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There are dozens of interesting "conflicting interests" cases in business and life.

But...Pizza?


This blog post is quite bad on all of its points.

More specifically to dating apps: There is a huge market imbalance on it, there are only a few women to pair off to whomever they prefer... So they can serve that market just fine, then the rest of the men are the ones to jerk around a bit: trick them with bots, tell them if they pay they will move up the ranks and have a better chance, come up with "studies" that show all they have to do is make better pictures and keep paying and trying.

How immoral is it really to satisfy a percentage of users... and then abuse the rest? Its not like you can properly give them what they are looking for anyway. I think its quite immoral but thats why I am not a successful businessman.

The pizza and other comparisons are quite dumb and not the same thing: A market that requires many participants to benefit a few, only some can be helped so do your best with those, then figure out how to abuse some/many for profits. If they don't figure out how it really works, well, thats a shame that they keep participating.


Any information on how to make webs and web apps easier to navigate for these agents? I got it using some apps and it did amazing job. However I realized it complains about certain (very ovious) buttons being not easy to see


Oh no... may be LaLiga found out pirates hosting on AWS?


this is how I discover that is not just Serie A doing this shenanigans. I'm not really surprised


All the big leagues take "piracy" very seriously and constantly try to clamp down on it.

TV rights is one of their main revenue sources, and it's expected to always go up, so they see "piracy" as a fundamental threat. IMO, it's a fundamental misunderstanding on their side, because people "pirating" usually don't have a choice - either there is no option for them to pay for the content (e.g. UK's 3pm blackout), or it's too expensive and/or spread out. People in the UK have to pay 3-4 different subscriptions to access all local games.

The best solution, by far, is what France's Ligue 1 just did (out of necessity though, nobody was paying them what they wanted for the rights after the previous debacles). Ligue 1+ streaming service, owned and operated by them which you can get access through a variety of different ways (regular old TV paid channel, on Amazon Prime, on DAZN, via Bein Sport), whichever suits you the best. Same acceptable price for all games.


MLB in the US does the same thing for the regular season, it's awesome despite the blackouts which prevent you from watching your local team but you can get around that with a simple VPN. But alas I believe that they will be making the service part of ESPN which will undoubtedly make the product worse just like they will do with NFL Red Zone.

The problem is that leagues miss out on billions of dollars of revenue when they do this AND they also have to maintain the streaming service which is way outside their technical wheelhouse.

MLS also has a pretty straightforward streaming service through AppleTV which I also enjoy.

What i find weird is that people complain (at least in the case of the MLS deal) that it's a BAD thing, that somehow having an easily accessible service that you just pay for and get access to without a contract or cable is diminishing popularity / discoverability of the product?


> The problem is that leagues miss out on billions of dollars of revenue when they do this

TBH, I have a hard time believing statements like this because if the revenue difference was really there, they'd make the switch.

If there's one thing I'll give credit to US sports leagues for, it's knowing how to make money.


After rereading my comment I think I was a bit vague, but i'll try to clarify.

Most leagues DO sell their rights to other big companies to have them handle it however they see fit for a large annual fee.

MLB does it partially, some games are shown through cable tv (There are so many games a year that only a small portion is actually aired nationally) the rest are done via regional sports networks (RSNs) that aren't shown nationally. In order to make some money out of this situation MLB created MLBtv that lets you watch all games as long as there are not nationally aired or a local team that is serviced by a RSN. Recently there have been changes because one of the biggest conglomerate of RSNs has gone bankrupt forcing MLB to buy them out and MLB is trying to negotiate a new national cable package with the big telecoms. I believe ESPN has negotiated with MLB to buy out MLBtv but details are scarce.

MLS is a smaller league and Apple bought out exclusive streaming rights for 10 years for some ungodly amount of money. NFL and NBA also have some streaming options but I am less knowledgeable about them but I assume it's similar to MLBtv where there are too many games to broadcast so you can just watch them with a subscription to their service.

In the end of the day these massive deals are the biggest source of revenue for the leagues and the more ways they can divide up the pie among different companies they can extract more money in total. Just looking that the amount of contracts for the US alone is overwhelming.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sports_broadcasting_contracts_...


More and more ads at every level every year, when will it be enough?


It seems after making it several times to the front page in HN the author has decided to give this (apart from the ads) really interesting blog a new try... I hope they find a less intrusive way to monetize it.


Sabine papers, those in "her area of expertise" were pretty bad, at least those I read. We reviewed several of them out of curiosity in several journal clubs. She is pure show.


Several of her first-or-sole-author minimal length quantum gravity phenomenology papers have more than a hundred citations:

https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=NaQZcyYAAAAJ&hl=en

and if nothing else, that's strong evidence that she has made a contribution to academic dialogue in that area.

Hossenfelder et al. 2003 in particular, is quite striking for an early career researcher: <https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&h...>. Also noteworthy are several early publications on either side of her 2003 doctoral thesis on microscopic black holes in large extra dimensions. In that period numerous co-authors, reviewers, and editors supplied indirect evidence against your claim that her papers "were pretty bad".

Quite a lot of strong constraints on large extra dimensions came out of the LHC work eight to twelve years after these publications. Her old link-rotting written blog captures some of that: <https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2011/06/extra-dimensions-a...>, for instance.

There is an enormous difference between being wrong and publishing nonsense.

> at least those I read

You could have usefully supplied a short annotated bibliography. It would certainly make your final sentence

> She is pure show

less likely to be seen as nonsense and more likely to be seen as wrong.

Whatever she has become in the past couple of years, she was certainly not pure show in the first eight or so years after her doctorate.


Sometimes contrarianism is just sour grapes.


Maybe she is projecting how she did science onto others?


Hey, I do not quite understand your statement. How should this happen? Ex Devs? Hacking my git account? Or do you mean something else?


Something else: I support some long term clients still using some 1990s software that I've ported to run within a VM on modern hardware. I ended up using developer tools made in the 2000s to decompile the executable and make changes to the software, others have done so and posted their own version. These tools were not available when the developer walked away, so they probably never envisioned these changes.

With AI and other tools developing rapidly, I wouldn't be surprised if someone was able to do things with your code in ways you didn't expect, even if you choose not to open source it yourself.


What does "appropriate code base mean"? If I did it, then I would of course cleanse a bit here and there, make the corpse prettier as somebody wrote in another comment. More thant that, however, is an amount of work which is just not viable. Thanks!


Yeah, no one wants some abandoned open source project for a defunct business. The only value is in code that is living and maintained. So if you're not willing to make it a living, maintained codebase, then don't bother releasing your source code, it's not even worth 10 hours of your time, since no one will use it.


> Yeah, no one wants some abandoned open source project for a defunct business.

That's not true. The OP mentions there are current users. Some of the current customers might be able to use ANY distribution to patch problems for a while. Eventually, someone mightneed to decide on serious maintenance or not. But initially it quite possibly would not require much.

When there are current users, the future may not be a thriving project but may be simply a patched up current solution. Nothing wrong with that.

I suspect this is the case pretty often: a current solution is not great but it's in place. The code itself is nothing to write home about, but it's in place. Patching problems in the code might be the easier path for the user.


  Logical Possibility != Statistical Likelihood


An open source code base built for long term collaboration is likely to be organized differently than a code base written under desperate business conditions (which a dying company is).

Or to put it another way, if it’s not a hell-yes, it’s a No in practice. Even if you don’t want it to be one. Open source projects need enthusiasm. Only Google can get away with throwing code over the wall.


I think he means properly maintained and worked on.


That is interesting. May I ask what do you mean by "if you can"? Thx


If you have the rights/if your customers will tolerate it.

EDIT: to clarify as I realize that was pretty vague.

1) Depending on how you use your dependencies you may have a licensing conflict that makes the GPL incompatible.

2) I think your shareholders/VCs/whoever holds the equity (or if you're bankrupt the senior bondholders) probably own the copyright for the code so you would need their permission.


Thanks for the advice. One fear I have is about security. Is the code is exposed, it will be way easier to exploit potential security flaws... I will not be able to just do nothing if this is the case .. Ill end up wanting it.


> It will be way easier to exploit potential security flaws.

It will be also easier for other people to find them and report or fix them.

In general it's a bad plan to rely on code secrecy for security. It's security through obscurity which never works out. All the cryptography schemes and algorithms are public. Most of the public internet runs on open source code. Transparency is a strength, not a weakness.


What's to exploit? The company won't exist anymore...


People's servers hosting it. I will not be officially responsible but anyway not nice. I may be just paranoid


This is the risk we accept when we use something like this. I think it's fine to put it up. If there are security issues, the community of people that use it can respond accordingly.


lol. To be clear I like her the way she is... It did not work financially but I believe it is a neat piece of code. I keep "using it" myself regularly ;)


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