Show HN: Ulaxi calculates whether UberX, Lyft, or Taxi is best for your trip • Hacker News Board

Re: Show HN: Ulaxi calculates whether UberX, Lyft, or Taxi is best for your trip

#21

Post by atom-morgan » Mon, Apr 14, 2014, 7:15 PM UTC

xivzgrev wrote: post #12

atom-morgan wrote: post #3

Great work. It does exactly what it says it does and helped me validate the choice I made a few weeks ago. I picked Uber and according to your app, it's the cheapest option for that route. Going forward, I'll probably use this. As for feedback. First, I'd kill the alert message. You show the pricing by company anyways. Maybe highlight the cheapest option but I wouldn't use an alert window for it. Second, I'd make cha…

Thanks for feedback! It's pretty clear people don't like the alert window, so I'll remove that. What I liked about the alert window is that it displayed results, on same page without needing to scroll, on a mobile device. Is there a way I could hide/unhide dev elements to make the inputs disappear and results appear in their place? Or what were you imagining? I agree tiled is dated - I wanted to launch something rath…

Absolutely. You may end up doing something else but you could definitely hide/unhide an element to show your results. Check this out as an example: http://jsfiddle.net/atommorgan/8Fjsq/

Re: Show HN: Ulaxi calculates whether UberX, Lyft, or Taxi is best for your trip

#22

Post by sguha » Mon, Apr 14, 2014, 7:35 PM UTC

Are you taking into account the new Lyft pricing from last week? http://www.lyft.me/help?article=1263247. Comparing it to the UberX rates https://www.uber.com/cities/san-francisco, it seems like Lyft should be always $0.50 more (when there is no happy hour/surge), unless I'm missing something.

Re: Show HN: Ulaxi calculates whether UberX, Lyft, or Taxi is best for your trip

#23

Post by sguha » Mon, Apr 14, 2014, 7:41 PM UTC

sguha wrote: post #22

Are you taking into account the new Lyft pricing from last week? http://www.lyft.me/help?article=1263247 . Comparing it to the UberX rates https://www.uber.com/cities/san-francisco , it seems like Lyft should be always $0.50 more (when there is no happy hour/surge), unless I'm missing something.

I realized I could just look at the JS and I can answer my own question...so yes your Lyft rates need updating :). Cost per minute is now 0.3 and cost per mile is 1.5

http://www.lyft.me/help?article=1263247

Re: Show HN: Ulaxi calculates whether UberX, Lyft, or Taxi is best for your trip

#24

Post by a-priori » Mon, Apr 14, 2014, 9:31 PM UTC

peterwwillis wrote: post #18

Some things I find interesting after accidentally mapping from my work to SF: Your trip is 2812.3 miles and will take 2455.1 minutes. 1.7 days? I found it hard to believe it would only take two days to drive the width of the country, but other maps/sources show the same time, minus breaks of course. Uber rate: $4957.94 Lyft rate: $6328.86 Taxi rate: $9087.01 For 21 miles per gallon using premium (my car; ugh), the co…

The IRS calculates that the cost per mile to operate a car in 2014 is, on average, $0.56 per mile. This factors in the fixed (amortized cost to buy a car) and variable (gas, maintenance) costs.

Based on that, the cost to drive 2812.3 miles one way is actually $1574.89.

http://www.irs.gov/2014-Standard-Mileage-Rates-for-Business,...

Re: Show HN: Ulaxi calculates whether UberX, Lyft, or Taxi is best for your trip

#25

Post by dang » Mon, Apr 14, 2014, 9:41 PM UTC

xivzgrev wrote: post #17

Got a new URL up! I can't change the URL in the original posting :(. http://stenographer-arithmetic-82316.bitballoon.com/

Thanks. We changed it.

Re: Show HN: Ulaxi calculates whether UberX, Lyft, or Taxi is best for your trip

#26

Post by bobfunk » Mon, Apr 14, 2014, 9:50 PM UTC

xivzgrev wrote: post #16

miles_matthias wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it a static site? Then bitballoon. Dynamic? Heroku, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, DigitalOcean, AWS EC2, etc.

Thanks for the tip! Got the site on an alternative server. Not the prettiest url but does work! http://stenographer-arithmetic-82316.bitballoon.com/

BitBalloon founder here, cool site!

You can change the URL to something nicer from the UI - just click "Edit Name" and pick something like ulaxi.bitballoon.com :)

Re: Show HN: Ulaxi calculates whether UberX, Lyft, or Taxi is best for your trip

#27

Post by egonschiele » Mon, Apr 14, 2014, 10:02 PM UTC

I've taken a car home from work multiple times. These prices are accurate. Good work!

Re: Show HN: Ulaxi calculates whether UberX, Lyft, or Taxi is best for your trip

#28

Post by geuis » Mon, Apr 14, 2014, 10:14 PM UTC

The pricing isn't quite accurate. During non peak times, its approximately $9.50 using Uber from home to my office. The pricing was showing about $7.50.

Re: Show HN: Ulaxi calculates whether UberX, Lyft, or Taxi is best for your trip

#29

Post by projct » Mon, Apr 14, 2014, 11:23 PM UTC

xivzgrev wrote: post #14

nlh wrote: post #5

Thanks for sharing -- happy to offer some "instant feedback": * Alert windows are jarring. My first instinct when I saw it was "ok, thanks for telling me who to take, but why are you telling me this in a vacuum?" -- and THEN I saw that you give a comparison. I'd skip the alert window entirely -- just show the list and at the top (or highlight, etc.) show the winner. * It would be SUPER cool if you could calculate whe…

Thanks for feedback! It's pretty clear people don't like the alert window, so I'll remove that. What I liked about the alert window is that it displayed results, on same page without needing to scroll, on a mobile device. Would you be OK with scrolling down to the see the results? Re: your second idea, that's definitely come up a lot. They don't have API so it requires a hack around. Are there phone apps out there th…

You could use an anchor to scroll the page down to the results. the url http://stenographer-arithmetic-82316.bitballoon.com/#informa... seems to already do this correctly.

Re: Show HN: Ulaxi calculates whether UberX, Lyft, or Taxi is best for your trip

#30

Post by jacalata » Tue, Apr 15, 2014, 7:16 AM UTC

xivzgrev wrote: post #14

nlh wrote: post #5

Thanks for sharing -- happy to offer some "instant feedback": * Alert windows are jarring. My first instinct when I saw it was "ok, thanks for telling me who to take, but why are you telling me this in a vacuum?" -- and THEN I saw that you give a comparison. I'd skip the alert window entirely -- just show the list and at the top (or highlight, etc.) show the winner. * It would be SUPER cool if you could calculate whe…

Thanks for feedback! It's pretty clear people don't like the alert window, so I'll remove that. What I liked about the alert window is that it displayed results, on same page without needing to scroll, on a mobile device. Would you be OK with scrolling down to the see the results? Re: your second idea, that's definitely come up a lot. They don't have API so it requires a hack around. Are there phone apps out there th…

Uber has a mobile website - you could either scrape the site (probably much easier than trying to scrape an app) or capture the traffic and build your own kind of API. There's a service called gargl that says they do that kind of thing, although I haven't got around to looking at them yet.