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Show HN: Flight Penguin – Like Hipmunk, but a browser extension

flightpenguin.com

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Re: Show HN: Flight Penguin – Like Hipmunk, but a browser extension

#31

Post by maxmorlocke »

TheHideout wrote: post #23
maxmorlocke wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There shouldn't be any reference to a subscription. Can you let me know where you saw one? We used to have this setup as a paid extension, but pivoted away as that business model didn't work as well as we'd have liked. Re: privacy and data. You can certainly review the settings we request and our terms of service - we ask to run the extension on a number of travel sites we interact with. We only collect your search i…

Thanks. I saw it on the subdomain and page header bar on the privacy policy page.

I think I've gotten them all. Appreciate you bringing this to my attention!

Re: Show HN: Flight Penguin – Like Hipmunk, but a browser extension

#32

Post by trothamel »

maxmorlocke wrote: post #5
trothamel wrote: post #4

The Chrome extension asks to read the browser history. Why does it need that permission?

It doesn't, this is a side effect of requesting the chrome.tabs permission which we use to manage which tab is currently being highlighted. Chrome includes this note because the chrome.tabs permission set is very broad and includes an onUpdated hook that could allow the extension to capture history as you are browsing. Unfortunately, Chrome doesn't offer more narrow scoped permissions (e.g. tabs.query and not just ge…

That's fair, thank you for this reply.

Re: Show HN: Flight Penguin – Like Hipmunk, but a browser extension

#33

Post by maxmorlocke »

captn3m0 wrote: post #17

Why does the extension need a Google login? I deleted the login div from the HTML, and the extension works fine without the login.

There are a few reasons:

1.) When a user reports an issue to us, it is much easier to find any issues in our error reporting stack. if we have their name and email address attached to the issue as opposed to asking them for all the search terms, time of issue, etc. and then hunting through to see if we've already found (and hopefully fixed) the issue. This practice started when we were a paid subscription, and I've found it useful to continue, especially with a very small team supporting a set of highly asynchronous interactions with scripts running across multiple websites and pushing data back to a common source.

2.) There are contractual requirements for some of the data that we've purchased to be protected from copies of those databases being made. Placing it behind an auth wall and leveraging account based rate limiting for API endpoints met our partners' needs.

Re: Show HN: Flight Penguin – Like Hipmunk, but a browser extension

#36

Post by ajoseps »

I'm confused as to how to actually book a flight through this. I selected NYC->SFO and found some flights I'm interested in. When I click through, I get redirected to another site e.g. trip.com. I try searching for the flight in question on the actual airline's page and nothing comes up for it.

I'm guessing I'm misunderstanding how flights are booked on planes. Does trip.com act as a wholesaler or something of that sort?

Re: Show HN: Flight Penguin – Like Hipmunk, but a browser extension

#37

Post by smallerfish »

Cool.

Various issues:

* Airport code matches should always rank higher than substring searches. I found a number of cases where it was 3rd or 4th.

* I'm onto your crypto mining operation ;) - the searches are pretty CPU intensive. Do you do any kind of threadpool sizing based on number of cores / existing load average?

* It'd be nice to display some kind of status in the main screen beyond just adding flights as they come in. "X of Y searches complete" etc

* Speaking of the CPU load, it'd be cool to stop it as soon as "Update Search" is hit, since the prior searches are now obsolete.

* Finally, if you can add a truly useful "I don't really care about the dates, just somewhere around here" mode, that'd be awesome. _You picked Sunday but that adds a minimum of 5 hours; you really should pick Wednesday. Also it should be a week before._

Re: Show HN: Flight Penguin – Like Hipmunk, but a browser extension

#38

Post by maxmorlocke »

ajoseps wrote: post #36

I'm confused as to how to actually book a flight through this. I selected NYC->SFO and found some flights I'm interested in. When I click through, I get redirected to another site e.g. trip.com. I try searching for the flight in question on the actual airline's page and nothing comes up for it. I'm guessing I'm misunderstanding how flights are booked on planes. Does trip.com act as a wholesaler or something of that s…

We don't handle the booking, we redirect you to the travel site that we found the best price on. Many online travel search agencies and metasearch sites can put together itineraries the airlines don't offer directly.

Re: Show HN: Flight Penguin – Like Hipmunk, but a browser extension

#39

Post by maxmorlocke »

smallerfish wrote: post #37

Cool. Various issues: * Airport code matches should always rank higher than substring searches. I found a number of cases where it was 3rd or 4th. * I'm onto your crypto mining operation ;) - the searches are pretty CPU intensive. Do you do any kind of threadpool sizing based on number of cores / existing load average? * It'd be nice to display some kind of status in the main screen beyond just adding flights as they…

Thanks for the feedback.

Re: codes: yup, that's a bug and will be fixed (or at least the obvious one will be...)

Re: performance - this is on our radar, and we'll keep chipping away at making things a little better as we go. We do have some limits based on system characteristics, but the primitives available to chrome extensions for system information are limited (praise WECG - there's a lot of bad that can be done with too much info).

Re: ballpark dates - This is on our radar, but is both a thorny interaction and below the priority of a few other things users commonly request. No firm commitments on dates as such... but yes, it's a useful tool when you know you want a "May" vacation, and you want a reasonably priced flight that is comfortable.

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