Hacker News Reader

usefulon How to Beat High Airfares (2011)

we do a good job, the airlines don't want to pay for the arms race they create by making their rules around pricing so difficult that no single person in their business understands it (personal opinion). I believe airlines that do use our services do much better than the ones that don't (like +0.5-1% more margin). Think about how much money that is to someone like united with 38 billion in revenue.

The only reason I have a job is because the reservation system is old and has all sorts of scope creep to do things that aren't really airline related but were implemented to make a sale.

tl;dr I agree with the guy at the end of the story.

usefulon How to Beat High Airfares (2011)

Part of my job is to prevent this. We are very good at cancelling your ticket based on airline rules if we know you wont get on a plane based on your other flights. Airlines ban/fine travel agents (and sometimes passengers) that abuse their rules.

usefulon Workers on Samsung factory site battle police in Vietnam

hard to fight automated soldiers with intelligence tracking of your movements since birth from low earth orbit

usefulon Experian Sold Consumer Data to ID Theft Service

all structures depreciate, eventually it will fall down. It requires maintenance to keep the same value. This is one reason most people will tell you to never buy a condo. Land is finite and does not depreciate.

usefulon App Store Pricing: Worth Less than a Cup of Coffee

I happily pay $60/year for Strava. But I would never buy the app.

usefulon GNU APL 1.0

I use APL daily because our production codebase is based on it and we are (thankfully) phasing it out. Imo, it's a giant calculator and has no place in production code

usefulon How airline reservations are used to target illegal searches

It's more surprising that DHS keeps copies of the PNR data. The passport/visa stuff is acceptable but you can tell a lot more about someone from PNR data. Who they travel with, payment information, itinerary, changes in travel, medical conditions, baggage, services, it goes on and on.

usefulon Ruins of forgotten empires: APL languages

1/2 our codebase is in APL. It is a good calculator.

usefulon Unfit for work

Doesn't the Obama care insurance penalty basically do this? Companies are forced to either spend $10000 per employee like they do do now to give them coverage or pay a $2000 fine to the government. The beauty of this is that part time workers are exempt from the fine so most companies will just hire 25% more people and make everyone only work 30 hours.

Unemployment is basically solved in 2014. Under employment on the other hand...

usefulon Ask HN: My game was just featured in the Windows 8 app store, what do I do next?

I like the concept. Combining tetris and word finding is a neat gameplay mechanic.

usefulon AdBrite will cease operations on Feb 1, 2013

I had a top 3 site on adbrite and was making almost six figures per year around 2004. I got banned without any warning. It was fun while it lasted. Their whole system sucked. They banned me because they wanted me to charge more. Their system allowed a huge backlog of ads that I had to display when my site got popular and prevented me charging more.

usefulon Greg Knauss's 10-year-old son's $23,800 bug bite

It costs $121/month for 100% coinsurance, no copay, and a 3000 yearly maximum cost in network. Can no one spend <10% of their income on their health?

usefulon A real-time collaborative HTML/CSS editor

<SCRIPT>a=/XSS/ alert(a.source)</SCRIPT>

basic injection works, it doesnt properly screen input

usefulon Google HTML/CSS Style Guide

Luckily my text editor converts all your tabs to 2 spaces for readability and formatting working with multiple developers.

usefulon Please do not take down the Sality botnet

Whatever a jury thinks

usefulon [dead]

Notepad++ is awesome. I'm just sick of getting corrupt settings. My only gripe is the plugins could have better shortcut/toolbar integration

usefulon The Stanford Education Experiment Could Change Higher Learning Forever

Coursera, I'm doing the NLP class but it is just a guy writing equations on a chalkboard. The class would be much better if he used plain english to explain his equations instead of reading off the slide.

MITx, I gave up on the electronics course because I can't read the guys handwriting and I didn't like the labs. The book is also in the worst format I've ever seen but at least it's free.

usefulon Anant Agarwal is leaving CSAIL to direct MITx

Before universities, guilds would have members vouch for their apprentices. If you were a master blacksmith, your word saying that your apprentice was skilled enough to be called a blacksmith was enough for them to go out on their own.

It's not the same thing but its swinging back towards that.

usefulon Mathematics for Computer Science

thank you, I was looking for something like this

usefulon How Udacity's Greatest Effect will be in the Developing World

The 373 class is very good. They change things up enough to make sure you understand the concepts. I think I might be picking up some sensors and motors from sparkfun pretty soon.

usefulon Obama Announces $2B Fund for Startups

http://www.startupamericapartnership.org/get-registered

afaik it basically gives you access to this: http://www.startupamericapartnership.org/search/content?f[0]...

usefulon Obama Announces $2B Fund for Startups

Nice to see a website I worked on finally get on HN. http://www.startupamericapartnership.org/

usefulon The Dangerous Mr. Khan

Are you starting to use videos from other people? I'd love to see 3rd party content on the site provided it scored well with both students(attention) and teachers(content).