Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

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Right, but companies like Sabre [1] solved this in the 60s. If its gotten progressively easier over ~55 years, why should we be wowed now that anyone can spin up a travel aggregator that scales (just as I'm not impressed that Simple/BankSimple exists when they ride on top of a real bank, Bancorp; I'm actually deeply disappointed as one of the first Simple customers that ended up leaving because it took 5 years for them to implement joint checking accounts. At a bank). Amazon, airlines, Ticketmaster, all online companies that have to maintain "truth" about shared inventory and its pricing up to the second.

If you're breaking ground, awesome, you're doing something truly revolutionary. Would you be wowed if I built a Shopify clone off of Stripe and Squarespace? Or an app and site that performed ridesharing while simply talking to Uber or Tesla's backend? Probably not.

Ahh! There! Perfect example. I eagerly await the video, with baited breath, of a presentation from the team at Tesla rolling out autonomous driving using Nvidia's deep learning chipset. But if you build another Kayak, Hipmunk, etc, I do give you credit for grinding away on it if its a successful business. Grinding away on a business day after day for years is fucking hard. I'd just argue its not revolutionary or breaking new ground.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabre_Corporation

Disclaimer: Satisfied HotelTonight app user.

Overbooking in the hotel industry is a normal practice. Cancellation rate is pretty high. Hotel Tonight deals with the last minute inventory, overbooking here would result in unsatisfied customers. I worked for an online hotel booking site in the past. We had integrations with multiple GDS and channel managers, SynXis (Sabre) was one of them. SynXis was not the fastest or most accurate when it came to inventory. SynXis had some ridiculous throughput limitation to query for availability, luckily we did not have to rely on that API. I can't speak about original Sabre technology since I haven't used it myself.

> I'd just argue its not revolutionary or breaking new ground

Which is totally fine and not a prerequisite for a business or tech business

My reply was directed at the comment I replied to that maintaining state at the level and complexity described is a solved problem. Sorry I wasn't less ambiguous.

> If it was a solved problem then you would think it would be common knowledge among practicing engineers. There might even be a textbook available which contained these insights.
This sounds pretty similar to how they describe it, actually:
"Elasticsearch came to our attention…" [... another thing ...] "Pretty much on the lines of what FriendFeed did..."
So basically they reimplemented what other people had done and written about. So (especially at this level of detail) not particularly useful compared to the existing resources they talk about having seen themselves. Later they talk about a big win being "introducing caching." This is all pretty well known stuff, at least in certain circles. And yes, other companies do things in different ways - scaling a single-source-of-truth schema'd database vs going schemaless and horizontal is a source of active debate - but they do talk about these ways.
(Though, something I've also seen personally: if you staff your startup with fresh 20-something grads, you're gonna have to rediscover it... but that's another discussion?)

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