tomhoward

The thing is that major live sport is now the only category that is successful in the broadcast TV market. Without that, many (most?) broadcast networks may as well shut down. We saw the best evidence of that recently in Australia when the Foxtel pay TV company was sold to European sports streaming service DAZN.

Foxtel has dozens of channels including the “agenda-setting” Sky News but in the end only its major sports rights deals (which it’s been bidding up and losing money on for years) held any value.

One day we’ll all accept that broadcast TV is dead and everyone can just have a personalized content feed streamed to them, but for as long as broadcast TV license holders keep up the fight, it’s going to be a frustrating endeavor trying to see the sports we want, wherever we are.

It’s weird how invisible tennis is on television in Europe.

I was traveling in Spain and Italy last year when Roland Garros was on, which included major highlights like Nadal’s (likely) last ever match there and strong performances from European players like Alcaraz, Sinner, Tsitsipas and Zverev (indeed almost all of the current top ten men are European).

But it was only on the pay channel EuroSport, which many homes (and thus Airbnbs) don’t seem to have, and was only available for us in one upmarket hotel in Spain we stayed in for an indulgence for one night.

So the tournament promoters may be making the calculation that if the current TV rights holders aren’t ultimately getting many eyeballs watching their events, they need to do other things to build/maintain the profile of the sport with a view to one day offering it only via the internet (particularly if broadcast TV continues to decline and the networks can no longer afford large rights deals).

I'll share a perspective as someone who doesn't really have a dog in the fight (For the record, I'm over 20 years into my career but don't fear losing roles/income/status due to AI, and am using it in my projects and can see plenty of ways I could benefit from it):

Lots of people on HN have been in tech for many years or a few decades and have seen several hype waves come and go, including ones involving AI. Plenty of us understand the technology that underlies current AI tech (even if we couldn't have built it ourselves). Some of us have spent plenty of time researching or contemplating nature of consciousness and the philosophy of mind, and see predictions/presumptions of human-like intelligence emerging from GPUs as at least a little silly. Plenty of us have come to know what it looks like when people are making grandiose claims – which they deeply believe to be true – particularly when great status and power seems within reach.

We can at-once happily recognise that contemporary LLMs are highly impressive and powerful, and the efforts of the researchers are brilliant and commendable, whilst also noting that these technologies have major pitfalls and limitations, and no obvious ways to resolve them.

The "blew past the Turing Test" claim is overblown, because we all know that an LLM-based product can seem human-like for much of the time, but then start generating crazy nonsense any moment. A human that behaves like that can cause millions of dollars in business losses, or planes to crash, and all kinds of other costs and harms. Human workers are evaluated on their ability to perform at a high-level on a consistent and predictable basis. By that measure, LLMs are nowhere near good enough for critical applications yet (even if they may be better than many humans at certain things, much of the time).

The claims that LLMs will just keep improving at an accelerating rate until they don't make mistakes anymore are fair enough to make, but until we see solid evidence that it's happening and details of the technology breakthroughs that will make it happen, people are within their rights to reserve judgement.

First HN submission: Feb 3 2009 (0 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=463793

The quoted book was being purposefully colorful and inflammatory for literary effect, but it still doesn’t make any claims of investors being “blacklisted” just because they said something unflattering about YC. (“Disseminating unflattering portraits” implies some kind of organised campaign to damage YC, and I have no idea if that really happened or if it’s just part of the colorful/exaggerated writing).

The only cases I know of where an investor was banished from Demo Day/YC’s network was for acting in bad faith towards founders. If YC banished investors who had a track record of being great to founders, they would be doing a disservice to founders, and therefore acting against YC’s own interests.

That aside, my original comment doesn’t contradict anything in the article (I can’t speak for the entire book - honestly when I tried reading it I couldn’t get past the first few pages).

What in the article (sentence or paragraph) contradicts what I wrote?

The article is about how YC defended one of its funded companies against a legal attack. It doesn’t say anything about YC refusing to fund someone who criticized it.

YC will fund anyone who is building a company that looks like it could be highly successful.

There's one case I'm thinking of now where someone was as critical of YC (both the org and individual leaders) as anyone could possibly be, in a highly public and sustained way, and their startup later got funded by YC.

I'm not commenting specifically on the heart-muscle aspect of the study, but it shouldn't be a surprise that the weight loss from this drug is significantly attributable to muscle loss; it almost always is when dieting. It's the same with keto/low-carb or any other kind of caloric-restrictive dieting (which Ozempic facilitates).

The modern weight-loss programs I'm seeing now (at least those aimed mostly at middle-aged men) emphasize consuming significant amounts of protein (2g for every 1kg of body weight each day) and engaging in regular resistance training, in order to maintain muscle mass.

The article addresses this:

To keep muscle strong while losing weight, Prado says it is essential to focus on two main things: nutrition and exercise. Proper nutrition means getting enough high-quality protein, essential vitamins and minerals, and other “muscle-building” nutrients. Sometimes, this can include protein supplements to make sure the body has what it needs.

Perhaps there needs to be more formal research into this, and a strong recommendation made to everyone using these drugs that this kind of diet and exercise plan is vital.

dang explains it here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40577703

Thank you for sharing this. It’s some food for thought! So much thought and effort went into how the site would feel to use, but it’s very hard to convey the importance and value of that to investors who are not in the primary audience. I still haven’t let go of the idea that we could make it work some day.

The upfront capital costs and fixed running costs are huge, and the commissions are very low - often zero, normally about $1 or $2, only very rarely $10+ if it’s a high-priced purchase (business/first class with multiple passengers, but that’s rare on a budget flight funding site). And because travel is an infrequent purchase for most people, you don’t get much of a retention flywheel.

This is why there are close to zero flight search engines that are successful standalone companies and almost all the big brands have been acquired by bigger dominant players - Kayak is now a sub-brand of Booking (prev. Priceline) and Skyscanner was acquired by Trip.com in China.

Yes they can be valuable properties but more as a traffic generator for selling other products (accommodation, car rental, insurance), and you need a big team to do all that.

We built the company from the start by scraping low cost airlines, and always did a lot of it.

It’s just a very big undertaking - building all the scrapers, maintaining them (every time any detail of an airline website changed), getting around anti-scraping measures, running servers, and even then your data is out of date as soon as a flight’s price or availability changes. And it’s an exponentially growing undertaking the more comprehensive you want your index to be - I.e, to include round trip and multi-stop tickets.

Great to hear! Thanks for saying so.

Question for you: can Google Flights (or any other flight search engine) give you the same kind of search capabilities/answers/experience you got from Adioso?

I love hearing this! Makes it all worth it. Thanks for sharing :)

Seems likely if you imagine the producers just looked at an alphabetically sorted list of YC companies for name ideas.

Great to hear! Thanks for saying so.

I still hope to rebuild it one day but only when I can do it as a passion project. You can’t make a living from a site like that.

It’s an ongoing tension. Direct bookings are ideal but are only adequate if your brand awareness and loyalty is strong, like AA and Southwest. To whatever extent that’s not the case, you need to be available via partners/agencies and on metasearch sites in order to be found.

Our pitch to airlines when we were trying to establish partnerships with them was that we could find flexible travelers to fill seats that would otherwise be empty, and we had unique ways of doing that (which is why the company was able to pivot to enterprise), but we weren’t strong enough for them to feel the need to partner with us (and they don’t want to help a small player grow into a big player).

Flight revenue optimization is an art and science at least as old as industry deregulation, and funnily enough is now something my old company is providing a lot of help with. If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em as they say.

> Third party apps are not allowed by airlines to charge less than the airline

Technically true in that they can't undercut the airline on the same fare class.

But there are many different fare classes and some of them are only offered via 3rd parties, so you can often get much better deals via e.g., Expedia than you can by going direct to the airline.

Just this year my family flew Melbourne-Madrid then Milan-Melbourne, both legs on Cathay, but this route was only available on Expedia (and maybe other OTAs too, I don't remember) - all I know was that it was impossible to even search for this route on Cathay's own website. We didn't have any issues, but if we did I don't know if I'd worry about Expedia's customer service being much worse than an airline's own service.

It's called "virtual interlining".

The startup I co-founded (Adioso - YC W09 [1]) tried to do it, including having discussions with a travel insurance provider about offering "layover protection" - so that if one leg was delayed causing you to miss your onward leg(s), your costs are covered. Kiwi.com does this now.

We worked on it from about 2008 till 2013 then basically gave up, as it was too hard to offer a service that customers could really love and trust. (It wasn't for nought; the technology we developed was valuable, and the company was able to rebrand and pivot and now does important work for airlines to optimise loads and fares [2], though I left when the rebrand/pivot happened).

The thing that makes it hard to do is it's basically impossible to get all the flight inventory, including fares and seat availability, that's complete and up-to-date enough to deliver a service that customers can trust.

The engineering challenge is one thing - solving a multi-dimensional travelling salesman problem (price and distance/duration) highly repetitively - but you can solve that with enough smart engineers and "compute", which ITA did in the early 2000s, and on a smaller scale, our team did a decade later.

But you could build the most beautiful routing engine the universe has ever seen, and still have a user experience that's kind-of garbage because the industry just keeps the flight inventory data so locked down.

These days there are APIs and feeds available from the major distribution platforms - Sabre, Amadeus and Travelport, but it's still not comprehensive. You often still need to negotiate individual agreements with major airlines in order to be able to publish and sell their fares. And even then, many of the low-cost airlines (which are often most of interest to travellers who want to find the cheapest route and deal with self-transfer) are not available through these distributors, and some, like Southwest, have blanket refused to be on 3rd party search sites, only starting to relax that position very recently and only with the dominant platform [3]. Kiwi.com has only recently come to a partnership agreement with Ryanair [4] after being in legal battle with them for years [5]. (I hate the thought of having to be at war with your most important partners).

Others have mentioned Skyscanner, which was always the closest to us in what we were each trying to offer (we talked briefly with them about being acquired by them).

Right from the beginning when we got funded for Adioso, my mind became fixated on the thought "if only you get every single flight in the world loaded into one big graph database, what could you do with it?", but it turned out to be a very big "if".

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2010/08/31/adioso/

[2] https://amadeus.com/en/blog/articles/creating-a-private-resa...

[3] https://www.forbes.com/sites/geoffwhitmore/2024/05/25/southw...

[4] https://media.kiwi.com/company-news/kiwi-com-and-ryanair-ann...

[5] https://www.travolution.com/news/kiwi.com-celebrates-three-w...

No - it was a talk to YC current-batch founders, which is always off the record.

There won’t be. Talks given to YC batches are off-the-record, to allow maximum candidness.

This essay by pg is the closest you’ll get to a blog post discussing its main points.

There’s a convention for this that has been established over many years:

- If it has a hard paywall the link is not allowed and should be flagged or removed by moderators (or changed to an accessible source)

- If it has a porous paywall (usually that means it can be reached via archive.ph), someone should post a link to it, and mods will pin it to the top of the thread.

The outcome is that there should never be content on HN that is inaccessible to anyone.

Sometimes it may be annoying to have to get to it via the comments and an archive link, but that’s less annoying than content that is accessible being banished from HN altogether.

Everyone knows it’s an imperfect solution, it’s just the least imperfect.

Dang’s explanations:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41007829

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34130115

I'm planning to build this for myself and could make it available for others if there's interest.

Only now that T20 cricket is played in many countries including USA and continental European countries does it make sense to have cricket in the Olympics. That really only became true in the past year with USA participating in the ICC T20 World Cup.

With older forms of the game (5-day test cricket and 1-day/50-over cricket), matches took too long and it was played by too few countries to make sense.

I’m sure another motivator to include cricket in the Olympics is to appeal to viewers in/from India, Pakistan and other south Asian countries that aren’t so prominent in other Olympic sports.

A more satisfying life, better life outcomes.

Maybe it’s the opposite; kids need to learn that LLM’s can bullshit just like every other person and institution can bullshit, and the most important skill they can have is verification of information, no matter where it’s coming from.

It’s pretty normal to have devices out in the elements now, it’s just a matter of how many. Yes having a device on literally every plant will probably always be overkill, unless they are so cheap and easy to replace that it doesn’t matter when one gets damaged. More likely it’d be optimal to have a device every x-number of plants - which is what’s done now but the number of devices per number of plants needs to be higher than is currently conventional to increase precision.

Having machines moving around taking readings “each day” is insufficient, as during hot conditions the soil/plant moisture changes too rapidly. You need to take readings at least once every hour or even every 30 or 15 minutes in order to be able to start irrigating immediately when the moisture level starts dropping rapidly.

In Melbourne/Victoria, Australia, from 2025 they’re applying a government levy on vacation rentals and using it to fund new public and affordable housing projects [1].

They’ve also added a land tax on second homes to disincentivize hoarding of property (though this has had some perverse effects, notably, reducing long-term rental stock and moving into the owner-occupier segment).

It’s too early to evaluate outcomes, but this general approach seems more sensible than an outright ban. Tax the activity to reduce it somewhat whilst generating state revenue to fund programs to mitigate the negative effects.

[1] https://amp.abc.net.au/article/102878180

Looks cool but I'm not sure how current those TI CC1310 devices are. I can see product release pages going back to 2015. Do you know anything about future support/availability for this model, or any newer models?

Yeah absolutely. You’d certainly need solar power on your devices, and the more data processing they’re doing the more battery and solar power you’ll need.

So you’d centralize the more intensive processing on a unit with more power, and have smaller node devices on the plants doing simpler tasks - just reading from sensors and uploading data, and/or receiving commands to switch things on/off. They’d be solar powered too but the batteries and solar panels can be smaller.

These are all the trade offs you’re constantly working with in this game.