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When imperfect systems are good: Bluesky's lossy timelines

(jazco.dev)
768 points cyndunlop | 1 comments | 19 Feb 25 17:48 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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PaulHoule ◴[19 Feb 25 20:03 UTC] No.43106832[source]▶
An airline reservation system has to be perfect (no slack in today's skies), a hotel reservation can be 98% perfect so long as there is some slack and you don't mind putting somebody up in a better room than they paid for from time to time.

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.

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singleshot_ ◴[19 Feb 25 20:25 UTC] No.43107149[source]▶
Does the fact that an airline booking system must be perfect explain why so many flights are overbooked or cancelled?
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rconti ◴[19 Feb 25 20:28 UTC] No.43107193[source]▶
No, overbooking is a business decision justified by the fact that, statistically, not all passengers will actually show up for their flight, and lower load factors cost money.
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josefresco ◴[19 Feb 25 20:36 UTC] No.43107315[source]▶
What is the "no show" rate?
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artee_49 ◴[19 Feb 25 20:53 UTC] No.43107512[source]▶
I think you'll have to pay a team millions to figure that out, it is unlikely to be a static rate but rather decided based on multiple traits like time of year, time of flight, distance of flight, cost of ticket, etc.
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pc86 ◴[20 Feb 25 02:15 UTC] No.43110288[source]▶
The airline has literally all of the data on this, they definitely do not have to pay a team millions.
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patmorgan23 ◴[20 Feb 25 03:05 UTC] No.43110618{3}[source]▶
They probably do pay millions of dollars in wages for business analysts to figure out what this rate is on their flights.
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1. pc86 ◴[20 Feb 25 13:36 UTC] No.43114469{4}[source]▶
They probably just have an SSRS report that prints out in a few dozen offices automatically on some schedule.

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...