User9812

Seems believable. I just caught an interview on television earlier today with the CEO of a luxury worldwide hotel, and he said leisure clients went up from about 35% to 45% in the past decade, so it's a growing focus for them.

That seems like a good idea, and I could see hotel visitors wanting to select a room overlooking the parking lot (to watch a vehicle), or wanting to be on a particular side of the building (avoiding highway noise), etc. People have all sorts of little preferences, so I think that feature would get a lot of use. They also like being familiar with a room, so I could see them booking the identical one on their next trip.

Since we're talking about hotels, I think the business in general has a lot of faults. I get more perks at a $10 per night hostel or $50/night Airbnb apartment, than I do at a $300 per night hotel.

When you book a hotel for $300 per night, they nickel and dime you for everything. Wifi? You'll need to register for it at the front desk, and pay $20 per day. Oh, want a bottle of water, or small snack, that's another $10. That hostel, or cheap-o hotel will give you free wifi. I'd say half of the Airbnb places I've stayed at left beer or a bottle of wine in the fridge, and a few places had a giant fresh platter of fruit on the kitchen table.

Why doesn't this happen with a $300 per night hotel? To me, this is a complete turn off. I'll avoid the fancy hotels, because I don't know where it'll end. They're trying to gouge me at every single corner when I've paid a premium, and instead of being an appreciated customer, I feel like I'm being taken advantage of. My parents are well off, and I know they feel the same way. When they go on vacation and stay at a high end hotel, they have to tip people left and right. They're forced to use the staff at the entrance for carrying their bags up to the room, and then they need their wallet ready to tip them for that 2 minutes of work. What kind of awful first impression is that? You're on vacation, paid a small fortune for a room, and within minutes you need to shell out more cash.

Yes, I know their thought process is they can squeeze absurd prices out of people that have money, but I think it's completely backwards and destroys their image and sense of luxury.

I think there's a business for a mid-range hotel with perks. Take a mid-range hotel with $150 per night rooms. Add $15 of free perks, and charge $165 per night for your rooms. With that $15, you could give every visitor free wifi, 2 bottles of water, a couple of bananas/oranges, bag of chips, couple of health bars, bottle of juice, 2 beers or a bottle of wine, and small bag of nuts. To me, that's a huge difference in service and experience for a small price. It would make me book that place every night of the week, and I'd recommend it to others. I'd put employees or clients up in such a place, knowing they're feeling pampered. Why doesn't this exist? Would this not be appealing to anyone else?

I simply can't believe that's the reason. It's an error message, not a warning. It doesn't check if new comments have been posted to that thread, it doesn't prompt you with the new comments, and ask if you want to continue with the post, and it doesn't make it easy to go back to the original thread to check if there are new comments.

Asking users to type in an external text editor, and then copy/paste isn't a reasonable solution for a message board.

Not sure why you were downvoted, but I completely agree. I get the 'Unknown or expired link' message all the time because I'll write long comments, or write part of a comment, get sidetracked, then finish. There's no reason for this error message, and to have tokens time out after what feels like a matter of minutes.

Then of course this happens on the homepage too, when you click 'more', after being inactive for a while. Why?

And why is there no pagination?

Why do a click reply on a comment and get redirected to a completely separate page, instead of replying inline? And then when I submit that comment, it just redirects me to the top of the comment page, so I have no idea where I left off, and now the comments might be shuffled since votes have changed.

These feel like critical changes that benefit everyone, and require little work. Why are they never addressed after years?

Agree on this one. I imagine they factored the prices of business class flights into their bid on the project. People that are higher up in any industry want a few perks. I can't imagine telling someone that's at the top in the industry you'll need to send them on 64 flights to Shanghai, in economy class. That's basically a form of torture, so you need to put them up in business class and a decent hotel, otherwise they'll be walking out the door.

Do you know what companies never do? They never ask.

I see dating ads, cars advertisements, feminine healthcare products, insurance ads, etc. What do I want to see? Travel accessories, computers, hardware, games, tech gadgets, etc. I never see these ads.

Why doesn't Google say, hey, you're going to see Adsense all over the internet, advertisements before videos on YouTube, etc. Would you like to select a few categories so that time is spent seeing some cool products that are relevant to you?

I've been on the internet for 15+ years, and no one stopped to ask just once. I could select categories in about 20 seconds that would be more accurate than all this data collection and profiling that happens every day.

Instead, I just block ads, and install ad block on every computer I come across. I make my living off ad revenue, but ads are absolutely awful, irrelevant and too often malicious. If they gave me the option to select some categories in the past, I probably would have discovered some decent products to buy, and keep them turned on. But nope, I can't recall clicking an ad in the past decade.

Ok, so you've been dreaming of a world changing startup at age 17, and you're 24 now. What have you started? It's been seven years, it sounds like you spend a lot of time learning, but you need to start launching products.

The common saying, 'finished is better than perfect', comes to mind here. You talk about the UI problems with HN and Twitter, but guess what, they have a functioning service. They're both successful in their own way, and they can continue to grow and resolve these problems in the years to come.

Expect to fail often, that's just the startup life. If you waste all your time perfecting your world changing startup, and it never sees the light of day, or it launches and goes nowhere, you wasted unnecessary time. You want to launch something in the shortest time possible, and check for traction. If it doesn't exist, you go in another direction, or drop it entirely, and move on.

It's like searching for gold. You visit a new location, and quickly scratch at the surface and sample the land. What happens when you find nothing? You relocate and try again. You don't spend a decade digging deeper and deeper.

Take your favorite idea, figure out how you can take the core concept and launch it within a week. Forget about all the extra features, forget about the perfect UI, just make it happen.

Note: Numbers below would be money in the bank, after taxes.

1 million: Takes the edge off, I could support a family, and live a reasonable lifestyle. I'd take up a hobby with the spouse, or work on personal projects to bring in some extra money and to keep busy.

2 million: Similar to above, but working is no longer necessary. I could life comfortably and be happy. Of course, I'd need to be careful with my spending, and not drop $1,000 on a bottle of wine. I'm not one for fancy toys, so this could easily be retirement money in my situation.

3 million+: Same as 2 million, but I'd just have the option to do everything a little bigger. Higher end cars, larger house, more expensive city, better downtown location, etc. Personally, not necessary, so I'd just bank it, or put it towards a startup.

In short, I'll say 2 million is FU money. It provides everything I need in life, it would support a family, and at that point I can leave the rat race.

Hmm, the first 10 minutes had my attention, and I was agreeing on his points that design is obviously subjective, and difficult to measure. With code, you can spend a week refactoring a section of your project, and conclude with certainty that it's better written. With design, you try to do the same, and get 60% of people agreeing it's the right direction, and 40% saying you're going the wrong way. This creates a lot of internal conflicts, and noise as you try to reach your goal. I was hoping this talk was going to go into some specifics of how we can measure great design, and how we can clear some of that noise and have more confidence in our decisions.

However, it seemed like the talk stopped after the intro, then it spent 30 minutes showcasing some odds and ends from his past work.

Say you're strategic partners, and you specialize in RoR development, and have a business relationship.

Agree to some extent. This applies to those ideas where execution is the most important part. That's the vast majority of ideas. However, occasionally you get an idea where the concept is almost more important than the execution.

For example, Twitter. They've obviously executed it well and grown over time, but the initial concept is simple, and you'd want to be first to market. 140 character messages, and you can follow people. It's a good idea, you can create a working beta in a weekend, and grow quickly from there. You don't want to tell people about those ideas.

On the other hand, you have something like the Microsoft post on the homepage, about real-time voice translations for Skype. You can share things like that with the world. Everyone knows this technology is going to exist one day, and everyone knows it's going to be widely used. There's no big secret there. It just boils down to a lot of work, and who executes the most accurate translations. It's not a race, it's a marathon that's open to anyone.

I'm surprised taxi services are so far behind here. Why can't I request a taxi in a single click, select the vehicle, charge it to my account, see the location of the taxi on a map and the ETA until it arrives? Why can't I see the route it'll take, or modify the route myself and set a waypoint?

I'm sure some taxi services offer a couple of these features, but none of the ones that I've used. I think one had online booking, but it was broken and I had to find a phone, and then I got no answer, and then I was on hold for 5 minutes.

Why can't I set a custom alert, so I get notified when the taxi is 2 minutes away? That way I don't have to keep looking out the window, or spend 15 minutes sitting on a curb, wondering if they forgot, and I'm going to be late.

If taxis are losing business to Uber, it's their own fault, and lack of innovation.