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Comment by NathanCH | Hacker News Reader

User: I want to travel the last week of august.

So, your program needs to calculate what date that is, or the user is will need to look at an external calendar (Windows GUI) to determine which date that is.

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So, your program needs to calculate what date that is

Yes it does, Qnd that is harder for the programmer and easier for the user. Calendar wudguts suck for:

   > last week of august next year.

Twenty years ago parsing user input and calculating a date was resource constrained and ambiguity was expensive because the query was hitting Sabre on some mainframe. Today we've got gigahertz and gigabytes in our pockets and we're wired up at megabit speeds to caches and CDN's and search tools with autocompletion (Windows Intellisense)

And yet we still have to manually query every combination of departure and return dates to find reasonable airfare.

That's less a fault of our interface devices, and more that the airlines are not in the business of giving us the cheaper fares. ;) I'm sure they'd be happiest to suggest fares that were cheaper than competitors, yet 3x the price of a different day's fare for the same trip.

Not on Adioso, which is why I use them. You can choose a city (with multiple airports) for the departure location and something like "about X weeks/months" for the travel duration. And then drill down, since they display a range of dates.

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