dlitwak

By the articles own admission, the problem of the storage being persistent can just be solved by doing sessionStorage instead of localStorage.

I was just analyzing websites recently to figure out how they were not sending any data back to their servers while still having AJAX-like responses. We are doing AJAX and the amount of data we are sending back causes 2-3 second delays. Similar sites have accomplished it almost instantaneously.

What I found was that the sites I checked used localStorage, or at least from what I could tell from the minimized javascript. It seems like most of the established players have concluded that there is no better alternative and that they will just need to hack together something with localStorage: which brings me to my request:

Perhaps someone can elaborate not only on the pitfalls of localStorage/sessionStorage, but the best ways of working around them?

1) true 2)also true, but flight commissions are at ~.1% according to my credible sources. And they are vanishing quick. My personal opinion is that it is a failed business model and as travel companies shift away from making money off of transportation commissions we will see more alternative forms of transportation. 3) Only when a company gets to scale are they able to make ANY money off of flights, and even then the number of queries they have to pay for from their data providers, server costs etc., bite deeply into whatever fee they make. and the fee is super small to begin with. 4) agreed completely, I elaborate on that. Disagree with your conclusion. Hipmunk several years out is still not profitable, with a great interface. A lot of flight travel startups are not profitable, so I don't see how you say this is the formula for a "financially successful" startup.

Please point out where in the post I said that these other travel aggregator sites are "essentially worthless". I'd really like to know. If I recall I merely pointed out that I don't see it as noticeably better than kayak. I'm pretty sure this is a direct quote: "Hipmunk is a useful product . . . I want to make that clear."

and my argument silverstorm is that I didn't insult them: "Hipmunk. Don't get me wrong, the interface is beautiful. However, I don't use it. This is pretty cool, I won't deny, and it looks gorgeous." Apparently not being completely 100% head over heels for a YC company is interpreted as 'insulting' them.

Apparently Hipmunk is a soft spot here . . . it is definitely curious that no one has vehemently defended any of the other startups. I wonder if it would have elicited the same response if I had criticized Expedia or some company that wasn't so dear to the YC community.

I'm also a bit surprised at all the presumably "startup" people who feel the need to lecture me on being a young upstart who doesn't know what he's talking about, with an unlaunched product, who supposedly knows better. Oh the irony of a bunch of people who rock the boat for a living jumping down the throat of a kid who has the audacity to criticize. It seems that criticism of the big bad companies is ok, criticism of one of our own, not so much.

Again, the article is from my perspective, on why I don't use it. You can say what you please about how intuitive it is and all the reasons why, but I don't use it, and I was trying to give some insight as to why. And I don't appreciate you making it seem like I don't respect Hipmunk, i made it abundantly clear I thought they had a wonderful product, I merely described why I didn't use it, and it seems like I'm not the only one who feels that way.

I'll ignore the quip about my own project haha.

I think they are cool enough that they will get enough funding to be able to compete with the big players. But that is precisely my point, they aren't different enough that they will attract organic traffic from people saying 'wow, my kayak experience was truly awful, let me try an alternative service'. They are better, so perhaps a gradual migration will occur, but yes, I think with the product they have not being different enough, they need to pursue some aggressive advertising etc.

Thansk dkrich. What I find pretty funny is that I definitely complimented hipmunk. Pretty sure I said it was useful and had a wonderful interface haha. I never insulted them but merely stated the reason why I don't use it. But for some reason not being head over heels in love with the product, having something slightly critical to say gets people incredibly defensive.

I also don't have any ill will towards Hipmunk, I think the product looks great. But yes, I also agree that, for flights, travel isn't 'broken' so badly. If it was, Hipmunk would be overflowing with users. Last article I read they were having trouble attracting new users.

Now for other forms of transportation . . . I'm going to have to disagree with you that travel isn't broken.

We aren't social travel martey. Never said we were. The post was about the entire travel industry. We barely mention our own project in the post exactly because we thought it would take away from the argument: we aren't making a sales pitch or trying to sell anything as we aren't in the social travel discovery space and aren't really catering to the same market as hipmunk (we are targeting budget travelers who want to compare buses, trains, the backpacker type).

I agree, but the title of the blog post is why I don't use them. I don't use Hipmunk. I don't use many of these new services, all for different reasons. I don't use Hipmunk not because its useless, far from it, but because my habit is to use Kayak, and I guess for the type of travel searches I do on a regular basis, I don't see a reason to switch.

not trying to trash anyone brd, and this is a statement from my perspective on why I don't use them. I never said any service was awful, it is merely my perspective on why I, as an avid traveler, feel no impetus to become an avid user.

I admitted it was a good service, my commentary was focused on why I don't use it, and the reason is it isn't different enough to break my habit.

I have been told many times that you can't build a business to compete with the major players by being 5% better than them. You need to be 5x better than them, otherwise people won't switch. That is my point, and for me, I realized that the visualization of time data is not what bothers me every time I go to Kayak, so I wasn't really prone to switching.

I am merely trying to provide a little bit of introspection . . . and I guess I don't know what you expect. Yes we are putting out a travel product soon, but that doesn't invalidate my opinion on what is out there, and there is a reason a large portion of people still use Expedia etc. . . .

I think no matter how well you raise a 10 or 11 year old, at that age they are still impressionable and subject to a lot of group-think and peer pressure.

that's irrelevant though, Obvious is an idea incubator, but they launch separate companies/entities (dunno the exact legal structure but that also doesn't matter), and one of them, Twitter, has its own domain name. Unless you are referring to something else . . .

This is spot on. I was a "band geek", more specifically an "orchestra dork", in high school, and a computer science nerd as well. Not exactly the most popular combination. My attitude in high school was mostly not caring about being popular, and I didn't make any effort to identify with people I considered to be unlike me. I had other friends, in the music program, who were sociable and could identify with the less academic oriented crowd and they did fine. I gained a lot of this awareness in college and actually went on to be my fraternities social and rush chair, and what changed was that I gained a more acute awareness of people's social interactions and put in the time to figure out the college social situation. This isn't always a huge priority of nerds, or they just haven't gotten there yet: they may be so advanced in one aspect that the social skills haven't quite caught up yet. However, I disagree that all these geeks will go on to inherit the world: if they don't EVENTUALLY gain those social skills and recognize how valuable they are, they won't get anywhere near as far as they can. There is some ridiculous statistic like some 60-70% of all senators/presidents were Greek (frat and sorority life), and I think this speaks less to the value of the greek system and more to the fact that people who place value on interacting with other people and communicating go farther than those who don't.

Most intensive development is a bother in Windows. When I started learning ruby on rails I had to go through cygwin(a command line simulation program) to be able to follow along with the tutorials. There are lots of bugs, and since Macs are based on BSD, same as Linux, it is supposed to be easier to develop on them.

They are called hipsters not nerds :)

While facebook and twitter may not be intended to "save" the world you'd have to be naive to not admit they have definitely changed the world. You have no idea what the founders intentions were when they started either. To interconnect people is a noble idea in itself. Aspiring to be the next Mark Zuckerberg as long as its for the right reasons isn't bad either.

And the idea that you should start working at any company because you want to save the world is a stretch. You could make this argument for any company that is not involved in National Defense/Renewable Energy, or some other field that is so obviously necessary for our future. Enhancing people's quality of life, even if its not completely necessary to survive, should not be looked down on.

You don't need to separate into "good" and "bad" but I think it'd be easy to get bipartisan support for a bill that opened up a large amount of visas to immigrants with masters and doctorates or entrepreneurs with existing funding. The fight over the other kind of immigration is likely to be a lot more vitriolic.

Vivek Wadhwas comments are a bit unfair in my opinion. "Students are flocking to computer science because they dream of being the next Mark Zuckerberg, not of saving the world. "

One could argue that social media applications like Twitter and Facebook went a long way towards facilitating the revolutions in Egypt, Tunisia and the growing conflicts in Libya/Yemen. No one technology "saves the world" necessarily, but I think Twitter and Facebook don't deserve to be set aside as merely "fun."

"I like change, I like staying on the cutting edge of web technologies, but I don't want to learn something, only to discard it and re-do it completely to bring it up to date with a new way of doing things all the time."

As long as something is backwards compatible, I don't see the problem. That is the natural progression of a rapidly evolving industry like tech, there is always something new. I don't see how introducing coffeescript as an option makes a problem for anyone. I agree there shouldnt be change for changes sake, but often through trial and error we discover a more efficient way of doing things. If rails doesn't evolve, it will be replaced by frameworks like Django, CakePHP that do.

companies pay millions of dollars for a spot in the superbowl to reach customers and they aren't able to quantify them, and obviously million dollar spots on tv aren't for every business. But, like Groupon, that isn't to say they don't benefit businesses that use them right. And it can be used as a way to build awareness. Maybe the restaurants and coffee shops that offered groupons didn't get anything out of it because their patrons didn't like the product enough to come back when there wasn't a discount. I don't think restaurants/coffee shops are inherently bad targets, you can be prompted to try someplace new and become a regular if the food is any good. Seems like bad decision making on the part of the business owner.

Most of what was "Soviet" was taken from individual owners in the first place. My family fled Estonia from invading Soviets, giving up several businesses. I visited a couple years ago and 4 families now live on the plot of land that was once rightfully ours. It's part of life, deal with it, we did. The making public of private land was also theft in the first place so I guess I don't quite get your point, he rightfully bought the land according to the laws at that point in time, he doesn't deserve to go to prison.

I'm curious to see what effect this has on companies like Square, who seem to have been leapfrogged a bit. But I guess since square's main offering is as a point-of-sale credit-card swiper, I suppose there is a way they can change their product offering to something that can read phones as well as take cards.