

FlightCaster (YC S09) predicts future of development  - yarapavan
http://www.sdtimes.com/FLIGHTCASTER_PREDICTS_FUTURE_OF_DEVELOPMENT/By_Alex_Handy/About_FLIGHTCASTER_and_HADOOP/33813

======
maxklein
I'd be suprised if flightcaster does not shut down or significantly change
direction within 2 years.

~~~
Maktab
Any particular reason why?

~~~
maxklein
Because they won't make money with their current approach.

~~~
dmix
It seems they'd be a prime acquisition target from major airlines. An
investment could keep them afloat until that is realized.

~~~
borism
Did you mean... an investment in airline x could keep airline x afloat, right?

------
cvg
Great Article! I didn't understand how flightcaster worked until a couple
minutes ago. I thought they just scraped airline sites faster. :)

I wonder in what other areas this tech could apply? Financials comes to mind
first, but perhaps something less saturated. Groceries? Gas prices? Perhaps
something with less supply/demand pressure.

------
edw519
I'm a little confused by this title.

OP provides a nice description of FlightCaster's business issues and technical
approach, but exactly where is this "prediction of the future of development"?

------
hussong
I'm still amazed by what the FlightCaster team has built in such a short
amount of time.

------
icey
Somewhat unrelated, but this strikes me as good news for FlightCaster:

[http://www.cnn.com/2009/TRAVEL/10/08/flight.delays/index.htm...](http://www.cnn.com/2009/TRAVEL/10/08/flight.delays/index.html)

------
jorgem
Not understand.

~~~
mahmud
Decisions in airlines are made based on a set or rules and conditions. You
will be able to predict flight schedules based on published flight times,
weather, airport traffic and similar variables. Not different from stock
prediction or insurance risk assessment, and similar industries heavy on
mining data, both historical and real-time.

Their platform runs on Amazon's S3 which has an slightly different usage
pattern than their application needs. So they overcame this limitation by
implementing in-house measures to augment the platform (instead of, say,
scrapping S3 and building their own storage stack and hammering scalability
and distribution on top of this later; in another words, a quick fix saved
them both time and money.)

They also layered a higher-level API, Cascading, on top of Hadoop and S3.
Cascading allows them to interact with underlying storage and network at the
function call interface. Essentially, their code doesn't look any different
than a straightforward serial desktop application. This is bottom up
programming; instead of writing a lot of code in a big language over a weak
platform, you build up the platform, make it beefier, and program it in a
simple domain-specific language (though it's not unusual for big chunks of
software to be generalized and moved away from the application core; most
large applications have a huge library dependence, both 3rd party and custom
built. So without even a clean API and specialized syntax, software can be
reused in this bottom up fashion [See: Greenspun's 10th Rule])

The best analogy I can think of for bottom-up programming is spoken language.
Experts in a field, say doctors or programmers, are able to speak with each
other in technical terms. They have enriched their mutual language and they
can communicate with ease. However, if a doctor or a programmer would speak to
a non-specialist, a lot of the vocabulary would have to be "expanded in
place"; acronyms would have to be spelled out, concepts would have to be
explained, and analogies and metaphors would take the place of direct
communication. So even though the gist of the conversation might be understood
by the non-specialist, he we would not have a complete picture until he learns
the subject and builds up his own vocabulary.

Programming on top of a weak platform is like having a novice for a peer; you
will be doing more educating than collaboration.

[Edit: I really thought the parent was either a non-english speaker or a non-
programmer; checked his history and he is both :-/ You owe me 20 minutes of my
time, jorgem.]

~~~
jorgem
Thanks for the details.

I was looking the question history, and even I don't understand what I didn't
understand.

