YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Amtrak booking system experiencing major issues amid nationwide FAA ground stop

119 points snow_mac 1 hour ago 39 comments

testtestmetest 1 hour ago | parent

Our systems are collapsing under the weight over our own vibes.

AndrewKemendo 1 hour ago | parent

Always fun to live through a “textbook example” of something; in this case it’s a cascading failure (1) in transportation infrastructure

(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascading_failure

basch 1 hour ago | parent

While the most likely, what’s the chance this is all some serious patch being applied in stages across a huge swath of infrastructure?

fbrncci 1 hour ago | parent

On a Friday (the 13th), who's brilliant idea was that.

AnimalMuppet 1 hour ago | parent

At one place I worked, the two releases that made us the most nervous went out on Friday the 13th, and Halloween (IIRC). The reasons that they made us nervous had nothing to do with the release dates. We were nervous that what we did had hidden bugs, and even after testing, we were still somewhat nervous.

Both releases were clean. Go figure.

MBCook 1 hour ago | parent

There’s a lot of people who needed to get from A to B.

Without planes, lots of them probably just tried to rush to Amtrak and they received a volume they’ve never seen in a very short order.

I doubt there is anything more complicated than that.

basch 1 hour ago | parent

Which is why I started with “while most likely”

internet2000 1 hour ago | parent

Jensen Huang making sure he takes the country down with him?

chihuahua 37 minutes ago | parent

Maybe he left-padded CUDA.

jumploops 1 hour ago | parent

The FAA hug of death

FlamingMoe 1 hour ago | parent

It's not like anyone predicted the apocalypse would happen today.

cklscikng 1 hour ago | parent

Wow almost forgot about that. Hmm... naa we'll be fine!

(context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50482379)

mastazi 1 hour ago | parent

As usual, Australia got lucky thanks to the fact that most prophecies neglect to specify the timezone (It's currently the afternoon of the 14th here).

xvxvx 1 hour ago | parent

The word of the day is: cascading.

Coming soon: car rental sites, hotel booking sites, food delivery services, taxi and ride share services.

throooooo 1 hour ago | parent

FAA and Amtrak are managed by the federal government. None of the things that you named are.

strix_varius 1 hour ago | parent

I mean I can barely get the Amtrak site to work on a good day.

NDizzle 1 hour ago | parent

Planes, trains… automobiles are next!!!

brudgers 1 hour ago | parent

Mine is internal combustion.

And is not connected to the internet.

petemill 1 hour ago | parent

Amtrak's site has always been the worst example of a national rail website

ericmay 1 hour ago | parent

Are you sure??? Because some of the ones I’ve used in Europe and Asia are god awful

dijit 1 hour ago | parent

We should compare.

Not because I doubt you but Europe is pretty disparate.

Amtrak from NYC to Philadelphia cost as much as a flight to continental Europe, and the experience was abysmal, truly awful I couldn’t even get the tickets for hours and took a bus instead.

Perhaps I’m “spoiled” by UK and Swedish trains but UK is pretty terible

ericmay 59 minutes ago | parent

We were talking about the websites, and the OP was saying it’s the “worst example”. Cost and experience weren’t being discussed.

dijit 55 minutes ago | parent

Yes, I meant I had a bad experience with the website, as in, it didn't work at all and I had to go to a service counter.

They acted like I was committing a crime at the service desk too tbh. I’m not sure how they are in business.

ericmay 50 minutes ago | parent

Yea and in France when the only train for the day broke down I couldn’t get a refund because “you might come back to France one day”.

Sorry, as an American Amtrack’s website isn’t even in my top 5 of worst train websites.

dijit 48 minutes ago | parent

not getting a refund is a lot different than not even getting a ticket imo.

Fair point about refunds for delays in general, its so awful I normally don’t do it. Not with trains, busses nor airlines.

ghaff 55 minutes ago | parent

It depends hugely on when you book--both time in advance and time of year--as well as any sales going on. Which can vary a TON in Europe as well. I almost always take trains within Europe but they're no bargain.

saalweachter 11 minutes ago | parent

Re: when you book, for the East Coast trains time of day matters greatly.

If you book a train from NYC to Philadelphia on Dec 9, there are four trains leaving before 6am with coach tickets for $10.

NYC to Boston has similar early morning prices.

ghaff 4 minutes ago | parent

Right. I'm not going to NYC for now but I saw the end-of-year sale in my inbox recently. Pricing varies a lot. (And I usually don't book Acela on my own dime absent a bargain; the transit time isn't much different from the regional.)

dpc94 1 hour ago | parent

Renfe in Spain is awful

TheTon 56 minutes ago | parent

I use the app frequently and I actually love it. Pick two stations, pick a train, apple pay, done. It’s not flashy, but I appreciate the simplicity.

saalweachter 17 minutes ago | parent

I use the app daily and I ~hate it.

If you have a month pass it frequently forgets at the end of the month, and you have to repeatedly look it up. When you look a ticket, it doesn't remember it in the app, so you have to look it up again for your return trip.

It also periodically forgets all of your tickets locally and needs to resync from the network. It doesn't matter if you were just looking at the ticket three minutes ago. This ie especially annoying if your train is underground after leaving the station, and they are collecting tickets while you have no Internet access.

petcat 5 minutes ago | parent

Yeah the mobile app is excellent

romanhn 7 minutes ago | parent

I don't know. Last year I was trying to buy bullet train tickets for an upcoming trip to Japan, only to find that the booking website operated only during daytime work hours (Japanese, of course). Then there was me trying to buy train tickets from Mt Fuji area to Tokyo. I could buy them, but they could only be picked up in Tokyo, not Mt Fuji! That was a pretty major wtf, given Tokyo was our final destination.

kristopolous 1 hour ago | parent

I've been wanting them to have an api for years with a TOS that you cannot resell tickets or make any additional fees from the sale to discourage SEO snakes from hijacking things.

A more reasonable front-end could be made without much effort and a very low monthly overhead to host since it's mostly a proxy

Require the same upsells with the insurance and credit card offer I don't care, that's not the problem I have with the site.

godwinson__4-8 24 minutes ago | parent

No government service should require a frontend.

API only access where a frontend is currently available should be a legal requirement. For one thing, not doing so is prejudicial regarding accessibility.

I really yearn for a world where we stop making people deal with all these garbage frontends. Especially in the coming age of personal LLMs on device - anyone should be able to create their own frontend for any service and drive their own version specifically tuned to them. Make the standard frontend as simple and accessible as possible (minimal scripting - I think you could have a government agency set this as a regulatory limit in terms of KB of JavaScript) and just cut the fat and the abhorrent waste.

Clients will ship with defaults. Most people's personal tunes will not deviate much from each other at all. But people who actually care can make it as interesting as they want. Instead what we have now is a system that incentivizes people to make the default too interesting to justify their own employment. It's rare to come across a frontend these days that doesn't scream absolute garbage.

pipe2devnull 19 minutes ago | parent

Amtrak isn’t a government service though

CodeCompost 58 minutes ago | parent

Now that US AI psychoses is reaching pandemic levels, I wonder if governments outside the US will accelerate their migration plans. Too bad we can't socially distance ourselves, wash hands and wear masks.

When I get back to the office on Monday I'm going to start making steps to make sure that skill atrophy gets limited so that we don't fall into the same helpless incompetence.