This isn’t surprising to me. I know lots of people who work for this company in the Netherlands, and I’ve heard a lot of inside stories about the questionable business practices that go on there. Starting at the very top, with the fraudulent marketing lies to sell you rooms because there’s only X number of rooms left, which is entirely bogus, and for which the courts have punished them, if I recall. They’re not inter…
> They’re not interested in anything but profit above all else Not disagreeing with you, but why is it a surprise to anyone? Any company that seems to be “nice” is only doing that as a good PR increases their profits, which depending on domain may be very important.
American spy hacked Booking.com, company stayed silent
121–130 of 301 posts
Re: American spy hacked Booking.com, company stayed silent
#122This isn’t surprising to me. I know lots of people who work for this company in the Netherlands, and I’ve heard a lot of inside stories about the questionable business practices that go on there. Starting at the very top, with the fraudulent marketing lies to sell you rooms because there’s only X number of rooms left, which is entirely bogus, and for which the courts have punished them, if I recall. They’re not inter…
Re: American spy hacked Booking.com, company stayed silent
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
Booking.com is the poster child of 'dark UX patterns' like that.
I cannot recall anything concrete but from HN and other tech news platforms I heard only bad things about the platform.
Bad UX: How Booking.com deceives clients
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15152155
https://medium.com/@ilyadoroshin/bad-ux-how-booking-com-dece...
How Booking.com manipulates users (ro-che.info)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15297915
https://ro-che.info/articles/2017-09-17-booking-com-manipula...
[dupe] Dark Patterns (darkpatterns.org)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20858714
Successful machine learning models: lessons learned at Booking.com
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21182445
https://blog.acolyer.org/2019/10/07/150-successful-machine-l...
Dark Patterns at Scale: Findings from a Crawl of 11K Shopping Websites (2019)
Re: American spy hacked Booking.com, company stayed silent
#124> The specific intelligence organization—of which the United States has 18—is unknown. I certainly couldn't have named them all, so I dug up a list: • Air Force Intelligence • Army Intelligence • Central Intelligence Agency • Coast Guard Intelligence • Defense Intelligence Agency • Department of Energy • Department of Homeland Security • Department of State • Department of the Treasury • Drug Enforcement Administrati…
All that intelligence and they still can't figure out how to stop a bunch of unemployed basementarians from organising on Facebook to storm one of their principal seats of government... (Sorry for the Twitter-grade comment - but I do sometimes wonder what these people really spend their time doing, that they couldn't catch that one.)
Re: American spy hacked Booking.com, company stayed silent
#125This isn’t surprising to me. I know lots of people who work for this company in the Netherlands, and I’ve heard a lot of inside stories about the questionable business practices that go on there. Starting at the very top, with the fraudulent marketing lies to sell you rooms because there’s only X number of rooms left, which is entirely bogus, and for which the courts have punished them, if I recall. They’re not inter…
Booking.com is the poster child of 'dark UX patterns' like that.
Re: American spy hacked Booking.com, company stayed silent
#126> The specific intelligence organization—of which the United States has 18—is unknown. I certainly couldn't have named them all, so I dug up a list: • Air Force Intelligence • Army Intelligence • Central Intelligence Agency • Coast Guard Intelligence • Defense Intelligence Agency • Department of Energy • Department of Homeland Security • Department of State • Department of the Treasury • Drug Enforcement Administrati…
What does Space Force Intelligence do?
Re: American spy hacked Booking.com, company stayed silent
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are Perl programmers generally more morally flexible than others?
No, I mean that BooKing.com is morally flexible enough to hire anyone who claims they are willing to program in Perl, because it's so damned hard to find good Perl programmers who don't know any other languages they enjoy programming in more, and can't find better jobs than programming in Perl. If BooKing.com were trying to hire JavaScript programmers, they'd have a vastly more enormous pool of young and old, well ed…
Re: American spy hacked Booking.com, company stayed silent
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
at the same time the UI is awesome. using booking.com on a regular basis and I'm quite happy with it.
When searching for an accomodation, booking.com offers a map, which shows the price of each accomodation, with filters applied. This is so useful and I wish other travel sites also had this. A list of a 200 hotels of $50-100 is simply not enough information when searching in an unknown city. I need to narrow down that list, for example with features like a kitchenette (60 hotels left), but also a location near the ci…
Re: American spy hacked Booking.com, company stayed silent
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are Perl programmers generally more morally flexible than others?
No, I mean that BooKing.com is morally flexible enough to hire anyone who claims they are willing to program in Perl, because it's so damned hard to find good Perl programmers who don't know any other languages they enjoy programming in more, and can't find better jobs than programming in Perl. If BooKing.com were trying to hire JavaScript programmers, they'd have a vastly more enormous pool of young and old, well ed…
Re: American spy hacked Booking.com, company stayed silent
#130This isn’t surprising to me. I know lots of people who work for this company in the Netherlands, and I’ve heard a lot of inside stories about the questionable business practices that go on there. Starting at the very top, with the fraudulent marketing lies to sell you rooms because there’s only X number of rooms left, which is entirely bogus, and for which the courts have punished them, if I recall. They’re not inter…
For some reason, the hotel business seems pretty shady. My sense from crawling the web is that it's one of the areas that have the most blackhat SEO as well. Straight up linkfarms. This is sheer speculation, but I do think the hotel business is really convenient to get into if you have a questionable side-business and need to launder money. Who is to say if a room was occupied or not that night, if that foreigner who…