231–240 of 244 posts
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It's because Vegas is for suckers, and they know this. The entire purpose of Vegas is to separate tourists from their money.
Vegas is only fun when you have money to blow. My trip in Vegas all I thought was, why the fuck is this so expensive? Not my idea of a vacation
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Add-on fees have gotten out of control, both in the hotel and airline space. There is a race to the bottom for having the lowest price to show on booking sites. This is a form of SEO for airlines and hotels. I am not familiar with any airlines that charge for carry-ons, but for example I know that many hotels in downtown Las Vegas have mandatory "resort fees" that on many nights actually exceed the nightly rate shown…
This is just like used books and various items on ebay coming up for 1cent with $15 shipping charges.
Disclosure: I built a competing tool for finding cheap flights, https://concorde.io . I think the secret of Scott's success is his incredible writing ability. Finding the cheap flights is the easy part. Communicating with users in a way that consistently wins over their hearts and minds takes a high level of consideration and creativity. This writing ability combined with his co-founder's understanding and applicatio…
- since you are using Stripe, allow me to log in and pay without submitting my CC info over again.
- when selecting home airports, how about prefilling it with the list of closest to you / busiest based on geolocation? The picker interface could be improved by allowing autocompletion as well.
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Another ridiculous thing about United Basic economy that doesn't seem like it would save them money is that you can't check in online early you have to do it at the airport...
That's in case they overbook you're end of the queue.
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Spirit airlines. Also many airlines are rolling out "basic economy fares" that don't include food/drink/carry-on and compete with low-cost carriers, but run on normal flights. What used to be "normal economy" now requires an "upgrade" or "add-on" - ugh.
Though you can usually bring your own snack and drink, no? A few cans from duty-free, for example?
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Add-on fees have gotten out of control, both in the hotel and airline space. There is a race to the bottom for having the lowest price to show on booking sites. This is a form of SEO for airlines and hotels. I am not familiar with any airlines that charge for carry-ons, but for example I know that many hotels in downtown Las Vegas have mandatory "resort fees" that on many nights actually exceed the nightly rate shown…
Resort fees drive me crazy. It's one thing to charge for add-ons if you're taking a flight, because they're technically optional and there is a way to avoid them. But resort fees are mandatory. There's no way to opt of using the gym or the pool or whatever it is that they're charging for. That they are somehow not included in the list price defies logic.
The logic here is perfectly sound. Resort fees haven't decreased customers (or haven't by enough to matter); and the FTC has a long history of not doing their job, so the risk of enforcement is fairly low. Ethics aren't an issue because large corporations tend to be sociopathic. So why not?
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Tech provides leverage horizontally, not vertically. As programmers, we often fool ourselves into believing the opposite.
what do you mean i don't understand the horizontal / vertial
Horizontal - scaling up your application to lots of customers.
Scaling software is easy, there's no factory to buy more equipment for. Creating business value is much harder.
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Speculation: it's possible that the source sites are actively hostile to scraping and intentionally mess with the layout regularly, or may even have ruled out any kind of automation in their ToS - so if you don't want to get sued or blacklisted, you can do no kind of (detectable) scraping.
Can anyone recommend scraping adapters (businesses or tech) that are robust to this sort of thing? I'm talking about something higher level than, say, Beautiful Soup -- something you can configure to point at an endpoint, essentially request a sql row subscription from it, and not have to mind it too much. Both the traversal/retrieval and data-interpretation parts seem to have interesting aspects when you consider cu…
Just wondering if the guys can automate the scraping part, seems unlikely this is usually information that needs to be handpicked or "moderated" by one or more humans.
Who says it's not automated? https://workplace.stackexchange.com/questions/93696/is-it-un... ;) Seriously though, automation may not be a good value proposition, even if the companies with the data that SCF is scraping manually want to cooperate. It seems the human scrapers are a fixed cost. It's not getting harder to do manual scraping as new customers come on board. The business is already paying this fixed cost. T…