Flying for Thanksgiving • Hacker News Board

Re: Flying for Thanksgiving

#51

Post by cperciva » Wed, Nov 21, 2018, 10:47 AM UTC

kevindong wrote: post #7

Growing up, my Chinese family didn't really celebrate Christmas. Consequently, we would always travel for family vacations on Christmas day. Christmas day flights were generally slightly cheaper than non-Christmas day flights, which was nice. --- I also like how the writer asked for the daily number of unique users but got bandwidth usage instead.

I'm guessing they didn't have the number of unique users logged anywhere, and figured that their bandwidth logs were the next best thing. Rather refreshing to see that sort of thinking from a government bureaucracy rather than simply having an answer sent back of "unique users? Sorry, we don't track that".

Re: Flying for Thanksgiving

#52

Post by aaronbrager » Wed, Nov 21, 2018, 11:07 AM UTC

Plastikdusche wrote: post #41

deadprogram wrote: post #26

Oh man, how I love data! Good work on this post.

Very cool approach indeed, but there's also this ;) https://www.flysfo.com/media/facts-statistics/air-traffic-st...

That data is only monthly

Re: Flying for Thanksgiving

#53

Post by rtb » Wed, Nov 21, 2018, 11:16 AM UTC

AshleyGrant wrote: post #5

Flying on Thanksgiving Day is a joy. I've done it twice now. The ATL concourses are practically empty. It is a bit strange to see the flight boards almost empty on a Thursday morning. I do bring $5 Starbucks gift cards for the entire crew of every flight I'm on to thank them for having to work on a day when most of the country is with family. It's not much, but it's something. The folks flying on holidays are low on…

Why $5 Starbucks gift cards and not $5 cash?

Re: Flying for Thanksgiving

#54

Post by dandare » Wed, Nov 21, 2018, 11:18 AM UTC

coziestSoup wrote: post #32

Anyone else struck by the promptness of the Dept. of Technology here? Always nice to see things just like this working.

It's 20 days in the UK. https://www.gov.uk/make-a-freedom-of-information-request/how...

Re: Flying for Thanksgiving

#55

Post by thrower123 » Wed, Nov 21, 2018, 11:21 AM UTC

rtb wrote: post #53

AshleyGrant wrote: post #5

Flying on Thanksgiving Day is a joy. I've done it twice now. The ATL concourses are practically empty. It is a bit strange to see the flight boards almost empty on a Thursday morning. I do bring $5 Starbucks gift cards for the entire crew of every flight I'm on to thank them for having to work on a day when most of the country is with family. It's not much, but it's something. The folks flying on holidays are low on…

Why $5 Starbucks gift cards and not $5 cash?

I hate gift cards. "Here, rather than crassly giving you actual money, I've spent that money on this company scrip that you can only use in one place. Aren't you excited?" Great idea, just brilliant. I'll add it to the stack of worthless iTunes cards and cards for restaurants that don't have a franchise within 500 miles...

Re: Flying for Thanksgiving

#56

Post by dandare » Wed, Nov 21, 2018, 11:25 AM UTC

TIL about ghostscript's txtwrite function. A dawn of a new era!

Re: Flying for Thanksgiving

#57

Post by iammart » Wed, Nov 21, 2018, 11:38 AM UTC

Really enjoyed reading this, thanks for the post!

Re: Flying for Thanksgiving

#58

Post by chrisseaton » Wed, Nov 21, 2018, 11:50 AM UTC

Rapzid wrote: post #17

_asummers wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assuming a podcast is 50MB, that would be 300k podcasts. If I'm about to jump on a flight, I may download 4-5, which would put that at about 60k people. I just found an article saying 53 million people flew through SFO in 2016. If we distribute those evenly (unreasonable, but ballparks it), we get just under 145k passengers / day. Obviously web pages and mp3s are much lighter than a typical podcast, so this isn't the…

I see extremely few people listening to anything that's not in-flight entertainment on flights. I bet it's mostly kids watching youtube videos.

That’s funny - I almost never see anyone using inflight entertainment screens any more. People are always watching Netflix or listening to something instead. And I think my view is supported by airlines starting to remove those screens because they’re not being used.

Re: Flying for Thanksgiving

#59

Post by Domark » Wed, Nov 21, 2018, 1:02 PM UTC

thrower123 wrote: post #55

rtb wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why $5 Starbucks gift cards and not $5 cash?

I hate gift cards. "Here, rather than crassly giving you actual money, I've spent that money on this company scrip that you can only use in one place. Aren't you excited?" Great idea, just brilliant. I'll add it to the stack of worthless iTunes cards and cards for restaurants that don't have a franchise within 500 miles...

It’s the thought that counts.

Re: Flying for Thanksgiving

#60

Post by ghaff » Wed, Nov 21, 2018, 1:03 PM UTC

chrisseaton wrote: post #58

Rapzid wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see extremely few people listening to anything that's not in-flight entertainment on flights. I bet it's mostly kids watching youtube videos.

That’s funny - I almost never see anyone using inflight entertainment screens any more. People are always watching Netflix or listening to something instead. And I think my view is supported by airlines starting to remove those screens because they’re not being used.

Depends on the airline and the plane. If anything, I would have said there was a trend toward in-flight on-demand programming at no charge. It's increasingly delivered over WiFi but, in my experience, there's usually a screen as well. Admittedly, my experience is mostly limited to United (trending toward on-demand) and JetBlue (just free DirectTV AFAIK).