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Hipmunk Says Goodbye

hipmunk.com

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Re: Hipmunk Says Goodbye

#251

Post by ericd »

nraynaud wrote: post #215
scottrogowski wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience with (2) larger companies, and confirmed from conversations with friends, is that while you tend to have more support, you are often placed on individual siloed teams where you stay for years. I think the key benefit of smaller companies is that you can work across so many different aspects of the application. Process also tends to be less burdensome so you are able to devote more of your time to the te…

Someone told me they spend 2 years in a team responsible for some of the undo menu at a giant software company. Incredible siloing.

I was interviewing at a megacorp a long while back, my interviewer was solely responsible for the pie charts in some old application. He mentioned in the interview that it was totally feasible to run your own startup on the side.

Re: Hipmunk Says Goodbye

#252

Post by schmookeeg »

monksy wrote: post #184
ape4 wrote: post #58

As a Canadian, a feature I'd really like... request no stops in the USA. eg when flying to South America. (USA is a great country but doesn't get "in transit")

That being said, I would completely love to specify stopovers as the flight path, also completely avoid airlines (even fi they're codeshared). (I.e. Leftouthansa)

I've had fun with airwander.com for looking at potential stopovers -- never booked through them, though, so can't make it an official recommendation.

Usually when wanderlust strikes me, or I'm going somewhere terrible and want to inject "somewhere better" as a stopover, I find myself there contemplating the "ifs"

Re: Hipmunk Says Goodbye

#253

Post by mful »

untog wrote: post #161
scottrogowski wrote: post #92

I worked for Hipmunk for a little over two years before they were purchased and have some fond memories of my time there. There have been a lot of articles on HN lately suggesting that it is better to work for a large company over a startup. Based on my time there, I would strongly disagree. I came in as a junior engineer (feral would be an appropriate term) and during my time, touched basically every part of the web…

But a lot of larger companies have great programs for junior developers that ensure they learn a lot. In my experience and stories I've heard it seems that you can have an amazing time as a junior developer at a startup. If it's a good one. It it isn't, you'll be absolutely miserable and have no support. Similarly, you can be at a large company with a fantastic program for junior developers and learn a lot. And you c…

Engineering learnings at big cos vs startups are wildly different. If your goal is to learn what it takes to start your own company, you are much better off working at even a mid-sized startup, than a big tech co. There are a number of reasons for this, but a particularly consequential one is that you will learn to build/manage/deploy applications from 0, and if things go well, through a variety of scales thereafter. At a mid-size startup you'll have less of the "from 0" bit, but you are much more likely to learn to deal with the scaling issues that manifest as the software that was built in the early days starts degrade with growing load. You will also likely be using similar open source tools in both the early & middle startup stages.

Building features in a large, existing codebase, in the robust tooling context of a big company, is nothing like building services from the ground up.

Re: Hipmunk Says Goodbye

#255

Post by velosol »

jzwinck wrote: post #240
cglong wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried Hipmunk once because I loved the site's personality, but it wasn't able to find any flights on Delta to Atlanta (Delta's primary hub). As much as I liked the site, the inability to find such a basic route made me lose confidence in it from the start :(

I tried delta.com but it wasn't able to find some international flights on their own alliance airlines. I called them about this and they confirmed this is done deliberately when booking using points. This made me lose confidence in delta.com and I went back to using Skyscanner. (Yes it's basically a scam that their "partner" airline flights are hidden when buying with points.)

Are you otherwise able to purchase those legs with points?

Re: Hipmunk Says Goodbye

#256

Post by PeterisP »

wrkronmiller wrote: post #246
Jasper_ wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The industry of mobile apps and games has seen rates go unsustainably low, often to 99c or free, causing them to make up the difference with in-app purchases, ad networks, tracking, and lots and lots of psychological tricks. Nobody can dare simply sell a game on the iOS or Google Play store for $5 or $10 anymore, because there's far more "free" ones out there. This has turned lots of people off of these storefronts.…

I wonder how much these in-app-purchase tactics would be mitigated by Apple/Google listing the median per-person spend for each app: e.e “Free (with average $5.00 in-app fees)”

The median will likely be 0 for almost all apps; it would be outrageously, extraordnary successful for a freemium app to convert 50% of its users to paying customers.

The mean is also uninformative - for many games the majority of revenue is provided by a small number of 'whales', and their behavior is not representative for a normal user.

Perhaps a histogram would give an accurate impression, but I'm unsure whether app devs and Apple/Google would want to make that info public.

Re: Hipmunk Says Goodbye

#257

Post by grogenaut »

inferiorhuman wrote: post #120
dmix wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can someone explain to me what Concur does? I'm guessing it handles a bunch of the travel stuff for bigcos with lots of travelling sales people?

Everything Concur does, it does extremely poorly.

It's perfect enterprise software. It meets the legal requirements and integrates with things like nesuite or peoplesoft. Whether it's easy to use or not is inconsequential.

Re: Hipmunk Says Goodbye

#258

Post by prepend »

cosmotic wrote: post #55

Hipmunk was simply the best. Very clean interface, no frills, quite thorough (except southwest), best presentation, easy to sort/evaluate ... A cute chipmunk. Looking at the three alternatives from all the other comments (google, matrix and skyscanner), they seem 5 or so years behind the times.

They lost delta a few years ago as well.

Re: Hipmunk Says Goodbye

#259

Post by arciini »

no_wizard wrote: post #207
phsource wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry about that! We just fixed it -- if you create it again, hopefully you get a non-Vietnam War picture

I do have a question: How’s PHP holding up in 2020? Are you using a big framework? Are you using it because it’s what you’ve always known or did you choose it deliberately over other options? I’m genuinely curious. Not meant to be negative. I’ve always wondered how well PHP scaled for others.

We aren't using PHP for Wanderlog (which is built with Node.js), but did use it for many of our projects before 2015.

There really was (is?) no faster environment to get started with a single dynamic page that can submit a form and display data from a database. I don't have experience with the more recent frameworks, but I'm sure they're very mature now.

Re: Hipmunk Says Goodbye

#260

Post by nemothekid »

smabie wrote: post #177
rb808 wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> owned by opaque equity groups. or owned by index funds, who really don't care much how management operates.

That's not true, Fink of BlackRock is always sending letters about something. Here's the most recent example: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/14/business/dealbook/larry-f...

Letters are meaningless. BlackRock touts sustainability when just last month they decided to buy up a huge sum of Aramco
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