We must end the tyranny of printers in American life | Hacker News Reader

We must end the tyranny of printers in American life

washingtonpost.com

21 pointsdrannex32 comments

We must end the tyranny of individualism? ;)

Recently, I needed to print something in Vietnam. I took the elevator down from my apartment into the underground shopping mall and walked over to their print section. I scanned the printer's QR code to pay them $.1 and then I could send the document from my phone to the printer. Great print quality, lots of paper options, and easy to use. Plus I can even combine my printing trip with buying breakfast/lunch in the hawker centre along the way.

In my opinion, you only need your own printer if the public infrastructure isn't good.

Here, we have libraries and commercial print shops, like Office Depot, UPS Store, FedEx store. There was a coffee house with a printer, too.

But the nearest one is a mile away. If it were an easy walk, that'd be great. It'd be logical for USPS stations to have printers; they want to do more retail operations, right? What if every Circle K and 7-Eleven had a printer? Hmm.

There are privacy issues with transmitting your print jobs to your nearby underground shopping mall.

Given how intrusive they usually behave, I'd expect the average consumer printer to phone home, too. The solution in both cases is privacy laws.

I can put my home printer in a restricted vlan and block it from phoning back to HP. No laws needed (until the mfg tries to brick the device on loss of WAN access at least).

> until the mfg tries to brick the device on loss of WAN access at least

Didn't HP already do that with their Instant Ink program?

Or until the manufacturer includes a cheap GPRS module in the hardware.

I know this article isn't all that serious, but it's a weird one still.

  Today’s TV set, computer or mobile phone is light-years ahead of one you might have owned 25 years ago. Can you say the same about your printer?

Well, yes. 25 years ago, I owned a dot matrix printer. It was loud, you could tell what the printout was supposed to say (but it was by no means pretty), it was slow and monochrome. For the same price today, I can get a really good color laser printer, or even a 3D printer.

  Again, I know that many of you love your printers and can’t imagine not owning one.

That's an impressive 180 there.

I, too, like my printer. The only gripes I have with it are non-printing-related (touchscreens suck, please give me actual buttons).

Maybe stop buying HP and get a Brother instead?

The HP Laserjet 4L was available in the 90s and it was glorious. Best value for money. Let’s not pretend 25 years ago was dark ages of dot matrix printers (loved my Epson though and using Printshop to print banners with it)

The 4L cost $2,200 when it was introduced in 1992, which is almost $5,000 in 2023 dollars.

Dot matrix printers were affordable for regular people, laser printers not so much.

edit: My point is not "everyone only had dot matrix printers 25 years ago" (even though I did); it was "laser printers were prohibitively expensive (at least for most people) in 1998"

in 1996 the 4L was 400 German Marks already.

Inkjets had made dot matrix printers obsolete in the home earlier in the decade, whether or not you still happened to be using one.

The BJ200 rendered the dot matrix obsolete in 1988.

> Today’s TV set, computer or mobile phone is light-years ahead of one you might have owned 25 years ago.

And 25 years ago Netscape had a print dialog which worked better than today's Firefox print dialogue.

I made a simple app to address the need to print for people that want to avoid owning a printer: https://www.printandmail.app. It does 2 things:

1) Prints something out

2) Mails it to the address of your choice

If you need a printout, just mail to yourself. For government forms, etc. you can pre-fill the PDF and then mail it directly to the recipient, skipping the envelope/stamp/post office part too.

Are you using Lob's API? I'm imagining an alternate reality where instead of SMS verification you receive a postcard with a four digit code.

I am! I made this as an approachable tool for non-eng folks, as Lob's interface is intended for larger volume mailers (direct mail campaigns, etc.).

Sweet! Want to let you know, your rails server seems to be having some internal issues, esp. in the signup flow: https://files.catbox.moe/z6xcrz.png

Thanks! Bug in the email/password creation method, fixing this now. In the meantime, could you try social sign in if it's applicable?

Fixed! Apologies for the issue - email/pw based flow is working now.

> I'm imagining an alternate reality where instead of SMS verification you receive a postcard with a four digit code.

This is actually a thing for certain special cases where address verification is considered particularly important.

That's how I signed up for Nextdoor, a social network based on neighborhoods.

https://archive.is/ZFDMQ

> I know that many of you love your printers

Nobody loves printers; at best they are grudgingly tolerated.

I’m on my second Brother multifunction laser. No complaints, really. It’s fast and didn’t cost much and you can easily use generic toner (though I don’t - the quality is bad).

Printing at a fedex store or whatever is pretty cheap. A lot cheaper than buying and maintaining a printer on a per page basis for most people, I bet.

A cheap way to collect a panel of old and modern day malwares. It's akin to a Petri Dish.

Can't you email them a PDF now?

you can

Are you thinking of the way you'd bring in a thumb drive and plug it into one of their public-use computers? That's old-school now. They still have public computers, but they cost! I just log in to the website, upload a thing, configure options, and then hit "Send" to put in a request for printout.

I own a dell laser office printer. For the last 3 years when I hit print, it prints. Even on a computer that was just re formatted. Or a new Mac. This baby is just plugged into my network, given a static ip, and just hangs out announcing that it can print and scan.

Honestly, it's magic now.

In the past this was a painful setup experience, especially with inkhet printers. Will it print today? No idea.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36734563

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