Hacker News: alteria

New comment by alteria in "iCloud+ custom email domains should be better"

alteria — Mon, 28 Feb 2022 05:23:38 +0000

At least one news website threatened to shut my (expensive) paid account because I was using a "generic" email address, and as such, was likely sharing my credentials.

They insisted I change the email to myname@myname.tld, which was enough in their books to prevent credential sharing.

New comment by alteria in "Intuit sabotages the Child Tax Credit"

alteria — Wed, 30 Jun 2021 18:45:36 +0000

Square acquired Credit Karma's Tax business, probably folding it into CashApp

[1] https://squareup.com/us/en/press/credit-karma-tax

[2] https://www.pymnts.com/news/partnerships-acquisitions/2020/c...

New comment by alteria in "Facebook and Twitter algorithms incentivize 'people to get enraged'"

alteria — Wed, 10 Mar 2021 17:38:23 +0000

You should be able to block those elements with uBlockOrigin or similar browser extensions. I blocked a bunch of the "trending" stuff since it never really contributed positively to my site experience.

New comment by alteria in "Killing TurboTax"

alteria — Wed, 03 Mar 2021 18:54:16 +0000

The other comments provided a great overview, but I would really recommend read ProPublica's reporting about them [1]

Some very brief highlights:

- They use dark patterns and other trickery to prevent people from filing for free (the vast majority of Americans can file for free via IRS free-file), instead directing them to the "free" up-sell laden product

- Lobbying against literally anything that would make filing taxes easier or cheaper. It doesn't have to be this way (and it's not in many countries), but it's how they make their money.

[1] https://www.propublica.org/series/the-turbotax-trap

New comment by alteria in "Coinbase is a decentralized company, with no headquarters"

alteria — Wed, 24 Feb 2021 20:37:26 +0000

But they also have to live without an office and may not have meaningful stakes to make the tradeoff worth it for most.

New comment by alteria in "Amazon Is Forcing Its Warehouse Workers into Brutal 'Megacycle' Shifts"

alteria — Thu, 04 Feb 2021 17:39:33 +0000

Presumably this was an office job? It might be a little different with a warehouse job that has very productivity targets set from above.

New comment by alteria in "Remove auto renew from my account"

alteria — Tue, 03 Nov 2020 03:31:12 +0000

I don't know if this is a recent trend, or if I've only experienced negative things in the past year or two, (perhaps in the lead up to their IPO?), but I ended up switching away from them.

They closed my account because they suspected commercial use. If I wanted to re-open it, I would need to send in a picture of my ID, and sign some legal documents attesting to my continued non-commercial use or something.

They might not care about personal users because we don't pay, but I did end up switching to different software for the commercial projects I use remote access software on.

New comment by alteria in "The real prices of the iPhone 12 and iPhone 12 mini"

alteria — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 19:03:23 +0000

The whole presentation I was wondering how much Verizon paid as well.

Between the pricing reveal and the conflation of their 28GHz deployment as a standard 5G experience, it seemed like it was the iPhone sponsored by Verizon.

New comment by alteria in "HomePod Mini"

alteria — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 16:50:31 +0000

Is Spotify on Airplay 1 still?

New comment by alteria in "FreeYourMusic lets users migrate their playlists off Spotify"

alteria — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 16:44:58 +0000

With Amazon I do like that I talk to real people, but half the time they try to give me money instead of actually trying to solve the problem.

It's great that chat is empowered to send $5 or $10, but oftentimes I just want to have my problem solved.

New comment by alteria in "Microsoft's CEO is tired of working from home and he's not alone"

alteria — Mon, 12 Oct 2020 16:58:09 +0000

For sure. Like many younger workers, I didn't move into a ultra-high COL area to spend all day in my shared living arrangement.

There isn't a lot of room to optimize for a WFH world with those kinds of spatial restrictions.

New comment by alteria in "Luna – Cloud gaming service"

alteria — Thu, 24 Sep 2020 23:50:12 +0000

fwiw the Adobe Photography plan requires a 1-year commitment (paid monthly) and has an early termination fee if you do try to cancel, so it's not as straightforward.

New comment by alteria in "Giant Pacific Octopus"

alteria — Fri, 18 Sep 2020 19:02:57 +0000

Yes, whoops!

New comment by alteria in "Giant Pacific Octopus"

alteria — Fri, 18 Sep 2020 17:07:59 +0000

Yes. I volunteered at an aquarium for several years, and we spent a surprising amount of time learning octopus etymology. It was a top 10 question for adults to ask.

New comment by alteria in "Does Facebook pay Apple 30% of revenue derived from ads made within its iOS app?"

alteria — Thu, 27 Aug 2020 23:06:35 +0000

That's correct. It's a very big difference if you think about it. Under the normal arrangement, a customer has to retain for 12 months before the 15% rate kicks in.

Depending on the product, you could be losing a significant portion of your customer base before then. For example Netflix, known for insanely good retention, loses nearly 40% of customers by month 12. [1]

[1] https://secondmeasure.com/datapoints/netflix-disney-plus-app...

New comment by alteria in "Rackspace S-1"

alteria — Fri, 10 Jul 2020 16:45:56 +0000

Amazon. It may be true that they A/B test the shit out of things, but it feels super clunky every time.

New comment by alteria in "The War on Upstart Fiber Internet Providers"

alteria — Sat, 27 Jun 2020 00:31:24 +0000

They did, which was the shocking part! If you believe their claims about profit distributions (which you probably shouldn't), the total cost might even average less than $70/mo.

New comment by alteria in "The War on Upstart Fiber Internet Providers"

alteria — Fri, 26 Jun 2020 18:48:55 +0000

Funnily enough, I was doing research one day and came across a local ISP co-op in one of the Dakotas that was selling rural, symmetric 1/1 for $70 per month. Much better service at a lower cost than in SF (been trying to get ATT to finish their fiber install for the past 2 months).

Unfortunately I don't remember the name, but you could probably find it on one of the FCC maps.

New comment by alteria in "Mozilla VPN"

alteria — Thu, 18 Jun 2020 18:41:38 +0000

They must massively oversubscribe their services, far beyond ISPs. The advertising probably brings in a lot of profitable users who aren't pushing tons of BitTorrent traffic as well. With the insanely high affiliate commission they're offering I can't think of another way.

New comment by alteria in "AWS Snowcone"

alteria — Wed, 17 Jun 2020 18:46:36 +0000

I would add the standard caution when looking at averages, that symmetric 1/1 fiber may be pulling the upload value up significantly. Or that Speedtest users have higher internet speeds.

But I really want that stat to be true. The world of American ISPs is sad and depressing.