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Comment by brk | Hacker News Reader

Maybe I'm in the minority, but I would generally assume that everybody has at least 1 printer at home. I'm also not aware of many printers that keep logs for long durations, but perhaps their shared network printers were logging to some kind of system log.

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It’s higher than I expected at 70% of Americans having home printers. [0]

I expected it to be super old but there must be old people with printers.

I get annoyed when companies expect me to print stuff at home. I prefer companies to assume that no one has a home printer and plan for it by including return labels and whatnot.

[0] https://metafacts.com/home-printer-trends-in-the-us-tupdate/

I wonder how many of those printers are actually still functioning. There was a time once where you actually had to print stuff (anyone remembers MapQuest maps?), so I'm guessing there are still a lot of printers from that era collecting dust at people's homes.

I swapped over to a laser printer for that exact reason. There's still a few things a year I need to print and the laser printer stays working through the lulls where I always had issues with inkjets clogging up.

And I walk to a nearby copy shop for my printing needs. At maybe twice a year it's a rare enough occasion that I refuse to keep a printer myself.

I do shooting sports so I print a lot of targets for that too.

That's what I do for photo printing. I use my laser for things like maps, tickets, instructions and forms. Love using it to print out instructions for use in the shop, where I can get my greasy fingers all over the paper, and not on my nice clean instruction manual.... When I need some color photos printed, I head to the print shop.

Yes, I love my laser printer. It's somewhere around 10 years old, and has printed a grand total of 99 pages. But it's still happily using the same toner it came with, while an inkjet's ink would have dried out and needed replacing countless times.

I had an old HP printer from 2009 that I finally got rid of this year. The case was broken, the tray was falling off, and it spent years collecting dust. It still worked! Only the ink dried out. I'm curious about the reliability of printers, and how often people have to replace them.

Yea i have a printer; a decent one (laser iirc) for my wifes college papers. We've not hooked it up in years though, and offhand i'm not even sure how to use it.. that's how long it's been lol. Hell, i'm not even exactly sure where it is ..

My c64 has a great working dotmatrix printer. A home computer without a printer is a modern invention. I would expect if the employee had a computer they would have a printer.

I would expect the employee to have a modern computer.

My wife wanted a photo printer. At first I told her it was a ridiculously primitive and pointless idea, but I went along with it since I had a bonus burning a hole in my pocket

I have to admit, it turned out to be pretty cool. I hadn't used a printer in years for anything personal, and it turns out you can print professional-looking glossy photos for like 15 cents each between ink and glossy photo paper. Now we have a ton of nice family photos all over the walls, and I printed out a selfie from my WoW character when our guild killed some raid boss together and mixed it in with the other pics

Corporate networks tend to keep printer logs for extremely long durations.

Also, printers at home are incredibly useful. I'm surprised more people don't have them. Especially now that online shopping (and therefore online returns) are so much more common and require printing return labels.

Amazon returns no longer require printing out labels, so someone who does most/all their online ordering via Amazon wouldn't need a printer.

I need to print return stickers for Amazon in EU.

Interesting. I’m germany we love paper but amazon returns work without the need to print a label at home.

In Austria you do need to print the label. How dos returning without a label work? I mean how does the post know where to ship the package?

At least in the US, Amazon has arrangements with major shipping companies like UPS and FedEx. So if you want to return something, Amazon says "Bring the item to your local UPS store and have them scan this QR code." The QR code gives UPS the shipping information it needs.

I just did a similar return for an Ebay package, but with USPS. At least in that case there's definitely a label, it's just a matter of who prints it. You could print it yourself from an attachment on the email, or show a QR code at the post office and they'd print it.

Only for things bought and sold through amazon. If you get something sent directly from a seller returns have you print out a label.

I have occasion to actually need to print something about twice a year. I don't know how it is that we live such drastically different lifestyles that you find them so incredibly useful.

Honestly, printers have gotten so cheap that the pain in the ass they can save when needed would make them useful to have for even that low of a volume. Printing a return label means I don't have to drive to a shipper. Your cheapest printers nowadays can scan and sometimes fax, which is useful for when legal or other requirements force you to submit a signed document. I'm not a fan of digital tickets for travel and events due to the apps being garbage and the severe consequences in case of technical problems, so these are easily printed as well.

As crappy as modern printers are, they provide an oversized amount of peace of mind for me.

None of those are significant problems in my life I guess, certainly not enough to justify even dedicating any space to a piece of electronic equipment that I will use infrequently enough to be frustrated by whatever way it has decided to not work when I do want to use it.

I typically also only print 2-3 times a year as well. But those times are sensitive-ish documents (one being hard copies of my tax prep and return for my filing cabinet, even though it’s submitted electronically) and I don’t want them printed on a printer I don’t own (paranoia). (And my printer is not connected to the network, I connect via USB).

> one being hard copies of my tax prep and return for my filing cabinet

...what year is this? Like, I have some questions:

1) Why keep hard copies of documents created electronically when there are so many more redundant, more secure, and more convenient ways keep the electronic versions themselves?

2) What in God's name are you putting on your tax forms that warrants being that paranoid about who sees them?

> 2) What in God's name are you putting on your tax forms that warrants being that paranoid about who sees them?

Well, it includes social-security numbers for starters, and may also include bank account routing information (where to send the refund check, or withdraw in case of extra payment needed).

1) It's been more than once that we've seen hackers completely wipe people's digital lives? I mean, how problematic will logging in to many of these services be if Google decides to lock your account?

2) As an American example, ask Trump, he really doesn't want to release that information for one reason or another. Simply put trying to figure out other peoples security and sensitivity sensibilities is not something you have all the details on and are making vast assumptions.

> It's been more than once that we've seen hackers completely wipe people's digital lives? I mean, how problematic will logging in to many of these services be if Google decides to lock your account?

There are still much more convenient and technically superior methods than using physical paper copies if that is your concern.

> ask Trump, he really doesn't want to release that information for one reason or another.

Using "unscrupulous, if not criminal, activity" as an example in this instance doesn't seem like the best argument.

Technically superior is a very biased argument... A safe with a key is a very well established security mechanism with a pretty easily traceable chain of custody. Someone has to physically be at the location of the files to get the files.

Any digital record has a huge number of failure modes. For security you'll want to encrypt, when encrypted you'll now have another piece of data you need to secure and backup. You have to ensure the backup services are secure. If any of these become insecure how do you trace the insecure accesses? If it was accessed from overseas what do you do about it?

Criminal activity is common, but lets go with something that would be criminal in one country and not in another... This gets very messy with cloud services where some other government can request the information. With a safe you have to get the local government to sign off on a warrant.

I print once or twice a month--return labels, random home admin (taxes or city stuff), and I prefer paper boarding passes (w/ backup on my phone) because they're less fussy for a number of reasons than the phone. I also print documents that I need to carefully read or edit, because I am easily distracted when reading/editing boring stuff on a computer and can waste too much time writing about using printers on HN.

>Maybe I'm in the minority, but I would generally assume that everybody has at least 1 printer at home.

I haven’t seen a home printer since I moved out. In all these years I’ve only needed to use a printer once (sheet music when I was learning piano).

It’s just not that common to use paper anymore, aside from school projects.

School projects and super-handy things like being able to print coloring pages on-demand for most any topic one can think up, are probably a big part of why they're still so common. It is so damn nice to have a printer if you have kids of most any age.

I've also yet to find a superior UI to printed pages for running RPGs. Books are great, iPads are great, laptops can be OK, but for the core material you need for a given session, there's nothing in the world I know of that beats ~20-30 pages of printed notes and excerpted bits of PDF books & some randomly-generated junk from the Web for each session, so you have only expected-to-be-relevant info in it. Nothing better when you're actually at the table. I mean, you could do the same thing writing it by hand if you have very neat handwriting, but being able to mix together your own notes and e.g. NPC template-blocks, custom maps, and commercial material pulled from books, is awesome and saves tons of time when prepping. You can achieve something similar with just an iPad, but it's still slower and more awkward to actually use—though I do have other things I use tablets for at the table, that they excel at.