User9812's comments

Seems believable. I just caught an interview on television earlier today with the CEO of a luxury worldwide hotel, and he said leisure clients went up from about 35% to 45% in the past decade, so it's a growing focus for them.

That seems like a good idea, and I could see hotel visitors wanting to select a room overlooking the parking lot (to watch a vehicle), or wanting to be on a particular side of the building (avoiding highway noise), etc. People have all sorts of little preferences, so I think that feature would get a lot of use. They also like being familiar with a room, so I could see them booking the identical one on their next trip.

Since we're talking about hotels, I think the business in general has a lot of faults. I get more perks at a $10 per night hostel or $50/night Airbnb apartment, than I do at a $300 per night hotel.

When you book a hotel for $300 per night, they nickel and dime you for everything. Wifi? You'll need to register for it at the front desk, and pay $20 per day. Oh, want a bottle of water, or small snack, that's another $10. That hostel, or cheap-o hotel will give you free wifi. I'd say half of the Airbnb places I've stayed at left beer or a bottle of wine in the fridge, and a few places had a giant fresh platter of fruit on the kitchen table.

Why doesn't this happen with a $300 per night hotel? To me, this is a complete turn off. I'll avoid the fancy hotels, because I don't know where it'll end. They're trying to gouge me at every single corner when I've paid a premium, and instead of being an appreciated customer, I feel like I'm being taken advantage of. My parents are well off, and I know they feel the same way. When they go on vacation and stay at a high end hotel, they have to tip people left and right. They're forced to use the staff at the entrance for carrying their bags up to the room, and then they need their wallet ready to tip them for that 2 minutes of work. What kind of awful first impression is that? You're on vacation, paid a small fortune for a room, and within minutes you need to shell out more cash.

Yes, I know their thought process is they can squeeze absurd prices out of people that have money, but I think it's completely backwards and destroys their image and sense of luxury.

I think there's a business for a mid-range hotel with perks. Take a mid-range hotel with $150 per night rooms. Add $15 of free perks, and charge $165 per night for your rooms. With that $15, you could give every visitor free wifi, 2 bottles of water, a couple of bananas/oranges, bag of chips, couple of health bars, bottle of juice, 2 beers or a bottle of wine, and small bag of nuts. To me, that's a huge difference in service and experience for a small price. It would make me book that place every night of the week, and I'd recommend it to others. I'd put employees or clients up in such a place, knowing they're feeling pampered. Why doesn't this exist? Would this not be appealing to anyone else?

Agreed, people are unreliable sources of information. It's not because we're trying to fabricate a story or lie, it's because our memory is anything but perfect. I remember seeing some good YouTube videos that demonstrated this, but I can't find any at the moment. Below is a random eyewitness video I just stumbled across...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSzPn9rsPcY

I think the best part of that video is how the professor mentioned the robber had an odd nose. Later, the student recalls seeing the robber firsthand with an odd shaped nose, but they don't recall hearing anything from the teacher. This is basically inception, the teacher planted a small seed of information, and now it turns into the memory of the student without them knowing.

I simply can't believe that's the reason. It's an error message, not a warning. It doesn't check if new comments have been posted to that thread, it doesn't prompt you with the new comments, and ask if you want to continue with the post, and it doesn't make it easy to go back to the original thread to check if there are new comments.

Asking users to type in an external text editor, and then copy/paste isn't a reasonable solution for a message board.

Not sure why you were downvoted, but I completely agree. I get the 'Unknown or expired link' message all the time because I'll write long comments, or write part of a comment, get sidetracked, then finish. There's no reason for this error message, and to have tokens time out after what feels like a matter of minutes.

Then of course this happens on the homepage too, when you click 'more', after being inactive for a while. Why?

And why is there no pagination?

Why do a click reply on a comment and get redirected to a completely separate page, instead of replying inline? And then when I submit that comment, it just redirects me to the top of the comment page, so I have no idea where I left off, and now the comments might be shuffled since votes have changed.

These feel like critical changes that benefit everyone, and require little work. Why are they never addressed after years?

Agree on this one. I imagine they factored the prices of business class flights into their bid on the project. People that are higher up in any industry want a few perks. I can't imagine telling someone that's at the top in the industry you'll need to send them on 64 flights to Shanghai, in economy class. That's basically a form of torture, so you need to put them up in business class and a decent hotel, otherwise they'll be walking out the door.

Do you know what companies never do? They never ask.

I see dating ads, cars advertisements, feminine healthcare products, insurance ads, etc. What do I want to see? Travel accessories, computers, hardware, games, tech gadgets, etc. I never see these ads.

Why doesn't Google say, hey, you're going to see Adsense all over the internet, advertisements before videos on YouTube, etc. Would you like to select a few categories so that time is spent seeing some cool products that are relevant to you?

I've been on the internet for 15+ years, and no one stopped to ask just once. I could select categories in about 20 seconds that would be more accurate than all this data collection and profiling that happens every day.

Instead, I just block ads, and install ad block on every computer I come across. I make my living off ad revenue, but ads are absolutely awful, irrelevant and too often malicious. If they gave me the option to select some categories in the past, I probably would have discovered some decent products to buy, and keep them turned on. But nope, I can't recall clicking an ad in the past decade.

Yep, it's definitely a phone sized device, and you can see her scrolling with her finger in the reflection, so it's a touch screen. Now, what's actually unique about it that separates it from the millions of similar devices, I guess we'll have to wait and see. Perhaps the display stays square to your head? I mean, if you're viewing the screen at a slight angle, it skews the perspective to look straight?

http://i.imgur.com/ExL1OqV.png

There's a quick photoshop of a phone at an angle and the display square. Now, you wouldn't purposely use the phone at such an extreme angle, but when you're typing, playing games, in bed, etc, it might make things easier to use. Fairly straightforward, it would just be tracking the location of your head, and adjust the perspective of the display.

Same thing here, I had no idea about this site, so I click their mission from the article.

http://building.gittip.com/big-picture/mission

Well, that made it more confusing, so I click process at the bottom of the above page.

Now it sounds like it's a giant pool of money, anyone can volunteer for anything, and take some of that money. So, I can say I want to keep the elderly company and go play scrabble with them in the evenings, and take $10/hr from Gittip for my time? So, I visit the site directly to see if this is accurate...

https://www.gittip.com

Apparently not. Ok, now I'm suppose to enter a Twitter username? This is to donate money to Twitter users? Still confused, so I click a random profile of someone receiving money. It starts to make more sense, so these are just people marketing themselves, and asking for weekly donations. The about page confirms this...

https://www.gittip.com/about/

Far too much work to figure out what's happening here. I still have no idea what I can donate money towards. I mean, how do I browse causes? If I want to support musicians, or people cleaning up garbage on their beaches, where do I go? I can't find any type of listings, or categories here. Is this just for programmers? I need to know their Twitter/Github username, or randomly click profiles on the site?

I give up, I've spent 20 minutes reading, and browsing this site, and my only conclusion is that it's a place to sponsor your favorite programmers, by giving them a weekly donation. I've been programming and freelancing for over a decade, and I can't think of anyone by name that I'd donate towards. This site gives me zero help in finding people to donate towards, aside from aimlessly browsing hundreds of profiles, hoping for someone to catch my attention. I don't have that kind of time.

This entire thing is too frustrating. I don't have a Twitter, GitHub, Bitbucket, or OSM account, so they won't even let me sign-up anyway. However, they say, 'Gittip's audience is everyone; it's intended to be a mass-market consumer product.'

http://building.gittip.com

Browsing the above, it looks like they spent way too much effort on over-analyzing everything. They have widgets, an API, browser extensions, but they're missing the most important thing, I working business model. It seems like the result of too many engineers and programmers in a room, while no one is spending a minute thinking about marketing, sales, or the user experience.

Ok, so you've been dreaming of a world changing startup at age 17, and you're 24 now. What have you started? It's been seven years, it sounds like you spend a lot of time learning, but you need to start launching products.

The common saying, 'finished is better than perfect', comes to mind here. You talk about the UI problems with HN and Twitter, but guess what, they have a functioning service. They're both successful in their own way, and they can continue to grow and resolve these problems in the years to come.

Expect to fail often, that's just the startup life. If you waste all your time perfecting your world changing startup, and it never sees the light of day, or it launches and goes nowhere, you wasted unnecessary time. You want to launch something in the shortest time possible, and check for traction. If it doesn't exist, you go in another direction, or drop it entirely, and move on.

It's like searching for gold. You visit a new location, and quickly scratch at the surface and sample the land. What happens when you find nothing? You relocate and try again. You don't spend a decade digging deeper and deeper.

Take your favorite idea, figure out how you can take the core concept and launch it within a week. Forget about all the extra features, forget about the perfect UI, just make it happen.

Note: Numbers below would be money in the bank, after taxes.

1 million: Takes the edge off, I could support a family, and live a reasonable lifestyle. I'd take up a hobby with the spouse, or work on personal projects to bring in some extra money and to keep busy.

2 million: Similar to above, but working is no longer necessary. I could life comfortably and be happy. Of course, I'd need to be careful with my spending, and not drop $1,000 on a bottle of wine. I'm not one for fancy toys, so this could easily be retirement money in my situation.

3 million+: Same as 2 million, but I'd just have the option to do everything a little bigger. Higher end cars, larger house, more expensive city, better downtown location, etc. Personally, not necessary, so I'd just bank it, or put it towards a startup.

In short, I'll say 2 million is FU money. It provides everything I need in life, it would support a family, and at that point I can leave the rat race.

Hmm, the first 10 minutes had my attention, and I was agreeing on his points that design is obviously subjective, and difficult to measure. With code, you can spend a week refactoring a section of your project, and conclude with certainty that it's better written. With design, you try to do the same, and get 60% of people agreeing it's the right direction, and 40% saying you're going the wrong way. This creates a lot of internal conflicts, and noise as you try to reach your goal. I was hoping this talk was going to go into some specifics of how we can measure great design, and how we can clear some of that noise and have more confidence in our decisions.

However, it seemed like the talk stopped after the intro, then it spent 30 minutes showcasing some odds and ends from his past work.

Say you're strategic partners, and you specialize in RoR development, and have a business relationship.

Agree to some extent. This applies to those ideas where execution is the most important part. That's the vast majority of ideas. However, occasionally you get an idea where the concept is almost more important than the execution.

For example, Twitter. They've obviously executed it well and grown over time, but the initial concept is simple, and you'd want to be first to market. 140 character messages, and you can follow people. It's a good idea, you can create a working beta in a weekend, and grow quickly from there. You don't want to tell people about those ideas.

On the other hand, you have something like the Microsoft post on the homepage, about real-time voice translations for Skype. You can share things like that with the world. Everyone knows this technology is going to exist one day, and everyone knows it's going to be widely used. There's no big secret there. It just boils down to a lot of work, and who executes the most accurate translations. It's not a race, it's a marathon that's open to anyone.

I'm surprised taxi services are so far behind here. Why can't I request a taxi in a single click, select the vehicle, charge it to my account, see the location of the taxi on a map and the ETA until it arrives? Why can't I see the route it'll take, or modify the route myself and set a waypoint?

I'm sure some taxi services offer a couple of these features, but none of the ones that I've used. I think one had online booking, but it was broken and I had to find a phone, and then I got no answer, and then I was on hold for 5 minutes.

Why can't I set a custom alert, so I get notified when the taxi is 2 minutes away? That way I don't have to keep looking out the window, or spend 15 minutes sitting on a curb, wondering if they forgot, and I'm going to be late.

If taxis are losing business to Uber, it's their own fault, and lack of innovation.

A bus is possible, but if this was a viable business, it should exist already. The only difference is the cost of the driver, so the automated bus might save passengers $5/day. Is that $5/day extra cost keeping this business non-existent at the moment? I'm a little skeptical.

Keep in mind your taxi service is cheap because it's on the road all the time. A taxi might make $250/day, and pay the driver half of that cost. That means the company is making $125/day per taxi. You're one of 15 or 20 people taking that taxi in a day, so the $15 trip is possible. If everyone was taking an automated car to work, they need to pay the majority of that $125/day price. Split it with 4 people, and that's just over $30/day each. Kind of expensive. Add more people and we're turning into a bus or public transit again.

Work schedules offset would help everything all around. If some people worked 7-3, 8-4, 9-5, 10-6, 11-7, etc, then we could decrease rush hour traffic, and use the cars multiple times to lower the price to $10/day, which starts to become interesting.

I like your idea of buying a car, adding it to a network, and getting money back when you're not using it.

1. Not sure I agree with the first point. People hunting for a parking space once a day likely causes less pollution then a car driving itself to a charging station or depot twice a day. Plus, if these are an affordable method of commuting, you're going to be pulling people away from public transportation, and getting more vehicles on the road. If they're more expensive, then you'll just have people buying their own, and then they're in your situation, where they buy an SUV model since it's more versatile.

2. Moving some depots outside the city will definitely help. Yes, some of the cars going into the city will be used for courier jobs, or tourist day trips, but that's an incredibly small percentage. You might have 500,000 automated cars taking people to work. 450,000 sit in a depot waiting for the evening commute, and 50,000 are used for people active in the day. Once again 500,000 people take their car home, and about 450,000 sit idle again waiting for the next day. How does this work as a business? If you use one of these cars for work, you need to pay for 90% of the cost, because that car rarely gets used outside of taking you to and from work. Sure, you could do a ride share with a couple of other people, but still, the few of you are renting that car full-time. It doesn't work.

3. If these can be solar charged, then surely a taxi can be solar charged, so there's no difference in fuel cost. You're paying a driver, and someone in an office answering calls, so there is an extra cost, and I think they have a use case here.

In short, these cars need to be on the road all day long, that's how they lower their prices and raise efficiency. That doesn't work for daily commuting. However, they would be an incredible taxi service. Imagine you have a fleet of 100 automated cars, people use an app to set their pickup/destination, and the cars find the most efficient way of organizing the routes and schedule. A car breaks down, and another one automatically reroutes itself. You could give people the option of carpooling with a checkbox. Let people register on the app, and upload a photo. So, you set your destination, and it says it'll be $10 and 15 minutes, or you can carpool with John (25/male), and it'll cost your $7.50, and 20 minutes. This could even happen while you're in transit. You get a pop-up on the dash. Want to lower your rate and share a ride with the person in this photo? Say yes, we'll credit $5 to your account, and take a 5 minute detour to pick them up. Worried about safety? You could review passengers, and only car pool with people that have a high rating and good feedback. I think that's exciting, it should offer lower rates to consumers, and you get to socialize with new people at the same time, so you might make some friends on your next taxi ride.

Well, if I lived in an apartment building, I'd like to have real neighbors, people that speak my language, enjoy a sense of community, and friends in the building. It would get quite annoying if I come home every evening to a new set of people on vacation or backpacking, and checking in and out of the surrounding apartments. The building shouldn't be a hotel, it's my home.

Now, I've used Airbnb a dozen times, but I can see the concern for people in the above situation. I've had people ask me when I'm renting certain Airbnb apartments if I live in the building, and they seemed a little upset with the idea of me just passing through for a week.

They should add a table, or two sets of seats facing each other, and an optional table that pulls out between them. Then show 4 people in the car, having a little business meeting on the way to their office, or have a family of 4 in the car, eating sandwiches or something on the table as they go to school.

That should be one of the key points, you can use this time productively, and not just spend it looking out the windshield. You can visit with your children on the way to their school, and not have your back to them as you divide your attention between the road and their conversation. Show a side-by-side of a parent driving, scatterbrained and frustrated, then show one sitting next to their child in the automated car reading a book together as it drives.

I can't see that working. You'll require a ton of cars taking individuals or small groups to and from work in a big city. That's not very efficient, and the reason we have a metro system in the first place.

1. That's a lot of pollution. 2. You have twice as much traffic, since these cars need to come to your house every morning, and drive back to their charging station in the evening. They can take those trips off-peak hours, but you still have a lot more cars on the road. They could stay at your house overnight to save on wasting energy, but at that point you're just owning a car, or renting one full-time. 3. Do many people take a taxi to and from work daily? No, and this is quite similar. It's too expensive, people take public transportation, or buy a cheap vehicle (this could be that vehicle).

This is a replacement for the taxi, and for car rentals. If you live in a city and need to rent a car for a day, this would be a great situation. You don't even need a driver's license, so you just push a button, car appears, and you're taking it to your destination. I've lived in a dozen different cities, and this is something I'd use. I don't rent cars often because it's kind of a hassle, a little scary driving in a new city, and a little annoying searching for parking, but the convenience of pushing a button would encourage me to use it for certain trips. It should also be slightly cheaper than a taxi since you're not paying or tipping a driver.

They could probably get creative and offer monthly plans, where you get up to X trips, and Y kilometers, for a slightly better rate than renting on a per trip basis.