Hacker News: _gllen

New comment by _gllen in "The Amazon tax"

_gllen — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 02:48:52 +0000

Depends on what ads are showing and what they are bidding (vs. what you can afford to bid for the marginal traffic) but yes can be very much worth it to pay google's troll toll.

New comment by _gllen in "Tonight's restaurant dinner fell off the Sysco truck"

_gllen — Thu, 09 Oct 2025 04:52:06 +0000

Also just saw that. I wonder why YT vid and article both feature “Milk and Honey”

New comment by _gllen in "Apps That Didn't Add 'Trader' Contact Info in the EU Removed from App Store"

_gllen — Tue, 18 Feb 2025 19:50:13 +0000

removed from the EU app stores, right?

New comment by _gllen in "Apps now block sideloading and force downloads through Google Play"

_gllen — Wed, 11 Sep 2024 16:36:46 +0000

If you have any more info on this, would love to hear more.

I spent a couple days trying to deconstruct what the apk sites bidding on adwords for our brand (ecommerce free app) were doing. Proxied traffic and didn’t see anything fishy. Chalked it up to ad arbitrage in the end. Didn’t seem like getting people to download the apk was the primary goal.

(email in my profile if you want to share privately)

New comment by _gllen in "Kagi finally let me lay Google Search to rest"

_gllen — Thu, 12 Oct 2023 02:19:40 +0000

Sounded cool, but seems like it’s (!expert) a closed beta. I just get redirected to expert.nl, maybe requires the ultimate plan? The docs are pretty unclear.

New comment by _gllen in "Ill in England? Your Location Can Determine If You Live or Die"

_gllen — Mon, 17 Jul 2023 02:10:16 +0000

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euro_Health_Consumer_Index

New comment by _gllen in "Scams upon scams: The data-driven advertising grift"

_gllen — Sat, 08 Jul 2023 14:05:35 +0000

Really 0%? It seems like some of the buyers would return their mattress and buy another. If 10% return and 90% of those buy another brand, that seems to me like an above average audience to market mattresses to.

New comment by _gllen in "Scams upon scams: The data-driven advertising grift"

_gllen — Sat, 08 Jul 2023 13:30:14 +0000

It’s possible that an audience that is very likely to buy a mattress are recent mattress buyers.

New comment by _gllen in "Apple forced to make major cuts to Vision Pro headset production plans"

_gllen — Tue, 04 Jul 2023 14:33:50 +0000

The eye tracking sounds like a killer feature (I can imagine how it could enable reading with touchless, perfect, infinite scrolling). Sadly, from my brief read of the docs, it seems like Apple doesn’t allow apps to access what people are looking at (“to preserve privacy”) though.

New comment by _gllen in "Ask HN: What topics are good for a UI/UX Primer?"

_gllen — Sun, 25 Jun 2023 16:29:50 +0000

His youtube channel is inactive, but also great: https://youtube.com/@SteveSchoger

New comment by _gllen in "Apple re-enables Bluetooth on every OS update on purpose"

_gllen — Thu, 21 Jul 2022 17:27:27 +0000

Also love how they nag me to enable siri and make safari the default browser every update.

New comment by _gllen in "Ask HN: How are you dealing with the M1/ARM migration?"

_gllen — Sun, 12 Jun 2022 11:34:16 +0000

Was only a problem with my first try (the Macbook air, right after release)

My 2nd try with the MBP in 2022, following the guide I linked above, Android Studio has been perfect.

New comment by _gllen in "Ask HN: How are you dealing with the M1/ARM migration?"

_gllen — Sat, 11 Jun 2022 07:16:06 +0000

I have pods that haven’t been updated to work with arm yet.

New comment by _gllen in "Ask HN: How are you dealing with the M1/ARM migration?"

_gllen — Fri, 10 Jun 2022 18:35:46 +0000

I didn't realize it wasn't already ARM. I found one day (https://stackoverflow.com/a/68929949) that running Simulator with Rosetta allows momentum scrolling to work, and everything else seemed perfect, so I left it that way.

New comment by _gllen in "Ask HN: How are you dealing with the M1/ARM migration?"

_gllen — Fri, 10 Jun 2022 18:10:44 +0000

I tried going from a 2018 MBP to M1 MBA in 2021 and had too many issues to make it my primary machine. Docker and Android development were particularly brutal to get going reliably IIRC. The M1 performed well for the things it could do, but I still needed the MBP (which constantly reached 100% CPU) for other stuff, so I ended up doing a horrible multi-machine setup with Synergy. That was a dark time in my life ;)

Then tried again early this year with a M1Max MBP, and it has been the biggest step change productivity boost of my life. Definitely still some pain points, but the way this thing handles anything I throw at it is incredible.

I'm mostly doing front-end dev (react native). Have a minimum of 2 IDEs, 1 iOS simulator, 1 Android simulator, Windows (ARM) Virtualbox, 2 browsers open at all times. And then add a mix of Docker, XCode, Android Studio, Zoom, Sketch, Affinity apps, Slack, Zoom, etc. I haven't ever heard the fan spin up. I was carefully managing what I had open on the 2018 MBP, and now I don't even think about it.

The only thing I'm still running in Rosetta is Apple software: XCode and the iOS simulator, but they run smooth, so I don't even think about it.

The MBA setup I was just flailing my way through. For the M1Max setup, I found this guide very helpful in my initial setup (mostly focused on a RN Dev): https://amanhimself.dev/blog/setup-macbook-m1/

New comment by _gllen in "Ask HN: Any weird tips for weight loss?"

_gllen — Thu, 10 Mar 2022 12:03:43 +0000

Offer a friend (that will keep you honest) an amount of money that would be extremely painful to lose if you don't hit your target. This is how I quit smoking 10 year ago. It's also how I'm down 80 lbs in the last 12 months.

Very easy to stick to rules when there's an unreasonably large fine for breaking them.

New comment by _gllen in "Ask HN: New web service idea that you would pay for?"

_gllen — Mon, 21 Feb 2022 15:34:00 +0000

Slack ignore for channel, user(bot), and/or regex pattern.

New comment by _gllen in "Apple appears to be manipulating its own App Store ratings"

_gllen — Sat, 20 Nov 2021 18:57:18 +0000

> I wondered if maybe this was a common confusion with podcast apps, where listeners think they’re reviewing a podcast instead of the app itself. But no, I didn’t see that obvious pattern when I checked reviews for other top podcast apps in the App Store.

The rating popup is “enjoying {appname}” .. seems understandable considering this app name is “podcasts”

New comment by _gllen in "Implications of third-party payment processing on iOS and Android"

_gllen — Wed, 01 Sep 2021 13:22:04 +0000

> but never once have any of them said to me, “Boy, I sure wish iPhone apps and games could ask me for my credit card number to make purchases

Non-technical people would expect to download the Kindle app and be able to buy books, or download Netflix and buy a subscription, or Subscribe to a Twitch streamer. They don't know why the apps lack these obvious features, but if they did, they'd at least be thinking “Boy, I sure wish iPhone apps and games could ask me for my credit card number to make purchases"

New comment by _gllen in "Experiments and leaking company secrets through your testing infrastructure"

_gllen — Tue, 26 Feb 2019 02:20:42 +0000

Very cool! I find it fascinating to see what experiments other companies run, and especially what the winners were.

I've had a similar idea on my mind for a while now: Find sites using optimizely (eg with nerdydata), automatically screenshot the variations, and revisit to see what the chosen winner was.