Live data from Hacker News

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

stenographer-arithmetic-82316.bitballoon.com

11–20 of 38 posts

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

#11
post #6

CPU Limit Reached You are seeing this page because website has reached CPU usage limit of the server, and it was temporarily disabled.

Dang! Well now I know the limits of that free service, which apparently is not that much. I'd be willing to pay for a more stable host - do you have any recommendations?

Is it a static site? Then bitballoon.

Dynamic? Heroku, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, DigitalOcean, AWS EC2, etc.

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

#12

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 rather quickly so this feedback is great to help prioritize what tweaks to make.

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

#14
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 that read the status from another app? I'm not really thinking of any at moment, but maybe if an app could use the phone to open another app and then read from the screen, that could work...

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

#16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dang! Well now I know the limits of that free service, which apparently is not that much. I'd be willing to pay for a more stable host - do you have any recommendations?

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/

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

#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 cost of a one-way trip driving yourself is $561. If ownership cost of the vehicles is assumed the same, the hourly rate for your driver is almost $108/hour (though i'm sure there's some taxi-specific costs i'm missing).

It really makes a striking case for how inefficient hired transit can be. But the above are transit options for a single passenger that can happen at any time or schedule. What about mass-transit options?

A Greyhound bus ticket from Baltimore to SF is only $244 and two days, 15 hours. There are five transfers.

An Amtrak train ticket from Baltimore to SF is only $318, and three days, 5 hours. There are three transfers.

And a one-way Delta flight from BWI to SFO is $171, and 10 hours 49 minutes. There is one transfer.

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

#20
post #19

Are the rates displayed invalid when routing outside of the San Francisco area? I see the callout, but it still seems to work..

Each city has different prices and availability. I assume this will work for anywhere, but will use SF prices.
Post reply on HN