Hacker News: LancerSykera

New comment by LancerSykera in "CenturyLink left users with no service for two months, then billed them $239"

LancerSykera — Wed, 01 May 2024 16:03:23 +0000

Having worked in telephone construction (including on a Centurylink contract), your next step after customer service fails should be your state's public utility commission. PUC complaints light fires under asses. Dead phone lines were not tolerated for us (due to, obviously, customers can't call for help if something happens), and you don't need a bonafide copper splicer to make a temporary repair to get customers back in service.

New comment by LancerSykera in "Police sue rapper Afroman for using footage of home raid in his music videos"

LancerSykera — Fri, 24 Mar 2023 15:13:15 +0000

>Qualified immunity only protects individual cops from civil liability, not from criminal liability.

Then why is literal theft protected by qualified immunity? https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/nicksibill...

New comment by LancerSykera in "Startup is selling tech to make call center workers sound like white Americans"

LancerSykera — Thu, 25 Aug 2022 15:30:51 +0000

I once got in an argument with a Puerto Rican coworker when I told him Spanish people are white. He genuinely could not fathom it, and was very pissed off about it. I guess he thought Latinos are direct descendants of Spaniards?

New comment by LancerSykera in "Enough with the notifications"

LancerSykera — Fri, 05 Aug 2022 16:03:08 +0000

Gas pumps.

Nevermind the Cheddar News of the pump, that's its own separate nightmare, but I just want gas. I put my card in, you give me gas. Skip the receipt prompt, skip the carwash prompt, and no I don't have a rewards card.

New comment by LancerSykera in "Street View turns 15"

LancerSykera — Tue, 24 May 2022 15:35:34 +0000

It was helpful in my truck driving days when going to customers I'd never been to before, and it was absolutely a daily tool in telecom construction/maintenance.

Example - random sheriff's office calls in a phone line ripped down when I've got one foot out the door for the day. I pulled up the address on Streetview while she was explaining the scene to me, and it sure looked like coax on that side of the street, our lines were on the other side. Sure enough, 45 minute drive later I called the sheriff and told them to call the cable company.

When you cover an area hundreds of square miles you can't go look at every job before sending a crew out. Pull it up on Streetview, even if the images are 10 years old it's probably still the same.

New comment by LancerSykera in "Cats learn the names of their friend cats in their daily lives"

LancerSykera — Mon, 16 May 2022 15:45:06 +0000

I grew up in a house of at least a dozen cats. All had names. Our very first one, Lightning (who was seemingly very intelligent and lived to his late teens), did not know his name as Lightning. For all he knew, his name was Puss-Puss, because he had been called that a lot when he was younger, and responded extremely well to it throughout his life.

New comment by LancerSykera in "Decades-old IBM database became profitable dossier on health of 270M Americans"

LancerSykera — Sat, 05 Feb 2022 17:17:00 +0000

As a fedex driver I always dreaded delivering those. Not because of the possibility of unfortunate outcomes such as yours (never crossed my mind), but because I knew they were unsolicited "gifts" that came from big data schemes like this. Just like how marketing companies know that you're pregnant even before you do.

New comment by LancerSykera in "Flightradar24 – how it works"

LancerSykera — Mon, 18 Feb 2019 10:59:38 +0000

The article goes over this.

New comment by LancerSykera in "Research estimates vaping is at least 95% less harmful than smoking"

LancerSykera — Sat, 29 Dec 2018 15:32:20 +0000

Altria, not Phillip Morris, bought a 35% stake, not full ownership.

New comment by LancerSykera in "Amazon FBA Experiment"

LancerSykera — Mon, 03 Dec 2018 23:42:08 +0000

Combination of spending too much money on myself and taking too many short term loans. Eventually I needed more loans to stay afloat, and then when my settlements were going entirely to loan payments, I knew I was done. Well before that point I tried refinancing through a traditional bank/credit union and nobody would touch me.

The night of that worthless settlement I started looking for a job back in trucking, there was a job fair for a local company the next morning, and I ended up there for 1.5yrs.

New comment by LancerSykera in "Amazon FBA Experiment"

LancerSykera — Mon, 03 Dec 2018 01:09:38 +0000

On individual sales including all fees, 20-25%. I currently owe the IRS roughly 20k or so from 2015, and I just started a new job at $16/hr. Guess how well that's working out for me.

New comment by LancerSykera in "Amazon FBA Experiment"

LancerSykera — Sun, 02 Dec 2018 17:27:45 +0000

I did have a very specific niche in the industrial categories. It was a business that I used to work for a supplier for, so I was familiar with products and manufacturers and distributors.

For me, it wasn't so much identifying top selling products, but rather ones that I could compete on price. I did use a good many tools for all aspects of the business, but couldn't really share them now as I've basically shut all that out of memory.

New comment by LancerSykera in "Amazon FBA Experiment"

LancerSykera — Sun, 02 Dec 2018 13:46:50 +0000

Selling existing products would be the smarter way to go at the beginning. Less risk that your unique product doesn't catch on, and just focus on procurement and sale pricing (as well as learning the process and policy expectations).

I did just a bit over $1 million in sales over two years of my Amazon business and it was 99% existing major brand lines. Some I bought direct from manufacturer, some from other suppliers.

New comment by LancerSykera in "To the Gulf of Minneapolis (2016)"

LancerSykera — Sun, 18 Nov 2018 06:44:51 +0000

The parking lot and back driveway of the metal shop next door is on Google as a street, with a name - 50th Street. And nobody knows why. I've deleted it from Waze ages ago, but Google has yet to catch up, if they even pull map data from Waze.

New comment by LancerSykera in "Amazon's Stealth Brands: Everything on Amazon Is Amazon"

LancerSykera — Sun, 18 Nov 2018 06:34:17 +0000

Former Amazon seller - A quantity issue like that is most likely from a listing page being changed at some point. Certain sellers somehow earn the ability to change product details, and Amazon doesn't bother to inform everyone else that sells that product. So, that listing for a dozen mouse traps could've originally been for a single one, or vice versa.

What compounds this is that complaining about other sellers misdeeds typically goes nowhere. The only way to avoid such things on the seller side is to have your own brand in the brand registry so you have complete control over product details.

New comment by LancerSykera in "Ask HN: How do sites like Reddit, HackerNews, etc get initial user content?"

LancerSykera — Wed, 08 Nov 2017 19:01:10 +0000

Crunchyroll got started by stealing stolen content. They uploaded high quality sub group releases to a low quality player without attribution. This is why there is now a sub "group" called HorribleSubs that is literally just rips off of Crunchyroll.

New comment by LancerSykera in "Why police could seize a college student's life savings without charging him"

LancerSykera — Sat, 10 Oct 2015 15:24:00 +0000

Minnesota recently fixed this so that a criminal conviction is necessary before forfeiture, and when I texted my state representative about it, he said my state senator already has a bill for it in committee in Pennsylvania.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/instituteforjustice/2014/05/07/m...

New comment by LancerSykera in "PPA Impounds UberX Vehicles in Undercover Sting Operation"

LancerSykera — Mon, 27 Oct 2014 00:26:51 +0000

Another being that it's the only place in the state where you need a license to openly carry a firearm.

New comment by LancerSykera in "Rum Deal: America’s booze laws are terrible"

LancerSykera — Mon, 16 Jun 2014 18:59:53 +0000

"It is still more revolting if the grounds upon which it was laid down have vanished long since"

I'm surprised that the author, being a current Pennsylvanian, didn't mention the Johnstown Flood Tax. Despite that particular flood having occurred all the way back in 1936, we're still paying the tax on liquor.

New comment by LancerSykera in "Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard (1992)"

LancerSykera — Tue, 22 Apr 2014 09:00:20 +0000

> Even some native speakers tend to have no idea when to use 'wa' or 'ga'

Glad you said this, so I can stop pounding my head over it. Just today I was thinking "doko wa kami desu ka? wait, no, doko ga kami desu ka... doko wa... doko ga... whatever."

Which kami I was thinking about is for me to know and you to guess incorrectly.