Startup snake oil: scamming early stage entrepreneurs - <AUTHOR> http://pandodaily.com/2013/11/04/startup-snake-oil-scamming-early-stage-entrepreneurs/ <comment><USER2> A little too much vitriol and angst for my taste, but it's an important subject.

My position is simple: there are lots of folks in the startup ecosystem that are trying to help me in various ways. Many of them charge money. Good for them. Folks gotta eat.

Having said that, from my side (startup founder), the situation is _very_ precarious. As entrepreneurs we are constantly swamped with pitches for various things to make our businesses successful. I know I've spent thousands of dollars on stuff that didn't do what I thought it would do. In fact, I've become quite bitter about all of it. When I think of all the money being spent by folks who are trying to buy success through tools instead of customer interaction? Makes me sad and angry.

But I think trying to name and shame is absolutely the wrong way to go about this. Most of these startup ecosystem folks mean well, and most of them have products that are well worth the money -- for folks who need the products. I think the real problem as entrepreneurs is that we are unable to recognize for ourselves whether we need something or not; so we buy too much. If we're too ignorant to know what to spend our money on, can't well blame others for selling us stuff.

So the answer here is educating each other, not going on some witch hunt for aggressive spammers (which is a separate problem). Let's continue to meet and share information on startups (which is why I'm here) and these other problems will work themselves out.

<comment><USER3> _" I think trying to name and shame is absolutely the wrong way to go about this. Most of these startup ecosystem folks mean well, and most of them have products that are well worth the money -- for folks who need the products."_

Completely agree. I'd love to see more stories that leave out the personal drama and, instead, run some analysis. There are a lot of these companies out there, offering similar services. What's the ROI on spending money with them? Which ones are better than others? How do they rank against each other?

To your point:

 _" I think the real problem as entrepreneurs is that we are unable to recognize for ourselves whether we need something or not; so we buy too much. If we're too ignorant to know what to spend our money on, can't well blame others for selling us stuff."_

We can't blame others for selling us this stuff, but we can and should share our experiences. It's completely legitimate to share a bad experience (or a good experience). There is a lot of opacity in this space, and transparency is going to help ease it.

I am completely with you, though: I could do without the public outing of names and email addresses. And I hate smear campaigns, even when they appear to be warranted. A lot of people make stupid mistakes when they're young and dumb; few people deserve to have those mistakes chase them across the internet for the rest of their lives. (As will probably be the case with the immature BD guy named in the article. If even half of what was said about him is true, he deserves to be fired, and his former employer should issue an apology to Ms. Fichtner. But does he really deserve a life sentence?)

In general, I wish tech blogs would focus more on tech and less on people. Leave gossip to the gossip blogs. It's hard to tell where informative journalism ends and personal vendetta begins in pieces like these. So I've trained myself to gloss over them. That's unfortunate, because underneath the thicket of naming-and-shaming, there's often some wisdom or advice to be found.

<comment><USER4> PandoDaily is a gossip blog that just happens to cover tech.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Okay, so they charge to attend a conference. Maybe the money isn't worth it. I don't see any mention of people having actually gone there, nor if the conference is actually a good thing.

Not recognizing the VCs from an east coast conference is hardly an automatic fail, in my mind. There's no shortage of financial companies here, after all.

A "scam" would mean that the people paying don't get what they were promised. This article doesn't claim that at all. It's just a bunch of people who think the price is too high.

YMV might be terrible, but this article is hardly convincing.

<comment><USER6> Charging un-funded startups to attend a conference to matchmake them with VC's is unproductive and unethical.

If there's a problem with this article, it's that it takes hundreds of words trying to unspool drama from such a simple point.

<comment><USER7> "Charging un-funded startups to attend a conference to matchmake them with VC's is unproductive and unethical."

100% don't agree. [1]

Unproductive for the startup? Making contacts and getting some exposure and having discussions (and most importantly making mistakes) is unproductive? How so?

Charging? As the retort from the principal of the firm said what are they supposed to do do this for free?

And exactly what is unethical? Taking advantage of young people who don't know the difference between what you (or others here) might consider a "legit" opportunity (hey like spending half their life trying to get into the YC or VC lottery to begin with) and this?

[1] When I graduated from college on my own dime I paid money to fly to (get this) a "word processing conference" in order to make contacts and establish myself in what (I thought) would be the new business I was starting (computer supplies). Later when starting other businesses I flew to other places to go to expos, shows, whatever I needed to do. I used my own money to do that (that I had earned).

<comment><USER6> What's a well-known startup that was funded as a result of having paid to meet investors?

If you can't name one, the unproductiveness argument is straightforward, and the ethical argument follows from it.

The reality is that this simply isn't how venture funding works. Founders don't pay to meet investors; they exercise their own networks to get intros. Paying to expand your network in some obvious was is unhelpful; all it does is send a signal that you don't have a real network.

<comment><USER7> "What's a well-known startup that was funded as a result of having paid to meet investors?"

The answer to that question isn't known to me.

Of course if I was the one that was producing the event, and someone asked that question, it would be valid. [1] That is if we could get beyond a definition and why it matters if the startup was "well known".

"The reality is that this simply isn't how venture funding works."

Half of what people are doing today (1/2 is arbitrary to make a point) are things that go against "how" something currently works.

"all it does is send a signal that you don't have a real network."

But who does it send a signal to? You mean it paints you with a big fat "I'm a newbie and I don't know how things work label?".

To be clear I haven't analyzed the value provided by paying this company money and can't say that I would recommend it (or not). But I don't think it's clear that there isn't any value and I am fairly certain that it isn't a scam either [2] that there could be people getting value from it.

[1] That said there are many situations in business where the effort and/or money paid doesn't result in a direct benefit like funding or something (and this is important) that is easily measured.

[2] Like those real estate seminars which I would say are a scam but I think they have entertainment value for some people. And maybe after you attend one you learn a valuable life lesson for the money spent.

<comment><USER6> It's not "known" to me, but I would be willing to bet significantly on the answer.

There are things that people don't do because nobody's thought to do it, or because nobody's been willing to accept the risk. But there are also things nobody does because they self-evidently won't work, and paying for introductions to VCs is probably one of those things.

The signals it sends is worse than "I'm new"; it's "I was unable to generate interest from investors on my own".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> On December 19th 2012 I responded to an invite to a YSV event with the following:

I have a few questions:

How many startups that have been funded as a direct result of this and prior events hosted by New England Venture Summit? What is the ratio to startups presenting and startups getting funded? Why do the investors not bear the cost of startup entry fees? Is there the option to waive the fee? What is your vetting process to ensure the quality of startups?

Here was the response I received from Kineret Weiss, note the sample of success cases and a reluctance to track the only metrics that matter for an organization like this - how effective are your conferences:

Hi Dinyar – Thanks for your interest. We evaluate each company based on the components of the summary outline (management team, business model, market potential, financials, etc.) which is needed to apply.

As far as stats, we don't have the manpower or ability to track that information, but we do know of several companies (such as Mojiva, Peminic, UTest, etc) that have received funding as a direct result of our programs.

At the same time your question and outlook is flawed and I'll tell you why.

Say I take your company today and sit you in front of the three most active VCs in your space. After the meetings they each get up telling you that they appreciate you coming by but that it's not a fit for them at this time. According to your data request, we would be offering you no value but the fact is we placed you in front of the three most active VCs in your space.

Additionally, there is always a good mix of returning and new investors in attendance, pointing to the fact that investors see great value in the high level of startups that present at our conferences. You can view the video highlights at the end of this email to see several top VCs (who I'm sure you'll recognize) who have found our summits to be of great value.

I have included further details below about the venture summit and the opportunity to be showcased including pricing, benefits, testimonials and a link to the conference website etc.

</comment><comment><USER9> I think the offense with YSV is that they are preying on the vulnerable. When a start-up is running out of cash and / or facing extinction they become desperate for money.

I would even go so far to say that money is rarely the real issue. Start-ups need to create the formula - insert $1 here, exit $2 there. Building a start- up is a lot of work and there are no quick and easy answers at any point, money may seem like the answer but in reality it can cause more problems then it solves.

</comment><comment><USER10> A lot of these conferences have the same underlying value prop. Finovate for instance does the same thing - it costs something like 9k or 10k to present! But Finovate is useful, because the content is better curated, they attract more influential players from the space.

It sounds like YSV does a much poorer job executing, which makes it a poor value, but not sure that makes it a scam

</comment><comment><USER11> Part of me hates the spammers that do this, creating nothing of real value for anyone but their own wallets, but another part of me, the grown-up, cynical part, figures that what they're doing is smart as hell: they're selling shovels.

Startups come and go in the thousands nowadays. What could possibly be smarter than sucking them ALL dry, instead of trying to be a profitless, slave-to-the- VC startup themselves?

<comment><USER12> Agreed. That could be a similar argument for the crop of 'Learn To Code/Hack in X Months' schools popping up all over the place. Lot's of shovels being sold for sure.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why does the open source community use GitHub, a closed source platform? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I wouldn't speak of an "open source community". there is no such entity, formally speaking.

the best reason however is, in my opinion, network effect. github has been the first big player in this space and is also the default place where people go.

However yes, I think that the open source community should move to at least gitlab.com, if not to sourcehut.org.

</comment><comment><USER3> The open source community is a vast and non-uniform group, so there's not going to be any unified reason. There are also plenty of people (both within the "open source community" and unrelated to it) who don't use GitHub, likewise for a variety of reasons.

But speaking personally, I'm totally okay using closed source services and tools when they are a good fit for what I need. The fact that I work on open source doesn't imply that I must refuse closed source services.

</comment><comment><USER4> I think this is an instance of a fairly common pattern.

Not all good ideas/implementations arise from the FOSS community. And sometimes, there's something that's so clearly better than the alternatives, that it becomes widely used despite being commercial.

Previous examples I'd cite are Solaris, Purify, vTune, BitKeeper, Sublime Text, macOS, etc.

Generally, some time passes until it becomes clear what it is exactly that is key to the experience, and those things are then either replicated or extended in FOSS, and people then move away.

eg. Linux has replaced Solaris, Git replaced BitKeeper, valgrind replaced Purify, etc.

There's also a spectrum of people in the community: some who are willing to use commercial products pragmatically, and others who aren't on a more purist stance. GitHub clearly has very broad adoption, but since the Microsoft acquisition especially, GitHub and SourceHut appear to be attracting more patronage.</comment>


Learn Vim Progressively - <AUTHOR> http://yannesposito.com/Scratch/en/blog/Learn-Vim-Progressively/ <comment><USER2> My problem with vim is that I keep pressing 'ESC' almost automatically to get out of insert mode. How to fix?!

<comment><USER3> Can't tell whether this is a joke or I just didn't understand the question.

=]

<comment><USER2> I press it even though I'm out of insert mode.

<comment><USER4> Shouldn't have any effect... Long time vim user... I still do it all the time. Especially when returning to the terminal from another app.

I also mapped jj and kk (and other direction combos) to esc for when I forget to hit escape...</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Review my startup: ProMapr - <AUTHOR> http://www.promapr.com/dev

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi,

ProMapr is an application for sharing -

1\. job referrals with your friends and

2\. your job wishes with your friends so that they can refer you.

I need some feedback on following (in the order) -

1\. concept/idea

2\. Process/design

3\. Everything else!

It is sort of an Alpha version, not yet launched and still under development. I have been working on it after my office hours for last few months!

Kindly let me know what you guys think of it!

Thanks & Regards,

Kshitiz Anand

</comment><comment><USER2> "login with facebook"

 _closes browser tab_

<comment><AUTHOR> Oops! Let me check! Thanks for letting me know!

<comment><AUTHOR> Mark, seems to be working!</comment></comment></comment>


Bubble? What bubble? Things are great. Unless… - <AUTHOR> http://www.boston.com/business/technology/articles/2011/06/05/bubble_what_bubble_things_are_great_unless_/?page=full

<comment><USER2> I started seriously thinking "bubble", when someone I know who runs a moderately-successful, very small Groupon clone, decided to launch an incubator.

Maybe that's not the sign of a bubble though. Maybe it will be a bubble when someone launches an incubator for incubators.

</comment><comment><USER3> Very funny quote from the article:

 _"August 2011: Your accountant, your Uncle Sal, and the garage attendant at your office building all confide they are cultivating start-ups on the side."_

</comment><comment><USER4> shit, i just went insane searching for that remotr acquisition by google...

</comment><comment><USER5> _Wendy's providing unlimited baked potatoes and Frosties, in exchange for a 5 percent equity stake._

I'd take that deal.</comment>


Making the travel site people want, even if it's impossible - <AUTHOR> http://adioso.com/blog/2013/03/adioso-making-the-travel-site-people-want-even-if-its-impossible/ <comment><USER3> Adioso: have you talked to ITA Software (now part of Google) about licensing QPX? We solved the data issue, very painfully, over a 10-year period, by working directly with the airlines. (This was, in fact, one of my major contributions to the company as COO, and many people were involved.) Using QPX, you could implement exactly what you envision with stuff ITA already has running.

I'm a cofounder of ITA but am no longer affiliated with the company. But if you want to talk to people there, I can connect you. Just reply here with some way for me to contact you.

<comment><AUTHOR> Many thanks David. We spoke to Jeremy very early on in proceedings (early '09), and it QPX didn't seem to be a fit (or at least, a cost-effective one) at that point.

But I'd like to think things have changed since then.

I'll ping you on LinkedIn.

<comment><USER4> Hey Tom - have you checked out Vayant? I've been playing with their API for my upcoming travel startup and it's been really good. Results in less than a second for most of Europe and Asia.

<comment><USER5> Totally. Vayant are on the open ended fast query wavelength. Tom links to them in the last paragraph

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> [http://adioso.com/us/oakland-california-to-maui-hawaii-in- au...](http://adioso.com/us/oakland-california-to-maui-hawaii-in-august- direct-for-6-days)

Gives me fares of $772, $841, and $940 (expedia is not responding)

Checking Google Flights, I see if I leave later in August, I can fly for as low as $443.

[https://www.google.com/flights/#search;f=OAK;t=OGG;d=2013-08...](https://www.google.com/flights/#search;f=OAK;t=OGG;d=2013-08-22;r=2013-08-28;s=0)

The search style you have is nice, but it is most important to me to get an accurate low fare! And speed really matters too...

</comment><comment><USER7> My mother owned a travel agency, my father a pilot. I was an airline pilot too. We learned how to use various reservations systems that the author seems to just ignore existence.

Amadeus and Sabre pretty much offer all those functionalities and much more than that. I can do that exact search Dustin wanted on Amadeus with 2 lines on a terminal.

All those websites building frontends to Amadeus and Sabre really should stop stating they are doing something different from what already exists. Just because expedia is an awful website it doesn't mean there is something magical or impossible behind what you did.

I hope you guys are not just an Amadeus/Sabre/ITA wrapper, because if you are, you are not profitable.

<comment><USER5> Ah a GDS romantic. GDS systems suck at search. Tell me? Why can't you even do these type of searches on the Amadeus flight search page? <http://www.amadeus.net> Maybe you would be kind enough to do a search from somewhere to 'anywhere' or 'Europe' from 'any date' to 'any date' on sabre and post the video. Bet you can't. Great flight search only happened when ITA liberated search from the GDS dinosaurs.

<comment><USER7> ITA is even more expensive than those 'dinosaurs' and offer pretty much the same functionality.

You missed my point (on purpose, but anyway...), which is profitability. As I commented before most airlines are not even offering incentives to those travel websites anymore. In fact, some companies are CHARGING websites to make automated reservations into their systems.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, so every decision we've made about how we go about building this product has factored in profitability, and aligning consumer incentives with supplier incentives.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If the slowness seen as being a problem for your visitors then why not flip it around? Change their expectations about what flight search is.

The search is obviously going to take a while because your site is so powerful and you're doing things that _no one else can_. Adioso isn't a dumb search engine that makes you do all the work - it's an automated travel agent that will churn through hundreds of flights and email you with a selection of the very best in a short amount of time. It even understands language like a real travel agent.

<comment><USER9> To add to this, I'd suggest adding an 'email me' option if things are slow on the site. Waiting on a website longer than 20-30s is painful but receiving a well formatted email within 10mins (with the same info) can still feel like magic.

It's a stop-gap but could work well in this case.

<comment><USER10> I'm working on something with the same concept but for a different market. There's no way for me to tap into 3rd party databases (for now). I'm setting it up so the results will be added to your own personal search-page where (only) you can view them after x-time. From there you can choose to view more details and/or close the deal. Not as fast as live-search, but I'm communicating it from the get-go.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Thanks for this series Tom, you guys are trying to succeed in a really challenging technical sector (Travel) and I, for one, really appreciate your honesty. I think that some of the confusion & criticisms I see in other comments are that after reading your pieces we all rush off to try adioso and some observations predominate:

# The ui is quirky on different screen sizes # The calls to Expedia are SLOW # The natural language search is perhaps only one search interface and not necessarily the best # The core bit you guys have worked on 'wingtip' is sort of lost in this version of Adioso because of trying to increase coverage # You could have utilised existing api's like ITA's QPX, Everbread's Haystack, Amadeus, even Skyscanner's api and increased coverage whilst being much faster. # The example link at the end that presumably is the answer to the question "For the first time, we're seeing signs that the flight data we need is becoming available, in the right format" is totally misleading. Vayant are an ITA competitor not a raw data provider. They have managed to achieve in their price cacheing tech what you have only achieved for lots of low cost carriers. # And this last point is my biggest confusion about Adioso and what I think is your internal confusion. Are you a tech platform for flight data or a consumer facing flight website. Because Kayak, Hipmunk (and previously Orbitz erc) are B2C consumer sites that get data from ITA, Amadeus etc. Vayant, ITA etc are B2B data platforms - tech companies. Only skyscanner truly is both I think. They are a B2C site that last year enabled the selling of over £2 Billion worth of tickets but which is powered by its own 'Graphite' Graph and price cacheing databases.

The embarrassment I feel for you is when you say that you are making a travel site 'even when it's impossible'. I cringe for you! You haven't built a site even as good as Skyscanner's and you're saying pretentious statements like that? I know startups are hard and this is for a book so poetic license is to be expected.

I say ditch the BS and get back to reality. You could attach your natural language interface to someone else's api (like Vayant's) and have a better B2C product or keep improving 'wingtip' but this all seems like a confused desperate fudge.

Incidentally, when are you going to talk in detail about 'Wingtip' it's the bit that most interests me. It IS Adioso. I really do wish you guys every success though. What you are doing is needed but ditch the slow ass Expedia api.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the comments - kind and otherwise.

I'm happy to let it all stand unchallenged - there's a lot you're not aware of or not seeing, but we know what we're doing and we're gonna keep doing it.

And yes we will be writing about Wingtip sometime soon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I tried the business trip I'm taking next week, and that I just researched on hipmunk earlier today.

"Boston to Tunis to Barcelona"

Big bag of fail. Adioso's trying to send me from "Boston, Texas" to "Barcelona, Venezuela", and finds no matching flights.

Even the simpler search "Boston to Barcelona" is sending me to Venezuela, not Catalonia. It's finding no matching flights.

I tried "Barcelona, Spain", editing the URL to be barcelona-es, barcelona-sp. Nothing worked. Maybe it's a corner case or maybe it's deeper than that, but I figured I'd send along the feedback. I do wish you the best, as airline "exploring" is a right pain in the ass.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for this.

Placename disambiguation is something we've wrestled with a lot lately. The way we do it now is: (a) find the most likely origin you meant based on proximity & size; (b) if we have historical data, choose the most likely destination given previous popularity, and (c) whatever the case, give prompts on each one to let you tell us you meant a different one.

Also, we don't currently support multi-city trips, so that would've confused the search parser.

But just running these searches now, they seem to give results:

<http://adioso.com/us/boston-massachusetts-to-tunis-tn>

<http://adioso.com/tn/tunis-tn-to-barcelona-es>

But yeah I know what you mean; the results can be baffling when they're not what you expect.

Thanks for sharing your experience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is fantastic -- I love everything about the concept; hopefully the speed issue can be addressed. But overall, fantastically designed product; kind of reminds me of a Wolfram Alpha for travel with interpretive responses to search

</comment><comment><USER13> I love the shit out of this site. I use it all the time. Happy to see it's from HNers.

I have nothing constructive to add, other than I prefer this to HipMunk.

</comment><comment><USER14> this is really highlighting the fact that there isn't one way to build one interface for all needs. Some people _have_ to travel on certain days - <USER2> can't rearrange those days for love nor money, and existing interfaces (while not great) work within those parameters.

Other people want to say "2 weeks in Moscow in April or May" and have something find either the cheapest, or quickest, or longest flights around. Adioso is going for that (obviously), but I'm wondering what else they can do to perhaps market more towards the 'free and easy traveller' crowd vs the 'locked down scheduled days' crowd.

</comment><comment><USER15> Maybe be upfront about the slowness. An example is the commercials for Buckley's Mixture (for getting rid of coughs).

"It tastes awful. And it works." (pictures of people grimacing at the taste)

<http://www.buckleys.ca/about/history.htm>

You can have a link to answer, "Why is it slow?"

<comment><USER16> Or give them something to watch while the magic happens. A mesmerising animation, for example. The most important thing is to convey that nothing is broken, and progress is being made.

<comment><USER17> Maybe do like the old Sims games:

"Upholstering Airline Seatbacks..." "Recalculating Airspeed Velocity..."

Maybe too cheesy, but it would make me laugh.

<comment><USER18> "Reticulating splines"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The Travel Site I want is a mixture of wikitravel and tripadvisor, only updated more often and not so narrow. By narrow I mean that users on a site only go to restaurants that are mentioned on the site, potentially missing some hidden gems.

The biggest problem whilst traveling for me is not flight info. That's not a problem I have, really. I buy a flight once and forget about it. But I spend a lot of time worrying about not getting ripped off, or walking around finding a safe place to sleep, choosing decent restaurants, selecting authentic places to see and things to do. Wikitravel did an OK job but again it was 'narrow' and also infrequently updated.

In summation, the perfect travel site for me would be basically a map telling me local places to sleep/eat/activity and the price and quality and rating.

<comment><USER20> Hmm.. couldn't resist inserting a plug here. But the site you mentioned is very close to what i'am building now <http://www.kettik.com>.

Like you i spend a lot of time before a trip researching on the kind of experiences i could have once i get there. And being an independent traveler i'am more interested in the kind of activities i could do by myself rather than having someone arrange it for me. So i designed the site along similar lines.

User experiences(blogs)/photos/attractions/activity/sleep/eat/

I'd love to hear your thoughts on it. Especially on the way how the content is presented, there's a lot of scope for improvement there.

<comment><USER19> I'll check it out, thanks.

At first glance I'm wondering why I can't filter by locale. It reads more like a travelogue website than one that can help me immediately.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Very nice. This search works with the way I think. I remember being amazed when Kayak came out and again with Hipmunk. This might be next in that sequence.

<comment><USER22> I did a search: JHB to Buenos Aires in November for 60 days. [http://adioso.com/za/johannesburg-za-to-buenos-aires-cr- in-n...](http://adioso.com/za/johannesburg-za-to-buenos-aires-cr-in-november- for-60-days)

On flysaa.com (Star Alliance member) I can get a cheaper direct flight. Not sure what logic was coded to determine which result receives preference (i.e. ranking) in the results.

I also usually use <http://flisea.com/> to search for reward flights on Star Alliance airlines. Not sure what API to linking to - perhaps you could check it out.

Or perhaps, change the purpose of the site: Find the best available reward flights on One World, Star ALliance and SkyTeam over a specific period of time. It's focused and a big need for frequent travellers

<comment><USER21> Tried it just now. <http://flisea.com> was confused when I entered "San Francisco" as the destination; I had to enter "SFO" when what I really wanted was "SFO | SJC | OAK" and it never returned any flights. Adioso has room to improve their price search but the user interface is just what I want to use - no error messages, just does the best it can with what you give it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Results are buggy. "San Antonio to Caribbean for two weeks in July" displayed plenty of results, including Georgetown, except it was Georgetown TEXAS. My next search was for "San Antonio to anywhere in July for under $200". I get many results; however the price range is way over $200 on most of them. If I hit the back button I lose my search (can't see what I last typed to fix it). Also I keep almost clicking the giant PLAY button in the center of the page to start my search, probably because my search string ends right about where the big play button is. My eyes have to scan far right to see the actual search icon, which is somewhat obfuscated because it has no contrast with the search bar. I guess I can just hit Enter to search ;)

</comment><comment><USER24> Kind of a misleading blog post. It seemed like exactly the site I have been trying to find (a way to give less specific queries when finding tickets). However, it makes you be as strict as any other flight search engine it seems.

This query is 'too broad': <http://adioso.com/fr/france-to-california-june-13>

All I want is to find the cheapest ticket from anywhere in Europe to California in the middle of June, and nobody can give that information to me.

EDIT: I'm sure this was modded down by one of the employees of this site. I included a link that proves what I said, instead of modding my comment down, how about explaining why the linked search is 'too broad'?

<comment><AUTHOR> Adioso co-founder here. I didn't downvote you. I can't speak for the others, but I highly doubt it; they're all too busy working to improve the site and besides we're just not like that.

The post doesn't say Adioso can can currently let you search for _anywhere in Europe to anywhere in California_.

We're working towards that kind of capability, but as you say, no other site in the world can do it, and we can't either, yet, but I think we're working harder than anyone else to offer it.

<comment><USER24> If I wrongly accused you, my apologies.

That is what the blog post led me to believe I could do, and I was genuinely surprised that I couldn't do it.

I really don't see any queries I can do on your site that I can't do on Kayak already, except that Kayak seems to have many more sources of data and therefore fares at least as low and sometimes lower?

<comment><AUTHOR> Have a look at the scrolling search suggestions on the front of <http://adioso.com>, then try executing the same searches on Kayak, _in a single search_. All of them.

<comment><USER24> All of them? Maybe I misunderstand what you are saying, but if you mean that the random travel searches you scroll on the site are a feature, that is bordering on insane.

I don't need to go to some random place for some random duration at some random time.

So, since it would be insane to consider _random_ trips to be a useful feature, I assumed that it was recommending certain trips because they were really good deals. Maybe your system figured out I live near San Jose, and recommended me a flight because it was just such a great deal it was worth my time to try that search and maybe go on a vacation on a whim. That would actually be an awesome feature, and I would probably use it a lot! So, benefit of the doubt.

So I tested that theory, and here is what I got:

[http://adioso.com/us/san-jose-california-to-hawaii-hawaii- ne...](http://adioso.com/us/san-jose-california-to-hawaii-hawaii-next-week- for-7-days)

Best flight that Adioso found was $535 for that trip. BTW, Expedia _never_ returns on your site.

Then I went to Kayak. It took me about 30 seconds to fill it out, and it took me here: [http://www.kayak.com/#/flights/SJC,nearby- HNL,OGG,LIH,KOA/20...](http://www.kayak.com/#/flights/SJC,nearby- HNL,OGG,LIH,KOA/2013-03-13-flexible/2013-03-20-flexible)

So, the best fare that Kayak found was a $277 hacker fare. That's almost exactly half as much as what Adioso found. Sure, that's a hacker fare, and for a 10 day trip not 7 days. Fine, the best fare that is exactly comparable is $350 for a 7 day trip leaving next week round-trip on Delta.

<comment><AUTHOR> _Sigh_ :)

I mean they're examples of searches you can do on Adioso, many/most of which take a lot of time and many repetitive searches on other sites.

The Hawaii search you tried came up with the same fares as Kayak when I tried it. It may well have timed out for you, which is part of the performance challenges this post is mostly about.

But it occurs to me your approach to travel doesn't make you the intended customer for this product, so I won't try to persuade you further :)

<comment><USER25> Who exactly _is_ your intended customer currently? I'm honestly curious. Your site currently doesn't support things like "I'd like to leave from anywhere in CA and go to Europe sometime in August and have a really great experience and a really good deal" and you're also claiming it doesn't work for the style of the person you're responding to... so... who exactly is it that you think is the target user of Adioso?

I'm not just giving you a hard time, either. I'm planning a trip soon and we've got a lot of flexibility in a lot of ways combined with some whacky constraints in others. Is Adioso right for me?

I honestly can't tell. It seems like I should be able to.

<comment><USER26> Random location (in a rough geographic area) to random location (in much larger geographic area) would be pretty crazy search.

I think for most travellers it's fair to say that they know what their starting point is. Or am I making an ass of myself?

<comment><USER25> Usually! But I know people whose idea of a geographic starting point would be a lot larger than you'd think and would just treat it as an excuse for a roadtrip.

Also you could have a schedule where some days I know I'm going to be near city X and others near city Y, but I wouldn't mind beginning from either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Maybe it's better on the desktop, but the site is unusable on the iPad retina. Even typing into the search box is laggy. The resulting search results don't fit the page, have things on top of one another. Basically unusable and for me any travel site has to work on my iPhone and iPad. My desktop is for development, mobile for everything else.

It seems as though google flights is a lot better at finding cheaper flights. I don't want a search box that attempts to guess my query.

For me google flights, kayak and skyscanner meet all my travel needs.

</comment><comment><USER28> This is the kind of website that wows those of us on HN, because it is a very well executed site.

But it does not solve a need, from what I can tell, that Kayak or other meta- searches solve. And at first glance, it seems slower than Kayak and has fewer options.

Visually, I think some people would debate whether your layout is more useful than the clutter of Kayak/Priceline/etc. It certainly meets the guidelines of attractive typography and whitespace but it took me some time to interpret what's going on.

In one real sense, I think the width of your site is a real problem. There's a reason why content sites, like blogs, usually fix their content width to 600-700 pixels: because it's hard to go from left to right and back to left across a wide width. Your current layout forces this upon the user in a way that's not very easy to read. Most people might say that Kayak is ugly and cluttered but it is much much easier to figure at a glance. Sometimes, ugly/cluttered is better...kind of like the debate between HackerNews and DesignerNews.

I'm sounding too harsh here...but only to be helpful. This was a site I showed all my coworkers because I thought it was pretty cool. But "cool" or different isn't enough in the travel space, unfortunately.

<comment><USER29> > But it does not solve a need, from what I can tell, that Kayak or other > meta-searches solve.

I'll give you my last flight search (and ticket purchase) as a direct counter- example.

I want to go to Europe for two to three months. I'll fly wherever is cheapest and I'm willing to go for any period between March and July.

This is theoretically one search on Adioso. It is impossible on Kayak or any other website I've seen to date. And when I say impossible, I don't mean impossible in a single search, I mean I would have to do several thousand searches to cover the full matrix of options which would actually be impossible.

Not to mention, the carriers listed by Kayak actually was quite limited (not sure about others).

<comment><USER6> Try this:

[https://www.google.com/flights/#search;f=YVR;t=POX,ORY,XCR,B...](https://www.google.com/flights/#search;f=YVR;t=POX,ORY,XCR,BVA,CDG;d=2013-03-20;r=2013-03-24;mc=m)

Then flip between to the Map and lowest fare icons (top right of map). I find this much better at zeroing in on a good fare, with loose travel requirements.

<comment><USER30> Thats what drove me crazy about this website. You can't do what you're describing. You can with Hipmunk and apparently google flights.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> It's reasonable to take the speed hit in order to make it more useful to more people, but the UI seems to be designed with fast searches in mind (for which it'd be perfect), rather than for the necessarily slow searches that actually happen. It'd be a lot nicer to use if you typed your query and something happened to reflect the immense amount of stuff going on behind the scenes rather than just sitting there for a few seconds...

</comment><comment><USER20> Any plans of releasing an affiliate API ?. I'am current creating a travel media site (think Tumblr + Tripadvisor mashed together) and i would love to integrate a intelligent, accurate & unobtrusive little flight search widget to the site.

For instance when a user visits a page under any destination (say Bangkok) I would like to present him with something like 'Flights from {Your Location} to Bangkok starting at {xyz}$" to get him to start his flight search.

Here the 'xyz$' pre-search number should be a real price that the user would see in the search results and not some unrealistic number that sites like Tripadvisor and Expedia use as link bait. The start location should be the user's current location and the destination should be from a list of options (e.g {dest: "Ko Phangan, Surat Thani, Thailand, Asia"}) specified while calling your API.

A few months back i explored various options available at that time and gave up on the idea as being impossible. But now, since you are making the impossible possible.. maybe you could do something about it? I'am sure that many other publishers would be interested as well.

</comment><comment><USER32> You should be able to say "New york to southeast asia for three weeks" instead of "New york to southeast asia for 3 weeks"

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure we can do that pretty easily, but why would you want to type four more characters?

<comment><USER33> Mostly because it's natural to type a word longhand in the form of a sentence. So it's not that you should be able to do one or the other, but that you should be able to do either. A user shouldn't be coerced into doing something unnatural for them if your premise is to make it conform to a user's natural language rather than forcing a query type language.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah makes sense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Great website, love the idea! One thing I still don't get is why exactly it is slow? How come you can pre-load some data, but not other? The first thing that comes to mind is caching, but I guess I am not understanding the problem correctly.

Side note: 2 weeks ago there was a hackathon at our university (Edinburgh) and in the Travel category one of the teams tried to do exactly the same thing. However, they only implemented the NLP part as they were using data via Skyscanner's API. Our entry[1] had a similar flavour, but rather than typing, one could select their cities and we did the planning for them.

[1] <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ir7XrlC0aw>

<comment><USER5> They have their own fast, local price cached graph 'wingtip' but it only has data from selected low cost carriers. With this redesign they have felt the need to fill in the gaps via calls to Expedia's api's which are slow.

<comment><USER34> Any ideas on what prevents them from getting the rest of the data?

<comment><USER5> Adioso began as a single source for price search to low cost carriers and the low cost carriers are not in the GDS because they won't pay the prices.So I presume they scrape (spider at regular intervals) the low cost carrier prices from the airline websites but possibly they have api direct links. Tom could tell us. (Tom I really want an in depth post on wingtip!) But to do fast real time search for hundreds of airlines you need more than a fast schedule (time dependent graph) you also need the complex fare rules worked out and programmed. All of that data is available but costs. The last bit is you then need to check availability via wherever you can book the ticket (GDS or direct to airline) and cache it for speed. I think that the fact that Tom links to Vayant's price cacheing api it is an admission that it isn't raw data that's lacking it's a higher level api where fares and availability are already worked out. Because seriously to do that yourself is a huge time & engineering challenge. It took ITA years. Adioso have the fast Graph and can get the schedule data. Vayant is offering an off the shelf solution to do fares and availability. Could work.

<comment><USER34> Right, makes a bit more sense now. Thanks for the thourough explanation. Also, I would too be interested in a post which gives more insight into Wingtip as it sounds quite interesting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Can you make the audioso logo link to audioso.com, and the world blog link to the blog?

</comment><comment><USER36> Great blog post and great perseverance.

But I prefer Skyscanner's 'whole month' search. I can see flight prices for the whole month to a whole country on a single screen. With yours I see seven days at a time. And it takes an age to see the next seven!

I'm sure it's a difficult problem getting accurate 'fuzzy' flight info fast, but Skyscanner have it cracked and have done for some time.

I like the idea of your somewhere warm search, but again it's dead in the water if it takes 30 seconds to _start_ returning results. Just because you offer powerful search doesn't mean you can sacrifice speed. You've still lost my attention in spite of the novelty.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the kind comments. Regarding speed/performance - did you see the part of the post where we explain this?

<comment><USER37> Explaining it doesn't help your users deal with it ;)

I'd suggest making it a bit more asynchronous, or returning whatever results you can first. Allow people to save searches, perhaps, and come back to them in a few minutes.

<comment><AUTHOR> _Explaining it doesn't help your users deal with it_

Didn't say it did :) We just know it's a problem - by far our biggest problem - and the one we're most determined to fix.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> rkuykendall-com "That's slow, especially when you have to do dozens or hundreds of searches to deliver a single set of results."

This seems like a simple communication problem. If this information was displayed to the user ( "36 Searches Completed" or something, ticking up while they waited ), watching that number quickly grow would make me feel crazy productive. "I just waited 5 minutes for a search result" turns into "Oh my god, it would have taken me an hour to do all those searches, this is awesome! Oh, I just did another 3!"

Of course, this is exactly what is happening. You just need to communicate that to the user.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yaya, we plan on doing something like this.

<comment> rkuykendall-com Great! I plan on using Adioso all the time once I get past grad school and have some money. The "Anywhere" destination is exactly how I would love to travel, but no other site allows that.

<comment><USER38> Skyscanner has an "everywhere" option of some description.

<comment> rkuykendall-com That's nice if I know exactly when I want to leave and return.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I have a hypothesis. If the results are exactly what I want and are so good that I don't need to do multiple permutations of the same search, it won't matter one bit that the search takes a long time to complete.

<comment><AUTHOR> I like this hypothesis a lot.

<comment><USER16> The challenge is that not only do you have to really nail it with the "one bullet", but you probably also have to prove it as well. Just coming up with the best answer might not be enough, because people don't trust travel sites to do that. How do you earn trust? You have to convey the sense of an exhaustive search encompassing all the best-known airlines (especially the budget ones), all the available fare types, and flight times. It's almost like putting together a business case for the trip. "Here's the recommendation, based on all these different things we considered."

<comment><USER39> Thank you for expressing this. My first thought when trying out a travel booking website is always "Am I missing out on something?"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> The site looks beautiful, and the UI for the search results is really flexible & powerful. Just a fantastic job.

But the search box, it requires educating the user, and this is your initial and most important functionality on your site. The funny thing is, you allow your user to type in the search as if they are speaking to a person which is a great idea and obviously the way it should be, but that is not how users have been trained to interact with random websites. I am sure you are aware of this, I am sure the search box is very important to you, but I think you should revisit the search box and homepage.

Here are some ideas, feel free to love them, hate them, praise them, trash them. I hope they are good and if not I hope they give you some new ideas.

* Home page - plain white & bare, logo centered, add airplane or luggage to logo so you don't need to describe what you are offering, text "Where do you want to go?", text box, and nothing else. (Format it like google and people will be more inclined to use it like google)

* Automatically figure out where they are coming from. Google analytics knows already, so I am sure there is some way to grab that info. Assume this is their starting point until they tell you otherwise. It currently is defaulting to LA.

* The first question anyone answers when traveling somewhere is "Where", thus the only text on your page asks, "Where do you want to go?".

* As the user types in his destination / search, the website immediately responds informatively and aesthetically.

* Once you have matched a destination, the background of the page changes to a beautiful image of that location, the vacation doesn't start once you get off the plane, it starts now. Going from plain white bkgd to a destination image bkgd ideally will slowly start to pull your user into a vacation mind set.

* Once you have matched a destination, the text on the homepage changes from "Where do you want to go?" to "When? You could type next week, or 03/22".

* If the user deleted the destination before entering "When", repopulate the input field with both the destination and when they want to travel text, he will now understand that you just keep entering information into the field as if you are talking to a person, or searching on google.

* Once you have matched when, introduce new imagery of activities you can do there and/or native food dishes. You are continuing the theme of providing your user with an vacation experience now, not later.

* Once you have matched when, the text on the homepage changes from "When? You could type next week, or 03/22" to "For how long? You could type a few days, or a weekend"

* After you have all needed search data, proceed to results, and if possible continue vacation now theme

* The search box should still work as originally intended as well.

 __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __

Keep up the good fight, don't let them leave the home page without thinking "This is cool!", and I would love to one day hear people say "I need to adioso!"

<comment><USER41> Hello, I'm the designer behind the homepage and search box. Thanks for the great feedback! As you could have guessed, there's been a lot of thought and iterating over the homepage and the orange search box, both on a functional level and a branding experience.

It's been a really interesting exercise. Searching (at least from a Web interface POV) is a really robust paradigm and a space that is challenging to innovate in. While I agree that we haven't quite 'nailed it', I feel like we're constantly moving towards the promised land while adhering to the plethora of backend and frontend contraints.

I like your idea from a story telling perspective, but it feels a little step heavy. We're trying to be patient in educating users on the breadth of queries we can handle. Understanding what you could put into the Google search box was a very gradual discovery experience.

I too am hoping we can turn a proper noun into a verb :)

<comment><USER42> Here's my take on the search box- I'm a parent flying with a young child, and I just finished booking flights last week.

While the capabilities of the open-ended design of the search is amazing, when I search for flights, I find that I am looking for something very specific. I know cites and dates, direct flights only. Even before getting married and having a kid, I generally think about where and when I want to travel well before I start searching online. I don't know if other people are more spontaneous than I am, but I am constrained by PTO days, other people's schedules, etc. At the most I want the flexibility to change the leave/return dates by a day or two.

Since I already know the parameters of my trip, I find that the input that most travel sites have settled on (To, From, Include nearby airports, Leave date, Return date) gets me to what I'm looking for faster. The open-endedness of the Adioso search box was actually slower, since I tended to type too little and did a lot of filtering afterwards. It felt like my choices are either I type too much and the computer doesn't understand, or I type too little and "fix it myself".

From my biased perspective, I think it would be a big win to have the traditional search inputs be the default but with the open-ended search as an alternative input (not "Advanced search" but maybe the link is "I'm flexible"). As an alternative search, it's no longer a limiting search but it now feels like: you can type _anything_ and the computer just figures it out! Sweet! Also, user education no longer is a problem- everyone knows what to do with an "I'm flexible" search box.

The other big speed advantage of the traditional search input is: often I will return to a travel site weeks later and my trip details are already pre-filled and all I need to do is hit the search button. You can't really do that with a search box. (When I hit back from the Adioso search results page, I lose everything and the search box is empty. That seems like a bug, I think I should be able to save at least that little bit of typing.)

BTW, I didn't feel like Adioso search (getting back the initial results) was slow at all. It felt just as fast as any other travel site and definitely faster than the worst of them that leave you staring at airplane animations for 10s of seconds.

Great work, I'm really interested to see what happens with Adioso. I'll definitely be trying it more in the future!

<comment><USER43> > when I search for flights, I find that I am looking for something very > specific. I know cites and dates, direct flights only

I'm pretty much the same if I'm going on holiday - I usually chose an exact city well before looking for flights rather than a country or an area.

If I'm flying back to my parents though, it's a bit different. There are a number of airports around them:

\- one has flights daily but requires a 3 hour train journey

\- another has flights twice a week and is a 1 hour drive

\- another has flights daily, is a 1 hour drive, but is usually more than twice the price of the others

\- another has flights daily, is a 2 hour drive, and the price varies

For this I usually just open SkyScanner (Adioso doesn't seem to have many low cost airlines in Europe) in 10 tabs or so and compare the results myself...

<comment><USER44> That might be the case for you both, but I certainly have a use case for this style of searching. I often want to go on a break over a set weekend/week with no set destination in mind, and very flexible with dates. This type of things is perfect for when your not explicitly looking for a specific date range or flight path.. more just experimenting with options.

Hats off to you guys, like the semantic query style rather than the traditional mould!

<comment><USER42> Absolutely agree that there is a use case for the open-ended search- it's powerful, cool, and not yet addressed by anyone. My point is that the "traditional" search also has it's strengths, especially when the trip is not going to be open-ended: travelling to a wedding or graduation, travelling for business, travelling with a group of friends where the schedule and destination is agreed upon.

In fact, thinking about it more, I strongly suspect that personality (in a Myers-Briggs J/P way) has a lot to do with how we prefer to travel. Some people plan everything out ahead of time down to the hour, some people close their eyes and spin the globe.

I think the other factor is how often you fly. If you don't travel/vacation very often, you are more likely to be travelling for a specific reason where dates and destination is known. If you travel very often, you will probably have more opportunities to pick a random place to go for the weekend.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> I love the website, it is really useful. But I love more the idea of "We identify a problem people have, and we won't give up until we solve it!" That is very motivational.

</comment><comment><USER46> a) It needs an 'OR' operator. If I enter from as 'Western Europe', I'm told it's too broad, which is ok - but I'd like to be able to choose a few convenient starting places rather than do a separate search for each. (To those who say a random starting location is a bad idea: actually, in Europe, it's a pretty good one. Depending on my destination, I've found it useful to travel up to 8 hours by train to catch a decent flight, and I'd consider taking a low-cost flight pretty much anywhere in the continent for a particularly fun-looking and decently-priced flight to far enough away...)

b) It needs better data. <http://www.ltur.com/de/flug.htm?omnin=TopNavi-FL> currently would let me get from Brussels to Punta Cana (Dominican Republic) for 411 Euros if I left tomorrow. Adioso starts at 490, and the second cheapest is already over 1000.

It's nifty; if it gets better data and a bit more flexibility, I could see using it. I travel a lot and have a pretty flexible schedule. For now, I'll be sticking with edreams, easyjet, etc.

</comment><comment><USER47> Guys there is an easy way around your problem. if your results are as good as you say they are then its just a matter of tweaking your ux. offload the result delivery to email and pubsub the actual search. If you have thought of this I would be interested in hearing why it doesn't work. If not then please at least include it as an option.

<comment><USER26> Not sure if this would work for them but it would definitely deliver a shitload more emails for their database.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Have you thought about treating it as more of an agent query and bringing the user back to the site with an email notification? The searches I tried were so slow I'd probably forget about them and my stale-tab-killer would close them before I'd see the result.

Plus then you could potentially update them if better results came along (and they agreed to that).

</comment><comment><USER49> Speed is a nonissue. Take flightfox: it crowdsources the search and it takes days. Educate people and they won't care.

</comment><comment><USER50> The reason this product doesn't exist "already" is because it's not the type of searching airline's preferred customer need.

Airlines prefer business class customers (routine flights, willing to upgrade to expensive business class tickets) and those customers typically search for small 1-2 day windows.

<comment><AUTHOR> Even if this was true, it hasn't stopped many/most airlines being financial disasters.

We know airlines want this as much as consumers do, if it gives them a better ability to manage their capacity and market their products more efficiently.

We also hear it's a myth that airlines prefer business-class customers; on a dollars-per-square-metre basis they do better out of coach.

EDIT: Also note, most of the newest/fastest-growing/most profitable airlines in the world are low-cost and don't have business-class.

<comment><USER51> Presumably you've had some discussions with GDS companies: what reasons have they provided for not offering [affordable licences for] such flexible search parameters?

<comment><USER5> Nah, in modern flight search, ITA & Vayant take all the raw flight data like schedules, fare rules etc which they buy from companies like OAG and Innovata & IATA. GDS increasingly are nothing more than a source for cacheing prices when a 'direct connect' connection to the airline is not available or where the end consumer (an ota or travel agent for example) will be purchasing via GDS. Certainly no GDS has tech that does open ended real time Graphed queries like Google Flights, Adioso's Wingtip, Vayant, Skyscanner can do

<comment><USER51> The cached prices are the hard part of the search though (anyone with a licence to schedule data from Innovata or OAG can build a tool that searches for "all return flights from California to Europe in summer"). In theory it should be possible to grab current price/availability for that set of flights from a GDS and filter it to give "all return flights ... under _$1500_ " (minus some LCCs that don't accept GDS bookings) which is the more interesting part of the problem from the consumer's point of view.

Presumably if Adioso are finding it worthwhile building their own price scraping/caching engine the GDS companies aren't willing to allow their systems to be [affordably] queried on that kind of scale. I'm just wondering whether they're claiming it's impossible for technical reasons, IP reasons (they sell price data back to the airlines) or just weren't willing to quote Adioso an affordable rate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> This is what I've been looking for - trip ideas based on a vague spec. Speed isn't actually as important to me getting a comprehensive list of options. If you take my order and then email me the results in 30 minutes, that's better than 30 minutes wasted on Kayak and the like.

</comment><comment><USER53> hmm, adioso team, just wanted to say: your blog is set to meta robots "noindex, nofollow" which does not make to much sense for a public blog. (p.s.: no, i do not stalk your blog, i just use this obtrusive-testing plugin www.f19n.com/b/canonical-robots-meta-user-script)

</comment><comment><USER54> I love the design, and the pictures in the search results :)

What I find annoying is the search results show dated prices and when I want to book I get a higher price.

I am surprised no one mentioned this in this discussion, isn't that a huge usability issue? Worst that speed or openended textbox?

</comment><comment><USER55> For what it's worth I think you've managed to improve the speeds quite dramatically recently. Still a bit slow, but I've found Kayak on my iPhone can be _pretty_ damn slow about returning a full set of results depending on the time of day.

</comment><comment><USER56> I tried two searches. In the first, it couldn't find St Lucia. In the second, I searched for flights to Amsterdam and it returned flights to Albany.

Great idea, great presentation, but needs some more tweaking.

</comment><comment><USER57> Wow that website is unusable on mobile (nexus 4) what a shame...

</comment><comment><USER58> "For a week or two" became "For a week"

Looking forward to using this. A lot. :-)

</comment><comment><USER59> There is still no good way to create a multi leg travel. That's the problem I would personally tackle, as I face it every time I am planning a travel.

</comment><comment><USER60> So apparently Adioso thinks "Scotland"" means "Suitland, Maryland, US". Okay, so second shot with "Scotland, UK" becomes "Portland, UK".

</comment><comment><USER61> I've loved this site since 2011. Had no idea how grim things were for a while. Good to see you guys pulling through!

</comment><comment><USER62> What's that song at the end of their video?

<comment><USER63> Hey I'm the guy behind the video. The song was actually produced specifically for the video by my music partner Derrick Calloway. We produce under the name Enso (www.ensoofficial.com)

Cheers!

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> Do you know if it will be possible to add Southwest Airlines to your data set in the future?

<comment><USER65> Not unless Southwest opens up their flight data, as it's currently closed to everyone. AA tried this once and pulled Orbitz's access (Expedia followed in support of Orbitz), then AA realized no one had any brand loyalty and "patched their differences" with the companies.</comment></comment>


Object Oriented Programming is Inherently Harmful - <AUTHOR> http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/OO_programming/

<comment><AUTHOR> My favorite:

"The problem with object-oriented languages is they've got all this implicit environment that they carry around with them. You wanted a banana but what you got was a gorilla holding the banana and the entire jungle." -- Joe Armstrong</comment>


Who are the Y Combinator Companies? (Summer 2006) - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2006/11/09/the-y-combinator-companies/

<comment><USER2> Scribd, Xobni, and OMGPOP were the ones that made it big from that batch. Jamglue did well too, till they were shut down by legal threats. And while JumpChat didn't last long, founder John Resig later became well known as the creator of jQuery.

<comment><USER3> Sorry paul... didn't mean to downvote you.

Do you own a smartphone?

<comment><USER4> He doesn't because he's too addicted to the Internet as it is, so the last thing he needs is to have access to it at all times. He likens smartphones to hip flasks.

Unless that's changed since he wrote that in an essay/HN comment/etc.

I do wonder if at some point they'll become so ubiquitous--and so many YC applicants and companies will be focused on smartphones--that he'll feel he has to to get one so that he can better judge the value of companies focused on mobile and give them advice.

<comment><USER5> Smart phone will come down in price to the point where all phones are smartphones.

<comment><USER3> s/will come/came

Smart phones are basically free now - you just pay extra for data.

There are now 45M smart phone owners in the US, out of about 250M phone owners, and it will just take a few years to erase the last dumb phones.

Smart phone sales were about 170M in 2009, and 280M in 2010, worldwide. Its going absolutely freaking nuts... biggest computing platform and market opportunity of a generation. Same significance as PCs or the internet. Half a billion new computers, as fast as semi-modern PCs, all in the last two years. Go make some money everyone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> To save you the trouble, of the websites listed: Pollground now redirects to SodaHead. Xobni is still alive and kicking. The rest are either parked, dead, or offline.

<comment><USER7> Scribd is unnamed, but is doing more than fine.

<comment><USER5> They may be doing fine but I haven't seen as much negative writing about any other YC start-up as with scribd.

I hope they can find a way out of the negative perception.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think the lesson here is to keep away from social media crap. They generally don't work, either make it big or die (and certainly 99.99% would die). For example, what's the point LikeBetter? I think it can be built as a side- project, a simple App and not a startup. Also the monetization would be little hard. (Ads don't pay any more).

However, Xobni happens to provide something useful that businesses need. They have a clear monetization strategy (sell a product) And they seem to be doing well and they have some jobs openings.

<comment><USER9> > "Ads don't pay any more"

That's a bit of a generalization. They pay well for me :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> wasn't there a goog spreadsheet floating around with all the exits of all the yc, techstars, etc startups?

<comment><USER11> Ask and ye shall receive: [https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AkkhSN3vaY4jdF90b1l...](https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AkkhSN3vaY4jdF90b1l1Vnl5NmZjaTBNQWlJYVozMEE&hl=en#gid=20)</comment></comment>


Personal data stores found leaking online - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-28707117

<comment><USER2> > The net scans that Digital Shadows carried out regularly revealed links to > domestic NAS boxes on the Google index, he said. "That means it will have to > have been shared somewhere else to make it crop up on a search engine." That > "somewhere else" could well be a place where cyberthieves gathered or > swapped data, he said.

If someone emails an Internet-accessible link for a resource on their home NAS, to/from a gmail address, would that be indexed by Google?

> Getting known faults on routers fixed could be frustrating

Does OpenWRT support automatic updates for security fixes, i.e. no functional changes?

<comment><USER3> Crawling private mail for public displayed results? I seriously hope that's not what happens.

OpenWRT does not support any type of automatic update, AFAIK.

<comment><USER2> > Crawling private mail for public displayed results? I seriously hope that's > not what happens

It's not clear, an old theory is that users could be pasting URLs into the browser search field, [http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/3824030.htm](http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/3824030.htm)

Prior incident with Microsoft and Skype chat: [http://www.h-online.com/security/news/item/Skype-with- care-M...](http://www.h-online.com/security/news/item/Skype-with-care- Microsoft-is-reading-everything-you-write-1862870.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> From a quick search, it seems that the attacks are either through direct access from the Internet, or by getting into the local network first, usually via an infected email/links to exploit patches, possibly even social engineering, if someone falls for it.

Unless someone is aware of other avenues?</comment>


Show HN: Platform that assesses job candidates based on job profile - <AUTHOR> https://techanalyze.io

<comment><AUTHOR> So basically we are launching a platform on which job candidates can be invited by companies for taking online assessments based on the skills needed for the job opening they are applying for. After finishing the assessment, the company receives a report on how the candidate performed in order to make a judgment on who to hire.

We are just starting with mostly PHP centric skills (like different PHP versions, Symfony2 framework), but we are working hard to add HTML5/CSS3, javascript and jQuery to the portfolio as well.

Our goal is to move away from only the standard "knowledge" questions, but gradually moving to a more situation based system, where we ask people to respond to problems and situations arising when working with those particular skills. Also we like to add more and more intelligence to the system to figuring out what kind of candidate we are dealing with. Also we would like to build more "intelligence" into the assessment system, where we figure out the actual skill level based on a dynamic range of questions (so for instance, we start out with simple questions, move on the more difficult set questions each time you have questions correct)

I know there are many cultural differences between hiring people in the EU and the US. Especially in the Netherlands, it's not often you find that you need to work your way through many layers of interview rounds consisting of tests, phone interviews, etc. We have a more "we'll try and see how it works out" attitude I guess, as it's quite normal to have a 1-2 month probational period. That being said, figuring out a candidates potential BEFORE the hire saves a lot of time and money, especially when you have a range of potential candidates available.</comment>


Facebook testing downvote-upvote kind of feature - <AUTHOR> https://i.imgur.com/EMwh4zf.png <comment><USER2> A better approach than a simple dislike button.</comment>


The New York Times: "In a Crisis, True Leaders Stand Out" - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/30/opinion/coronavirus-leadership.html <comment><AUTHOR> Shared this mostly to express surprise and uncertainty about it, and to gather others' views.

Compare with criticism: [https://medium.com/@indica/in-the-nytimes-only-white- leaders...](https://medium.com/@indica/in-the-nytimes-only-white-leaders- stand-out-3e2c175245f8)</comment>


Ask HN: Let's talk about the Metaverse - <AUTHOR> Does anyone know, is anybody building, or planning to build, a metaverse? Something like Oasis in Ready Player One?
How realistic do you think it would be to make this at the current state of technology?We already have World of a Warcraft and Minecraft, we have haptic gloves, VR is coming along.
Do you think this will happen in the following years? What are the biggest obstacles to this? <comment><USER2> I don't know how you define a Metaverse, but I assume it comes with high expectations of sensory inputs. Check out [https://highfidelity.io/](https://highfidelity.io/) I think this project will grow to meet the high expectations of a metaverse.</comment>


Ask HN: Low code platform for building SaaS applications? - <AUTHOR> Is there any low code platform available to build SAAS applications. Low code players like outsystems, Mendix seems to concentrate on enterprise customers. <comment><USER2> Check out [https://www.8base.com](https://www.8base.com) for building the backend of a SaaS application. You still need front-end developers so the platform is not no-code. Many of the no-code products we are familiar with are great to build an prototype and mybe an MVP but lack capabilities related to multi-tenancy, complex data and workflow, or performance at scale.

</comment><comment><USER3> You should check out [https://makerpad.co](https://makerpad.co). Ben provides a wealth of knowledge on building Saas with no code.</comment>


Some Apple component suppliers now sacking staff - <AUTHOR> https://digitimes.com/news/a20181127PD208.html <comment><AUTHOR> "Career Technology, a supplier of flexible PCBs for iPhones, have recently laid off 110 dispatched workers to cope with order cuts by Apple.

An iPhone assembler has also advanced its workforce trimming project, seeking to reduce personnel cost and other expenses to counter the greater-than- expected reduction of orders.

iPhone camera lens supplier Largan Precision, for instance, has estimated its November revenues will fall from October.

most iPhone supply chain partners are expected to see their revenues decline starting November on Apple reducing orders amid lackluster sales performance for its new devices, the sources said."</comment>


Ashes Cricket 2013 game taken off sale - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-25137093

<comment><USER2> The YouTube video of the "fielders in a state of confusion" is quite funny:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zjGgau3iF8](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zjGgau3iF8)</comment>


Protect solar system from mining 'gold rush', say scientists - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/may/12/protect-solar-system-space-mining-gold-rush-say-scientists <comment><USER2> While nice in theory, this is the exact opposite of how you get humanity into space in a meaningful way quickly. How much slower would the American frontier have been pushed westward if we said, "wait, 7/8 of everything is off limits"? Expanding into space requires incentives and those incentives need to be available enough for companies and people to chase them despite all the risks.

<comment><USER3> Largely, governments tried to wall off unauthorized expansion in North America. It didn't work at all, and people went anyway.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Apply exponentials to anything without limit, and you'll get absurdity.

Mining anything in space is ridiculously difficult. The only asteroid mining companies basically stalled out. There's no point to this right now. Earth has much richer reserves of basically everything.

The only point to space mining is if people want to live out there for their own reasons. Mining for export would only be a minor component of that.

</comment><comment><USER5> Let us say that China raises the $$, explores space, claims resources and defends them against all comers and then sell at monopoly prices and owns the world. It eventually leads us to a global chinese oligarchy with the same excess that Russian oligarchs have manifested. We already have man chinese oligarchs buying houses etc all over the world with stolen state money

</comment><comment><USER6> This is correct, clever, and wholly counter-productive. It's much easier to get agreement to things in the afterglow of a widely shared success than prior to one. Poorly-timed admonitions like this reduce rather than expand public buy-in for the underlying proposition.</comment>


Flash is being redefined - <AUTHOR> http://theflashblog.com/?p=627

<comment><USER2> From this point forth thou shalt be known as Flash!

Somehow I doubt that the scores of Flash, Flex developers, designers, etc, will get this memo. It'll also be interesting to see if Adobe's marketing department is able to stick to this. I've found it very difficult to change one's definition of a word or service once it's defined in people's minds. I doubt these definitions will catch on universally.</comment>


Buffett Rules Out Double-Dip U.S. Recession - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-09-13/buffett-rules-out-double-dip-u-s-recession-says-berkshire-units-growing.html

<comment><USER2> The guy has proven himself to be a business genius

That being said, everything I've read recently point to us already being in the next leg down of the double-dip recession (unemployment, housing sales, etc). Maybe he knows something I don't (certainly true but not exclusive from the next possibility), or maybe he's lost his marbles.

<comment><USER2> When he says "We will not have a double-dip recession at all. I see our businesses coming back almost across the board" maybe he's speaking specifically about his own business properties and not the rest of the economy as a whole...</comment></comment>


Tim Bray's first six months of Android - <AUTHOR> http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2009/07/19/The-Android-G1-Six-Months-In

<comment><AUTHOR> I suspect that the battery life woes of the iPhone and Android is not because the batteries are worse, it's that the UI is so much better that you can actually use it more.

<comment><USER2> Well, the physical battery has never been the problem -- it's the drain from the software.

There are Windows Mobile phones that are so bad, the carriers ship them with a spare battery!

<comment><USER3> Ship with a spare battery?! That's a great idea - I wonder why Apple doesn't do the same with the iPhones...

;-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment> Devils-Avacado Try using your phone to listen to music on headphones while charging it :)</comment>


What dirty secrets does Turkish PM fear Twitter will leak? - <AUTHOR> http://econgoat.com/blocking-turks-only-makes-them-stronger-more-stubborn

<comment><USER2> I think you all need to check this informative link out: [https://medium.com/technology-and- society/cb596ce5f27](https://medium.com/technology-and-society/cb596ce5f27)

["Everyone Is Getting Turkey's Twitter Block Wrong Turkey isn't trying to be North Korea, China or Iran; it's trying to be Azerbaijan" by Zeynep Tufekci]</comment>


Twilio, Linode, Heroku and more in the Bad Ass Developer Bundle - <AUTHOR> http://appsumo.com

<comment><USER2> Worth it just to get six months of SendGrid Silver (i.e. dedicated IP address for sending emails) for, umm, about half the price of buying one month normally.

Given that "sign up for SendGrid" was on my todo list for tomorrow, well, that worked out great.

</comment><comment><USER3> 6 months of SendGrid Silver, and some credits on Twilio is totally awesome if you are not using these services yet, because you should be.

</comment><comment><USER4> I would have bought it just for linode but: New or inactive customers only. unused accounts will expire on December 31, 2010. Users agree to abide by the Terms of Service.

<comment><AUTHOR> Let me know what issue you have. I can talk to the guys.

<comment><USER5> Any way to have it apply for current customers in the form of a credit?

<comment><USER6> Exactly. Just signed up for Linode (768) _YESTERDAY_. Great deals though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Wow, that is an _amazing_ deal. I'm tempted to get it without a good reason to.

</comment><comment><USER8> Bargain, love AppSumo! Anyone want my Twillo credits? Not a US resident so can't use them, see my profile for my email.

<comment><USER9> Same here. I'm also not a US resident, so if you'd like to get started with Twillio, let me know.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Is there a way to tell if the Heroku piece of the deal is still active? I suppose we may know after it expires, but at this point, I don't see a definitive confirmation either way of whether it is active or not.

It would be a great excuse to finally try some Ruby coding!

<comment><USER11> heroku has a free plan, so there's no reason not jump head first into a Ruby app.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> if you've got an idea now and are a hacker, there's no excuse not to try with this kind of deal.</comment>


Important Security Update (Netgear Arlo) - <AUTHOR> https://community.netgear.com/t5/Arlo-Stories/Important-Security-Update/m-p/1577917 <comment><USER2> I've heard some horror stories about data infrastructure and general IT practices specifically in the Arlo team at Netgear.

I'm curious if this is because Netgear's management doesn't invest in it, and this is why Arlo is being planned for its own IPO later this year. From what I've heard though, the Arlo team sounds very chaotic.

A more pessimistic view (hopefully wrong) is that internally Netgear knows the Arlo business unit is overvalued, in terms of whatever effect it attributes to Netgear's overall growth & stock price.

Then the IPO would be a way for Netgear to externalize the losses that would come from an inevitable price correction, by selling at an inflated IPO price.

This is effectively the same thing many startups do: use hype to drive the private valuation way up, leading to a knowingly unrealistic IPO price that will quickly suffer price correction, but not before the investors sell at the inflated price, and screw over employees and general stockholders who unwittingly come to own the stock through their 401(k)'s third party asset manager.

With startups, the ruse is obvious, but it seems harder to understand coming from a large public company incubating something for a spin-off IPO.

I hope I'm just overly cynical about it though.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm available for basic security consultancy.

\- MFA for initial logins \- captcha for repeated attempts \- IP based heuristics to detect fraud

I feel like these places invest very little in securing their platform.

I have to hope that the URLs for the objects stored in the cloud (s3) are at least time-bound and signed.</comment>


Generic graph algorithms in Go - <AUTHOR> https://godoc.org/github.com/yourbasic/graph <comment><USER2> That's pretty cool. Definitely want to play with that.

Tangential note: Does anyone know of a decent replacement for Graphviz written in Go or some other more modern language? Maybe this is just a solution looking for a problem, but Graphviz (as great and needed as it is) feels a bit long in the tooth and it's maybe not as scalable or fast as one would want.</comment>


Leadership of Egypt's ruling party resigns - <AUTHOR> http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/ml_egypt;_ylt=Ah64_oJgvZtOa2s4.ByfHWqs0NUE;_ylu=X3oDMTM4azBpbjNlBGFzc2V0A2FwLzIwMTEwMjA1L21sX2VneXB0BGNjb2RlA21vc3Rwb3B1bGFyBGNwb3MDMQRwb3MDMgRwdANob21lX2Nva2UEc2VjA3luX3RvcF9zdG9yeQRzbGsDbGVhZGVyc2hpcG9m Edit: My bad. I thought Mubarak but it is his son and another guy.
 I changed the title so that is was accurate instead of my initial "Mubarak resigns". My apologies for adding to the confusion. <comment><USER2> Wrong Mubarak --- the article refers to Gamal Mubarak, the dictator's son, and not Hosni Mubarak, the dictator himself who (as I write) remains in office.

Gamal is resigning a political party post, which means that the family succession plans are off. That's a step in the right direction, but it certainly won't be enough to meet the protestors' demands.

</comment><comment><USER3> Wait...doesn't this say his SON resigned? Kind of a misleading title.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I stunned. I really did not think it would happen.

<comment><USER4> It will happen.. but it hasn't yet.</comment></comment>


Wikipedia: Are you evil? - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Are_you_evil%3F

<comment><USER2> Its categorized as Essays -

This essay contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. Essays may represent widespread norms or minority viewpoints. Consider these views with discretion. Essays are not Wikipedia policies or guidelines.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikipedia_essays](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikipedia_essays)

</comment><comment><USER3> So everyone who isn't a contributor (helping) but only a user (using this to their advantage) is evil..?

</comment><comment><USER4> I don't really think answer #2 is aimed at lurkers, but rather people who contribute edits for their own gain rather than to be helpful.

No need to get upset, move along.

</comment><comment><USER5> If you are not their serf on their plantation you have to burn in a fire, even if you don't use Wikipedia for a profit.

</comment><comment><USER6> Maybe I'm still half asleep or whatever, but I don't get it.

What point is this trying to make?

<comment><USER7> The point they are trying to make is, it's selfish (or evil) to not contribute to wikipedia, while taking advantage of its utility.

Something along those lines.

<comment><USER8> So if you become jaded about perpetual Talk wars, edit reverts, pissing contests about who is really the expert or what is really notable, and decide that you just don't want to work with those cliquy self-appointed arbiters of what is right and fair, then you're evil?

Are there degrees of evil? If you used to contribute before your underwear burned away, are you less evil?

Do you start off good (when you first find wikipedia) and become evil by leeching?

Or is it the exposure to the dirty secrets of its inner workings that make you evil? With good arising from joining the fight against those machinations?

How is this category notable, BTB?</comment></comment></comment>


Europe's 1st mobile accelerator -backed by ex Admob/Amobee/Google mob enginr VP - <AUTHOR> http://www.kernelmag.com/scene/2472/springboard-launches-new-mobile-accelerator/

<comment><USER2> looks interesting, how do i apply?

<comment><AUTHOR> Click the link to apply:

[http://www.f6s.com/springboardmobile2012#programs/ajax- appli...](http://www.f6s.com/springboardmobile2012#programs/ajax-application)</comment></comment>