The worst waiter in history (2014) - <AUTHOR> https://priceonomics.com/the-worst-waiter-in-history? <comment><USER2> The idea of the soup nazi was that his soup was more than worth the torture. Sam Wo's was at best average food served with a side of shtick.

</comment><comment><USER3> This was incorporated into the chain restaurant "Dicks last resort" [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dick's_Last_Resort](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dick's_Last_Resort)

</comment><comment><USER4> Why did it close in 2012? Maybe because the old generations went away and the new one had enough crap form the old ones to add this to their full plate? Result, nulla/zip/zero/nada new customers

</comment><comment><USER5> In Soho London there is also a Chinese Resonant known for its rude waiters and there is the infamous Coach and Horses which I have drunk in a few times.

<comment><USER6> I think you mean Wong Kei! It's great, but similar in set up (multi-story, tasty yet cheap, and legendary rudeness).

Was hugely disappointed to take a friend there a few years back and find they'd dialled down the rudeness completely: no "Next floor" yelled at you when their floor was full and you had to trudge up more steps.

<comment><USER7> I ate there around 1990, he asked for my order and I started to ask for the starter 'chicken and sweetcorn sou....' when he shouted at me 'no time for soup!'

<comment><USER8> You order! You eat!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > The pictures we've included in this article confirm Edsel's perennial smile > in the presence of ladies -- we don't condone his behavior.

Yet the author feels no need to not condone the rest of Edsel's bad behavior. It's not OK to fondle you but fine to spill soup on your lap? To me it's all disgusting. I'd likely clear out permanently before my butt hit a chair. It's a little gross that the article treats him as a folk hero.

Not that I have a problem with people who tolerated or even liked it. Some people like being abused and God bless them. If they came back after the first time it's no longer really abuse because they expected it and had choices. Same if they knew what to expect by reputation.

But was it a popular place despite his antics or because of them? Maybe for the same reason that people liked being insulted by Don Rickles, which I can't fathom either.

<comment><USER10> > _was it a popular place despite his antics or because of them?_

Because of them.

The groping obviously isn't okay. But just because he's being insulting doesn't mean everyone must feel insulted. Think of it as dinner theatre.

<comment><USER11> The now long gone owner of the Aub Zam Zam on Haight St was a beloved notoriously cranking bastard. Friends of mine go to a hole in the wall Sushi place that is also run by a notoriously cranky guy. Show up with four people and he'll kick you out.

It's old school San Francisco.

<comment><USER12> Bruno's reputation was making the best martini's in San Francisco. If you minded your P and Q's you would get served and not face any abuse. But if there was any hint of jerk in you, Bruno would 86 you the hell out of Aub Zam Zam.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It's so old and well-known story, just boring.</comment>


Wi-Fi Sync: Coming Soon to the App Store? - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZ7xn86Zwyo See the Reddit discussion thread with comments from the author here:
http://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/bvzzt/hey_reddit_i_made_an_app_that_lets_you_wirelessly/
I find it hard to believe that this would make it through approval - even though he claims he's not using any private APIs, it seems like he'd still have to do something squirrely that Apple wouldn't like. <comment><AUTHOR> See the Reddit discussion thread with comments from the author here:

[http://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/bvzzt/hey_reddit_i_ma...](http://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/bvzzt/hey_reddit_i_made_an_app_that_lets_you_wirelessly/)

I find it hard to believe that this would make it through approval - <USER2> though he claims he's not using any private APIs, it seems like he'd still have to do something squirrely that Apple wouldn't like.

</comment><comment><USER3> WiFi sync to iTunes has been working on iPod unofficially since the 2G models, and via third party supported apps on Android for around a year. The question is will Apple approve it?</comment>


How to Sell More Software by Adding 12 Characters to Your Homepage - <AUTHOR> http://www.userscape.com/blog/index.php/site/comments/how_to_sell_more_software_by_adding_12_characters_to_your_homepage/ <comment><USER2> The best part is the claim that most people _still_ won't call, which I'm quite prepared to believe, although there are other hypotheses that would explain his experience. I wonder if one could devise a way to break out the number of people who choose a company based on their contactability, but never call on the phone, from those who don't care and/or would always use email anyway. Maybe get two rival businesses (in the same market) to do a post- purchase user-satisfaction survey? But there's still a boatload of confounds even if you can get two rivals to agree to it. It's so hard to do good science on messy real-life human interactions. :)

</comment><comment><USER3> I spend a lot of time researching software and technologies for my clients. Many times there are two or more candidates that are very close in usability, features, cost, but if one of them has a posted phone number with easy to reach people on the other end of that phone line, they are more likely to get my recommendation.

</comment><comment><USER4> He's wrong on his first point about 37 Signals. Jason has established office hours when you can call and speak directly with him.

But I agree most people won't do it. You have no idea what opens up if you won't first have the conversation.

<comment><AUTHOR> _Created on 01.29.2009_</comment></comment>


ʻOumuamua: the first known interstellar object to pass through the Solar System - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CA%BBOumuamua <comment><AUTHOR> Yes, this is recent news. The Wikipedia article does a good job of consolidating the information about this object in one place, however.

</comment><comment><USER2> Why did they change Rama's name?</comment>


Is Node a Fad? - <AUTHOR>

Is it safe to assume that Node is here to stay and not just a fad? Some clients have it in their requirements and is configuring a Node server a worthy skill to have? <comment><USER2> Not a Fad! It is a solid workhorse! Configuring Node servers is hardly an issue - maybe 5 minutes work. Writing services to run on Node does require some JS experience and becoming comfortable with the asynchronous nature of the Node environment. But most efficient browser side code is written in the same style.

Node shares the v8 JS engine with Chrome - so it is a high performance environment to write services for. Being able to use the one language, JavaScript aka ECMAScript, on both the server and browser is going to ensure longevity with lots of experienced programmers.

Will something "better" come along? - given enough time, YES!

Is it suitable for any task you may think of? - NO! It is unlikely that we'll ever see a truly capable Swiss Army Knife of software engineering - not that I'd try to fix my car with a SAK either!

</comment><comment><USER3> Node is a tool which is gaining in popularity because it's best suited for _some_ projects/tasks. And setting Node.js on the server is easy. Even if it's behind nginx (which is often the case). I think it's here to stay.

</comment><comment><USER4> Node is here to stay. I dare even to say that its going to take a flight and thrive to a similar level as ruby in the coming 2 years

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> edit: In a Node.js process, only one thing happens at a time. Is it entirely impossible to perform a synchronus action on a node server?

<comment><USER5> No isn't. You can perform synchronus actions. A lot of the io functions have a blocking version.</comment></comment>


Google unveils 'Solve for X' website, hints at TED-like think tank - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2012/2/6/2774727/google-solve-for-x-think-tank

<comment><USER2> Why give The Verge the traffic for summarizing Android Police's story?

[http://www.androidpolice.com/2012/02/06/the-secret- google-x-...](http://www.androidpolice.com/2012/02/06/the-secret-google-x-lab- may-be-revealed-today-feb-6-as-solve-for-x-website-and-youtube-channel-go- live-video/)

</comment><comment><USER3> If it is Google, why doesn't it look like Google? Why is it 'wesolveforx', and not solveforx.google.com. Why PHP? Why do Whois records say the site belongs to:

Registrant: TBA Global, LLC 535 N. Brand Blvd suite 800 Glendale, CA 91203 US

       Domain Name: THINKBELIEVEACT.COM

<comment><USER4> The Whois record for wesolveforx.com shows Google as the registrant (<http://www.whois.net/whois/wesolveforx.com>). TBA is a marketing agency that Google is (presumably) working with.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Site: <http://www.wesolveforx.com/>

G+ Post: [https://plus.google.com/115560212683913825996/posts/57dD3pjz...](https://plus.google.com/115560212683913825996/posts/57dD3pjzebA)

</comment><comment><USER6> And here I was thinking that google stepped up its advertising games by offering something like recaptcha but for ads. No paywall, just ad-wall, an ad urging you to type the words "the product X is the best"/"X will grow your...muscles" before you can access the content.

<comment><USER7> Was it HTTP code 402, "payment required"?

If so, look out. There may be more ahead.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> <http://www.youtube.com/user/wesolveforx/videos>

It looks like the talks are beginning to be made public.</comment>


Hipmunk Says Goodbye - <AUTHOR> https://www.hipmunk.com/tailwind/hipmunk-says-goodbye/ <comment><USER3> There's a number of comments about how hipmunk declined or didn't have good prices. It reminded me of a recent Matthew Stoller piece ( [https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/the-wave-of-terror-in- ame...](https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/the-wave-of-terror-in-american- commerce) ) :

"Similarly, I spoke on a panel a few months ago in Congress on airlines, and Adam Goldstein, the former CEO of flight travel booking site Hipmunk, talked as well. I used to love Hipmunk, but it's terrible now and I don't use it. Goldstein explained why. He noted that after the wave of consolidation among airlines during the Obama years, airlines stopped allowing his site to have access to pricing data unless they hid certain routes to consumers. This move to avoid competition destroyed the business and harmed consumers. (It's also obviously illegal, and the Department of Transportation has antitrust authority it doesn't use to stop it.) Why did Goldstein speak publicly? Hipmunk sold itself off and he's no longer there."

<comment><USER4> > after the wave of consolidation among airlines during the Obama years,

Ah the "too big to fail" years where everything consolidated and only got bigger including the big evil banks which took the brunt of the public's fury following the 2008 crisis (and occupy).

It's funny how so much of the regulations put in place had the opposite effect and made running small firms (ie, with more liability than the big ones) became almost impossible. Following the crisis there are now 5 mega banks who control everything and tons of the small banks shutdown and found it impossible to operate in the market with the new conditions,

It's sad that most people's consumer-interfacing perception of markets is often through these megacorps which exist in heavily regulated systems (which everyone then blames their poor experiences on markets), which are often structures which were the result of reactions to bad behaviours of a few big bad guys, which then resulted in policy only designed for the big bad firms. Meanwhile the other 90% of the marketplace, who did nothing wrong and who aren't the same size, were left dealing with the new overhead.

Automotive, airlines, finance, energy, bio/pharma, etc are all getting consolidating into smaller and smaller groups of megafirms or owned by opaque equity groups.

I don't know what the solution is but in so much of dystopian fiction the world is run by a few giant companies who control everything. That sort of system naturally creates a greater disconnect between the needs of the average consumer using the service and the whims and needs of the company (for ex: boycotts become meaningless/ineffective and consumer power lessens).

Meanwhile data is showing the number of new businesses being created are lessening and people are wondering why inequality keeps increasing, when forming small/medium sized companies used to be the main way to become upwardly mobile.

Soon the only option for upwards mobility is working your way up megacorps or making small companies who just get sold off to a bigger firm within the first 10yrs of operations.

I don't mean for this to be a diatribe against regulations but this sort of thing concerns me and regulation is only one of many forces pushing the economy towards this structure. I still think entrepreneurship is forever underrated in inequality discussions but its such a complex problem to confront, I just hope that the future really isn't just endless consolidation and an endless series of political barriers put in place preventing new shops from improving the mistakes of the past (which was a reliable source of progress for a long time).

<comment><USER5> I don't understand you using consolidation and abuse of power as a reason to _dislike_ regulation. There are plenty of non-regulatory incentives for consolidation. Why not simply regulate consolidation? Target large holding companies and megacorps with aggressive taxation policies on revenue or headcount or market cap or similar? And then _enforce_ the regulation with teeth?

There are always going to be creative people coming up with new ways to be bad actors, so regulation has to be an evolving constant. But responding with an _aversion_ to regulation is just giving the game to the bad actors.

<comment><USER6> Oh hell no. More lawyers to find more loopholes. How about addressing the root cause: the lack of competition? The way to do this is lower the barrier to entry, which is made of 100% over-regulation.

You can involve all the antitrust you want, as long as you don't lower the barrier to entry you're just lying to yourself and adding more useless middlemen.

<comment><USER7> The barrier to entry is definitely not "100% over-regulation". Starting an airline would be extremely difficult even if it were entirely unregulated. You need airplanes, pilots, and a variety of flight and ground crew. You need landing slots at busy airports. And then you need a customer base big enough to fill up your flights.

Even if all of that were easy, you still want anti-trust regulation, because airlines are a cutthroat business. If you start up NerdBird Inc, specializing in SF-Austin flights, it is absolutely in the interests of United and American to undercut you on that route for as long as it takes to drive you out of business. Which will probably not be very long, as airlines are expensive to run and margins are thin.

<comment><USER8> Look at what happened to Virgin America? It was a consumer-focused airline that was doing very well financially, and it was forcibly acquired because of regulations that US airlines must be US owned.

<comment><USER7> Nope. That was a problem early on for Virgin America. But Branson was quite explicit: consolidation was the problem: [https://www.virgin.com/richard- branson/virgin-america](https://www.virgin.com/richard-branson/virgin-america)

<comment><USER8> Yeah, read the article. He was against the merger - regulation drove the forced consolidation, which he did not want. He posted about it a ton when it happened.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I worked for Hipmunk for a little over two years before they were purchased and have some fond memories of my time there. There have been a lot of articles on HN lately suggesting that it is better to work for a large company over a startup. Based on my time there, I would strongly disagree. I came in as a junior engineer (feral would be an appropriate term) and during my time, touched basically every part of the web application - backend and frontend. I made a lot of mistakes and through it all, I left significantly more experienced than I was when I started. I don't think there was a better place I could have spent my time at that stage of my career. My advice would be, do work for a startup. Even better, try to work for a startup like Hipmunk with an experienced senior engineering team who have worked on some hard problems - like how to scale Reddit in the era before AWS. You'll learn a lot.

<comment><USER10> But a lot of larger companies have great programs for junior developers that ensure they learn a lot.

In my experience and stories I've heard it seems that you can have an amazing time as a junior developer at a startup. If it's a good one. It it isn't, you'll be absolutely miserable and have no support. Similarly, you can be at a large company with a fantastic program for junior developers and learn a lot. And you can also work at an awful large company where you'll learn nothing. "Startup vs large company" feels like a false choice in many ways.

<comment><USER9> My experience with (2) larger companies, and confirmed from conversations with friends, is that while you tend to have more support, you are often placed on individual siloed teams where you stay for years. I think the key benefit of smaller companies is that you can work across so many different aspects of the application. Process also tends to be less burdensome so you are able to devote more of your time to the text editor writing business logic.

Still, my experience and my circle is limited so I suspect some might have had the opposite experience.

<comment><USER11> Someone told me they spend 2 years in a team responsible for some of the undo menu at a giant software company. Incredible siloing.

<comment><USER12> I was interviewing at a megacorp a long while back, my interviewer was solely responsible for the pie charts in some old application. He mentioned in the interview that it was totally feasible to run your own startup on the side.

<comment><USER13> An acquaintance of mine worked at Google for one entire year on the functionality of one single button in GMail (I don't recall what it was specifically). He was very disappointed, left and launched a startup.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is a shame, and says more about the consolidation of the tech industry than Hipmunk's product.

One of Hipmunk's founders spoke to a course that I was in about their experience as a founder and how they were running their business. A few weeks later, a well known founder of another travel search company visited the class and said outright that if Hipmunk did have any success, that they would copy those features and that Hipmunk couldn't threaten their position. That is exactly what happened.

To boot, Hipmunk was acquired and shuttered by another travel conglomerate.

<comment><USER15> An often echoed sentiment around here is 'is your startup idea a product, or a feature?' If you startup is a feature, it's just going to be copied.

The only way to prevent this is with patents.

<comment><USER16> Twitter is a feature.

<comment><USER17> Are networking effects a product or a feature?

<comment><USER16> Category error, they're an effect. Is hunger a kind of food?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Hipmunk was simply the best. Very clean interface, no frills, quite thorough (except southwest), best presentation, easy to sort/evaluate ... A cute chipmunk.

Looking at the three alternatives from all the other comments (google, matrix and skyscanner), they seem 5 or so years behind the times.

<comment><USER19> Southwest doesn't give out its pricing information at all. Which is why hipmunk didn't have it.

<comment><USER20> Not very consumer friendly.

<comment><USER21> At the time when southwest cut them off, the online travel sites were expecting $5 to $10 in compensation. Offering the lowest price required trimming that cost.

News story from 2002: [https://www.cnet.com/news/southwest-soars-without- travel-sit...](https://www.cnet.com/news/southwest-soars-without-travel- sites/)

<comment><USER22> To trim the cost of a referral program, you shut down the referral program. Or cut the payout.

That's not a reason to stop supplying data entirely.

<comment><USER21> There are a lot of sites that I would love if they had nice free APIs. People generally don't create those without a financial benefit.

<comment><USER22> The financial benefit is getting flight bookings.

This is an API where the airline effectively charged a _negative_ cost for use. If they decided it was too negative, why not try adjusting the price?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> It doesn't seem to be mentioned in this thread yet that the founders tried to buy it back:

[https://skift.com/2020/01/14/hipmunk-co-founders-spurned- by-...](https://skift.com/2020/01/14/hipmunk-co-founders-spurned-by-sap- concur-in-attempt-to-buy-back-the-company/)

<comment><USER24> "SAP Concur refused the offer. It intends to shutter both the Hipmunk consumer brand and the Concur Hipmunk business travel incarnation on January 23."

Do Sap Concur stand to gain by closing Hipmunk down? Why would they not take money for something they were going to destroy anyway?

<comment><USER25> It's probably now integrated with their systems, and to disentangle would require engineering. You can argue that so long as the $$$ of the sale pays for it that SAP should sell it, but I would argue that if those engineers could be working on something else that is of higher value that you shouldn't try to sell it, especially if the cost of disentangling isn't well known.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> One of my first technical interviews after teaching myself to code was with Hipmunk. They were incredibly nice and patient with me despite me being a clueless bundle of nerves, and I learned a lot from their very practical take home challenge, although by the time I had finished it they already hired someone. Thanks to them though I came to love working with Redis and Tornado (Python async framework). It's a fond memory and I'm disappointed to hear about this.

I hope that the team are able to quickly find other roles and don't find their lives too disrupted by this.

<comment><USER27> Most of the team has already moved back to reddit. :)

<comment><USER28> As a random person who's been on reddit for over a decade now, it's really cool to see how close-knit the reddit team is. Partially I'm jealous, since I've never found anything even close to that.

<comment><USER19> I think being in the trenchs on small teams does that to you :) .

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I'll really miss it, the visual way of seeing how a flight is split up and how long the layovers are was better than all the other aggregators. Also with their sorting by "agony" feature was great and it was always easy to see the type of the airplane.

I don't know any other aggregator who does it this well.

<comment><USER30> Google maps automatically factors in "agony" when you ask for transit directions (by design), and the " _schedule explorer_ " gives you a visual layout of all the travel times and transfers you can use. It's very similar to the way Hipmunk displays flight information, so I never understood why Google Flights didn't adopt the schedule explorer from Google Maps...

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Anecdotally, it seemed like Hipmunk had nothing to motivate users to actually book through them. It was a great site to find what specific flight to take. The sorting by "agony" was great and I have never seen any other site have an interface as seamless as the sliders you could use to narrow down flights to specific windows of time. But once I had my preferred flight number, I booked somewhere else to get that mile bonus or whatever other incentive existed elsewhere.

</comment><comment><USER32> This is sad - Hipmunk greatly facilitated my digital nomad lifestyle at some point as I could chain multiple flights in multiple months together to make "a travel around the world" schedule, i.e. 1 month intervals Boston->Miami->Zurich->Kyoto->Sydney->Auckland->Honolulu->Vancouver->San Francisco, all without any return flights and spaced as I liked.

Is there any other service allowing the same?

<comment><USER33> Google Flights supports "multi-city" travel plans that does exactly this!

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> This is a long time coming: for more context, Hipmunk was acquired by Concur back in 2016 for $58MM [1] as the flights meta-search business was just getting tougher and tougher

As someone who's dabbled in flights bookings (BookWithMatrix) and now am working on a travel startup (Wanderlog, [https://wanderlog.com](https://wanderlog.com), a Google Docs/Trips for travel planning), flights are just not that profitable. In North America, you'd be lucky to get 1-2% commissions. In the rest of the world, it's a bit better, but Hipmunk was definitely North America-first.

Concur never was a consumer company and Hipmunk never was going to make a ton for them, so it was just a matter of time. RIP -- a lot of their best features (not just showing the cheapest flights, but the "Best" based on agony) have made it into all major meta-search tools, so it's not for nothing!

(Also, I personally use a combination of ITA Matrix, Google Flights, and Skyscanner now. ITA Matrix still has time bars, if you loved that UI; Google Flights is just so fast, and Skyscanner searches low-cost carriers that Google Flights sometimes misses)

[1] [https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/hipmunk](https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/hipmunk)

<comment><USER4> Can someone explain to me what Concur does? I'm guessing it handles a bunch of the travel stuff for bigcos with lots of travelling sales people?

<comment><USER35> Everything Concur does, it does extremely poorly.

<comment><USER36> Question if anybody knows: did Concur used to be good, and then became trash after it was acquired by SAP? Or was it always clunky and hostile?

<comment><USER37> In my experience, it was always trash. I've had to use it at every company I've ever worked at and it has never been good. At one company, the rule restrictions were so onerous that that and the UX made booking travel so appalling, I paid my own way more than once and then fought for a reimbursement rather than using it.

I travel pretty frequently so I often just call American Express (who acts as a Concur reseller for my company) directly to do the corporate bookings rather than futzing with Concur. I usually find the route I want ahead and then call Amex to price it out/book it. American Express is great — tho my company is big enough to have dedicated CSRs for our account, which helps. Concur is just frustrating.

That said, I will say that the worst parts of Concur are usually employer-made decisions. If your employer has really restrictive travel policies, that makes the Concur experience even worse. For instance, I've had the system insist I book an indirect flight that costs more than a direct because of how something is coded, with no way to override. My current employer has very decent travel policies so that's not an issue, but if it is, it makes the terrible UX and bad search even worse.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I used to use Hipmunk, but at this point, I've built up a lot of airline loyalty and often find booking directly with the carrier or through a credit card portal (if I'm using points) for personal travel gives me the best fare. All my business travel has to go through Concur anyway, so search tools like Hipmunk and Kayak don't matter, no matter how nice the interface.

When I didn't fly all the time, I didn't care about loyalty. But I did 160,000 actual airline miles (far more FF miles earned) last year (most of them on one alliance, but enough to get lowest tier status on two others) last year and at this point, I'll pay extra for Delta because I get auto-upgraded to Comfort+ at booking, I have a very good baggage allowance regardless of service class (assuming I'm main cabin and not basic economy, which I wouldn't do anyway), I have a lounge membership, and I get frequent upgrades. At that point, my comfort and those benefits are way more important than saving a few dollars across airlines.

And that's the problem with these types of services, I think. They cater to the occasional traveler who doesn't travel enough to make a profit (unless you're Google and you own the software everyone else has to license), whereas the frequent travelers are either booking through corporate tools or directly with one airline because they have loyalty — or both.

Catering to then majority of flyers who fly once a year, when margins are what they are on flights, is a tough business. It is interesting that Hipmunk's parent company got a piece of my $60k in travel last year (most of that was work, maybe $2500 was personal), because that's where your percentages can matter.

<comment><USER38> > Hipmunk's parent company got a piece of my $60k in travel last year (most of > that was work, maybe $2500 was personal), because that's where your > percentages can matter.

I think for corporate travel management, the fee structure is usually $X per transaction, rather than a percentage of the fare, although I can't speak to exactly how Concur charges, and it'll differ depending on the size of the customer. Average ticket prices for corporate airfare are likely considerably higher than for consumer, since that's where the majority of business class and refundable tickets are sold.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Bah, not a huge surprise given how brutal the travel tech industry is, but they remained my fav travel site - seemed to often find fares that were missing off google flights or other competitors. Loved the U/I too. RIP.

<comment><USER40> Define "brutal"

Booking has made money off travel hand over fist this past decade. It's highly competitive, sure, but for a reason since hotels pay massive premiums to these websites to drive sales.

<comment><USER41> Hotels have less of a monopoly on travel than airlines. Plus most hotels are franchised, so the brands don't have an incentive to lower commissions paid as they still get their royalties from gross revenue, and it all comes out of the hotel owner's pockets.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> As a Canadian, a feature I'd really like... request no stops in the USA. eg when flying to South America. (USA is a great country but doesn't get "in transit")

<comment><USER43> How many countries do? I take it for granted traveling through Europe, but made the 'mistake' of booking a USA->Peru trip through Mexico City rather than taking a lounger journey through Miami, and had to clear customs and fill out a landing card for Mexico. Then it ended up being the same when transiting through intermediate countries in South America. I have so damn many passport stamps from just one trip, where I'm much more accustomed to shengen and EU travel in general.

<comment><USER42> Perhaps its small countries that do it best. Eg Hong Kong, Singapore. Well, the website needs a database of "in transit" aware countries (or airports) and option to prefer them.

<comment><USER43> Ah, I've not flown through those other major international hubs. I bet places like Dubai are super easy as well. I vote for your proposal! :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> why-oh-why Something that's hard for me to find is a website that gets me from point A to point B without caring about stop count and duration. Is the flight cheap and stops 23 hours in Hong Kong and 20 hours in Kuala Lumpur? I'll take it.

Also Kiwi and Google Flights let you make wide searches but their efficiency drops so low they're basically useless in my experience. You're better off searching day by day.

Hipmunk never returned the best rates or routes for me so I had to drop it.

Lately I'm really into dohop.com because it shows routes that others don't (South East Asia)

<comment><USER44> [https://www.skiplagged.com](https://www.skiplagged.com) is exactly what you are looking for! dirt cheap flights sometimes with like 12 hour layovers. If you have the time (but not necessarily the money) it is just the ticket

<comment><USER38> Assuming skiplagged is still doing hidden city ticketing, it's important to recognize the risks involved here (primarily that overuse of it may cause airlines to reject your bookings and/or shut down your frequent flier accounts). It's probably a reasonable tradeoff for someone just looking for the cheapest flight once, but likely isn't for frequent travelers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Off-topic: I have been a long-time Kayak user, but don't see many people mention it hear when discussing Hipmunk. Does anyone feel strongly that one of the competitors is better than Kayak? If so, could you elaborate?

I have occasionally used Google Flights, but it seemed to have fewer knobs and I could not find any features that made me want to stay. The only competitors I have consistently but rarely used is Skiplagged, since it performs a kind of search (of somewhat dubious morals) that can't be done with Kayak.

<comment><USER46> (disclaimer - worked at Kayak a long time ago)

A big part of what made Kayak good was that it was (is?) a solid data product - basically a gigantic farm of scrapers and crawlers glommed together with direct-from-provider (airline, hotel etc) data ingestion pipelines and coherence protocols that flowed into massive unified local cache databases. All this to ensure that you, as a customer, saw the most up to date and widest variety of information possible.

When Kayak IPO'd, it was around the time that ITA software (massive airline data provider you've never heard of) got sold to google, and there was a lot of hand wringing over whether this'd spell the end for Kayak. But even then it looks like ITA supplied only 42% of flight data (check out the S1 filing [https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1312928/000119312510...](https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1312928/000119312510262521/ds1.htm#toc117777_2)), the rest from other data providers (Amadeus etc), online travel agencies, or individual airlines.

So given that, Hipmunk's focus on "we're gonna make the UX so much better" was admirable (especially given the state of a lot of the competition), and it pushed everyone to do better in that regard, but always felt a bit naive as a business strategy to me, since I think most people will pick the site with the slightly worse UI and better / cheaper / non-stale flights rather than the other way round. Especially in a non-premium race to the bottom industry like online tickets. And getting quality data takes a big team and lots of money and infrastructure, as well as lots of business relationships.

But I always thought they were a cut above a lot of the other competitors which were bad UIs mangled with dozens of ads thrown together in a slapshod way on top of the same 1-2 data providers.

<comment><USER45> Thanks! I have the vague impression that there are fewer stale or missing flights on Kayak than competitors, but I haven't done a bunch of comparisons recently, so I'm very interested in what others think.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> That's really sad. Hipmunk has been the only way I've found flights for the last several years, and I always loved it!

Personally, I don't know what else to use instead.

<comment><USER48> Google Flights is excellent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> I'll miss Hipmunk. My career as a video producer started by creating an animation explaining their service back in late 2010. At that time, Alexis Ohanian was their marketing principal and he introduced me to many YC startups in need of similar videos. Soon after, I got to meet him, Adam Goldstein, and Ashton Kuther in person at SxSw 2011. Super nice people. Fond memories!

</comment><comment><USER50> Unrelated: it took me until this very moment to realize that hipmunk is chipmunk without the C. Is this the origin of the name and I am literally the last to figure it out?

<comment><USER51> You are definitely not the last since I hadn't realized it either :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> Oh, bummer!

I love the product and have even used it within the last few days. Thank you Adam and Steve for building something I used for 9 years.

</comment><comment><USER53> I had the weirdest experience at the airport yesterday, LAX. I went to the the United ticket counter to buy a ticket for lax to nyc, same day. They told me I was better off buying online. In fact they looked completely unprepared to book a ticket. I couldn't believe it. I checked other counters and sure enough, I was at the right place.

So I tried using Hipmunk yesterday. It felt tired to me for some reason. I ended up booking on Amex platinum travel. Who do people use for booking flights?

<comment><USER54> I'm a bit confused. You'd go to the United ticket counter in person but then don't go to united.com when asked to book online?

May I ask why that wasn't your first choice for this particular incident?

<comment><USER55> Why go to UA.com when you can talk to a person that can tell you about the plane loads, what has more availability with FC/B. Also if you're flying that day, they can tell you more about the backpressure on flights. Not everything has to do with the cheapest price.

Most of the airlines like to complain that people are only focused on the price. They market themselves and try to make themselves look at price. They don't offer a lot of transparency on their product and they complain why people are using their site as intended. (Or avoiding it with comparisons)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> I always liked the Hipmunk branding :-)

<comment><USER57> It and Padmapper are two services I occasionally use almost entirely because they have cute mascots. I'd probably even buy t-shirts with them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> I really liked Hipmunk's interface and used it to dream often.

What I want out of airline aggregators, and what GFlights seems to do alright at:

      * Multi-city itineraries
      * Source and destination searches based on region/airport group (e.g. "AUS or DFW or IAH -> MUC or LHR)
      * Date range searching for flexible schedules and pricing

One of my example searches recently:

I want a flight from somewhere in Texas to somewhere in western europe, then to Dublin, then back to somewhere in Texas. I want to go for 9-13 days in February or March. Show me results by price.

GFilghts seems to do this pretty well. I used to like Hipmunk, but I don't know if it had any competitive advantage over other systems mentioned here. They certainly pushed the envelope, even influencing the tools we name today.

And to other comments, it is indeed unfortunate that pricing data is so obscured by airlines. Another instance in which the government should mandate more transparency.

</comment><comment><USER59> Damn, I've been a Hipmunk user since the very start. Probably 50 different flights through them. Can anybody recommend a replacement, particularly the sort-by-price, sort-by-agony, and the visual UI?

I would have paid a 2-5% HipMunk fee to not have to go to all of the individual websites..

<comment><USER60> I've been using google flights after Hipmunk started losing carriers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> Unusually personal for me because I worked in one of their offices, but for a different company, after they had moved out.

Definitely feels like the end of a larger era. So much consolidation, stuff shutting down. "The end of the beginning", as one popular tech writer put it.

</comment><comment><USER62> For those looking for replacements, Google Flights and Skyscanner have been mentioned in this thread... But also consider checking out Great Escape[1]. It has a neat UI.

1\. [https://greatescape.co/](https://greatescape.co/)

</comment><comment><USER63> Really sad. Hipmunk was something I loved and something that took a lot of pain out of my life.

</comment><comment><USER54> RIP poor hipmunk. Been a huge fan of their site.

A sign to never drop the ball and always keep innovating!

</comment><comment><USER64> I used Hipmunk ever since I took Steve Huffman's (founder Reddit and Hipmunk) Udacity course.

Not surprised it didn't make money, I would always use it alongside Kayak and then book directly with the airline/hotel/car company.

<comment><USER32> That's how I learned about it as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> For me Hipmunk had the best calendar control. You could just type in your dates in pretty much any format and it was able to parse it. No need mess around with pop-ups and small buttons to switch months etc.

</comment><comment><USER66> This makes me wonder... how should I compare all these flight search sites? I mean, you may notice one has some feature another don't, but is there something more methodical?

</comment><comment><USER67> What's your favorite alternative?

<comment><USER68> I'm a fan of Matrix: [https://matrix.itasoftware.com/](https://matrix.itasoftware.com/)

<comment><USER69> Once you get the hang of it, it's great. You can do stuff no other site can do. This really asks for some kind of query language. Or maybe there is one?

<comment><USER70> Google used to offer the QPX Express[1] API for querying flights. Then it got killed[2], like 190+ Google services[3]

[1] [http://web.archive.org/web/20160413025405/https://developers...](http://web.archive.org/web/20160413025405/https://developers.google.com/qpx- express/v1/trips/search)

[2] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15594975](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15594975)

[3] [https://killedbygoogle.com](https://killedbygoogle.com)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> I use to work in the flight search industry. It is really hard to compete because you simply make nothing off of flights (your big margins are on hotels). I also doubt google let them hang on to the ITA matrix engine API since they seem to be closing that off to everyone. It is sad to see the last option for airbnb search in the metasearch space die off, but there are still plenty of good flight search engines out there.

</comment><comment><USER72> Is there a down side to converting some of these things into open source projects?

It could be cool to turn over the domain and source to a group, let them run it and use it.

</comment><comment><USER73> Might be off topic, but does anyone know what data providers / sources sites like Hipmunk and Kayak are pulling this data from? Is there a centralized source for flight data that's freely available or is this pay to play? I'm trying to understand the business model and mechanics of how they sourced the information they indexed.

<comment><USER74> Itinerary information they get from Amadeus[1] or ITA software (which google acquired to kickstart their flights product). Prices I imagine come from integrations with the hundreds of online travel agencies like Expedia, eDreams, etc.

[1] [https://skift.com/2012/08/07/amadeus-working-to-oust-ita- at-...](https://skift.com/2012/08/07/amadeus-working-to-oust-ita-at-kayak/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER75> Google Flights as my go-to option. Unparalleled speed, can iterate over 10 days with click of a button.

</comment><comment><USER32> How much does running a service like Hipmunk cost? It might not be a good business for the current owner, but it could be profitable for e.g. company of four people. Wouldn't it be better to give it back to Huffman and run it as a small project?

</comment><comment><USER76> I am not a travel newbie, but I believe it's the first time I heard about Hipmunk. What was so innovative about them? It looks like yet another travel aggregator among at least half dozen of it's kind: Kiwi, SkyScanner, Kayak, Expedia, Priceline, Orbitz...

<comment><USER77> The big thing at the beginning was the ability to sort by "agony", i.e. a combination of travel time, number and length of layovers, and carrier quality.

To this day I still find it the best search interface if price is not your only concern. It's compact and easy to tweak.

Unfortunately, the way they handled payments was too US-centric, which meant I often ended up looking up a flight with them and then actually booking it somewhere else (because you don't want to book an Euro trip with some unknown US operator who may or may not be accountable if anything goes wrong). Also some of the cheapest airlines were typically not included.

</comment></comment><comment><USER78> :O

how can this be, Hipmunk was so much better than the competition... people... people wanted it...

</comment><comment><USER79> I remember Steve H. announced the launch of the company on the Tornado web server forum (backend was built with tornado). I used them a lot in the past, especially for the hotel heatmaps, which were super useful.

</comment><comment><USER80> So what's the new Hipmunk? Most other sites - Orbitz, Travelocity, etc. - <USER2> pretty terrible. HM got more crashy over the last year but even with that, still better than the alternatives.

</comment><comment><USER81> Thanks for all of the help you provided on booking trips for me!

</comment><comment><USER82> I guess if they were still independent they could just run the app on maintenance mode. Since hosting is so cheap, they couldn't just pay a small team to maintain it?

<comment><USER77> Api access to all those services is not cheap.

</comment></comment><comment><USER83> Warm feelings of the fun UI is the first thing that came to mind. I miss the products that Show the fun and quirkiness that went into building it.

</comment><comment><USER84> This thing is riddled with typos. It seems inconsiderate to say goodbye to your customers without at least reading the thing through for errors.

<comment><USER85> Do you also grammar check the eulogies at funerals?

<comment><USER86> If I'm listening to them, in general I'd expect some thought put into it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER87> They keep talking about access to data, but not what's happening to the data itself. Is it being deleted? Sold?

</comment><comment><USER88> Reminds me of milewise. Bought by merrissa Mayer as an acquihire company for Yahoo. Great idea that was left to die

</comment><comment><USER89> Bummer, I loved hipmunk's interface. Their time graph and sorting by agony was the best I've seen.

</comment><comment><USER90> Aww :( I know that other sites offer real advantages to Hipmunk, but to this day nothing beats their UI.

</comment><comment><USER91> We need to use SAP Concur at work for travel booking. It is possibly the worst software I have used.

</comment><comment><USER92> Well hell. I quite liked Hipmunk.

</comment><comment><USER80> Curious as to the terms of the exit in 2016. Does anyone know? This was a great site.

<comment><USER93> This is a little speculative but doesn't seem like a reach [https://www.inc.com/christine-lagorio/concur-acquires- hipmun...](https://www.inc.com/christine-lagorio/concur-acquires-hipmunk.html)

I suspect the common didn't get out alive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER94> A generous 8 days notice of the product shutting down. That's a new record I think.

</comment><comment><USER95> Their name always confounded me. I never remembered what they did when someone mentioned this company. For some reasons, other "generically" named companies (Amazon, Adobe, Apple) don't have this issue, but this synthetic name just didn't ever mean "air travel" to me.

</comment><comment><USER96> It's unfortunate for Hipmunk to just be turned off despite its founders trying to buy it back: [https://skift.com/2020/01/14/hipmunk-co-founders-spurned- by-...](https://skift.com/2020/01/14/hipmunk-co-founders-spurned-by-sap- concur-in-attempt-to-buy-back-the-company/)

I remember being pretty amazed by its UI back when it launched, but unfortunately has fallen off the last few years.

Flights are hard, and it's why we're staying away from flights at first for my travel startup Wanderium (wanderium.com). Instead we're focusing first on the "long tail" of travel issues: visas, vaccinations, safety, local customs, infrastructure, etc. By aggregating all of this data in a single place and presenting them in a single, personalized experience we think it can save travelers many hours per trip.

Check out our beta if you're curious: [https://www.wanderium.com](https://www.wanderium.com)

</comment><comment><USER97> "Any time a company gets acquired, there are always concerns about what it means for the company and product. Here are some things to know:

1\. Hipmunk isn't going anywhere"

-Adam Goldstein, October 3, 2016

<comment><USER98> I don't think it is reasonable to expect a promise like this to be kept three years later.

<comment><USER77> Two-three years is actually the optimal time frame to kill an acquired company, in my view, at least for big conglomerates. You avoid excessive brain-drain at the start by declaring far and wide that it will be "business as usual"; this way any useful know-how handover can happen smoothly, and you get a chance to identify the best bits you will eventually salvage. After a couple of years, you've likely cannibalized what was worth, the golden- handcuffed talent has either left or was moved to more critical areas, and the rest is just a legacy shell.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER99> Excited to see that Hipmunk is now a strong candidate for Our Incredible Journey ([https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com](https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com))!

</comment><comment><USER100> Did all the people at Hipmunk immediately quit? If not how come SAP Concur (TM) 's web interface still looks, works, and feels like something out of the IE6 era?

<comment><USER101> Exactly my question when I learned through this post that Hipmunk is owned by Concur. The Concur flight search is the worst I've ever used. It feels like you have a better chance at winning the lottery than Concur's search actually showing you the flight that you want to take (that I already found on another website (usually Hipmunk)).

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> the holy grail of travel search engines is one that include award availability (+ amount) across all carriers

</comment><comment><USER102> hipmunk of old will be missed... i traveled all over the world with the intel they provided on cheap flights

</comment><comment><USER103> so much for "Hipmunk isn't going anywhere"

</comment><comment><USER104> RIP. I wonder what happened. I guess it just doesn't make money?

<comment><USER105> The article says it all. Their parent company came up with a different way to do corporate travel solutions...

<comment><USER106> Or its boring, corporate parent got bored of its fun, little, upstart adopted child. I can't read press releases of this kind without thinking "soulless corporate decision based just on money". Maybe Hipmunk was making $$ but the corporate parent wanted it to make $$$.

Too bad. Hipmunk had a lovely UI and was very useful. I hate how acquisitions (and acquihires in particular) cannibalize and destroy awesome little products.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER107> For people who don't know why this is relevant to HN: Hipmunk (YC S10) was co- founded by Steve Huffman as a rebound from reddit (YC S05), and got sold to Concur a few years ago.

<comment><USER88> I'm sorry. It's relevant to hn beyond the fact that it's a YC alum that coufounded it...

<comment><USER107> Not really. It's a flight-booking company. If Kayak or something got closed, it'd be deemed off-topic for HN. Kayak and Hipmunk do virtually the same thing. The difference? One was by a YC founder, the other has T.V. commercials.

<comment><USER108> I disagree - it was a really great product, something to be emulated. When it came out, there was nothing like it, and it truly felt like a step change compared to the existing sites. It was not quite the same impact, but felt like a shadow of the feeling when you first used Google instead of Altavista.

One thing the HN community values is really good, well-executed products, and it's instructive to learn what killed this great one. I'm sorry to see that it was mostly antitrust shenanigans and competitors catching up (flights.google.com is very good now) that made the gap between Hipmunk and others fade.

Hipmunk however has made searching for flights better than if it had never existed at all, and I am thankful for that. I still don't think the UI of Google flights is quite as good as it TBH.

<comment><USER107> I think this is a fair and balanced argument. I'm not entirely sure if I agree with it, but you make a good point. This has definitely swayed me a bit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER109> Is anyone else seeing the strange lack of spaces? Multiple words throughout the blog post show up concatenated for me, so it seems like a weird transmission bug, not one typo.

<comment><USER110> The HTML markup is very strange. There are a bunch of spans around various characters, words, and sequences of words, and sometimes there are non- breaking spaces in seemingly random spots. Chrome and iOS Safari both seem confused about how to render the text and how to handle "word" selection (i.e. double-clicking).

My guess would be this is the output of some web-based rich text editor from the blog engine or CMS. Or it could be some sort of obfuscation system to circumvent adblockers or prevent scraping, although that doesn't make a lot of sense in this context.

<comment><USER111> Someone probably copied and pasted from somewhere into a JS rich text editor that converted it into html.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER112> What's going on with the missing spaces in that article?

" the decision to retire the Hipmunk product. "

If there isn't even anyone left to do minimal copy proofing, perhaps it is time to shut down.</comment>


What $20 Gets You (2003) - <AUTHOR> http://www.esquire.com/features/ESQ0303-MAR_20DOLLARS

<comment> klondike-5-3226 this is so awesome! you really know how to live it up. Even with 2 grand I don't feel like I have the imagination to get into half the shenanigans you do. You should write a blog post on that!</comment>


Bitcoin service StrongCoin hacks their users to regain stolen funds - <AUTHOR> http://blog.turboroot.com/bitcoin-service-strongcoin-hacks-their-users-to-regain-stolen-funds

<comment><AUTHOR> And some comments on bitcointalk.org about how this is possible: <https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=186051.0>

Brings to mind an old blog post from tptacek :-)</comment>


A Muslim's Response to "Draw Muhammad Day" - <AUTHOR> http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=xprnw.20100519.DC08054&show_article=1

<comment><USER2> The fatwah against Salman Rushdie, the reaction to the Danish cartoons made it feel to people in western countries that muslims were trying to impose their values here, by extreme means if necessary. Not for the first time has an attempt to make people behave in a certain manner had unintended consequences</comment>


Why I am dropping MongoDB for Mysql... - <AUTHOR> http://www.blue74.com/?p=25 <comment><USER2> There's been a few of these posts recently and in every case it's the fault of the author either because they chose the wrong product for their use, because it's not being used as directed or because the unstable versions are being used.

\- There are no transactions in databases like MongoDB. That's clear.

\- Reported "corruption" and data loss but no reproduce steps. What version? Did the server crash? Have you reported to the developers? We've been using MongoDB for over a year in production having started at v0.9 and now using only stable releases and have never lost any data when we do 5-8k inserts per second.

\- No joins. It's a non relational database, what were you expecting?

\- Schemaless. Yes - don't make typos / QA your code.

\- Unstable replication. We've had a few issues with replication but nothing that can be described as "unstable". Again, a general statement "nothing but problems" without going into specifics.

\- Not stable. I refer above with our long usage history. It's unstable if you use the dev versions, as expected.

I don't claim MongoDB is perfect, indeed I've written about several issues we've had[1], but nothing critical or show stopping. It seems it just isn't a right fit for what the author wants.

[1] [http://blog.boxedice.com/2010/02/28/notes-from-a- production-...](http://blog.boxedice.com/2010/02/28/notes-from-a-production- mongodb-deployment/)

</comment><comment><USER3> So...

\- Lack of Transactions

\- No joins

\- Schema-less

If these are important, you really shouldn't have been using schema-less document database.

\- Unstable

This is the only real point I can give to you unless you were actually running the bleed edge version. If you were using the trunk/head version you were just asking for the problems you were having.

<comment><USER4> > _If these are important, you really shouldn't have been using schema-less > document database._

What does that have to do with his complaints?

The "lack of transactions" is a lack of MVCC. This has nothing to do with NoSQL, RDBMSs, document databases, or schemas. Many NoSQL databases do offer some transactions support ... like CouchDB or the storage in Google's AppEngine.

"No joins" ... we've been taught for years the virtues of normalization / relational data, both in school and throughout the industry, and now we should let go of everything we've been taught. Great, but where are the best practices / patterns? Where are the books on data-modelling?

"Schema-less" ... it's not really schema-less, it's just that the schema is defined at the application layer. Again, where are the best practices for that?

One advantage of MongoDB in combination with something like Rails is said to be the lack of migrations ... I view that as a disadvantage as migrations are a great way of documenting what's changed.

To get back to my point ... don't shout at potential users something akin to RTFM ... educate them instead.

<comment><USER5> It isn't RTFM as much as do some research before choosing your data store.

The majority of his enumerated gripes aren't unexpected or hidden attributes of mongodb but fundamental considerations when deciding on a data store.

<comment><USER3> And his data loss issues seem to be related to server reboots according to one of his later comments. MongoDB's docs clearly state that the database must be shut down safely or data loss will happen. (MySQL is the same way, it gets really annoyed at hard reboots)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> And in a moment of pure irony, I'm seeing an "Error establishing a database connection" message.

<comment><USER7> Indeed. At the risk of being overly flippant, I'd say "maybe you should go back." The page is still loading (after several minutes) for me.

<comment><AUTHOR> I am getting DoS'd. Got admins working on it now, I am guessing someone didn't like my post lol.

<comment><AUTHOR> And fixed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It sounds like he wanted a SQL database all along, so there's not much insight in this post.

<comment><USER9> Really? Then why does he say: "In Mongo's defense- I really like it, and hope to use it in the future when it becomes stable."

<comment><USER10> Well if one of his primary reasons for going back was that he doesn't like schema-less databases, then it's a fair thing to say that Mongo was never the right choice.

Of course he may have needed to do this project to discover that.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd bite the bullet on schema-less, if it were stable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I can't understand why anyone would start a project with Mysql instead of Postgress.

<comment><USER12> I can: my cheapie hosting service only provides MySql. But beyond that, no. I certainly prefer PostgreSQL at home, and would use it for other projects when I could. MySQL was simply too late to the "ACID party", and it's hard to believe they took data integrity seriously.

E.g. - transactions, isolation, referential integrity and other feature were too long coming. They did provide a free portable DB that ran on Windows early on and parsed SELECT statements, though :-)

<comment><USER13> > transactions, isolation, referential integrity and other feature were too > long coming.

They had that years ago using InnoDB. I remember using it in 2003.

MySQL's big thing over Postgres was replication.

<comment><USER11> My perception is also that replication was lately the only advantage Mysql had over Postgres in general.

My main problem with mysql is that I have seen too many data corruptions and I can't find anyone who has worked with both systems and doesn't recommend in general pg over mysql.

<comment><USER14> FWIW, Dead-simple replication is in the current postgres beta and due to enter stable soon.

Here are the docs: [http://developer.postgresql.org/pgdocs/postgres/hot- standby....](http://developer.postgresql.org/pgdocs/postgres/hot-standby.html)

Oh, and unlike the MySQL replication this implementation can not silently lose or corrupt data.

In fact the above document could also be considered "The missing Manual for MySQL replication". It tells you all the things that MySQL _doesn't_ take care of.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Having spent the past 30 minutes trying to get this guy's web server to even return _anything_ , I'm thinking he may reconsider...

<comment><AUTHOR> Was getting DoS'd. It's fine now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Would CouchDB be a viable alternative to MongoDB?

<comment><USER17> CouchDB is designed from the ground up for reliability, so there's no chance you'd have data go missing, even in the case of crashes and system reboots. CouchDB also offers strong consistency guarantees on a single node, so you can use it for things like banking. So... yes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I remember somewhere in MongoDB documentation that states why you shouldn't use Mongo for sensitive information (i.e. money related) because of the lack of transaction. (No reference, but obviously I read it somewhere because I remembered it.)

Maybe he skipped that part?

</comment><comment><USER19> <http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Durability+and+Repair>

"Of course, some problems require greater durability: we would not recommend using it for a bond trading system."

<comment><AUTHOR> Indeed we are a trading system :o

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Why would records disappear?

<comment><USER21> Tried to comment on the post, but so far still "Awaiting Moderation". I have never heard reports of missing documents w/ a production release of MongoDB (or a dev release, for that matter). Would love to help debug whatever issue he saw, but will need more info than that post gives.

<comment><USER22> Mike, you must have super ears. Let it be a testament to how much you care about MongoDB that I see you very often popping up offering to personally lend a hand helping someone who is having a problem. The handful of production environments I have either used MongoDB in or know of have never had a problem of missing documents when using a production release (or even 1.5).

<comment><USER21> Thanks! Glad to hear that the effort is appreciated :). We all try pretty hard to make sure everyone has a good experience with MongoDB.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> yet again the important question:

Which version was he using? I've never had data loss in a year of production using the "stable/production" version of MongoDB.

<comment><AUTHOR> Was using 1.4

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> problem: use SQL _or_ NoSQL?

proposed solution: use SQL _or_ (SQL _and_ NoSQL)</comment>


Ask HN: Existing Civil Fee/Fine Payments Need Innovation - <AUTHOR>

Quick Question: How many readers have spent a night in jail, justly or unjustly?
Edit: I've read some comments and you're not reading the question fully.
What were your experiences paying the fines?
If there was any fees/fine involved, was it reasonable and what city?
Was it a simple process?
Were there outside fees associated with paying the fines?
Did you go to a website or pay at the court house?
Thanks. <comment><USER2> Yes, following a non-violent protest.

The police charged a group of us (with batons out etc), punched and tackled me and threw me in a paddy wagon. After a good cop/bad cop type interview I sat in jail all night.

I ended up only having like a $300 fine for a traffic violation or something since I was on my bike.

This happened in Santa Cruz, CA in 2001.

<comment><AUTHOR> Did you pay this fee online or at an establishment?

Could you pay down this fee or was it all due at one time?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> > _How many readers have spent a night in jail, justly or unjustly?_

Probably more than you expect.

> _What were your experiences paying the fines, if there was any fees /fine > involved, was it reasonable and what city?_

This almost certainly varies quite a bit from place to place. Contact a lawyer; if you spend just one night behind bars, you can probably afford to at least talk to one about your situation.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a question for experiences paying the fine, not so much for advice.

I've added to the question to make it clear.

<comment><USER3> Ooh, that's much clearer; I thought you were asking for advice on what to do :)

I don't remember the particulars of my run-ins with the law, but I wish you luck!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Nope, sorry. If there's any consolation to be had, you're in fine company:

[http://www.thesmokinggun.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/...](http://www.thesmokinggun.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/670xX/photos/gatesmug.jpg)</comment>


Twitter finally reveals how it plans to make some money - <AUTHOR> http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9137768/Report_Twitter_to_release_revenue_generating_feature_in_Q4?taxonomyId=1

<comment><USER2> Seriously? It took an entire year to figure out how Twitter can generate revenue? And what they come up with is an Analytics Dashboard? Get out of here with that. If that's all they were going to do, they could have just copied TweetDeck or TweetCaster a long time ago. Or derived the idea even further back by learning from Google has done with Google Analytics. I thought they were going to really be coming up with something creative and new. Not so much I guess.</comment>


Ask HN: Distributed coworking anytime soon? - <AUTHOR> As someone raised in a more rural area I wonder if coworking could also be done online.<p>What are the parts that make coworking interesting? The audio-visual atmosphere? The more effective use of space and resources? Socializing? Community? Events? The socializing aspect of coworking would definitely be the emphasis for me. <comment><USER2> One way to get started, try a lunch-and-learn virtually. One person talks/teaches, the others eat. Later, that person may eat and someone else talks. Round robin. Simple, frictionless.

The closest analogue to coworking online that I can think of is building your own community. At the most extreme end, Problogger, Zen Habits, or the Art of Noncomformity. At the lower end, smaller niche communities (e.g. knitting, parents who travel with their school-age kids to foreign countries).

As a purely anecdotal counterpoint, if you have a distributed team focused on solving one of the hardest problems in technology, state-of-the-art video conferencing technology can erase distance and barriers.

> EACH MORNING, WHEN Andrew Fikes sat down at his desk inside Google > headquarters in Mountain View, California, he turned on the "VC" link to New > York.

VC is Google shorthand for video conference. Looking up at the screen on his desk, Fikes could see Wilson Hsieh sitting inside a Google office in Manhattan, and Hsieh could see him. They also ran VC links to a Google office in Kirkland, Washington, near Seattle. Their engineering team spanned three offices in three different parts of the country, but everyone could still chat and brainstorm and troubleshoot without a moment's delay, and this is how Google built Spanner.

"You walk into our cubes, and we've got VC on — all the time," says Fikes, who joined Google in 2001 and now ranks among the company's distinguished software engineers. "We've been doing this for years. It lowers all the barriers to communication that you typically have."

[http://www.wired.com/2012/11/google-spanner- time/](http://www.wired.com/2012/11/google-spanner-time/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Lunch-and-learn sounds interesting to try things out. Constantly having a VC with your co-workers appears to be the closest you can get to actual coworking. Maybe VR/AR will remove even more distance in the future.

Edit: Maybe the essential part of coworking, however, does not lie in constantly being connected to your coworkers, but in being able to socialize in the breaks between work and thus improving productivity (there seems to be a connection). This type of online coworking could be seen as an online break hall where you can link yourself in and talk with strangers about life and the universe.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I tried this like 3 years ago. Few people would show up and ultimately it ended being like another work meeting. Everyone also reported not having improvements in their socialising.

Try it out. It helps understand the limits in online interactions.

</comment><comment><USER4> That seems to nicely combine the disadvantages of a co-working space with the disadvantages of working from home, without adding any upside whatsoever.

You'd have all the distractions of a co-working space but you're still stuck working out of your bedroom, with the couch and TV right there and your partner popping in to ask little favors around the house.

I don't think it's a particularly good idea.

<comment> jon-wood Working from home doesn't have to be that way. Sorry for jumping on your comment, but I hear this sort of thing so often!

Long term work from home (as opposed to waiting in for a plumber) only really works if you have a space to do it, and buy in from people you live with. If you can, have a specific room which you go to for work, and make sure your partner knows that when you're in that room you aren't available for little favours - although one of the nice things about home working is that you can surface now and again and do those things.

If you can't make those two things happen, commute to the office, or find a co-working space.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do you get the most out of HN? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I put every article into my backlog and never end up reading it.

That way, I can get all the satisfaction and dopamine rush of indicating my interest in reading something intellectual without actually doing any of the work to read.

It's fantastic.

<comment><USER3> Ive come to understand this is inherently bad, right? Anything that raises your dopamine level and constantly seeking that rush by doing that behavior, when really its just a time kill?

So what can we do to combat this? How can we better avoid this? Whats a better alternative? To stay away from the computer? To just read a few articles in depth and miss out on the rest? How do you combat the FOMO of information you might be able to capitalize on?

Hope my question makes sense and someone has some answers!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> For a while I had a journal, and I would force myself to read the article, and write a summery of how it's relevant to my life, how can I benefit from it, and how I might be able to apply the information.

I kept this up for about a week.

It cut down my HN usage to about 5 articles a day, and it made me more selective on which articles I would open.

It became a chore and I didn't stick with it, but it could transform the passive reading experience into a more contemplative activity. Ymmv.

<comment><USER5> The problem with that is that the real gems are, many times, in the comments. But parsing through that is way harder and more time consuming.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Depends, I guess, on what you're trying to get out of it.

I use it as a way to burn time while waiting for the bus or the build without feeling as guilty (or gross) as Facebook would. For getting perspectives I might not have thought of that help me synthesize new information. And for scratching the "someone is wrong on the internet!" itch.

I probably read 50% of the Ask section and 2-3 items per page of results on front page or newest. You could drink from the firehose if you really wanted to spend every moment of your life on this site, but I prefer to be highly selective about what to read and even more so about what to engage with.

</comment><comment><USER7> I found this interface a while ago: [https://hckrnews.com/](https://hckrnews.com/)

It has something like infinite scroll and tells you what's new since you last visited. I find it much easier to skim than the top page, or even sorting by 'new'. I usually scroll through it 2 or 3 times a day, look for big numbers on points or comments, and read those :)

<comment><USER8> I keep a list of a few more HN clients with alternate interfaces here as well.

[https://pinboard.in/u:tedmiston/t:hacker- news/](https://pinboard.in/u:tedmiston/t:hacker-news/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I learn about new and old things that people share.

I generally dislike when I see the same things for months/years (self-driving stuff, cryptocurrencies, AI). But in general, I feel like I learn a lot of stuff from HN. Sometimes, the comments direct me to Wikipedia and I end up learning even more about some old thing that solves everyday coding problems.

</comment><comment><USER10> Usually as something I read while either on public transport (where wifi is pretty spotty and Hacker News uses a hell of a lot less data than many sites) or as something to keep occupied while in downtime at work/waiting in a shop or what not.

Usually wait until I have access to a decent computer before actually commenting though.

</comment><comment><USER11> Resist the urge to try every single new framework/technology just because it's popular. I wasted far too much time trying to always use the latest and greatest when MySQL and Python cover 99% of all the use cases I'd ever need.

<comment><USER12> You have to try harder with web because it's rubbish to begin with.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I read HN while waiting for things (filling the kids bath, boiling tea water, etc) when I don't have the time to really dig into something. It makes me feel like I'm being productive.

</comment><comment><USER14> I get work through the whoishiring freelancer thread. I might even be breaking even once you account for all the time I waste reading the articles ;)

</comment><comment><USER15> I use Instapaper for reading online articles and the Safari extension adds a handy link below each submission to add the article to Instapaper.

I've really been trying lately - especially the busier I've been - to use that link exclusively and save all of my reading for later. And then I only engage with the topics I'm actually interested in.

But of course here I am in a comment thread :)

</comment><comment><USER16> I am subscribed to the HN RSS feed, so I go through that daily. I click through on the stuff that looks interesting, but never see the same un- interesting stuff again. Occasionally I'll actually visit the website if I'm really bored.

</comment><comment><USER17> I read it through a filter

[http://ontology2.com/essays/ClassifyingHackerNewsArticles/](http://ontology2.com/essays/ClassifyingHackerNewsArticles/)

</comment><comment><USER18> Hacker News Extension Suite [https://github.com/etcet/HNES](https://github.com/etcet/HNES)

</comment><comment><USER19> When you're logged in there an "hide" link.

I use that a lot.

</comment><comment><USER20> I scan through the new section and then check replies to my comments, usually senseless comments and downvotes for having an opinion.

</comment><comment><USER21> Close it and do some work instead.</comment>


Bitbucket Is Changing Their Ip Addresses - <AUTHOR> https://blog.bitbucket.org/2018/07/02/new-ip-addresses-bitbucket-cloud/ <comment><USER2> This blog post doesn't display without enabling JavaScript. There is absolutely no good reason to do this; please, don't.</comment>


Facebook's increasingly invasive predictions - <AUTHOR> http://www.samlecuyer.com/post/39482979298/dang-facebook-you-scary

<comment><USER2> I wrote about a similar topic the other day, too: <http://mcdowall.info/posts/The-Future-of-Social-Networks/>

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting. I'm sad that social networks are now about harvesting my info rather than connecting me with my friends.</comment></comment>


[video] Jeremy Ashkenas And Brendan Eich On JavaScript's Future - <AUTHOR> http://ontwik.com/javascript/jeremy-ashkenas-and-brendan-eich-on-javascripts-future/

<comment><USER2> I saw on slide 7 something called "Harmonizr" -- in the context of the video it seems like an ES.next -> JS compiler, but I can't find any info on it online. Does anyone know anything about this? Or is this just some term that was invented for some tool that takes ES.next features and translates them to today's JS? Right now I'm only familiar with the traceur-compiler when it comes to tasks like that.

Makes me wonder if I should start my next JS project in CoffeeScript or ES.next.</comment>


Dropbox faces growing competition in cloud storage wars - <AUTHOR> http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/88be965e-edd8-11e2-816e-00144feabdc0.html

<comment><USER2> The article requires an account to read.

</comment><comment><USER3> Stop it with the paywall sites already.</comment>


Ask HN: How much does p2p lending make? Are they highly profitable? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Lending Club reports an average of 5-7% returns with low volatility. Source: [https://www.lendingclub.com/site/investing/solid- returns](https://www.lendingclub.com/site/investing/solid-returns)</comment>


One Man's Quest to Prove Vermont Has Terrible Cell Service - <AUTHOR> https://www.npr.org/2019/02/01/690071045/one-mans-quest-to-prove-vermont-has-terrible-cell-service <comment><USER2> I believe this is the case everywhere in the U.S.

That is, major cell carriers claim widespread coverage in rural and exurban areas that is simply not the case.

People have had an incentive to expose this because of the federal funding for wireless expansion, but really it is a "truth in advertising" issue.

<comment><USER3> I've had a good experience with Verizon in rural areas in New England and Virginia/West VA. I used to use T-Mobile, and lose coverage frequently, but now I can go days without losing signal, even in the middle of nowhere.

<comment><USER4> I have both a T-Mobile phone and a Verizon phone, and Verizon often provides me with the experience of my phone saying that I have 4 or 5 bars, but being unable to get any data to flow, or sometimes to even make a call.

I don't know what causes that, but I have learned to ignore the signal strength display on Verizon.

<comment><USER5> created an account just for this:

i spend a lot of time in airports, one of my conversation starters is 'tell me something about your work i can't find on google'.

i said this to a person who inspects/installs cell towers. this person told me that a few years ago instead of installing new or upgrading towers for 4G LTE, on a lot of the towers the company had them install a chip that makes it look like users have 4g LTE signal but it's only 4g or 3g and not LTE.

i'm sure someone will come along in the comments and tell me this person lied and this is impossible, and that may be true, just throwing my two pennies out there.

<comment><USER6> If AT&T can rebrand LTE as 5GE then I'm sure this could be true.

<comment><USER7> During the transition to LTE, T-mobile did something similar -- they updated phones to report HDSPA+ as "4G".

<comment><USER8> AT&T (with HSUPA) spearheaded that, T-Mobile followed but was better able to actually argue it as their HSPA+ implementation was faster due to use of DC- HSPA+ (42mbits).

ITU relaxed their definition of 4G to allow for "significant upgrades to 3G technology", so blame them for everyone jumping on the bandwagon: [https://fcw.com/blogs/mobileplatform/2011/03/att- hspa-4g-pro...](https://fcw.com/blogs/mobileplatform/2011/03/att- hspa-4g-problem.aspx)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Here's the interactive map: [http://vtpsd.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id...](http://vtpsd.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=444a3d49c2374d509958f1c0e1d0d21b)

And the page that links to the full report: [https://publicservice.vermont.gov/content/mobile- wireless-20...](https://publicservice.vermont.gov/content/mobile- wireless-2018-drive-test)

</comment><comment><USER10> This map matches 1-1 in the areas I drive regularly. it orrectly shows no coverage at home and 2-3 places on the way to work 20 miles away where there is zero signal

</comment><comment><USER11> > At stake in the state's project [of having an Vermont Department of Public > Service employee drive around the state for six weeks taking download speed > tests] is potentially millions of dollars in federal money. The FCC has > $4.53 billion available to use around the country.

> "What we were looking at was being almost completely foreclosed from any of > it because our state was considered nearly completely covered with 4G LTE > service," [Clay] Purvis, [the state's telecommunications director] said. > "And now we've opened up a significant amount of that space."

</comment><comment><USER12> Just wrote a friend who is a telecom professor and suggested they run a summer experiment here in Michigan like this guy did with students collecting the data.

I don't know what he will think of the idea but I'd sure like to see a coverage map with real data, not the carriers version of the truth.

</comment><comment><USER13> Cell signal strength would be an interesting addition as a layer to Open Street Maps.

<comment><USER14> OpenStreetMap doesn't have layers.

It's also not really a great fit for data that you'd want to gather systematically. For signal strength, you'd get lots of data in places that people frequent (and that tend to have good signal) and little data in more remote places, where the measurements would be of more value.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I think this is great but would having the phones all lined up in a box like that cause any significant detriment / interference in their networking / radio communications?

I hope the state gets the funding it needs.

<comment><USER16> _would having the phones all lined up in a box like that cause any significant detriment_

When I saw that picture I thought the same thing.

But since their goal was to document how bad the reception is, any extra interference could only help make their case. :)

I put a smiley there, but this did seem very haphazard; not a well thought out setup.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I've spent a lot of time in Vermont.. It has terrible cell service and no quest is needed to prove that. As a vacation spot, I consider it a positive. I know the residents feel differently.

</comment><comment><USER18> This is a bit off topic but the article made me think about it:

I am considering getting a landline for my next home, and just realized I have no idea what a fair price is. I have not had a landline my entire life (always used a cell).

Is a hardline cheap in these areas or do they charge about as much as a cell since they know there is demand for a reliable connection?

<comment><USER19> What is the advantage of landline over VOIP?

<comment><USER18> > What is the advantage of landline over VOIP?

A few things.

First, there is a small bit of power going over traditional copper lines, and you are able to dial 911 even if the power goes out or the internet goes down.

Second it's a sociological mechanism. People in modern times are incredibly entitled, so saying "I didn't want to answer your call because I was busy" makes them irrationally angry.

But if you give out your landline you can just say you weren't at home.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I wonder how the cell coverage maps are generated. I think it is common to use terrain data and tower positions to determine line of site to a tower. Is that flawed in some way, or are the results being manipulated to improve them?

</comment><comment><USER21> God bless the guy, and too bad that the state is too cheap to buy better equipment for the purpose.

All carriers have this data for all of the carriers in each region. If you're a big customer, they will even show it to you under NDA.

<comment><USER22> We should tweak the law then to require carriers to report this data to the FCC for public consumption as a condition of radio spectrum licensing and usage.

<comment><USER21> I agree.

They would fight hard to keep that data proprietary, as certain property owners might be more aggressive about lease pricing or royalties.</comment></comment></comment>


Finding government customers with BigQuery and 17 years of federal contracts - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/antontarasenko/gpq/blob/master/notebooks/contracts_for_vendors.ipynb <comment><AUTHOR> Mobile-friendly version:

[http://nbviewer.jupyter.org/github/antontarasenko/gpq/blob/m...](http://nbviewer.jupyter.org/github/antontarasenko/gpq/blob/master/notebooks/contracts_for_vendors.ipynb)</comment>


WhatsApp Rolls Out End-To-End Encryption to Its Over One Billion Users - <AUTHOR> https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/04/whatsapp-rolls-out-end-end-encryption-its-1bn-users <comment><USER2> According to the german computer magazine heise (Which already blamed Whatsapp back in 2014/15 because when they released encryption back then it basically was not even worth it) suggests that it is still far from perfect. Especially as many details are not known, and it could happen that the user is suddenly unencrypted without even noticeing.</comment>


Ask HN: What if Pixel and Google Glass were reversed? - <AUTHOR> I often wonder what Google's market cap would look like if they had reverse the release of the Pixel and the google glass. Glass was way too early, but now could do quite well. Likewise, pixel would have been an actual rival back in 2010/11ish. Timing once again seems like the bitch in the product market relationship. Thoughts? <comment><USER2> Yeah they made a bad bet with google glass so early on. If they'd released a competitor to iPhone back then they'd for sure at least have a larger chunk of the smart phone market.</comment>


A very flawed Accusation: The Nobel Prize hounded out of his job - <AUTHOR> http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3141158/A-flawed-accuser-Investigation-academic-hounded-Nobel-Prize-winning-scientist-job-reveals-troubling-questions-testimony.html

<comment><USER2> What seems to be the worst part of this is that his( Tim's ) University ousted him immediately, based on no real evidence.

</comment><comment><USER3> So, not just the SJWs on social media, but also TV and news sites. Journalists are a huge part of the problem.</comment>


The Modern SaaS Stack and the Unexploited Amount of Data - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/plainflow/the-modern-saas-stack-and-the-unexploited-amount-of-data-6bf2e982b596 <comment><USER2> The author makes an excellent point about the integration barriers raised by running a business on an aggregation of cloud services. Sure, they all provide REST APIs. But as your suite of services evolve you must constantly re- implement your client code. And you'll never get the performance you can get from on premises where you may be able to connect directly to a vendors SQL DB because you're hosting it yourself, or eavesdrop on a pub sub message bus.

</comment><comment><USER3> There's a company called Outlier.ai that basically exists to deal with this problem. I quoted the CEO, Sean Byrnes, in this article about business intelligence: [https://www.inc.com/sonya-mann/business-intelligence- cloud.h...](https://www.inc.com/sonya-mann/business-intelligence-cloud.html)

Covers a lot of the same territory from a newsier perspective.

</comment><comment><USER4> At the higher end of the price spectrum, Adobe has done an amazing job gluing it all together. I'm familiar with them from the Omniture days, but recently attended their Summit event and it really opened my eyes on how integrated their stack has become: \- Analytics

\- Personalization

\- eCommerce and Cart recovery

\- Programmatic Ad Buying (including automatic credit for any bot traffic detected by WhiteOps above 3% threshold)

\- DMP, that syncs in real-time with your Analytics/segmentation and cart recovery software.

There is also a slew of video related stuff that was of special interest to me, but isn't really relevant to this thread.

Best of all, you can setup alerts by email and SMS, and then reply to them asking for more info that the system auto analyzes for you.

Source: Current Adobe customer and attended Summit 2017.

</comment><comment><USER5> A popular (in 2017) solution to the tech version of this problem (proliferation of services and data systems) is put it all in Kafka. I wonder if that would work for integrating Saas platforms.

You kind of need a bunch of Saas<->Kafka interactions, but if the tech side of your company uses Kafka for reporting and BI, why not have your Saas platforms put data there?

</comment><comment><USER6> This is where the bigger opportunity lies for AWS or Google Cloud to move up the stack. They already power the core of most of the smaller SaaS products. Hence it's just a matter of identifying the common tooling patterns and add value on top. These products can integrates well with their existing data pipeline tools, offering the incentive to business to standardize on a single cloud platform rather than shopping around for SaaS products.

</comment><comment><USER7> This post focuses on the problem, but it's also a huge opportunity to build a product that can integrate from a bunch of different SaaS and provide a BI layer. I'm sure lots of folks are trying to do this, but I haven't seen it done well yet. It probably needs to be an enterprise product w/PS, because of the infinite number of SaaS combinations.

<comment><USER8> The thing is, without a truly standard stack, the best integration of the stack comes from gluing it together ourselves.

We use a mix of APIs from the SaaS services we use and Zavier to capture the data points we need and make the services work well together. The availability of access filters into our descision, but it seems like at some point it may make sense to roll our own replacement for some.

Intercom has been great and our customers love it. But it is getting increasingly difficult to keep deeply integrated with the rest of our stack.

<comment><USER9> hey Jaxn - I'm the PM for the Intercom Messenger. Would love to learn more and see how we can make it easier for you. You can email me tom@ intercom.io if you'd like!</comment></comment></comment>


How Comcast bought the Democratic Party - <AUTHOR> http://freebeacon.com/columns/ready-to-smirk/

<comment><USER2> Please don't submit purely political articles, except in the rare case where they contain something of significant intellectual interest. This one doesn't, so it shouldn't have been submitted.

<comment><USER3> Being a Comcast consumer I found this interesting, political or not.</comment></comment>


Microsoft SQL Server Images Available on Google Compute Engine - <AUTHOR> https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/08/why-Google-Cloud-Platform-is-ready-for-your-enterprise-database-workloads.html <comment><USER2> The title, while interesting, isn't the posts title and hides that the post contains a lot more such as Cloud SQL 2nd Gen's GA, Cloud Bigtable's GA, Cloud Datastore's GA (and serving 15 trillion requests per month).

It probably be changed to the blogs title "Advancing enterprise database workloads on Google Cloud Platform".

<comment><USER3> Agreed. Lots of goodies announced, including taking Nearline Storage to near- realtime (versus 3+ hours on Glacier) and an increase in IOPS for some persistent disks.</comment></comment>