tomhoward

This is what it became:

https://volantio.com

https://amadeus.com/en/airlines/products/volantio

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

I love to think that it’s your shared love of Custard that’s kept you and your wife together all this time!

I too wrote for my campus newspaper - Monash Caulfield. I didn’t interview Custard (I did interview Snout, Earthmen and Atticus). But in some shoebox in storage are some Kodak instant camera prints of me and my uni mates with Dave and Matt when they played at our campus in 98. Such a wonderful time to be young.

Well, Triple Z is an independent/community station, not ABC!

I know that song/line well and remember mentions of Custard being “banned” by Triple Z in the band’s early days, but I can’t find any details. Do you know why they banned/smashed their music?

I suspect they had him in mind right from the start and even developed the character for him.

Custard/McCormack are Brisbane-based and Bluey has been produced from a Brisbane studio since the very beginning. The writers/producers would have known and liked his music and voice, and probably someone there already knew him personally. Bluey is shown on ABC in Australia and Custard has always had lots of airplay on ABC TV and radio stations.

For those not aware…

The voice actor for Bandit, Dave McCormack, was not previously known as an actor or voice artist, but he has been known in Australia since the early 90s as an indie rock band frontman.

The band he fronted, Custard, started getting airplay on Australia’s national youth radio station, Triple J, in about 1993, and they became a staple of the live music scene - especially uni student bars, live rock pubs and summer festivals - for all the 90s. They quit in 2000 but reformed in 2009 and are still recording albums and playing gigs.

They’re worth checking out [1] if you were into quirky 90s bands like Ween, Dino Jr, Flaming Lips, Ben Folds Five, etc. Full of grungy chords and riffs but mostly major key, happy/fun/funny compositions and lyrics. Very high energy and entertaining. Some nice slower jangly country ballads thrown in there too.

I think they’re the only band I ever stage-dived to, so I guess technically I’ve been “on stage with Bluey’s dad”.

Most music lovers in Australia now in their 40s knew of them, and I’m sure it was a factor in the casting to tap into the nostalgia of the people who are now parents of the kids Bluey is aimed at.

[1] It’s all on Spotify/Apple Music etc. Wisenheimer and Wahooti Fandango are their peak albums and Apartment, Lucky Star, Pack Yr Suitcase and Singlette are the songs that best convey their vibe.

They’ve cranked up the fees for renewals. New registrations of .com domains are €11 whereas renewals are €32. Some long-tail TLDs are much much more.

When you have as many domains (i.e. amazing future business opportunities!) as I do, that adds up to a lot.

So one by one I’m moving them all to Porkbun. Seems great so far.

I can imagine it doesn’t matter so much if you don’t have many domains.

I felt a lump in my throat as it came to mind while I drove around today with my 4yo son in the back, thinking about how to give him a “good life”.

Indeed, though HN didn't use a database when it was first built.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3515628

Good on you for being willing to try improving.

HN doesn’t really distinguish between “punching down” and “punching up”, and prefers to avoid “punching” at all.

The guiding principle to keep top of mind is “intellectual curiosity”. There’s a place for an intellectually curious discussion about the history and present day meaning of the word “shibboleth”, and the way you commented brings that to a screeching halt. And even if someone else seems to be acting like a bit of a jerk in the comments, it doesn’t make it OK to do it too.

But as you say, you’ll try to do better which is great.

That’s not my argument at all. You’re responding to a straw man interpretation of what I wrote.

I’m saying that for a country like the US, the idea that brain-draining the best from the rest of the world will have unmitigated positive outcomes is false.

I’m just saying every perceived benefit has some kind of cost or perverse consequence, eventually. Please feel free to point to a specific example of a policy that has been successfully implemented that contradicts this principle.

Yes of course but when articles like this (and the general policy/assumption in the US) just blankly asserts that we can just “brain-drain” our way back to prosperity and dominance, there isn’t much nuanced consideration of the limits, caveats and tradeoffs inherent to that approach, which need much more than an HN comment or brief blog post to fully explore.

This is basically an argument that China should become more like North Korea rather than the other way around.

How exactly?

I’m no pro-China advocate (I’m Australian and live with the mixed outcomes of our ties with China, and I have no strong feelings about what Australia or the US should do with respect to China or anyone else).

But (leaving aside arguments about their “true” motives and assuming good faith), China invests in the economic development of many weaker countries and doesn’t try to brain-drain them. The U.S. and western allies invested heavily in the redevelopment of Germany and Japan after WWII, and all countries involved ended up much stronger.

It’s that spirit that I’m talking about.

I worry that all the replies to my comment will be claims about what percentage of the smartest and most productive people will want to move to the US in practice, thereby avoiding debating the central point.

The first reply asserted that my comment was based on a “ridiculous premise” without addressing the principle.

I edited that sentence to be less absolutist, but still, isn't this essentially what this article and many people are advocating? Attracting all the smartest and most productive people in the world to move to the US? How is that a mischaracterisation of the argument?

There's an implicit assumption in the article and the comments here that "brain drain the world" is a free lunch.

But does anyone think through to the end-game of that? That when you drain the most smart/productive people away from every other country, all those countries become less wealthy and more dysfunctional, leading to societal decline, poverty, resentment, radicalisation, war, etc?

Aside from anything else, the other countries become less able to trade on good terms, and thus less able to buy US products/services. And so it becomes a self-defeating policy long-term.

Good economists (and to be honest I don't know of many these days) know that there are no free lunches. We need to put as much effort into helping every other country develop and thrive - and by doing that we'll create many more customers for the products/services produced in our own countries, and everyone can end up richer.

After writing this I wonder even if the economic and political dysfunction we're seeing in so much of the world as actually the inevitable consequence of decades of brain-draining, rather than an indication of the need for more of it.

I just deleted it from my phone, yesterday. I haven't actively used it in I don't know how many years; maybe briefly last year when traveling o/s and needing to make a landline call to a number back home, but other than that, pretty much no use for years, and lately all I've been getting was crypto spam group chats.

I remember how amazing it seemed when I was doing the "digital nomad" thing in the mid-late 00s, using Skype to redirect my landline number from home to my mobile (some Nokia thing, whatever was the best one for 20-somethings in 2006) with a local SIM as I caught buses around Thailand and Vietnam. It seemed so futuristic and exciting to be able to break free of the constraints of being stuck in one place - to travel around exotic places but still be connected to your work and contacts at home.

That said, most of the calls I received on that trip were telemarketing nuisance calls, so, as always, the reality didn't quite live up to the fantasy. Still, looking back it feels like it was a more optimistic and wondrous time.

Yeah it’s not a great explanation.

To me (and I’m of the era they’re describing so I used it a lot) it’s simply that _blank is a reserved keyword that means open the link in a new, unnamed window.

Other reserved keywords for “target” are _self (default value), _parent, and _top.

https://www.w3schools.com/TAgs/att_a_target.asp

Consider Melbourne if you prefer Northern CA climate and, well, other differences.

It's not "castigating" or criticising potential users. It's advising founders not to waste resources attracting large numbers of visitors who are unlikely to be potential users, and instead do the hard work to attract and retain users who will actually value your product.

I made this mistake multiple times back in early 2010s "virality hacking" days, and man it was a painful and costly learning experience.

"...once it is updated in the U.S. Geographic Names System".

It’s been a campaign of Mike Cernovich’s for a long time.

The worry is not so much that they’ll steal your IP (good legal protection can prevent that), but those kinds of corporate VC funds are generally looking to invest in things that fit in with their own corporate strategy and plan. The investment is a bit of a “try before you buy” before eventually acquiring the company and making the product part of their own offering.

That can be a good path if you’re making something that one of these companies would want to acquire and an acquisition by such a company is an appealing outcome for you.

But it’s not going to help you if you want to be an independent company and brand that can do things the way you want long term.

I've seen it work once, but it was hard over the long term: LIFX (smart light globes) [1], which was launched on Kickstarter in 2012 by people working from the same co-working space and accelerator I was involved with then (so I kinda had a backstage view on it).

Products like that work if there's natural consumer appeal built into the product, that you can convey in a video that gets people excited imagining how much better their life would be. That's what motivates pre-purchasing and also sharing/virality. That's why the LIFX Kickstarter campaign worked. But even with the $1.3M crowdfunding, they needed a lot more funds from investors; the crowdfunding just helped with initial funding and to prove demand.

Still, that company didn't turn out to be a big success. It was hard/slow to get the product into production and shipped to consumers – it took 2-3 years I think. Established lighting vendors like Phillips were quick to get competing products into major retail stores. Along the way the company seemed to have a lot of internal drama, and investors became disenchanted. The company was acquired in about 2019 [2], then that company went bust, then the LIFX assets were acquired again in 2022 [3].

So, from its early signs of huge potential success, it ends up being a cautionary tale and another case study that investors can look at as a reason not to invest in hardware startups.

Another cautionary tale is the "Coolest Cooler" [4], which ended up in a lawsuit [5]. I heard someone mention that a factory they engaged in China held them to ransom (staff went "on strike" in the middle of production) but I don't know details beyond what's been reported.

These cases demonstrate all the ways these kinds of projects can go wrong, and are much harder to turn around than a software project in which you can be building your product to maintain customer satisfaction and growth day-by-day.

And even still, this approach only works for gimmicky consumer products, not B2B products that are more likely to work commercially in the long term.

Edit: Also remember Pebble (watch) which was a huge Kickstarter hit and seemed like a successful company for a few years after that, then suddenly went bust.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/hollieslade/2013/12/11/eureka-h...

[2] https://www.geekwire.com/2019/building-energy-monitoring-com...

[3] https://www.techhive.com/article/827458/lifx-smart-light-bra...

[4] https://www.reddit.com/r/shittykickstarters/comments/x4ovj6/...

[5] https://www.reddit.com/r/shittykickstarters/comments/x4ovj6/...

The founder was already super rich and proven.

I don't know much about the details about how it got started (i.e., how much Palmer Luckey self-funded it in the early stages) but the fact that he'd already built/sold Oculus was always going to make it easier to open doors and close funding deals (even if the politics/FB drama was a complication).

Also, building tech for the US military has some advantages. You have one customer with very high stakes and very deep pockets. Obviously it's hard to get started and you need to be building something that's uniquely useful and valuable for defence purposes, but once you achieve that, once you're in the door of the military industry, you're on pretty solid ground, and that's attractive to investors. The one hardware company i know in Australia that's doing well is also making defence tech.

It's much harder if all your potential customers (in my case, farmers) are small family businesses spread thinly in non-urban areas all over the world. Investors know that makes distrubuition much more challenging.

They also all got started several decades ago when there were huge new blue ocean opportunities to pursue and much less competition for capital. And other many competitors have failed along the way. (Remember Amiga, Wang, Gateway, many others from the 80s and 90s).

The main issue now is competition for capital: the majority of tech investors regard software startups as much safer paths to huge returns. Whether they’re right or wrong in any individual case is a separate issue; they’re playing the percentages.

Investors are generally wanting to see little existing competition so that’s not really the issue.

They’re more concerned with factors that will cause the company to self-destruct. Running out of money before hitting PMF and growth is the most common failure mode for any startup, and is much more likely with any hardware startup, due to the dramatically slower iteration times.

That’s a big part of it. But mostly it’s that your dev+deploy+evaluate cycle is so much slower. With web software you can write a feature or bug-fix and push to prod in minutes - and repeat that many times a day. With hardware each equivalent cycle is weeks or months (especially in my vertical - farms).

I don’t think it’s just a UK thing, or that it’s much easier to start a hardware startup in the USA.

I think it’s more that the bar for getting a hardware startup off the ground is much higher than a software startup - everywhere in the world.

Personally I’ve been trying to self-fund and bootstrap a hardware startup (based in Australia but I’m reasonably well connected in Silicon Valley as I’m a YC alum). I’ve had plenty of early success and validation of all my market theses, but it’s super hard to get any investors interested. Plenty say “exciting” and want to chat. All lose interest when you start talking funding needs and path to market.

In a world in which investors and other startup industry contacts are accustomed to seeing a bootstrapped SaaS app showing signs of growth and revenue just a few months in, with a hardware startup it’s just impossible to avoid looking like a failure by comparison - due to all the costs, delays and complications involved with getting an MVP to market. And because successful hardware startups are so scarce relative to software ones, it’s hard even to get any good advice; there’s just barely anyone around with good, relevant experience to share (and I already know many of the people who have built companies in this vertical in past decades, none of whom are in SV).

I’ve come to the conclusion that the only way to make it work is to start by achieving success as a software startup, then transition into hardware to later - but even then you’d have to convince investors that it’s worth the risk.

In short, the whole tech industry has been spoiled by easy SaaS wins over the past decade, and that’s all that most investors are willing to even consider.

The exceptions are “start-big and-get-huge-fast” plays like Groq - but the founders of that company were already highly credentialed and connected when they started, and even then vanishingly few investors are willing/able to fund new companies like that. That’s not the kind of thing young, unproven founders can pull off, anywhere.

This seems quite an accusatory comment!

Taxpayer-funded TV stations aren’t showing major commercial sport in Australia or anywhere else, really.

If it’s not exclusive to pay television, it’s on free-to-air commercial networks. These are fully private companies that pay a large license fee to use spectrum, and fund their purchase of the sports broadcasting rights by selling advertising (usually at peak rates as these events are very popular).

In Australia, all four of the Grand Slam tennis tournaments are shown on free-to-air commercial TV. No taxpayer funding whatsoever but easily accessible to everyone.