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druskacik

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Fine-Tuning for Engagement

robertdruska.com
2 points·by druskacik·mese scorso·0 comments

Show HN: Search cheap night train tickets in Europe

trainbot.eu
4 points·by druskacik·3 mesi fa·3 comments

comments

druskacik
·18 giorni fa·discuss
I live in Prague and seeing the temperatures expected during weekend, I bought at least the portable AC. I'd say 2-4 weeks is quite a long period to justify this purchase.

Yes, historically, the AC didn't make sense in Prague, but there's no going back, the world is just going to get hotter.
druskacik
·2 mesi fa·discuss
Time off of work to get a haircut is insane. Aren't there barbershops open in the evening?
druskacik
·2 mesi fa·discuss
Yeah, the focus is mostly on night trains, although some day combinations leak to the data, so it's possible you'll find some combinations for daily trains.

Of course, I'd like to have the daily trains in the data, but that would drastically increase the number of combinations and require some more scaling of the scraping, which I don't want to do at this point. Focusing on night trains only is a nice niche.

I plan to add at least some daily trains between core cities, e.g. the EuroStar London <-> Paris route, which would make multi-leg search to farther cities easier (i.e. combination of night train + daily train).
druskacik
·2 mesi fa·discuss
It's definitely similar, but the philosophy seems different. NightRide supports exactly the use case on searching a route on a specific date. I also noticed that if they don't have the price pre-scraped, a scrape is called dynamically on user's request.

My idea is to pre-scrape the prices and answer questions such as: wanna go to Amsterdam for a weekend? -> here are the best dates and prices.
druskacik
·2 mesi fa·discuss
Added, but just the Milan - Brusells route from European Sleeper so far.

https://trainbot.eu/?from=milan&to=brussels&type=return

The 20€ Milan - Zurich tickets also don't look bad, but the early-morning departure / evening arrival are probably not that optimal.

https://trainbot.eu/?from=milan&to=zurich&type=return&seat_t...

EDIT: note, this route will be available from September.
druskacik
·2 mesi fa·discuss
Currently not possible, but:

- once you fill the "From" field with your start city, the "To" field will include only cities reachable from the "From" city

- at https://trainbot.eu/coverage/ you can search for all routes that go through your city

I plan to add a subpage for every relevant city with recommended routes once I'll have enough data. Something like https://www.seat61.com/ but with actual prices and dates.
druskacik
·2 mesi fa·discuss
Hm, thanks for the tip, I didn't know that. I scrape NightJet website, which lists only the 00:36 train. I'll look into it.
druskacik
·2 mesi fa·discuss
sorry about that :)
druskacik
·2 mesi fa·discuss
I have a working version of Trenitalia scraper (Intercity Notte trains across Italy), I just haven't added the routes to UI before verifying it works reliably. Hopefully I'll add it in the evening.

Also the Milan - Brusells route from European Sleeper, it's scraped but not yet in UI. I'll reply here when it's done.
druskacik
·2 mesi fa·discuss
That's the Prague - Zurich NightJet that's hellishly expensive, possibly because the target audience are Swiss people for whom it's not so much :D Also, NightJet does not price very dynamically as opposed to other providers, and their baseline price is always quite high.

But yes, in most cases this journey will be more expensive that an alternative flight, which is a shame. However, there are routes where it's comparable, e.g. the Prague - Amsterdam route.
druskacik
·2 mesi fa·discuss
Sure :) Thanks.
druskacik
·2 mesi fa·discuss
European night trains search engine. The plan is not to provide the functionality where user searches for a specific route on a specific date and the engine returns prices. The plan is to provide "tips for trips", e.g. I provide a starting city and it will recommend me interesting trip ideas any time in the future. There are many flight apps that provide this functionality, but no train app.

Currently I'm building scrapers for all relevant provider, then I want to connect the data for multi-city trips recommendation. Plus some connection to the day trains so that the trips are built more easily.

Some existing trip recommendations:

Prague <-> Amsterdam https://trainbot.eu/?from=prague&to=amsterdam&type=return

Berlin <-> Paris https://trainbot.eu/?from=berlin&to=paris&type=return

Zurich <-> Budapest https://trainbot.eu/?from=zurich&to=budapest&type=return
druskacik
·2 mesi fa·discuss
For me personally, I have the basic Claude Code subscription that I use to rewind on some evenings or on weekend, to code a bit for 1-2 hours. I have like 3-5 session with it every week.

The 5h windows are frustrating because I can go through them quickly if I have a more complex task. I haven't yet met the weekly limit. I'd say there are many cases similar to mine.
druskacik
·2 mesi fa·discuss
> If the man holding the flag had been wearing a thawb instead of a suit, or if the statue had been of a woman, I think the establishment's response would be quite different.

That's argumentum ad speculum[0]. You can speculate what the response would be if the statue was different in a way you imagine, but the thing is, it's not.

[0]: https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/logicalfallacies/Hypothe...
druskacik
·2 mesi fa·discuss
What truly deep art would you recommend for us laymans who enjoy Banksy's works?
druskacik
·3 mesi fa·discuss
Although it seems the night train offering in Spain is not great.
druskacik
·3 mesi fa·discuss
It's a work in progress and southern Europe is not covered well, Spain is not covered at all. I focuses on Eastern and Central Europe because that's where I'm from, I'll try to add Spain next :)
druskacik
·3 mesi fa·discuss
Altman is an advocate of Universal Basic Income, as far as I'm aware. That doesn't sound like he's not worried about massive job losses.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/sam-altman-universal-basic-inco...

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/sam-altman-wants-universal-ex...
druskacik
·3 mesi fa·discuss
The 8B model response to my "Harry Potter knowledge-bench" question is too funny not to share.

> *Fathers of Harry and James Potter*: - Sirius Black is the *father* of *James Potter* (the older brother of Harry).

> - James Potter is *Harry's uncle* and the *older brother* of *Luna Lovegood*.

> - This means *Sirius and James are Harry's uncles*, though they are *father and brother*.

https://pastebin.com/WAAmFKfX
druskacik
·4 mesi fa·discuss
I agree, their autocomplete (tab) model is the best, but recently I realised I am using it less and less - the new models are so good that I mostly just do agentic coding, and I do very little changes in the codebase by myself. This is probably a general trend and if the usage of autocomplete models is dying out, it's understandable the companies are not investing resources into it.