faced by the finance team.

<comment><USER3> Yeah I suspect that was it.

Oddly, I don't think a lot of this stuff really accounts for the complexities in air travel.

Like I literally couldn't rent certain types of cars ... and the no cars.... all in the name of saving money.

But I could take a taxi everywhere for 150% of the cost of car rental (at least) because you still had to get from A to B.

The end result was "don't check that box!" but any other box was ok even if it did the same thing or worse.

<comment><USER5> I recently had a fun experience with something called the "Fly America Act", a law which says that when the US government is paying for your travel you have to fly on a US flagged airline.

For my trip, the flight would've been about 6 hours (direct!) and cost $600 on a foreign airline. On the cheapest US carrier, the flight was about $850 and took 10 hours due to a layover. When you take hourly rates into account, it easily cost the government an extra $1000 for me to travel on the US airline.

I wish I could've taken the direct foreign flight and just sent United a check for $250. Would've been a win/win for everyone— the American airline gets its corporate welfare without any of the costs they incur when someone actually gets on their plane, and I wouldn't have had to waste 4 hours of my life each way sitting in an airport to satisfy a dumb law.

<comment><USER6> The Fly America Act is pork for the Airline industry; they aren't intended to save the taxpayer money. Exactly the opposite.

I've even seen _identical_ itineraries -- one under a US flag carrier and the other under a foreign flag -- with a mid-3-figure price difference. The airlines know what they are doing.

Call your congresspeople.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > We found that no one actually wants to use these tools— they just have to, > and that the only people who were satisfied with the state of things were > folks who had assistants they could offload the work onto.

I suspect this is the case with _a lot_ of business / enterprise software.

Congrats on the launch. I think this space (software assisted services that rely on Slack / SMS / email) is a promising one. Best of luck!

<comment><USER8> I wonder why enterprise tools end up this way, is it because the buyer (CFO/procurement) is different from the end user (employees)?

<comment><USER9> I was in b2b software sales until recently. I've been on the other side of the table when the buyer will be an end user, or when they have end users they're placing trust in and actually listening to.

Imo the issue is more just that ease of use is a hard sell. Buyers, including end users, want features. Lots of them. They want to be able to do everything they could ever potentially think to do within your software, doesn't matter if some of those tasks are once a month/year items for which perfectly good solutions already exist and for which there's no real gain from having it within this solution. It's what they ask about, what they want to talk about, what they test for, what I get feedback on from them when I win/lose the sale.

They might want ease of use in 6 months when they're actually using the thing and not give two hoots about most of the things they were certain were necessary earlier, but that's irrelevant. They didn't want it when it mattered. Now they're locked in. In terms of contract but also in terms of what their processes are designed for, what their staff are trained to use, what their other tools integrate with; and there's no guarantee or even reason to believe that an alternative wont be just as bad.

So there's tons of pressure on b2b software providers to do a lot of things but very little to do any of it well.

<comment><USER10> This is exactly it. You don't lose an RFP if your product sucks. You lose an RFP if you say that it doesn't match one of the 700 outrageous requirements

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This reminds me of Magic ([https://magic.gd](https://magic.gd)) or Fin (now defunct, [https://fin.com](https://fin.com) \- a closer match, with a similar if broader mission).

Hopefully the narrower scope will allow you to escape the issues that Fin ran into, trying to bolster their team. :)

Magic has fixed pricing for some tasks, including travel booking I believe - so hopefully Carry is (or becomes) either less expensive or higher quality.

<comment><USER12> Must have missed Fin shutting down. Any info on why they closed up?

<comment><USER11> This obliquely-named blog post has the context:

[https://www.fin.com/posts/fins-plan- for-2019/](https://www.fin.com/posts/fins-plan-for-2019/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> How much does this cost? I don't see any pricing information.

> We book travel on your personal card so you can get all the points.

Do you bill the charges directly to the customer's card or do they get billed by you and then you separately purchase the flight/hotel/etc?

Curious how that works regarding card data storage as you'd need likely need the full card number, expiration, and CVV to run each charge and it can't just be hash or payment token if you're passing it on to a third party for the full booking.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great questions :-)

> How much does this cost? I don't see any pricing information.

Carry is free for individuals and small teams. We don't charge for just booking travel, but we do have upgrades available for larger teams (admin panels, constraints, etc.). What are you interested in using Carry for? Seems like you work at a large company, feel free to email me at tejas [at] carry [dot] travel.

> Do you bill the charges directly to the customer's card or do they get > billed by you and then you separately purchase the flight/hotel/etc?

At the moment, most of our transactions are done the latter way (get billed by airline/hotel/etc and then separately charge the customer), but we're looking into some ways to avoid this, particularly \- Tokenization: Spreedly/TokenX \- Using something like VGS, [https://www.verygoodsecurity.com/](https://www.verygoodsecurity.com/)

Let us know if you have thoughts here! Payments are a very interesting topic

<comment><USER14> > At the moment, most of our transactions are done the latter way (get billed > by airline/hotel/etc and then separately charge the customer)

One concern that comes to mind about this is if the credit card companies would consider this purchase as "travel". Like where Chase Sapphire Reserve gives triple points for travel purchases, and also has a $300 travel credit, but either of those things would only work if Chase considers your service as "travel", rather than "online service" or whatever.

You may have already worked this out and gotten it classified as travel, and if so it would just be a nice thing to put on a FAQ or whatever.

<comment><USER15> Same for credit cards that offer travel insurance as long as the flights/rental cars etc. are booked through them. They'd most likely need to see the charge from the airline in order for the coverage to be effective.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point. Travel Point multipliers can be achieved via setting a merchant code (MCC) of travel on charges (stripe, for example, supports this.

The trip insurance card benefit— I don't think we can satisfy right now. We're exploring ways to use the user's own CC with the end vendor (eg airline) rather than us charging the user separately. "credit card tokenization" should work here (Spreedly, TokenX) but it's non trivial due to how many vendors are in the space

Email me if either of these are stopping you from wanting to use the service, and we'll figure out a workaround or let you know when it's solved!

<comment><USER10> Normally insurance is still valid in case of intermediaries, your travel insurance is perfectly valid if you booked through an OLTA. Maybe it's just a question of certification?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Can you have a non-Slack version? Just a page where you put your log in information and it asks the same thing the slack bot does? It would take like 15m to build this

<comment><AUTHOR> We have customers using SMS and email as well. We'll highlight those words on the site

Maybe we'll add a web app chat sometime, too. But would SMS satisfy the use case you're thinking about? Also, do you not use Slack or do you use it but not want to use it for travel? If latter, why?

FWIW, maintaining support for more platforms is easy when it's just text, but Slack is very powerful / can have rich UIs (eg a book button or a form in a response).

<comment><USER6> SMS is great. Please convince my $MegaCorp to use this instead of the god- awful 90s attempt at flights.google.com they're using right now... god speed!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Good luck! I still don't understand the need for these chat apps, tbh. Perhaps I'm just old fashioned, heh.

So I need a new app for my already-bloated slack app just to book travel? It also takes longer, is hard to search and retain, and is limited by the chat UI which is pretty useless when combing through tons of options and messages.

<comment><AUTHOR> We think both chat and navigational UIs have a time and place. This should really be an essay, but I'll try to keep it short.

Chat isn't being used to say we use chat. Chat allows us to easily use humans on the backend to interpret things that computers are just much, much slower at doing right now and would require a lot of engineering work for a wide breadth of user states that are currently unknown due to lack of data / users. I personally do believe the _ideal_ (golden/dream state) UI would be a "navigational" one that makes a lot of assumptions but states them all, asks a lot of certain dynamic questions, and presents information in different styles depending on context. Humans are quite good at this (most people love Slack'ing their assistant to book travel), but we really haven't found a UI that does this well for travel and don't believe it's the best way to start attacking the underlying problems.

However, I agree that some parts of the travel journey should be a navigational app though and not chat-based. For example, checking an itinerary is better done through navigational UI-- I don't want to reference a chat transcript for that. (TripIt is ok here and works off of your email, we might make something of our own later).

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Here's a killer feature everyone wants:

I want to put a date range and get the cheapest plane tickets.

Big range, I want to find the cheapest time of the year to fly and plan my vacation.

Nobody lets you do this.

<comment><USER19> Momondo.com does it, Cheaptickets.de as well.

Whenever I talk to my friends from the States I get the feeling no one compares flight prices. Most of them book with 'their' fav airline of choice without comparing different options.

<comment><USER20> It depends a lot on how often you fly - I prefer Skyteam partners (ie, Delta in the US) whenever I can because I fly often enough to have award status with them, meaning lounge access, priority support, upgrades in-flight, etc... I'm sure I pay them more raw dollars than I would if I booked my trips on the absolute cheapest airline in all cases, but the perks make all the difference between the flight being a chore or a moderately pleasant experience.

I have plenty of friends, though, who don't fly as often as I do and can therefore chase the cheapest fare. It doesn't matter to them if they get a flight with an airline they don't have status with, or an airline with no special perks at all, because they're not on the road often enough to qualify for those things in the first place. Raw price wins.

Travel is one of the few industries where brand loyalty still has some tangible perks (albeit decreasing every time airlines revamp their rewards programs), so especially within the US where pretty much all of the airlines fly to pretty much all of the major airports, its an approach worth considering.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> > Imagine automatically going from a customer message ("I need to be in Boston > Tuesday for a 10am meeting and return for a 9am meeting Friday") to parsed > trip requirements (from: SFO, to: BOS, arrive by: 10am, return by: 9am)

No offense if this was an off the cuff example, but this is awful parsing. I don't need to arrive in Boston by 10am, I need to be at the location of the meeting by 10am. I don't need to return by 9am, I need to be at the location of the meeting at 9am. If your agents are seeing the parsed version, they're going to make poor arrangements nearly every time.

</comment><comment><USER22> Love to give this a shot if anyone has a referral. Probably my major pain point is my team booking travel together. We'll put it on a clunky excel file or sharepoint page, people block out what they think is the travel date, factory times move and we all have to rebook or just go early/late, etc. Being able to block reschedule a group of individuals would be cool too, like grouping these individual accounts for certain types of travel.

<comment><USER23> Email me at gnomepomsky [at] gmail.com!

<comment><AUTHOR> adaorardor is a friend that can share an invite!

But, group work travel is super interesting. Feel free to just email me-- tejas [at] carry [dot] travel directly, and we'd love to chat and see how we can help, especially if your team has a trip coming soon.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Interesting... How are you performing the bookings? Are you registered as a travel agent with GDS access? Or are you going through an other agency?

<comment><USER8> We're partnered with a travel agency with GDS access. Additionally, we use various other OTAs that give us the full range of inventory for hotels and flights.

In general, travel agents that only use GDS don't have access to budget airlines such as Easyjet or alternative accommodations such as Airbnb or Sonder.

<comment><USER10> Ok makes sense. So you're acting as a TMC but without the TA part? I guess the difficulty here is incident support: Say I've missed a flight and I need to be rebooked, hotel and taxi notified etc... With a classic TMC I call them on the 24/7 hotline and some agent will do it live for me. In your case the support line would be you right? Because your travel agency might not have access to the airbnb reservations etc. But then isn't it tricky to intermediate the rebooking discussions between the customer and the agency?

Extra question: how do you manage the non-gds content? Do you ask your travel agency to add remarks to the PNR, or have you built your own database to track these "PNR+extra" bookings?

Sorry, lots of questions but it's a really interesting idea!

<comment><AUTHOR> We do the TA part, too. We book flights, hotels, Airbnbs, cars, etc. so we can reschedule everything in incidents, not just one part if customers use us full-service.

And yeah, we have our own database for everything. GDS is just one way to book and a "portal to the airlines" for us

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This is a really cool concept.

I installed it in a personal slack workplace and said "I need a flight to Cancun August 27th to September 1st" and got a boilerplate response saying a travel agent would get back to me within an hour. I followed up with "I need a flight to Cancun on August 27th, returning September 1st" and got no response at all. I waited a while and got asked for a time preference (it called me by my username not my display name, btw, which is a little weird). I said "Leaving morning, returning afternoon". Again, a lengthy pause. Then, without giving me a price quote, it said they'd have options for me shortly and asked me to finish creating an account (birthdate, full name, etc). After a while it asked me if I meant SFO -> CUN (I'm not really sure why that would be the presumption).

Is this currently an automated process or am I talking to a human support agent?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey! Thanks for trying Carry and sharing feedback. It's often hard to grok the perspective of a new customer from one interaction so this is helpful.

First off, >Is this currently an automated process or am I talking to a human support agent?

You're talking to a human! The human has custom portal/tools/processes to book travel, but all questions and replies are by consumers.

As per the details / juicy parts, 1) We'll remove or modify the boilerplate response for first time users within business hours (8am-2am PT). We don't really need it as we respond within a minute or two max.

2) Generally, we see display names from Slack, but for some reason, we don't for your user (unusual). Will check on that.

3) RE: The lengthy pauses, sorry about this-- today was a pretty crazy day with the launch and our agents had a spiky load, but we'll improve here. I believe the initial response only had a 1 minute gap but after that, things may have slowed down. Ideally, we automate the initial responses so it's ~instant.

4) The account creation is a first-time user thing. Our agent thought the booking was high-intent / going to complete (we primarily serve business travelers) so we asked you to create an account so we have the necessary details to book while we pull up the options.

Feel free to email me at tejas [at] carry [dot] travel if you have more feedback or questions! And, we'd love for you to try Carry again next time you'd like to travel :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> How will you handle itinerary changes by the airline?

I know lots of people regret booking with Expedia or the like when there's a change and they can't deal with the airline directly.

There might be some value in doing EU261 claims and their equivalents on behalf of businesses. My guess is that nobody pushes the claim when the employer is paying the bill.

<comment><AUTHOR> Founder here. Currently, you have to go through us to make changes to the reservation or respond to airline itinerary changes, but we have an emergency line 24/7 (think PagerDuty), and we believe we can do a much better job of dealing with the airlines than individuals (and optionally over chat instead of phone calls!). There's actually a lot of things you can do to manage reservations for customers on the backend that are not utilized in sites like Expedia that travel agents do (eg on this DOS-like terminal for the "GDS", you can manage reservations in the same backend that the airlines use).

> There might be some value in doing EU261 claims and their equivalents on > behalf of businesses. My guess is that nobody pushes the claim when the > employer is paying the bill.

This is a great idea. I actually haven't thought about doing this. I actually had a super delayed flight back in the day

<comment><USER25> Just to clarify: There are already services for consumers that will take care of EU261 claims on your behalf so you don't have to force the airline in court (and possibly you would just contract for them), but, like I said, for a corporate-paid ticket, I don't think anybody bothers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Adding automation to this workflow seems like an exciting problem to solve!

I'm interested in seeing how you end up dealing with inaccuracies that arise in a almost-safety-critical operation. E.g, in your example, returning at 9 (even ignoring delays) would make the traveler miss their meeting.

<comment><USER8> You're right, flights/travel is so mission critical that we don't see "AI" taking over this workflow anytime soon. There will be a real person verifying every decision for the near and medium-term future. The automation component helps these real-people make decisions faster (ideal case is 30 seconds or less once it gets really good)

<comment><USER27> Linking to their Calendar would be interesting so you can know their business schedule.

<comment><USER8> Yes! We're working on the calendar integration :) We find that several business users will omit calendar because of privacy or because they don't keep them up to date, but power users of GCal would love this I think

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> This reminds me of that robo company that you could text anything you wanted to and they would book/figure it out for you. Love that you are honing your focus in to Slack and Travel. Goodluck!

<comment><USER28> Are you talking about Magic [0]? I've used it a few times for rather esoteric items and had great experiences.

(Both were booking appointments at government agencies with awful reservation systems that often were overbooked or limited availability — TSA global entry appointments and DMV appointments. It cost about $30 each time.)

[0] [http://getmagic.com](http://getmagic.com)

<comment><USER29> Do they continually look for opened DMV slots?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Hey Tejas, this looks awesome! Congrats on the launch, I'm looking forward to trying it out!

I'm curious if you've looked into the "guest travel" space, allowing non- employees to book corporate travel. Pana(pana.com) is the only competitor I've seen explicitly focused on this space, but TripActions and CWT cover this use case as well. I think interviews make up a large part of travel expenses for lots of companies, and currently the experience is pretty subpar at most companies as an interviewee.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi Varun! I think we have many mutual friends :)

We think Pana is smart. Interviews are definitely a large part of travel expenses in the Bay Area. My guess is by specializing in guest travel, Pana can be used in parallel to other tools at a company, which is a big advantage. We're exploring some similar "parallel" approaches but not completely honing in on interview travel right now.

Have you used Pana as a candidate? How'd you find it?

PS: We're also exploring some other group travel opportunities-- eg conferences, weddings, etc. We think this is a huge market that is nowhere near cracked.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> You mentioned that it's free for individuals. I have a few of questions.

1\. I'm generally flexible about dates. The way I generally book a trip is to look at a date range and choose the cheapest option in several websites - Google Flights, Kayak, etc? Can I assume your process would be similar too?

2\. It's a very time-consuming process. How would you do it for free?

3\. Would I get any _additional discount_ if I go through you/any authorized travel agent in general? Or do they also internally use the same websites we do?

<comment><USER23> Hey!

1\. Yep, if you're flexible on dates we can look at flights within a certain range and help you find the cheapest option.

2\. We make money off of commissions but always guarantee that we're giving you the lowest available online rate (which is much more transparency than most travel agencies offer). Re: 3., that's how we make our margin and offer Carry to individuals for free--there are additional discounts available to travel agents that aren't available through Google Flights/Kayak etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> A lot of this really feels like the people who need that would be better off with a personal assistant/secretary that remembers the person's needs and preferences.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's the point :-)

Dedicated personal assistants are too expensive (or at least, that's the common belief). Our idea is to use a mix of computers + humans to provide a personalized experience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I would use this if you had a Bloomberg integration, and maybe if I could share my itinerary through it. I sit on it all day except for activities to upkeep my wellbeing.

<comment><AUTHOR> Founder here.

This is interesting! One of our friends in finance recently suggested this, too. We don't have access to a Bloomberg terminal, but we wanna look into this. Do you (or anyone else) know what it takes to ship an integration on the Bloomberg terminal? Will email you (from your profile) after the HN buzz, too :)

Also, @HN we're currently on Slack/SMS/email but if you have other platforms you'd suggest, let us know here. WhatsApp has definitely come up for some of our friends in India.

<comment><USER32> My email isn't working in my profile due to recruiters. I added you on LinkedIn.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Is your plan to continue to perform the travel booking directly? Or turn into a SaaS product (Slack, Teams<-you are here->Travel booking teams or companies) that any travel booking company can use? I'd love for our corporate travel provider to have this functionality, but we would never be able to support the use of a startup for our travel booking functionality.

<comment><USER8> We've been playing around with the SaaS idea that you described, because there are 80k+ travel agents in the US and they are underutilized! We eventually decided that performing the travel booking directly is important because that way we control the user experience, and our level of service is really the main value prop right now

We'd actually love to talk to your corporate travel provider and see if a partnership makes sense! ping me at kashish [at] carry [dot] travel? Otherwise we can get you started as an individual if your company allows it :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> How will you scale?

The reason that travel booking is so bad is because once you get too big, you start to eat the (very thin) margins of everyone in the travel industry. Then they get all defensive and, if you don't get acquired, start cutting you off or giving you crappy restrictions.

Are you competing with something like Carlson-Wagonlit Travel?

<comment><AUTHOR> You're right-- the travel industry is built around leverage and highly political. I can't say that we've worked everything out, but we've already started navigating such situations and think they're inevitable.

One theory (though a bit fluffy) is that if we can successfully automate more and more of these processes, our costs can be dramatically lower than "traditional travel agency" competitors / margin higher.

Yes, in theory, we're competing with Carlson-Wagonlit / Amex Concierge. That actually hasn't been hard at the smaller / medium size companies interested in using us (big ones are obviously harder since they have a travel desk, etc.). In actuality, we're currently competing with companies like Concur & TripActions and the most popular way, employees just spending tons of time planning/booking/expensing travel themselves.

Do you have a background in travel space? Would be cool to chat more

<comment><USER34> I've had some exposure to the travel industry by working for a credit card loyalty program, but nothing formal.

I appreciate your honest reply and wish you luck!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Can it take into account climate changes as well? And reduce/optimize travels, favor train, ..

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes. We have "customer personas" that we bucket companies into and allow custom rules on top of that... though we don't believe they're usually actually necessary.

Do you wanna use Carry at work? Happy to talk to you / employer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Do you use affiliate programs to get a cut of any bookings you make on your customers behalf?

</comment><comment><USER37> Tejas, your name rang a bell, and I'm pretty sure we worked on a class project together back in Uni (rhymes with "Matton"). You probably don't remember me, but I'm super happy for you and wish you all the best.

Small world :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Haha, I never went to uni so you're probably thinking of someone else :-)

<comment><USER37> so it wasn't technically university, but a academy for gifted high school students, located on a university. am I barking up the wrong tree?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> We use a similar YC company for corporate travel, flightfox.com. I can't tell you how much money we save by enforcing corporate policies and letting them use lots of tricks to get the best possible rates.

<comment><USER8> We've heard a lot about flightfox! We're focused employee-first so that we can build a tool that employees their managers for, but that being said, several of our corporate customers have been seeing a similar cost savings because of the ability to set travel policies with Carry.

Just curious, what % of travel at your company is booked through flightfox?

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Congrats on launching! Good luck!

I just briefly checked your website, but could not figure out if you only do business travel or vacations as well. Also, which countries is your service available in?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey! One of the founders here. Carry is available all over the world, but our responses can be slower outside of the hours of 8am - 2am Pacific Time. Where are you based?

For the last almost ~6 months, we've been doing top-down sales at companies, serving their teams that travel most (eg sales, implementation, professional services, etc. teams), but given demand from folks in our networks, we're opening up Carry to individuals (both for use at their jobs and not). From user behavior, we believe Carry is best for "high-intent travel", which we classify as travel that you know you have to take-- whether that's a bunch of people going to a wedding, a conference, or a business meeting-- as otherwise, users often don't know what they want.

What would you like to use Carry for?

<comment><USER39> I am from India. My use case for traveling is personal family vacation. I find it frustrating to book flights and hotels for personal vacations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Very cool project. I work at a GDS and I build slack apps for nonprofit organizations. Love to see two of interests used in New ways. Good luck with your success.

</comment><comment><USER41> Booking travel is fun but extremely time consuming. Excited to see if my company (~200 people) would want to integrate this

<comment><AUTHOR> Founder here. Found you on Twitter :). Will reach out

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Congratulation!

Now we know why Slack is highly valuated. You can even build a startup on top of it. :)

Anyway, what technology do you use for NLP? Spicy? Do you use Deep Learning? What about non-English languages?

</comment><comment><USER43> Don't Concur already offer this?

<comment><AUTHOR> Not exactly-- it's complicated. Concur is an expensing product that also has a corporate travel booking UI platform that sits on top of travel management companies (TMCs), some of which have their own portals with phone lines and chat services.

Just curious (not trying to sound snarky)-- Do you use Concur? If so, I'm curious if you prefer it to booking travel yourself. In research, we only met one traveler who was satisfied with Concur, and it turned out that they had an assistant using it for them. Our goal is to make a travel tool that's an employee perk and a joy to use, and one that saves the company even more money through saving employee time.

<comment><USER43> I guess it's similar but not exactly the same. [https://www.concur.com/newsroom/article/sap-concur-travel- bo...](https://www.concur.com/newsroom/article/sap-concur-travel-bot-on-slack)

I'm CTO at 8Common who own Expense8. We're a local player in Australia who compete directly with Concur. We hear all about peoples frustrations with Concur. We are also looking at interface and workflow enhancements too and I am interested to see how you get on with Carry. I do think there is a trend towards simplification of travel booking but I'm still not sure what the end (winning) result will be.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Congrats!

</comment><comment><USER45> Congrats on the launch guys, let's get bubble tea again sometime in the future :)

I think I mentioned this before in person, but I'd like to repeat myself just so that others can chime in with whether they feel this pain point too: a lot of travel revolves around other travel arrangements (not necessarily flights) on the same day. These other arrangements are often slightly time-customisable too, but the number of combinations is obviously limited (I can't take a bus to the airport after the flight). Finding the best combination that doesn't require me to wake up at ungodly times is a hassle that I'd like to see solved.

<comment><USER8> Thanks Adhityaa! So cool that you found us on here!

You're so right, there are no solutions that focus on point A -> B door-to- door, and we've found that the reason for that is that most solutions don't know their end customer. They don't include information like home address and office addresses. The only solution that we can see handling end-to-end is Google Flights since they can easily integrate with Google Maps, for us, a very important goal is to help people manage their day of travel, not just their bookings :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Love this product Tejas, we'll be using it!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, Ilya! We're helping some folks on Segment's Sales teams :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Congrats on the launch Kashish & Tejas!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, Nick!

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Congrats Tejas!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, Evan!! Get us some users at CloudFlare :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Congrats on launching!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, George!</comment></comment>


Neutrino tomography of Earth - <AUTHOR> https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-018-0319-1 <comment><USER2> This is really brilliant, literally jaw-dropping. I was really blown away by the idea and construction of the detector itself and this application is astounding.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IceCube_Neutrino_Observatory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IceCube_Neutrino_Observatory)

<comment><USER3> My favourite story about the construction of IceCube relates to the drilling of the holes to deploy the detector. They used two types of drill, which melt the firn (compacted snow) on top and ice lower down. One is a sort of conical heat exchanger, the other circulates water through a Big water heater on the surface.

In the early days of South Pole Station (late 1950s), supplies were airdropped in - the cargo planes of that era couldn't land on the snow and going overland was very difficult. Many of the parachutes wouldn't open properly, and so lots of supplies (including a bulldozer) and parachutes wound up buried in the snow. South Pole slowly accumulates snow, so that debris has gotten deeper and deeper below the surface over time.

Of course, the holes required to build IceCube had to go deeper than those supplies, but the drill can't go through things that don't melt, so in some cases the holes had to be moved off the nominal grid. According to the story I heard, one of the holes ran in to a bunch of meat, which floated to the top of the bore...

<comment><USER4> No mentions about finding meat here, but you might be interested in this story at IEEE Spectrum about the construction of IceCube from 2011 [1].

[1] [https://spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/astrophysics/icecube- the...](https://spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/astrophysics/icecube-the-polar- particle-hunter)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Supplementary Figure 6 is pretty cool! There seems to be a lot of strange things happening at the mantle-crust boundary that will take some further study to understand.

All said, this is a MAJOR advance in our understanding of the Earth and the science thereof. This technique should allow for some pretty amazing things in the future.

</comment><comment><USER6> Would it be feasible to put a source and detector in orbit so we could get high resolution CT images of the interior of the earth? IIRC the detector used here is very large, but there are smaller ones and a directed source would go a long way towards making the detection simpler.

<comment><USER7> Neutrino detection generally requires large volumes and large masses (for very large values of "large"), neither of which are as yet feasible for space based systems. The IceCube neutrino observatory, for example, makes use of a volume of ice that is on the order of a cubic kilometer (over 900 million tonnes). Suffice it to say, building cubic kilometer solid structures in space that weigh hundreds of millions of tonnes is outside of our engineering capabilities at present. However, within the next several decades this might be feasible.

<comment><USER8> Could we not just land a detector on the far side of the moon. Thats pretty large no?

<comment><USER7> You need to have the reaction mass to make use of. Most neutrino detectors use special chemicals in custom tanks, IceCube uses antarctic ice. You would need not just mass but ice or water for a neutrino detector, ideally highly compressed optically clear ice. The only possible candidate in the Solar System that fits that bill at present is Europa. Though it's possible that similar conditions might also exist on Mars (we know there are sub-surface glaciers, but we don't know how deep they go or how pure the ice is. And potentially some of the large sub-surface oceans (on Ganymede, Enceladus, etc.) might work too but we know even less about their properties.

<comment><USER9> Not all detectors were optical so if you found a moon made of, say, dry cleaning fluid, you'd still be good.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Nice but I'm still left wondering what the J/bit of neutrino transmission would be. Wouldn't it be cool if we could replace the long fiber optics stretching around the globe with direct-through neutrino stations?

<comment><USER11> Given the difficulty in neutrino detection, I seriously doubt it would replace fat links. You could gain quite a bit of advantage when it comes to trading though using a low bandwidth link.

<comment><USER12> [https://what-if.xkcd.com/73/](https://what-if.xkcd.com/73/) gives a fairly decent summary of the level of interaction of neutrinos.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Frankly this idea has been repeated every few years since the invention of tomography 40 years ago. Hopefully someone will actually do it one of these years.

</comment><comment><USER14> In theory, would IceCube be able to detect neutrinos generated by the same mechanism in the atmosphere of Venus?

<comment><USER4> In theory, yes. In practice, probably very difficult. They did detect a deficit in neutrinos from the direction of the moon though [1].

[1] [https://icecube.wisc.edu/news/view/131](https://icecube.wisc.edu/news/view/131)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Could this technique be useful on other planets?

</comment><comment><USER16> [https://mobile.twitter.com/stocknosticator/status/7425391560...](https://mobile.twitter.com/stocknosticator/status/742539156090281984)

Looks like my prediction will come true.

<comment><USER17> > Neutrino detection will revolutionize oil and other natural resource > discovery.

No.

<comment><USER18> To be fair, it probably will. But the ability to do it in a cheap enough manner is certainly far enough away that the value of those resources will likely be much lower than they are today.

Accurate, cheap, and small neutrino detectors would revolutionize any industry dependent upon locating things within... well... anything. But that statement is as meaningful (if not less) as "faster computers will revolutionize the automotive industry."</comment></comment></comment>


The DVR vs Internet Video - <AUTHOR> http://blogmaverick.com/2009/10/24/the-dvr-vs-internet-video/

<comment><USER2> "Let me ask a simple question, if everyone had a DVR that could record any and every series they liked, enabling them to watch the shows they missed immediately, why would they go to Hulu ever again ? Lunchtime at work you say ? I respond simply with "slingbox enabled DVR". Let them stream the shows from their homes."

Hulu offers a wide selection of content no longer broadcast on cable or satellite TV. Next problem is extremely limited upload speeds on most US ISPs. This would result in sub-SD quality streams. Hulu is about ~2Mbit/sec streaming. Average residential broadband is sub ~1Mbit upload. So half the quality on average under best conditions (hope no one is home using the Internet or get used to circa 1996 animated GIF quality video)

"Traditional media should be blasting the cable/telco/sat companies for not adding DVR features and dropping pricing fast enough."

They should be kicking themselves for raising prices of programming to the point where cable/telco/satellite providers need to overcharge for equipment to help offset the higher costs of programming which are so large over the last ~3 years that the providers were actually unable to pass all of it onto the consumer. They were terrified of $10-$20/month price increases. People accept <$5 increases on a yearly basis but it's not enough to keep up anymore.

</comment><comment><USER3> Eventually it all merges into the same thing. Look at music to the way video will go. iTunes, Amazon MP3, physical discs from brick&mortar or online locations, there are lots of places to acquire the same music from different channels. Video tends to be a bit more difficult to negotiate the rights to so it's lagged behind in this trend, but it'll get there eventually.

Money talks. A giant quantity of money talks loud enough for even those currently deaf to the promise of online distribution (due to prejudice, stubbornness, and fear) to hear it. Online distribution is easy and very profitable, there will come a tipping point where online distribution grows large enough to where the business potential becomes immensely obvious to everyone. And at that point every media publisher will flock to it like pigs to a trough. It's really only a matter of time at this point.</comment>


Lisp interpreter in javascript with jQuery : programming - <AUTHOR> http://marcbelmont.com/lisp-interpreter-javascript-jquery/ <comment><USER2> There appear to be bugs in it. I tried:

       (cdr '(ddd a xxx))

And it said:

       Error: The expression is not balanced. Remove -1 parentheses.

I tried adding a parenthesis (which I assume is the same as removing -1 of them), without success.

<comment><USER3> This interpreter does not understand _quote_ or _'_. When you write

      (cdr '(ddd a xxx))

the interpreter reads

      (  cdr  '(  ddd  a  xxx  )  )
               |
               \</comment></comment><comment>  '(  is a token

For example, this works:

      (cdr (list 1 2 3))

<comment><USER2> This however does not:

      (cdr (list ddd a xxx))

If the language doesn't allow lists containing things other than integers, it's not really a lisp.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Cool.

And for some more heavyweight Scheme->JS (stuff that you wouldn't mind using on a real project) check out inria's HOP (Scheme2JS is a component of it) and BiwaScheme.

<http://hop.inria.fr/>

<http://www.biwascheme.org/>

</comment><comment><USER5> Great weekend hack! One annoying request: paren-sensitive text box. :)</comment>


Roger Federer as Religious Experience - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/20/sports/playmagazine/20federer.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print <comment><USER4> If you've never read anything by David Foster Wallace, this is an excellent place to start. It has all of his tricks — the footnotes, the hyperliterate sentences, the disregard for periods, total maximalism — and not a few examples of his descriptive virtuosity.

It'll also, no matter how much you may already be awed, keep you from ever watching another of Federer's match without seeing the effervescent white light surrounding him or looking to see if his feet every really do touch the ground.

<comment><USER5> Heh. I've been crawling through _Everything and More_ and it's definitely _not_ an excellent place to start, unless you've already got the transfinite math chops and are reading it for sheer enjoyment. (Note: I don't already have the transfinite math chops, and while I'm reading the book for enjoyment, it's "sheer" mainly in the sense that the unforgiving cliff face to which a novice climber clings is sheer.)

If you enjoyed this essay on Federer, the logical next place to go with DFW is his essay collection _A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again_.

<comment><USER6> I loved A Supposedly Fun Thing, but my wife hated it. Maybe that was my fault for suggesting she read it on the cruise ship. (-:

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This great article[1] covers a lot of finesses in the Tennis universe with its Swiss king. The high level beauty of Federers game can be seen even from Tennis newbies. With his smooth movement, it looks like he has an additional second of time. Where other players struggle with intense footwork, he seemingly floats around the court (probably best seen with his great inside- out shoot).

If you get a chance to seem them, probably some of the best modern matches are:

* ATP Wimbledon Final 2007 & 2008: Federer - <USER2>

* ATP Australian Open Semi: Nadal - <USER3>

[1] from Aug. 2006, a time where Federer hasn't yet topped the Grand Slam record of Sampras

<comment><USER8> all three are great. but more recently you're forgetting the 2009 Wimbledon Final - he beats Soderling, passes Sampras's record of 15 grand slams, AND wins on a near-record 14 games to 12 fifth set.

<comment><USER9> Except that he beats Andy Roddick on that 2009 Wimbledon Final. It is in Roland Garros that he beats Soderling in final that year.

<comment><USER8> Doh! i watched those matches back-to-back last week (they replay lots of good tennis here in Argentina), which is why i got confused...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Great article... wish I read it four years ago, then again in hindsight it's nice to be critical of a journalist having knowing the content a bit. Particularly, this was quite comical: "Nadal ... his way of always cutting his eyes warily from side to side as he walks the baseline, like a convict expecting to be shanked." soo true, ha.

Pretty accurate description of, "if you've only watched pros on TV, then you really have no idea how" fast the game really is or how hard they are hitting the ball, that suffering from TV you lose that extra dimension to viewing the game, also where he talks about the foreshortening of the court assists in lessening the effect these players actually have if you were in person.

Another area that I found interesting: "The metaphysical explanation is that Roger Federer is one of those rare, preternatural athletes who appear to be exempt, at least in part, from certain physical laws."

"... a creature whose body is both flesh and, somehow, light." Well, if you've ever really looked at Federer, he really is one of the skinniest out there, in both tennis and overall sports... even Tiger Woods who is the same height and weighs _less_ than Fedex, looks at least to me, heavier than Fedex... can't deny Woods has more muscle mass than Fed and might well explain Fed's ability to float around the court.

Finally, what can we learn when he talks about what the game looks like to Fedex? It's almost like it really does depend on what's going on inside his brain, pistons firing like no other brains can.

Good find.

</comment><comment><USER11> If you're in the narrow group of people that like both Federer and David Foster Wallace, you'll like Infinite Jest, which is a 1000 page DFW book about tennis, drug addiction, and garbage disposal.

Otherwise, I found this NYT essay a lot less engaging than the essays in "A Supposedly Fun Thing...". Another good one at The Atlantic (it was better in print, where they got to play with the typesetting too):

       http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200504/wallace

</comment><comment><USER12> For Federer fans, here's something you may like:

<http://tt.tennis-warehouse.com/showthread.php?t=272192>

(Title: Federerisms)

</comment><comment><USER13> Stop, you're killing me!

I live with the worlds biggest Rafa fan. :)

(Actually, I also prefer him to Federer, perhaps because of canonization of St. Rodger.)</comment>


Patience and Finance - <AUTHOR> http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Documents/speeches/2010/speech445.pdf <comment><AUTHOR> A very interesting speech by the Executive Directo for Financial Stability at the Bank of England.

One of many: see [1] for a discussion.

[1] [http://blogs.hbr.org/fox/2012/03/the-regulator-who- explained...](http://blogs.hbr.org/fox/2012/03/the-regulator-who-explained- th.html)</comment>


Ask HN: Anyone with inside knowledge about Amazon working on Kubernetes product? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> You're asking for trade secrets, something probably not legal (I'm not a lawyer, though). Employees should not be telling you something confidential and the customers/partners usually have access to such information with a NDA/confidentiality agreement. So the question doesn't make sense.

A quick web search gave me this: [https://www.geekwire.com/2017/report-amazon- web-services-war...](https://www.geekwire.com/2017/report-amazon-web-services- warming-kubernetes-container-management/)</comment>


Learn Java Programming with 9 Excellent Open-Source Books - <AUTHOR> https://www.ossblog.org/learn-java-programming-with-excellent-open-source-books/ <comment><USER2> Recently related: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13783189](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13783189)</comment>


PostgreSQL for Those Who Can't Even - <AUTHOR> https://rob.conery.io/2020/01/24/postgresql-for-those-who-cant-even-part-1/ <comment><USER2> Regarding the pronunciation questions at the top: the organization seriously needs to stop the cutesy "PostgreSQL" spelling.

It's been SQL for 20 years and everybody knows it. Great job on switching to a query language that everybody (in the database world) knows. Now switch to a spelling that everyone can pronounce.

I've even had friends say "Postgre", under the mistaken but not unreasonable assumption that this is the root (non-cutesy) name.

<comment><USER3> What's the correct name to use in writing/speaking?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Rob's book "A Curious Moon" is a fun way to get familiar with Postgres. I work with SQL Server quite a bit, but have always want to take a peek at MySQL or Postgres beyond simple crud/form-over-data style toys. His book is a great way to do it.

</comment><comment><USER5> "Well I never!"

As it were.

Remember 2015, when _nobody_ could even? We thought they were simpler times. They weren't.</comment>


Gitlab Returning 502 or 503 (at least from Ireland) - <AUTHOR> Depending on the page, can't access from Ireland <comment><AUTHOR> What's strange is that the status page says website is green

<comment><USER2> not anymore

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah yes, all turned red !

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> You should find the issue is resolved now, there was a global issue which as been fixed at the time of writing.</comment>


Google X acquires 'tremor-canceling spoon' startup - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2014/09/10/google-x-acquires-tremor-canceling-spoon-startup/

<comment><USER2> Super nice and well deserved, congratulations. One of the nicer start-ups of the last few years.</comment>


GoJS: Interactive Diagrams for the Web - <AUTHOR> http://gojs.net/latest/index.html <comment><USER2> >Internal use from $1350 / developer

>OEM (external) use from $2995 / developer

I'm out of the loop - is that kind of pricing normal?

<comment><USER3> Depends on the price of developer's time and their expertise. Seems like higher level D3: [http://d3js.org](http://d3js.org).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I like the idea of being able to express diagrams with a "text notation" because it makes it really easy to use these diagrams in documentation or documents with the plus of being able to store then (with code?) in a source control environment.

But this imperative approach tights everything together with the language and then the graph engine is not just a tool, is a lib that you have to incorporate in your system. Based on that I like the declarative approach used by js-sequence-diagrams [1] and flowchart.js [2] much more, it gives you the freedom to use the syntax instead of the code...

js-sequence-diagrams goes even further and creates a svg that has the source it used to generate the image embedded in the markup, so you can aways look the image and go back to add/remove details from your diagram, which is pretty awesome for using in a constantly evolving documentation.

[1] [https://github.com/bramp/js-sequence- diagrams](https://github.com/bramp/js-sequence-diagrams)

[2] [http://adrai.github.io/flowchart.js/](http://adrai.github.io/flowchart.js/)

</comment><comment><USER5> Another diagramming library of interest is JointJS[0]. I played just a bit with it to keep it bookmarked as "should validate it for later". The core of the lib is under the Mozilla Public License, which is nice.

[0] [http://jointjs.com/](http://jointjs.com/)

</comment><comment><USER6> This is pretty incredible work. There are SO many modules and they all seem to work very robustly and cleanly. Very impressed.

<comment><USER7> You would love d3.js then.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Anybody aware of general graph drawing algorithms that are optimal in one sense or the other? Like minimal number of edge-crossings, minimual number of edge-bends, or minimal length of edges, or a combination thereof.

Preferably in JS of course :)

<comment><USER9> Holten's hierarchical edge bundling is probably something you would be interested in; this article presents a good description: [https://seeingcomplexity.wordpress.com/2011/02/05/hierarchic...](https://seeingcomplexity.wordpress.com/2011/02/05/hierarchical- edge-bundles/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Looks nice. I also recommend taking a look at [http://visjs.org](http://visjs.org) (no affiliation, other than a happy user).

<comment><USER11> yes, I've used visjs to do some cool stuff but haven't known about GoJS until now. Very impressive. In fact, I'm constantly amazed at the growing number and power of JS libraries in just about every programming domain, data visualisation being just one example.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Cool! I was looking for an easy way to create a sequence diagram just yesterday, but I did not see anything I was happy with. I will have to give this a shot.

<comment><USER13> You may also want to check out [https://www.draw.io/](https://www.draw.io/)

I'm not affiliated, but have used it many times.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Not to be negative but what does this provides over d3.js?

<comment><USER14> At a first pass I assumed it would be easier to just "get going", but after reading the tutorial it seems there is still a lot of initial legwork to be done to get a decent chart going: [http://www.gojs.net/latest/learn/index.html](http://www.gojs.net/latest/learn/index.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> See also [https://github.com/the-grid/the-graph](https://github.com/the- grid/the-graph) from noflo

</comment><comment><USER16> Did you get paid to post this? We don't usually get commercial JS libraries on the front page.

</comment><comment><USER17> Not to discredit the authors but this reminded me of image maps. Flashback to the early 90's!

</comment><comment><USER18> Nothing that you can't do with GraphViz.

</comment><comment><USER2> OT: wehaveaname below - you're autoflagged/dead for being a new account logging in over Tor. Just thought you should know.

<comment><USER7> Thanks for the heads up, it is understandable why that why Hackernews would take such measures but I really hope that the autoflag is a temporary solution until a person reviews my comments.

<comment><USER19> That's exactly right. Once a moderator sees the comments, we unkill them and mark your account legit so future comments will be fine. In the future, you (or anyone) can always speed that up by emailing us a link at firstname.lastname@example.com.

Comments posted from Tor IPs by new accounts are put under moderation because of past abuse by trolls. Sorry for the inconvenience. We have a plan to turn the review process over to the community, which should ease the problem considerably, but I don't know yet when we'll get to it.</comment></comment></comment>


How to be successful (at your career, Twitter edition) - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/sama/status/1214274038933020672 <comment><USER3> >Getting caught up in the parts of a job that don't matter is a dangerous trap and for some reason one that a lot of people fall into. Let other people play political games and avoid them as much as you can.

My experience at big companies is the inverse. The people who advance are the ones who spend 80% of their time focused on politics, while the heads down engineer will get a thank you and inflationary raise.

<comment><USER4> I don't think moving up the corporate ladder is what Altman considers to be 'success'

<comment><USER5> No, but you need political capital even if your goal is making cool shit and not moving up the corporate ladder.

Human interaction is political - unless your work is entirely self sustaining, you have to be able to navigate the politics of human interaction. These get worse when money is involved, and all of the other competing interests at a company. I'm not saying focus on politics to the exclusion of directly productive work, but this idea that you can ignore politics and still accomplish things larger than one man projects seems incredibly naive. I don't buy for a minute that Altman hasn't engaged in plenty of politics over his career.

<comment><USER6> "I don't buy for a minute that Altman hasn't engaged in plenty of politics over his career."

He is probably a natural at it so he doesn't even notice that he is doing it. Reminds me a little of Steve Jobs. He was able to cut through bullshit but he was also naturally a world class bullshitter himself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "How to be successful" always struck me as the wrong phrasing. It suggests a guarantee, the way "how to make a pie," suggests if you follow these steps perfectly, then you will have the pie they were trying to tell you how to make.

Maybe a better title for everyone that is responding negatively to this might be: "How to slightly increase your chances of success"

<comment><USER8> The saying "Luck favors the well prepared" exists for a reason. Keep an eye out for opportunities and seize them when you can, and you'll find that your chances of success increase quite a bit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Wow, not one positive comment so far. I guess the American dream really is dead. Feels like Eastern Europe.

A man goes to hell and upon arrival sees two giant boiling cauldrons - <USER2> with a large detail of devils, and one completely unattended. The man inquires about the cauldrons and a helpful devil explains: "One is a Russian cauldron, another one is American one. The American one needs serious attention, because when Americans try to escape, they all start helping each other,and it really is a bitch trying to beat them back in. TheRussian one, we just leave it alone, when a Russian tries to escape - the other Russians pull him back in.

<comment><USER10> You may well be assured Eastern Europe seems quite different at present moment from what you described now with lots of IT money pouring in nearly every single EE country, many countries tax less than 30% on salaries, and less than or around 20% in corporate tax. So maybe pick another place to relate with.

<comment><USER9> I was going to include this in the post but then forgot :) I live there, so I know, you are right.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > If there is a single key to success, it is the trait of being able to make > things happen in the world—willfulness, determination, execution focus, not > giving up when you hit a roadblock, the ability to solve any problem that > comes your way, and self-belief.

This is a great distillation of what's needed to make it in America. It's missing one vital ingredient-- the ability to take on risk, both by having the actual means (money, time) and the mental fortitude.

</comment><comment><USER12> I think successful people think everybody can be successful like they know some secret.

Not successful people have many problems like hunger, self-doubt, laziness, distraction.

I think first step is very difficult. Most people like me do not know what to do. What will bring success?

Is there really a secret?

<comment><USER13> Depends in the definition of success. Most people I know consider themselves successful when they have a nice (upward) career, nice healthy and happy family, close friends, 36 hr workweeks, vacation(s), car & house and early retirement. For instance, for programmers in, let's say the Netherlands starting out now (today) fresh from uni, there is no worries achieving that kind of success without working like a beaten horse, ignoring your friends and family, running around an office trying to make everyone happy etc. You won't get rich but you'll retire comfortably and will be the envy of most (which should be incredibly unimportant to anyone, but I guess people who think 'am I successful?' often need some kind of measurement tool).

Advantage of this view of success depends far less on luck besides where you are born (or able to immigrate to).

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> unrolled version -> [https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1214274038933020672.html](https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1214274038933020672.html)

<comment><USER15> thanks for this for us behind corporate firewalls

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> 'Compounding success (which means "growth" in the case of an early-stage start-up) solves almost all internal problems, particularly hard ones.'

I'd say that growth can compel you to ignore internal (and external) problems more than solve them. You don't develop the right culture that can stand up to adversity or attract the right talent, your growth (and success) isn't sustainable.

</comment><comment><USER17> This post is related to the delusional discount that we all apply to luck. Luck is the by far the single most important factor in success, but observing that reality is counter productive. It keeps us working like mad and blaming ourselves if we aren't successful, but without out that delusion no one would play the game and we would have zero successful people. Humanity would suffer.

<comment><USER18> Imagine two people in a similar situation, except the first has been saving money and working on a side project, while the second spends their money and has no side project. They both lose their job with some severance pay. The first sees it as an a lucky opportunity to work full-time on their side project. The second sees it as bad luck. Luck is important, but we can make some of our own.

<comment><USER19> That's not luck, though. That's simply being prepared for a downturn.

Being prepared is important, for sure, but if being prepared always or even usually meant desired outcomes in business, our world would look much different than it does now.

<comment><USER20> Being able to quit with severance pay is lucky if you wanted to quit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Most of this advice is not actionable. It falls into the category of such advice as "take breaks and have fun, but not too much" when the initial question was how much is too much. That is to say, you don't know more after hearing the answer than you did before.

<comment><USER22> I disagree, he says do things that are important but not popular. This could mean asking to be put on an older legacy project that provides a ton of value that people are scared to touch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Blog Post (Last Year) : [https://blog.samaltman.com/how-to-be- successful](https://blog.samaltman.com/how-to-be-successful)

</comment><comment><USER24> I think another big aspect is having or creating opportunities.

"Chance" encounters at e.g. a conference or a great company are far from just chance. I fear here once again the playing field is quite unequal.

</comment><comment><USER25> step 1: lie, cheat, sabotage your peers...

step 2: write bullshit blogpost/ book/ tweets glossing over your dishonesty

step 3: get followers

step 4: $$$

<comment><USER26> I found your steps particularly dishonest in the recent accolades for Shopify: [https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/26/shopify-ceo-you-dont-have- to...](https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/26/shopify-ceo-you-dont-have-to- work-80-hours-a-week-to-be- successful.html?utm_content=buffer1b817&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer)

The reason Shopify is so successful is that they have 0 morals as to who they host. They run a whole slew of shops for white power/neonazi pages and don't care at all. They run shops for Rebel Media, a Canadian neonazi page, and Breitbart. If you get rich by enabling Nazis you can talk about easy working hours all you like, it's all BS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I wonder how happy those people generally are? Maybe that would be a better definition of "successful".

<comment><USER7> Some of them are very happy. Some of them are very unhappy. Success =/= happiness - I don't see Sam saying it does.

<comment><USER28> > success =/= happiness

If you say so. Bit of a weird definition of success though, no?

<comment><USER7> > the accomplishment of an aim or purpose

Not trying to be cheeky, but that you understand immediately that I'm not talking about happiness here tells you that success =/= happiness. We can argue over what we should consider successful, but in the context of what Sam Altman is saying it's unproductive: we all know Sam is talking about professional success, and most of us also know there is more to life than professional success, but we (collectively) have been so burned out (either by not achieving it, or by missing out in our lives achieving it) chasing after professional success that have a knee jerk reaction to anyone talking about it.

I also think it's presumptuous of us to think Sam and whoever else did pursue success ambitiously are not happy - everyone's definition of happiness is their own.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "However, they are willing to work on something for a long time even if other people don't get it. "Important" does not mean "popular"."

I don't like this one. On the one hand you have some people who are successful with a lot of persistence but then you have probably many more who fail after being persistent. If you win you are being celebrated but if you fail you get accused of wasting your time. I think there is a lot of luck and timing involved when people succeed after working on something for a long time.

</comment><comment><USER29> Part of success is choosing the right tools for the job. Twitter is not a blogging platform, and posting 15 times in a row just looks silly, imho. Link a blog FFS.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Wow after reading the comments I feel I should not have posted this here. This is crazy! Do some people really think he was just lucky or he just had money to try all these things. These people take real risk and are smart enough to see the world as it is. There are few things to be learned here. How does these negative comments help in any single way ?

</comment><comment><USER30> Subtitle: At Your Career

Stow the angst everybody.

<comment><USER31> I sometimes wonder at the underlying cause for so many people to, seemingly intentionally, take an uncharitable view of something. It seems to just be part of the human condition, though HN is less rife with this than other places.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> 1\. Go to an elite college 2. Found a social network startup in SV around the turn of the century 3. Get VC 4. Sell the espoil for millions. Enjoy

</comment><comment><USER33> Or just be lucky.

<comment><USER7> I like to think of all the things he said as stacking luck as much as you can. It will always come down to luck, but you have to be prepared to grab luck when it comes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I think Sam Altman is a smart guy and he's definitely an example of someone who has met with success but I don't know that he's actually had a 'career' yet. That being the case, I'm going to take anything he says about how to have a successful career with a large grain of salt.

</comment><comment><USER35> Easy.

Step 1: Have a lot of money. Especially family money.

Step 2: Start a business with family money.

Step 3: Fail.

Step 4: Goto Step 1. Repeat 5 times.

...

Step 5: Maybe.. success?

Step 6: Write a book on how to be successful. Sell for $50.

<comment><USER36> you've just described the gary vee formula

<comment><USER37> And Trump? Although being president is another level.</comment></comment></comment>


Nedstarkism - <AUTHOR> http://webjac.com/2013/07/nedstarkism/

<comment><USER2> It reminds me of German sociologist Max Weber's famous passage in his essay "Politics as a Vocation" (1919):

"We must be clear about the fact that all ethically oriented conduct may be guided by one of two fundamentally differing and irreconcilably opposed maxims: conduct can be oriented to an 'ethic of ultimate ends' or to an 'ethic of responsibility.' This is not to say that an ethic of ultimate ends is identical with irresponsibility, or that an ethic of responsibility is identical with unprincipled opportunism. Naturally nobody says that. However, there is an abysmal contrast between conduct that follows the maxim of an ethic of ultimate ends--that is, in religious terms, 'The Christian does rightly and leaves the results with the Lord'\--and conduct that follows the maxim of an ethic of responsibility, in which case one has to give an account of the foreseeable results of one's action.

[...]

If an action of good intent leads to bad results, then, in the actor's eyes, not he but the world, or the stupidity of other men, or God's will who made them thus, is responsible for the evil. However a man who believes in an ethic of responsibility takes account of precisely the average deficiencies of people; as Fichte has correctly said, he does not even have the right to presuppose their goodness and perfection"

Source: [http://anthropos-lab.net/wp/wp- content/uploads/2011/12/Weber...](http://anthropos-lab.net/wp/wp- content/uploads/2011/12/Weber-Politics-as-a-Vocation.pdf) (public domain)

</comment><comment><USER3> I do believe the intelligent folk around here can handle a discussion on pragmatism vs. righteousness without needing a sugar coating of b.s. pop culture labelling it nedstarkism....

<comment><AUTHOR> You're right. Funny thing though, my wife made up the name watching Game of Thrones. Ever since then we've been calling it "nedstarkism" in the family. We've been using it for a couple of years now, it was not meant to be sugarcoating, it's just the name we've been using for it :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Another such dilemma is lecturing vs querying. In the quest to explore the topic of Righteousness vs Pragmatism, the author becomes deceivingly director- like. It'd be more pragmatic of him to explore the topic without spewing out one-all advice

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your comment. After reading your comment I re-read it and you're right, I was to director-like. Anyway it's already done, but I'll keep in mind to have a more exploratory tone in future articles. I, by no means, was trying to give directives. The whole article itself goes against the idea of following established rules, I'm no one to tell anybody what to do or how to act

<comment><USER4> It's all good mate, it happens to the best of us. Being objective is tough to maintain when writing pieces out of passionate opinion. I thoroughly enjoyed the article and do think your advice is mostly spot on except towards the end. I can reiterate the article if you are interested in my disagreements.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I always felt that "My rights end where yours begin" was the perfect center of pragmatism vs righteousness.

<comment><AUTHOR> Nice policy

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Of course, his list of rules on when not to be pragmatic are subject to change at any time.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hehe, don't think of it as rules, think of them as guidelines. I tried to find the things that I've found are eternal, but then again, I'm no super-wise man</comment></comment>


Is anti-virus software dead? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I was reading one of the recent articles published on the topic and I was shocked to hear these words "Antivirus is dead" by Brian Dye, Symantec's senior vice president for information security.

And then I ran a query on Google Trends and found the downward trend in past 5 years.

Next, one of the friends was working with a cloud security company known as Elastica which was bought by Blue Coat in late 2015 for a staggering $280 million dollars. And then Symantec bought Blue Coat in the mid of 2016 for more than $4.6 Billion dollars.

I personally believe that the antivirus industry is in decline and on the other hand re-positioning themselves as an overall computer/online security companies.

</comment><comment><USER3> As long as Microsoft Windows is alive, anti-viruses will still burn this planet.</comment>


Google monitoring all conversations - <AUTHOR> https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/2015/06/google-chrome-listening-in-to-your-room-shows-the-importance-of-privacy-defense-in-depth

<comment><USER2> This should go viral!

<comment><USER3> It has, more than a week ago.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Birdy Comments – comments for people, not websites - <AUTHOR> https://www.birdycomments.com/ <comment><USER2> This looks great. I have seen this idea implemented several times and each time it was an uninviting / non-modern UI.

I always wanted something like this to become popular and gain a user-base because it might lead to a more community-feeling web.

Here's hoping you accomplished it. Cheers.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I, too, value consistent and simple UI. Ideally when distributed web takes off Birdy should become completely distributed and encrypted.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> What's your plan to avoid the issues of not enough users making the extension pretty much worthless? There have been numerous attempts of this exact thing before.

There are so many unique urls that finding another user who have commented on that specific one will be more or less impossible.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point but I think it goes without saying that all social apps are worthless without a user base. I hope the convenience and advantages of this approach will attract future users.

I am not handling all unique URLs as truly unique - they are normalised. So actual pages where you would want to leave comments - say some business' home page or a Twitter user's feed - will have a unique URL and will allow multiple users to discuss content. Something like [https://youtu.be/PcdMU-H9Jts](https://youtu.be/PcdMU-H9Jts) and [https://youtu.be/PcdMU-H9Jts?t=899](https://youtu.be/PcdMU-H9Jts?t=899) are kept as aliases in my DB and will have the same comment tree.

<comment><USER3> > I hope the convenience and advantages of this approach will attract future > users.

But as far as I know, it hasn't worked for the others. And as far as I know, they are not only similar things - but identical. What distinguishes your implementation? What actually is the advantage of this approach?

I haven't seen the iOS integration before, but honestly - I would never use that, what is the chance of finding comments? 0.0000001%?

<comment><AUTHOR> I am curious to know which other apps you refer to. You answered you question yourself actually - mobile integration is key. iOS and Android extensions allow users to add comments not only to any page in the browser, but to all URLs that other apps share. Like Tumblr posts shared from Tumblr app. On another note - public comments do not necessarily mean that you need an active instant discussion. You can leave a review, for example.

<comment><USER3> Honestly it was quite hard to actually find them, weather that means I over- estimated the amount or that they have simply failed I don't know. I think a bit of both.

Maybe this [0] and this [1] fits the bill, both of them have very few users.

I still don't see how mobile will make it work, you will still have no idea if there is something going into the button and as I said if you go there to read something you will never ever find another comment because of the massiveness of the web. Even if you write a review, who is it for? The chance of someone reading this review, on this app, on the specific page for a product they want is so small it is not even funny. And writing a review usually means you do it for either the "stats" of writing reviews which you now don't get, or for others to read, which they just won't.

Don't get me wrong, I'd love for something like this to succeed and thrive. I just don't see it happening right now.

[0] [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dropchat/eaejhpdja...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dropchat/eaejhpdjaoedfbbnajilifkhdngdgbno?hl=en)

[1] [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/retort/ianfcbdiagd...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/retort/ianfcbdiagddaggjakeebfdccjihfkid?hl=en)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for your thoughts - I appreciate this discussion. I think in the beginning it will best work on bigger websites with popular commenting sections and strict editorial policies. Take The Guardian for example. They disable comments very often, moderate them aggressively - I would love to be able to discuss their content on their website without their control. Another user case is reviews on websites that more savvy users find not trustworthy. Scam websites etc. Being able to read actual user reviews there could be invaluable.

<comment><USER3> That's a good use-case I guess.

I had an idea that you could have a feed where peoples comments are showing up. So when you'd press the extension or open the app you'd see "oh people are using this app and this is where they are commenting".

Then Birdy itself becomes the "network" and each comment made is more likely to be seen by other Birdy members.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the suggestion. In the future I would like to add a dashboard where users would be able to see comments from all sources they are interested in. Just a single feed for all comments in the system might be overwhelming.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> That is nice, but why not Hypothesis?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hypothesis is a great idea but in my opinion is overly complicated for most users. I was very excited about Google Wave as well and that didn't didn't turn out very well. Birdy is very different - it works on most modern devices and is very intuitive. Everyone used comments before - now you just can comment on any page instead of relying on website owners to provide you with a platform.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Link.fish – Bookmarking Meets Web-Parsing (HN Exclusive) - <AUTHOR> https://link.fish/hn-early-access/ <comment><USER2> I watched the intro video, and this does look pretty neat. But, after reading the Privacy Policy[1] — I have decided to stick with Pinboard[2] for my bookmarking needs. Suggest maying adding a paid tier that opts-out of all advertising/tracking/marketing.

[1] [https://link.fish/privacy-policy/](https://link.fish/privacy-policy/)

[2] [https://pinboard.in](https://pinboard.in)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks a lot for the feedback. That is very helpful! Could you maybe tell me what parts you are specifically referring to? Because we actually try to collect as less information as possible. So do we for example not even ask for the name of the users. The only thing we ask for is an email address. The tracking (with for example Google Analytics) is used to know how many people are active and how the page is used to know what features to concentrate on to improve link.fish further (surveys are nice but are never as exact as actual usage data). We also do NOT display any ads nor is it every planned (hate them myself). What is maybe planned in the future (and can then also get deactivated for future paid accounts) is to send users special offers in which they could be interested. Like for example if somebody bookmarks a lot of apartments we can assume he wants to move and so he is maybe interested in getting 20% off for a moving service and/or DSL. Because we will not do any of that soon and currently I am only interested in honest user feedback you can simply sign up and write me an email to firstname.lastname@example.com . I will then make sure that as soon we have pro accounts you will get a free one. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is a really great idea! This could really be huge. The rights to scraping / data usage problem is completely solved within this business model since you use the clients own computer to extract and you allow them to invite their contacts to collaborate privately on the collected information.

I'm building something in a similar space, and it's really great to see people with new ideas coming into the scene. Stick around! Love this product!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks a lot! Right now it does not use the clients to scrape the data. But is maybe later planned to be also able to extract data from pages behind logins and/or when there are issues because of the scraping.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is definitely interesting. I'm trying it out - One of the things I'm noticing is that there's no way to edit the data that I see. Please correct me if I'm wrong on this - it seems very strange that this doesn't exist

<comment><AUTHOR> Great to hear thanks! About the data. It depends on what you mean. If you mean that you can currently not change the data of a single bookmark that's true. However, if you mean that the data can not be corrected in general then not, but it is not very clear for incomplete data yet. There are two possibilities. None technical people can simply click on the (!) in the top right corner of an entry to inform us about wrong or incomplete data. We will then fix it asap. More tech savvy people can use our "Data Selector" tool. If there is no data at all it will display a large button for it directly on the entry. If the data is incomplete it can be reached via "Plugins -> Data Selector" on the top of the page. It allows to easily define what kind of data should be extracted and how it can be found. That tool is still in an early stage so would definitely love some feedback!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Interesting. This has some feature overlap with Bookmark OS which I use daily. How does it let you select what info you want to scrape? What if the underlying structure that is being scraped changes over time?

<comment><AUTHOR> By default does it use a combination of microdata, metadata and common HTML structures to find information. If nothing gets found that way, people can use a custom build in tool which makes selecting the information very easy. If the structure changes, it does not yet get detected automatically. Rather does the first person which sees that information is not there, would have to load the parser and fix the parts that changed. Normally does not take more than a few minutes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Heads up for Safari users:

> There is currently a bug in Safari which prevents our page from running > correctly. So please choose another browser like for example Chrome or > Firefox.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah yes, hope the Safari users make the effort to test it in another browser for now. Will try to find a good workaround for the final version because it does not seem like Apple will ever fix it.

<comment><USER7> What is the bug? I'm curious.

<comment><AUTHOR> It has to do with IndexedDB which gets used to save some data.

<comment><USER7> [https://github.com/nolanlawson/fruitdown](https://github.com/nolanlawson/fruitdown)

<comment><AUTHOR> Great, thanks a lot! Will check it out and see if it fixes the issue.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Oh wow what an awesome solution for stupid bookmarks. I was looking for something like this for quite a while. This should be integrated into every browser!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Will do my best ;-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Isn't this the same thing import.io or kimonify were trying to do some months ago?

Not that they have succeeded in any way, maybe this will.

<comment><AUTHOR> Probably depends on how you define success. Kimonolabs did exit and import.io is still running and how it seems not that bad.

Apart from that are they quite different to link.fish . What we have in common is that we all turning websites into structured data. That is however where it ends. They offer pure data extraction services for professionals and companies for big sets of data for a few predefined websites (B2B). It can be automated, download and then they can do with the raw data whatever they want. link.fish, on the other hand, is a bookmarking service which allows anybody (B2C) to work with every websites without technical knowledge (not totally there yet). They can display anything directly in link.fish like sort their recipes by preparation time, their movies by rating and the sights they want to visit on their vacation on a map.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> awesome work! excited to make use of the product

<comment><AUTHOR> Great to hear. When you did would feedback be very appreciated as it is still a beta right now.</comment></comment>