skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
But it's all still the same.

I agree, there are minor differences in first class with airlines in my experience - but I am talking about an entirely different travel experience than what exists.
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Times like this, I wish everyone could be made to read _The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance_ ( http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5317066/cambridge-expertise.pdf ) or at least the original deliberate-practice paper ( http://www.gwern.net/docs/1993-ericsson-deliberatepractice.p... ).
> namely tying together information from multiple applications

That is not a legitimate reason. If I want my applications tied together I'll manage that myself.
7971. Robert Scobles iPhone Passcode.
Of course I have heard of first class.

But what I am talking about is an entirely different travel experience. Airlines trying to be different and innovating - and airlines trying to MAKE A PROFIT.
Seattle definitely has horrible public transportation. There cars really aren't optional.

I'm really not much better off here in NYC though because I live way out on a point in Queens. The nearest public transportation is a bus that's over two miles from where I'm living. The long and short of it is I commute two hours each way every single day.

It's a certain kind of hell I'm not long to suffer.

But I guess my biggest challenge at this point is not only do I not have a car I don't have a license; never bothered and now I regret it. I'm not alone in NYC in this regard. My coworker has lived in NYC all his life and never had a license. He's in his mid-thirties. So I'm trying to figure out if it's practical to attempt the move to SF. Of course there's many things to figure out besides the logistics... but certainly this thread is very helpful in regards to getting around the city.
Yeah. There are two possible scenarios.

1) Everyone who has run an airline for 30 years is an idiot. It never occurred to them that people would pay more for better service, even though they all went to prestigious b-schools. The author of this blog post is a genius.

2) The author of this blog post has no idea about the myriad of government regulations and economic realities of the airline industry.

If I'm ever arrogant enough to assume #1, shoot me.
Well, the thing is, Gates was an expert programmer. His coding on BASIC was impressive. He transitioned to management pretty quickly, but that doesn't mean much.
I used to watch movie trailers on trailer.apple.com but I had no idea which of my friends were interested in the same movies. I have been using Can't Wait beta for a few weeks now and its's fun to use. Good way for me to kill some time on transit.
This is a really bad title on TC. Reading that title made me think "Oh God, not another useless social network!". But then I read the article and realized it's an iPhone app that's actually very useful.
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Heh, title changed, my comment makes no sense anymore. :)
less noise? you mean like _this_ post?

oh, the irony.
Adding the import statement is fine. Method auto-completion is something I'm not OK with; it encourages API bloat and overlyDescriptiveNamesThatJustMakeTheCodeHarderToRead.

I don't program Java, but I might also be OK with having a program add type names where necessary. For example, you type "foo = new Foo()" and the software will add "Foo " in front, making the line "Foo foo = new Foo()". But, programming in terms of concrete instances is To Be Avoided, so maybe default to an interface and allow the programmer to toggle between the interfaces Foo implements. It would have to be a measurable win, though; typing FooI is not that hard, after all.

I'm definitely not discouraging the use of tools to make managing boilerplate easy; but it's a very fine line, some boilerplate cannot be eliminated with clever library use (imports), but some can (finding the path to the Desktop). Once you have a super-cool boilerplate generation tool, it becomes more tempting to add a quick snippet than to fix the language or library deficiency that's pushing you in the direction of too much typing.

Sometimes it's good to imagine things taken to the extreme. Imagine that C didn't have a preprocessor but it did have an editor that had really good snippets. Instead of saying #define PI 3.14 in your math.h file, the snippet would just type 3.14 in for you whenever you said "insert pi". This would produce the same object code as the preprocessor, but without another extra piece of machinery to mess up your source code. What you type is what the compiler sees!

Turns out that this isn't good, because computers are really good at pushing symbols around, but humans aren't. So don't show the humans the details, show them the abstract and let the compiler push symbols around.

(I've always wondered why someone doesn't add a preprocessor to Java. See also: coffeescript / javascript.)
This is very cool, congratulations! Just bought a sample pack. I have a few technical questions, if I may (or if you have a good blog post or document that can help, that would be amazing.)

I've been playing with RFID for a while. Is NFC different than RFID? On a different frequency than 132 KHz/13.56 MHz that I already have readers for?

Also, are there simple readers or breakout boards I can use to play with this (a la Parallax's RFID reader, or anything that could plug into my Arduino?) as opposed to buying a phone? Any suggestions for good readers or what the protocol looks like?

Also, out of curiosity (see, I'm a software guy, so often this stuff is a black box to me) did you all design and fab the tags yourselves? Or do you get them in bulk and then do your own customizations?

This is extremely cool stuff! I'm really excited about playing around with this!
What's different between the experience you suggest and first class?
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In iOS all UI measures are expressed in points and not in pixels. Saying 44 pixels is simply wrong. In the iPhone 4 the screen has the exact same size of the 3G but a scale factor of two so every point is two pixel.
Web Ugliness and the Cure
You are correct on both points.

Maybe you have a solution as to why the travel industry doesn't make any money? Because obviously what they have now doesn't work.
I can definitely vouch for this. I have a lot of exposure to medical back office staff, and I do a lot of trainings with them for my company's medical software. I'll no longer be shocked when I recommend that they just search the page for a name, and their first attempt is to start reading the whole page.

This highlights a few important facts. First, you can't write good software without being out in the "field" and really observing how your users use your product. It's very easy to get in the pattern of writing software for other techies. Second, something very simple as learning how to use Cntrl-F can drastically improve someone's quality of life. You don't need to build a fancy new algorithm, but you definitely do need to design a great intuitive user experience.
I wasn't trying to define an experience, but give ideas of things I hate when I fly.

The whole point of the article is why airlines can't make money - and maybe it's because they are all the same?

So why do you think airlines can't make money?
I'm not preaching morals, I'm taking business. Business' care not for fair software but their investment which is why I used the "somewhat open standard"-wording.

In the history you're clinging to you completely ignore that there was no real alternative. Open standards weren't in a viable state. Furthermore the competition from closed standards have forced open standards to shape up.
For $45,000 down and about 15k a flight plus gas milage, you can have this experience with Delta.

They'll fly you around the country in small jets used for business class clientele only.

Now, its pricey but it exists. That's the seperate "class" that you're talking about.

They meet you at the gate, take your luggage, and even send a limo to pick you up and take you to your destination. You never see security screening either.
It would be nice if there were categories or tags for submissions. I would love it if I could filter the front page to show just "coding tips", "industry news", "startup advice" in the same way there are filters for http://news.ycombinator.com/ask or http://news.ycombinator.com/jobs
I'd rather not call out specific companies but most of the recent launch announcements have been uninteresting to say the least. They are either slight variations of products that are already out there or their market is extremely niche.

Maybe PG just expects these startups to build a quick product and sell off to a Google, Facebook, Zynga etc. I know he chooses startups by their founders, maybe that is because he expects them to be acq-hired.

The most exciting thing I've seen announced on hackernews lately is codecademy and they aren't even part of YC.
Do you think the studies showing vacation time boosts productivity are crap as well? I mean, being on vacation means you're not even at work.
"Most (nearly all?) inventions aren't revolutionary in their novelty but are just an increment above what already existed."

This is true. If you're interested in the history of invention, try Steven Berlin Johnson's "Where Good Ideas Come From." Fascinating book, lots of depth, much recommended.
Excellent question. The answer deserves a blog post of its own. :-)
I was thinking the same thing.

Edit:

Also, Convore was launched in YC W11. So this transition must have happened a while ago.
So why do you think airlines can't make money?

Because not enough people are willing to pay $200 more for slightly more legroom, nor for better food, nor for this or that or anything else you mentioned.

As the OP said, airlines already do let you pay for as much of this as they can.
I'd be interested in your ideas for designing a better study. What this shows is that it improves concentration, which is vital no matter what your job is.
Sometimes users have different things on different devices.

Hell the requirements for auto-renewing subscriptions pretty much FORCE you to track udids.
So you are saying if 20% of the 1 billion people that travel every year didn't pay $200 more - it wouldn't generate profit?
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2905254
Hm, I don't understand what you mean by "niche"...codeacademy is much MORE niche than Can't Wait, at least right now...a lot more people watch movies than program.

Remember, what the startup does when it begins is not what it will grow into. Facebook was a place you could make a simple profile as a Harvard student. Microsoft made a Basic compiler (talk about niche at that time!).
> But its a beginning. Dropbox is raising a lot of money to go after some aspect of the enterprise market.

They really aren't. Revenues 2010 from various quickly Google'd sources and Wikipedia:

DropBox $100M

IBM $99.9B

Oracle $26.8B

SAP $17.9B

All of the big players there saw double-digit revenue growth relative to the previous year, too.

If you're about to reply with something about DropBox having a $5B valuation according to their next funding round, please consider that (a) AFAIK the round hasn't actually closed yet, and the markets have been pretty messed up recently so it's a lot less likely now than it might have been even a month ago, (b) GroupOn have been getting "valuations" well into 11 figures as well, which tells you how much this crazy maths is actually worth as a guide to future potential, and (c) DropBox are probably still small enough to be wiped out just by bad press and/or lawsuits over their reportedly dubious security and privacy policies, at least until any new round of funding goes through, and (d) in any case, a $5B valuation is a long, long way from having $5B in cash available to invest in attacking the enterprise market.

> From niches will come the important profitable software of the future.

I'm not sure what sort of niches you're imagining here. Pretty much every deployment of the heavyweight enterprise software is bespoke. That's why the developers tend to have teams dedicated to each major customer: they make a fortune on the consulting and customisation, on top of the cost of the software itself.
I'm in full agreement. Relatedly, why so much hatred for Groupon's ACSOI metric? If you believe you've got a great business, expansion via deficit spending is one possible strategy. If you're pursuing this strategy, you'll need metrics that show how you would be doing if you weren't expanding via deficit spending. Reasonable people can disagree about whether Groupon is a great business at its core, and whether the ACSOI accurately reflects how Groupon would be doing if they weren't expanding via deficit spending... but the widespread derision that they're "trying to claim they're profitable when they're not" seems intentionally obtuse.
There's many utf8 collations so you should specify something specific to default to. I recently read to use utf8_unicode_ci [0] is the best.

[0] http://philsturgeon.co.uk/blog/2009/08/UTF-8-support-for-Cod...
I may be misremembering this because I'm not a major traveller, but wasn't there a time when fares were regulated, so the government set the fare for a given route and class of travel, and the airlines competed for passengers by trying to make the travel experience better (since they could not compete on price)?
The companies are not all the same. Virgin America, Singapore Airlines, Southwest Airlines, British Airways, Emirates, all occupy different marketing niches compared to the standard US carriers (United, Delta, Northwest, etc.)

What the few successful airlines have realized is that there isn't THAT much room to go premium in economy class -- that consumers might pay $20 more for an airline they like, but not $50.

This blogger wants business class service for an economy class price plus a few dollars, and it's just delusional. A Boeing 777 costs $300 million.
They don't make money because they compete on fares, which is because that's all most people care about. Those who care about luxury just fly first, but that's a small percent of the market. Even most people in first got there via free upgrades.

After deregulation, especially in the advent of low cost regional carriers, there have simply been too many airlines. Bankruptcies and consolidation are going to take care of that very soon. This happens all the time in new industries (and the airline industry is effectively new since deregulation reshaped it so much).
I'm not sure it's 2x productive, and can be annoying/tiring as hell. Much better used in moderation.
Carly Fiorina took care of that task a long time ago.
If you're talking about the NDA, yes, that's true. But Yes, go read the iCloud docs, I think this is the point of this as well.
This is one of the coolest and most useful (for hackers) startups out there -- NFC is clearly the future, but is such a pain to deal with now in development (even small deployments; anything less than 50k unit quantities).
I hope I wasn't implying that the regulations are bad -- the incredible rigor of the airline industry, by all parties, is one of the major reasons that you can get in a gigantic metal tube for 20 hours, 7 miles in the air, going halfway across the globe, more safely than walking down the sidewalk.
Hey memset, thanks!

NFC is a subset of RFID which works over closer ranges (hence the term "near-field"). The other difference is it can be passive (i.e. the reader induces a current in the tag/sticker to read it, that's why the tag doesn't need any power).

13.56 MHZ readers should work. We're ordering cheaper reader-writers (~$50) and will put them on the store soon. In terms of sourcing, we get them in bulk. We basically tested all the suppliers for quality, speed, and are working with the best ones. Who knows though, buying a factory may be in our future.

Have a read of our About NFC page: http://www.tagstand.com/pages/about-nfc and our FAQ http://www.tagstand.com/pages/faq

and if you have any other questions, let us know!
Cool story, bro. You saw Robert Scoble!
I am saddened that I have never heard of this Great man before this article.
It is interesting how many comments on this page are focused on the short-cut rather than the underlying functionality. Ctrl-F itself has nothing to do with it and is purely incidental. The real rub here is that people don't understand that they can search for a sequence. This is equivalent to losing your keys and then locating them only by sense of smell.
Your guide to surviving the Information Revolution
I learned this when I was mentioning to people how happy I was that they had finally added webpage search to MobileSafari in iOS. Nobody had any clue what I was talking about. I tried relating it to Command/Control-F in their browser and nobody had ever seen the feature before.

I find this amazing, as the Find feature in a browser is my most common fallback. Too lazy to keep looking for something on a long page? Just use Find. Hell, they should teach it to you at school. It makes internet research much easier.
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I don't think (and hope) that I don't vocalize it, but I've definitely caught myself making the finger motion in thin air.
What marketing niches? My different areas in the world - but airlines are all pretty much the same.

Show me something amazing an innovate that an airline has done compared to a competitor. There are slight differences - and I travel all the time, I don't have any one airline I absolutely love and MUST fly.

And if I did, you can be assured I would pay more. I am not looking for business class services for an economy price - I am looking for a DIFFERENT airline.
Flew Delta across country. Food was good (and you paid for it). Had TV+games on the back of every chair in coach. Even served Ben and Jerry's icecream.

I think planes ARE being divvyed up like he is saying (business and or first class, sky lounges, etc), just he's underestimating the amount of people who don't want to pay to sit in luxury at 35000ft.
YC has always preached launching as soon as possible, which means that upon launch you'll only get a tiny hint of a startup's future ambitions.

I actually think the way forward is a little bit more obvious for this one. Without even talking to the founders or seeing their pitch, you should be able to think of a number of interesting directions. To pick the most obvious one, wouldn't being the IMDB of the mobile/social era be pretty cool? Is that even really "niche"?
thanks rdl - you're in MV? We've seen some really cool stuff happening, including the MobiSocial guys at Stanford. Eventually we expect the cost of these tags to tend to zero, and then they really will be ubiquitous. We listed a bunch of demos on our about us page: http://www.tagstand.com/pages/about-nfc
> Is $10K/month necessary for living expenses?

While at first glance, the "needing 10k/month" seems surprisingly high, it's likely he means "need 10k/month to maintain my present lifestyle." I doubt he actually means "I need 10k/month to survive," just that having a family means less compromising on lifestyle.

If kids are in school, maybe even private school, those expenses are likely something he doesn't intend to compromise on, which is completely fair. If he has a nice home in a nice neighborhood, he still has to pay property taxes. Healthcare costs more for a full family than 1 person. And so on. Sure, there's a path toward having lower living expenses, like moving where property taxes are lower and taking kids out of private school. It's just going to be a lot harder to take.
So many complain that sometimes it is this or that shortcut. That shortcut seems to only change in IDEs and common dev tools. Usually changing because the C-f is used for some other more common coding task.

In programs used by the general public I have a hard time finding when C-f(cmd-f for mac users) is not the standard for search.

Schools should have a class on finding data. When I was in school we had to have at least one electronic source in our papers. This was supposed to help kids learn how to look up data electronically. They should take one day every year to teach kids how to mine that data with google, and things like c-f. This would allow the kids to find the data they need much faster, and may actually make them enjoy finding and learning more.
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Too Ruby-focused?? Ruby appeared twice in the list, and both times as examples of much more general advice.
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First Class cabins are sized what they are because they reliably are all that will pay for them.

Very few people find it worth it.

Many people just don't get how well off they are compared to random person in a random town in the country.

$290. That's a weeks pay at minimum wage.
Well, in so far as I believe my argument, I guess I think others are wrong. But all of this is conjecture, that's what we're doing here, right? I could go back and cite a bunch of press releases, b that burden of proof isn't being applied to those who are making all of these claims about Groupon being a scam. Anyway I'm mostly disputing arguments rather than making positive claims.
I actually strongly disagree with the idea of an Electronic Literacy class, at least I disagree with it as a class which basically teaches people tricks like control-f that can save them time. Let me relay a story:

In college I worked as a T.A. for in intro programming class for non majors. For some the course started out teaching the students to use Nano as a text editor and assumed that they would choose a more full featured editor whenever they saw fit. Now Nano is a really bare bones editor, it doesn't even have line numbers. And not having line numbers is a serious problem when you're trying to debug c++ compiler errors that reference lines by number. I kid you not I saw kids counting down 100s of lines from the top of the file to get to the listing of the errors.

Now the thing about this situation is: these were perfectly electronically literate people. They all knew about Ctrl-F. And could easily be taught more tricks. The problem is they'd never grasped the philosophy of computers. Specifically that when a task that's so simply stated is taking too long there's normally a better way to do it. Or if there isn't it's an opportunity for you to make a better way to do it.

All of the students simply assumed that if there was a trick they'd have been told about it already so no one inquired further.
Following Acquisition, John Carmack Is Free To Be Himself
It really wasn't stupid for their business moves. Software was not their market, and they don't have the market share to compete with Android and iOS.

I loved the webOS platform. I'm still using my pre +, but that doesn't make it a right more for HP. I do wish they would have open sourced it. I would like to see it as a desktop os someday.

I do think this guy messed up in handling the marketing of webs, but that is more him trusting advisors. The CEO doesn't do everything, but is responsible for it.

Good luck to him, but I think he is gone too.