If you want a monthly price you have to tab across to get the true figure of £5.40.

The higher price wouldn't put me off - it's still very low - but the deception erodes trust from the very start.

Personally I stopped eating at McDonald's 21 years ago and it's the easiest thing in the world to quit (although I don't live in the USA, may not be a perfectly fair comparison).

Tangentially, here in the UK many supermarkets have upped the ante for people who don't want loyalty cards by introducing differential pricing: non members can easily pay an extra 10% on each shop. So far I've managed to sign up with fake details and save the barcode to Google Wallet, but it's all rather dystopian.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47289406

Points: 115

# Comments: 96

I had to zoom in (Mac accessibility tool) but then I could see the effect briefly. My eyes go everywhere, but I could see patches of moving shapes with stationary shapes further away, only that the patch moved around a lot!

Why not offer a premium ad-free tier?

For me, viewing web ads is non negotiable (print ads were much more manageable and didn't prevent me from enjoying the content).

However I only view about 4-6 Verge articles per month so I'll see how it plays out. If the best stuff goes behind a paywall then I can't justify subscribing, and nor do I want to hand over personal data to every site I read occasionally (for several reasons).

I've always wondered why publishers can't follow the Spotify or Netflix model for at least some of their content?

This does also raise the uncomfortable question of how much the content is worth. Yes they have some exclusives and unique content but in other areas if I stopped reading it I'd have another hundred reviews of the latest Apple products to choose from, and Reddit is much more realistic (albeit noisy) about the Sonos debacle than The Verge. The article about undersea cables was good though.

Oh, and the chairs make my arse* hurt.

This isn't a stupid little startup either, it's a listed and profitable company worth billions.

I stay because they know how bad it is so I just go in a few times per month to socialise.

(* Please forgive the lewd British slang).

Seriously though, I'm sure it's an improvement but having used the existing voice chat I think they had a few things to address. (Perhaps 4o does in some cases).

- Unlike the text interface it asks questions to keep the conversation going. It feels odd when I already got the answer I wanted. Clarifying questions yes, pretending to be a buddy - I didn't say I was lonely, I just asked a question! It makes me feel pressured to continue.

- Too much waffle by far. Give me short answers, I am capable of asking follow up questions.

- Unable to cope with the mechanics of usual conversation. Pausing before adding more, interrupting, another person speaking.

- Only has a US accent, which is fine but not what I expect when Google and Alexa have used British English for many years.

Perhaps they've overblown the "personality" to mask some of these deficiencies?

Not saying it's easy to overcome all the above but I'd rather they just dial down the intonation in the meantime.

All this adds up to the fact that established characters are already effectively part of the public domain. A perpetual monopoly on children's culture is both unnatural and unjust.

Disney still benefits from trademark law on their characters along with a generous monopoly on new creations. I would argue that extending this further would reduce the incentive to innovate.

I don't know what the parent poster had in mind, but in my view losing most control by now is absolutely right and proper.

I don't want someone pretending they're my friend when we've only just met, or trying too hard to please, it can come over as being just an act and sometimes the interruptions are jarring. The difference is noticeable if you're used to dining outside of North America.

Sure, usually if they're not busy I try to strike up conversation with the waiter or at least ask how they're doing. People should be paid and treated as equals and not rewarded like a dog for performing tricks.

I honestly don't think the service is significantly different between countries with high and low tipping norms. But higher tips result in a higher BS factor overall.

Not a surprise, but a change nonetheless.

Before Brexit I gave up trying to take my wife on a couple of business trips in the EU as they were too short notice to arrange the supposedly free visa, which in theory shouldn't have been even needed but definitely was in practice.

They've all used Terraform extensively but always rolled their own means of deploying IaC, with solutions more clunky than CloudFormation which let's face it isn't brilliant.

Why did Hashicorp fail to win this business? I think their pricing just seems too outlandish and is based on paying for the value of software they've already open sourced rather than being tied to the cost of providing a good service plus reasonable margin.

Their strategy appears to have failed, exacerbated by the macroeconomic landscape. I doubt their chosen solution - Microsoftification of their open source project - is going to do them any favours.

I was a kid at the time so could be wrong about this.