olympusmons

I just used Sygic Travel (https://travel.sygic.com) to plan a very last-minute road trip in Iceland. I knew nothing about Iceland to begin with. I spent less than 8 hours planning the whole trip, and ~ 5 of them were in Sygic. It was great! Post-trip, I can attest that using it helped me make the most of my time in Iceland. I was well-informed during the trip (at least on par with most other travellers I met), and ended-up seeing most of the popular spots.

I think Sygic did a great job with identifying the key user stories:

1. Ability to see a list of interesting places to generate ideas (they've partnered with Fodors, the content is comprehensive, at least for Iceland)

2. Ability to set my travel dates and schedule places that I want to visit on specific days

3. Ability to see places on a map so that I can schedule more efficiently. (I was able to schedule places in different regions on different dates, and thereby minimise driving times)

4. Ability to view and order daily itineraries (list + map) and ability to estimate travel time for a given itinerary. (This helped me avoid being over ambitious and gave me plenty of room to breathe during the trip)

5. Ability to see/book hotels on a map that have availability on my dates. I ended up making all my hotel reservations (4 nights) through their Booking.com integration. Never have I been happier to click on an affiliate link! The ability to visually plan your days and nights within the same interface really helps. Without this, I would have done what most last-minute travellers in Iceland do – book a hotel in Reykjavik (capital) for the entire stay and take day trips in/out. This would have severely limited my coverage of Iceland and cost more.

6. Ability to take my itinerary with me. They have a easy to use (free) mobile app with premium features e.g. offline maps. Paid for the premium features but didn't end up using them as internet worked great in Iceland!

Overall, the interface was really well done, albeit with a 3-4 hour learning curve. I found myself needlessly bouncing back and forth between ideation and scheduling.

I jotted down a few ideas while I was using it:

- Break down planning into several stages: Ideation, Scheduling, Reservations. This would allow the interface to be more streamlined and reduce cognitive complexity of planning

- Provide the ability to algorithmically cluster places into days and find shortest path for overall trip

Anyway, wish can looks great! I'd love to contribute. I'm a pretty good programmer (iOS/Web), professionally a senior product manager, and also have decent design skills. Let me know if I can help. I haven't coded for the web in a while so would prefer to team up with someone with up-to-date front-end skills.

I like your solution because it doesn't (necessarily) require a backend and would therefore be much simpler to implement.

There are several libraries that extract article text reasonably well. I believe browser extensions are written mainly in HTML/JS/CSS. Would the following node library suffice? https://github.com/ageitgey/node-unfluff

There's just the question of retrieval speed. I suspect simple HTML retrieval is an order of magnitude faster than normal page rendering due to ads, javascript, etc. So the client-only solution you've proposed might indeed be sufficient!

Lets brainstorm.

Perhaps one mathematical solution to the problem is to score pages based on the average time spent for each article. My hypothesis is that clickbait articles will score very low because the article will attract a lot of clicks from people who are not interested in the actual content but only the headline.

In theory, you could do this by deploying a tracker across the web similar to a Google analytics that performs the measurement. But in practice, of course, this isn't possible.

You might be able to approximate the score by building a browser extension that makes the measurement. A browser extension might also a good way to output results. It could, for instance, colour-code links (on mouseover) to help you spot click-bait before you click it!

Thank you for clarifying. I appreciate the thoughtful response.

The first line of your response very concisely illustrates my growing unease with discussions related to privacy on hacker news.

The fact that you're having to "hold back" is sadly indicative of why debates on sensitive topics like this are turning into echo chambers. I suspect that many who hold the minority view keep quiet to avoid being yelled at.

I don't intend to take sides here. I've only ever come here to read and understand other's opinions on topics that seem too complex to tackle on my own. I have a lot of respect for this community, but sadly its becoming harder and harder to keep reading.

For example, you make some good points here but it takes tremendous effort to consider them on merit because the language in which they're expressed sounds condescending and attacking (even though you say you're holding back).

I do hope that you, and anyone else reading this, will not take this personally and instead reflect upon the virtues of more open and tolerant dialogue. And very sorry for singling you out; it's not just you.