Live data from Hacker News

Google has acquired the data of failed US airline Spirit

theregister.com

441–450 of 457 posts

Re: Google has acquired the data of failed US airline Spirit

#441
This really should be all illegal - you communicate with a company, possibly including sensitive information to solve the issue at hand. Not so that 10 years later someone pick up the cadaver & miss-uses all its secrets for whatever they see fit.

I guess yet another victim of no GDPR in the USA ?

Re: Google has acquired the data of failed US airline Spirit

#442
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does this have value? Is any and every sentence in an e-mail considered 'fact' and thus to be fed into the AI? 90% of e-mails and Teams communications are inane. Polite banter, "thanks for taking care of that, I appreciate it" "please route the forms to Janet this week because Bill is on vacation" "unit will be un available until the parts come in" . I can't see the intrinsic fact value of this kind of communicat…

This data shows exactly how a huge company of thousands of employees works and coordinates. The perfect data to train an agent swarm on how to run a company. Maybe it's innefficient and inane, but it's how you start. The first LLMs, GPT-1, 2, were trained on complete garbage, the average document from the common crawl is random non-sense, yet they worked, and now we can use LLMs to filter the data for the next traini…

>This data shows exactly how a huge company of thousands of employees works and coordinates.

>The perfect data to train an agent swarm on how to run a company.

The company also failed and went bankrupt. So indeed, a perfect example how to run a company - into the ground!

Lets see if the resulting AI manages to do the same. ;-)

Re: Google has acquired the data of failed US airline Spirit

#443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only those wardriving vehicles. They use everybody to scan the world's wifi networks. Well, except people like me who stubbornly turn off 'location accuracy' every time some app demands you turn it on. I don't know exactly what gets sent to google, but it's certainly enough to identify and track (retrospectively) a huge part of the world's population. Now I know you get tracked by the celltowers anyway, but still…

Google 100% was wardriving and all of your other items. However, you can increase gps accuracy using wifi. GPS is not that precise (part of which is government regulations) and WiFi does help immensely with accuracy.

Yes, you can increase accuracy. However, I always turn it off and still get an accuracy of a few meters, which is plenty accurate nearly all practical purposes. Even in cities.

The difference used to be larger, but with the multitude of satellite systems now available and the advancements in receivers the difference is way less than it used to be.

Re: Google has acquired the data of failed US airline Spirit

#444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll never understand this attitude toward airlines. What did you want them to do in this situation? Keep flying the plane with engine issues so you could make your important meetings? It sounds like the airline did the right thing here but you were still mad?

I'll flip this around and say I've never understood why an airline is viewed as a special case. In the general case, if you enter into a contract and pay for a service, then don't receive that service, you're entitled to sue the service provider for your losses. For example, if I turn up to a hotel I booked only to find that the room isn't available, I'm entitled to sue the hotel for my cost in finding a reasonable l…

> In the general case, if you enter into a contract and pay for a service, then don't receive that service, you're entitled to sue the service provider for your losses.

You can sue anyone for anything. But when a service provider can't provide service because of acts of god, accidents, safety issues, or equipment failure, that's just... reality. Courts are not going to give you a huge payout because Delta refused to fly you in a broken plane to make your meeting. This is why insurance is a thing.

Re: Google has acquired the data of failed US airline Spirit

#445
post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are Americans in particular expected to know details about every country on Earth? Do you think Canadians know all these facts about Brazil? Do Indians? Or Swedes? It's only Americans that are smugly called ignorant for not knowing about the entire world.

Not details, but at least having a basic notion of where countries are located. Everyone should be expected to know, for example, that Mexico and Spain are two different countries that are located in different continents. Yet it’s always people from the same country referring to one by the name of the other. https://blog.education.nationalgeographic.org/2015/10/22/why...

You're giving way too much credit to the rest of the world if you think most people know stuff like that.

Re: Google has acquired the data of failed US airline Spirit

#446
post #316
post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are Americans in particular expected to know details about every country on Earth? Do you think Canadians know all these facts about Brazil? Do Indians? Or Swedes? It's only Americans that are smugly called ignorant for not knowing about the entire world.

Take the perspective of a non-US person. Regardless of country, almost universally, they will know more about the US than an American knows about their county. It kind of comes with being the most important and biggest cultural exporting country. So every foreign individual justifiably sees the asymmetry in knowledge. I think that that answers your question? Of course, I agree that it's kind of impossible for an Amer…

I 100% agree, I want to see if the people who downvoted me can come up with some kind of bizarre reverse engineered reason for why they think it's important Americans know about every country on earth.

Re: Google has acquired the data of failed US airline Spirit

#447
post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

seems OP is not talking about compensation of the deal itself but rather compensation for the actual flight rather than a $100 voucher. Assuming his flight to Brazil was much more than that

Why should the entire flight be compensated? The airline provided the flight, just 24 hours later (and the delay is what the $100 are supposed to compensate).

How many times does a door dasher have to deliver your food 24 hours later before you realize your argument has flaws?

Re: Google has acquired the data of failed US airline Spirit

#448
post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

seems OP is not talking about compensation of the deal itself but rather compensation for the actual flight rather than a $100 voucher. Assuming his flight to Brazil was much more than that

Why should the entire flight be compensated? The airline provided the flight, just 24 hours later (and the delay is what the $100 are supposed to compensate).

$100 to compensate for having to put an entire day of my limited set of days on this planet on hold is insulting. That's four bucks an hour.

Re: Google has acquired the data of failed US airline Spirit

#449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly would trust Google more than any other entity to de-identify the data properly.

With their army of lawyers? Absolutely not. Guarantee you they’ve already prepped a response along the lines of “someone else was supposed to take care of that before selling it to us we can’t be held accountable for it.”

That's not how they operate. They don't want the legal risk. Too big a target to be trying to squeeze out little gains that way.

Re: Google has acquired the data of failed US airline Spirit

#450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They lost a similar amount in 2020 I wouldn't be surprised that an airline lost money in one of the worst travel years of all time (due to Covid). Cursory searching shows United made more than $3,000,000,000 in 2024. So even if 2025 was an unusually good year for them, it wasn't a complete anomaly. Just goes to show that when flights get delayed due to insufficient available crew or maintenance issues, it's a savin…

Sorry man, your "just goes to show" ain't gonna cut it. Yes, I want better perks when the going gets rough, but it's not enough to blame only the c-suite and shareholders. This isn't software dev. Prior discussion on the article I shared in the other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48025282

> Yes, I want better perks when the going gets rough

Maybe you're not understanding what we're saying. There have been numerous comments remarking on flights that were delayed or canceled due to corporate decisions, which reduce to excess savings on (or insufficient investment in) maintenance and staffing. This has nothing to do with "better perks"!

Every dollar of profit is a dollar that could have been spent on maintenance and staffing, or god forbid, proactive investment in better systems and infrastructure. No one is saying that airlines should become non-profits. But I have a feeling three or four or five BILLION dollars in profits is too much.

Post reply on HN