Skip to content
New York, NYThe Second Opinion
Engraving of six fare traces against a dashed baseline band, one dropping away below it in ember
All work

farewatch

Nobody asked

PythonSQLitelaunchd

thing I built for myself that has been running unattended on my laptop since July.

TheWorkStoryNAMEYash NirwanSINCENew York, 2024

t checks the price of flight routes out of New York every few minutes, keeps every observation, and tells me when a fare drops far enough below its own recent baseline to be worth a look. Not a fixed threshold — a route that is always cheap should not alert every morning.

214,882 observations and 442 alerts so far. I have booked two flights off it. Nobody asked for it and it has never been switched off.

Six small line charts, one per route from New York: three to Seattle with medians of $337 to $357, three to Houston with medians of $238 to $267, from late July to late September. The Seattle routes never approach their alert lines. LGA and EWR to Houston both drop into the alert zone in mid-September, to $140 and $142.
Engraving of a tenement facade with a fire escape running up its centre bay, one window flagged in ember

Four New York City databases hold warnings about which buildings are fire risks. None of them talk to each other.

Next projects!

The rest of it, and what each one cost.

Engraving of a grid of fifteen records; one is an empty dashed outline in ember, a track that does not exist

Ask a language model for a playlist and it will confidently invent songs that do not exist.