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Comment by rad_gruchalski | Hacker News Reader

> Until two years ago, I flew out of ATL - the busiest airport in the US. Am I suppose to look on the board and look for my flight out of the hundreds of flights to see if anything has changed and keep looking every 30 minutes?

That’s what I usually do. It’s not that much of an effort to look at the screen right at the gate you’re sitting at to confirm that nothing has changed. I‘ve been to ATL twice, it’s not that bad.

What are you going to do when something happens to your phone …

Can you imagine… how did we manage to live before everyone and their dog had a phone in their pocket.

So yeah… yeah? That’s exactly what you supposed to be doing.

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> That’s what I usually do. It’s not that much of an effort to look at the screen right at the gate you’re sitting at to confirm that nothing has changed. I‘ve been to ATL twice, it’s not that bad.

And you somehow think that’s more efficient? Do you also think polling is more efficient than web hooks and push notifications? Why would I do that?

And the restaurants are usually not right at the gate you’re sitting at. Well in our case we are usually sitting in the lounge…

> What are you going to do when something happens to your phone

Well, I personally would take out my cellular equipped iPad on the rare occasions that I was flying by myself and I would still get text notifications on my cellular equipped watch or depend on my wife having her phone, cellular equipped iPad or Watch.

If all that failed yes I would have to get a paper ticket - which you can do at the gate.

How often do you actually fly? My wife and I have been flying over a dozen times a year post Covid.

I was in ATL either flying in, out or through ATL over 25x last year alone.

> Can you imagine… how did we manage to live before everyone and their dog had a phone in their pocket.

I personally had my first phone in my pocket in 1995. Never once in 30 years has anything “happened to my phone”.

What is there to be more efficient? You’re sitting there waiting for a flight. This isn’t a shopping mall, even if it appears to look like one.

Re push vs pull… which one do you prefer more? Kafka or MQTT? On a more serious note… pull because I don’t sit snd stare at the phone all the time. Phone stays in the pocket. So the act of taking it out of the pocket is a pull action.

There are no screens and announcements at the lounge? You went to the airport to fly somewhere, not shopping or a dinner for two, no? What’s more important than getting to your destination?

> What is there to be more efficient? You’re sitting there waiting for a flight. This isn’t a shopping mall, even if it appears to look like one.

That’s just it, even if I didn’t have lounge access, I would be hanging out at a restaurant or a bar that isn’t near the gate. I would have to be constantly looking on the board with all of the flights. ATL has 192 gates spread across seven concourses and two terminals.

> pull because I don’t sit snd stare at the phone all the time. Phone stays in the pocket

Of course I have an alarm set for when I need to start heading toward my gate. But gate changes and when it’s time to board are both push notifications to both my phone and my watch.

> There are no screens and announcements at the lounge

2100 flights take off per day from ATL. That’s over 100 flights an hour - I think there are at least 6 hours a day where no flights take off. They explicitly say they don’t make announcements.

This goes back to do you really want to be searching for your flight on a board with that many flights?

> You went to the airport to fly somewhere, not shopping or a dinner for two, no

If you either get to the airport early to avoid rush hour or have a long layover, you probably will end up having a meal or drinks while you wait. We had a four hour layover at LAX last week.

I think it was Kyiv's airport (so I can't check) but their flight times were not all rounded to the nearest 10 minutes.

I liked this, as finding the single 12:34 flight was much quicker than looking at the 4+ flights all with "12:30" at another airport, where on the display each line is rotating between multiple flight numbers, airlines and languages.

Personally, even if I'm using an app I still look at the screens to check. A notification might not have been sent, or my phone might have dropped off the airport wifi leaving me with no connection, or roaming might have stopped working.

I really don't get why you're being so hostile here. If you don't want to rely on modern conveniences, don't. There's no reason to get up in arms that some of us think that other ways can be easier.

I want to offer a counter point to all these Luddites:

I'm mentally handicapped (my mind is apparently somewhere on a spectrum) and technology allows me to limit human interaction- which causes me physical discomfort. I realise normal people love to talk to the lady at McDonald's, they probably live for that shit.

> What are you going to do when something happens to your phone

Uh... look at the big departures board, duh. I don't see why it's weird to want to use an indisputably more convenient method (auto-updating pass on my phone) for the common case, but still be able to fall back to a less-convenient method (departures board) if the uncommon case comes up.

And no big deal if I need a paper boarding pass. I can just walk over to the gate, show them my ID, and ask them to print me one.

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