A social media system doesn't need to be perfect at all. It was clear to me from the beginning that Bluesky's feeds aren't very fast, not like they are crazy slow, but if it saves money or effort it's no problem if notifications are delayed 30s.
Think about other ad-supported sites. If you're an engineer working on an ad-supported product, the perfect consistency you strive for in your code is not the product. The product is the sum of all of the content the user sees. And the costs of the tradeoffs you make are paid for by ads.
Am I willing to see 10x more ads for perfect consistency? Definitely not.
I (unwisely) tried to purchase an Icelandair ticket via the Chase travel portal. I would get a reservation number, go buy seats on Icelandair's website, and a few days later the entire reservation would vanish into the ether. Rinse and repeat 3x.
I can't remember the exact verbiage, but basically tickets can be "reserved" and "booked". One means the ticket is allocated, and one means the ticket is actually paid for. I eventually sat on the phone with an executive support person as they booked the ticket and got it all the way through. It turns out Chase reserves a ticket on an airline but as an SLA of ~3 days to actually pay for the ticket. Icelandair's requires a ticket to be paid with in 24 hours, so it was timing out.
Airlines are far from perfect. They overbook flights and sometimes have to ask people leave and pay them for the inconvenience. My wife and I once got $1000 a piece and a hotel and food voucher to volunteer to take a flight the next day on a layover in Atlanta.
As far as your particular situation, the number one rule of using a third party portal to book flights or hotels is - don’t.
I understand that Iceland Air is not a transfer partner of Chase. But even in that case, I would just wait to use my points until I could use a transfer partner.
On the earning side if paying cash, the difference between 2x/3x points when booking directly and 5x when going through the portal just isn’t worth the risk.
Or they can just haul you forcefully from the flight you paid for:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_United_Express_passenger_...
However, my understanding is that airlines have much more sophisticated per-flight and per-passenger models that calculate the predicted no-show factor based on the historical rates for that particular route (e.g. you're more likely to get more no-shows in business class flying from NYC to SF compared to holiday travelers with a reservation on the Florida Keys)
I can't imagine spending hundreds of dollars and just not showing up.
Side note: His employer is the biggest client of a major European airline.
Do I feel better taken care of if I can just take the following morning's flight at no additional cost or hassle, or if I now need to contact someone at Amex Global Business Travel, have them try to get me on a flight, have another expense, potentially not be able to get on the next flight or the one after that, etc.
* when I travelled to a single city with 20+ colleagues for several years, our nightly hotel rate was less than quarter of published rate. I don't think we got anything like that on Airlines, but nevertheless, bulk gets discounts.
* I forget details but between specific frequent cities which had hourly flights, we had full flexibility and we used this all the time. So we might catch a flight hour earlier if there was one available, or hour later if need be than booked.
Basically to everybody's point, business travel is very different than vacation travel and intuition from once a year personal trip don't apply.
* Yes of course there are negotiated discounts for major corporations- but full flexibility is still far more expensive than restricted tickets, just like business is still far more expensive than economy.
* Most airlines offer guaranteed same-day changes, or at least priority standby, to high-status loyalty members (which most consultants are) so buying full-flex tickets to get an hour earlier/later flexibility is redundant - basically, paying for a benefit you already have.
Maybe they've figured out that enabling their employees to stay a few extra hours without worry to finish a deal is worth it.
And as stated elsewhere, the majority of consultants are relatively junior people whose role has nothing to do with negotiating contracts.
The goal isn't to eliminate flexibility, it's understanding probabilities. If fully-flexible/refundable flights are 3x the fare of restricted, then in aggregate, the company could have a chunk of consultants throw out their original reservations and rebook later flights, and still save money. Yes- sometimes consultants need to stay longer than planned, but in an age of prioritizing "work-life balance," most consultants are encouraged to stick to their schedule and get back home when originally planned.
(The really ultra cheap Ryanair flights are less of a thing now, but in 2019 they were very much a factor)
I'm not trying to be pedantic but this is table stakes stuff. I know we're supposed to shy away from saying things like this but compared to the other engineering that airlines have to do, this is easy. It costs - at most, including wages - a few tens of thousands of dollars yearly to come up with these figures. It's a fraction of the salary of one United Airlines BA.[0] This cost might go up if one of the senior developers convinces their boss that this needs to be a machine learning model but unless they're resume pumping it's going to be at most PCA and a regression.
This is not a team of people working for months on this one thing.
[0] https://www.glassdoor.com/job-listing/analyst-revenue-manage...
Msg 1: I hate ___insert_controversal_person_category_here___
Msg 2: Is the kind of statement that really sets me off
Msg 1 has a very different meaning if you don't see Msg 2.
Trying to have a conversation on flaky platform is hell.
The slack just gets moved. Airlines oversell by about 8 percent. All systems need some slack in them. Isn't that kinda Bob's Law or something?
Like I click one page, don’t find what I want, and go back thinking “no, I want that other result that was below” and it’s an entirely different page with shuffled results, missing the one that I think might have been good.
On top of that immediate frustration, the YouTube style interface here
https://marvelpresentssalo.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/id...
collects terrible data for recommendations because, even though it gives them information that you liked the thumbnail for a video, they can't come to any conclusion about whether or not you liked any of the other videos. TikTok, by focusing on one video at a time, collects much better information.
or add it to the "Watch Later" playlist :) so you can watch it...later.
I've found a workaround, though – click back into the DDG search box at the top of the page and hit enter. This then returns the original search results.
— https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blekko
Perhaps GP has a more interesting answer though.
There are other ways to monetize search (look at Kagi for example) than advertising. Blekko missed that window though. (too early, Google needed to get a crappy as it is today to make the value of a spam free search engine desirable)
Also, (for other readers), I'm a huge fan of Kagi. Highly recommended.
I don’t know if anyone’s embarked on a P2P search engine but that’s essentially my concept. Anyhoo, thanks for the inspiration!
And that just pays to keep the lights on at the colocation center. If you're paying off the development costs (30 - 50 developers over 2 - 3 years) and the cost of an office somewhere. You'll want at least double that revenue or you'll go broke before you break even.
Ideally you are the 'go to' place for people looking to buy something as those queries make money. People researching Douglas Fairbanks for a high school essay consume queries but don't generate ad revenue.
It isn't for the faint of heart.
I know "search is hard" in the general sense but context is lacking (not a lot of details online from ex-search teams). It's always been apparent to me that you must have some other high-grossing product if you want to get into search or video, if only to pay for the servers.
Thank you for providing your context!
Doing it peer to peer without editorial allows sites to 'get into' the index easily which has its own plusses and minuses.
I like your example it is very interesting. If I get to work on (or even hear someone in my team is working on) such interesting problems and I can hear about it, I get happy.
Interesting problems are rare because like a house you might talk about brick vs. Timber frame once, but you'll talk about cleaning the house every week!
Looking back at my early work with microservices I'm wondering how much time I would have saved by just manually setting a tongue weight.
In the Blekko search engine back end we built an index that was 'eventually consistent' which allowed updates to the index to be propagated to the user facing index more quickly, at the expense that two users doing the exact same query would get slightly different results. If they kept doing those same queries they would eventually get the exact same results.
Systems like this bring in a lot of control systems theory because they have the potential to oscillate if there is positive feedback (and in search engines that positive feedback comes from the ranker which is looking at which link you clicked and giving it a higher weight) and it is important that they not go crazy. Some of the most interesting, and most subtle, algorithm work was done keeping that system "critically damped" so that it would converge quickly.
Reading this description of how user's timelines are sharded and the same sorts of feedback loops (in this case 'likes' or 'reposts') sounds like a pretty interesting problem space to explore.