Your online order has been delivered and it’s teeny tiny | Hacker News Reader

Your online order has been delivered and it’s teeny tiny

wsj.com

59 pointszdw50 comments

I work at a mass-customization company. We have an online designer and show you a preview of what you’ll get that you have to initial saying you approve the design.

From time to time, someone will assume there’s a graphic artist manually creating the products and will hand-write a description of what they want, scan or snap a picture of it, upload it, and approve the preview.

Because of the heavy automation, they’re likely to get 250 business card sized pieces of paper with their description of their business card on it.

Is it possible to automatically detect this has happened and help these poor humans? Why isn't this a thing?

Your company needs a good PM. Sigh.

We have CV/AI review that tries to catch this, of course.

No automated system is perfect, in particular because people buy business-card sized pieces of paper with all kinds of designs on them, including some pencil or pen drawings or hand-written “thanks for buying my Etsy/Ebay thing!”

I guess a great big modal box with a 3d render of a box of cards showing one with a clear image of what they will get, and a big “I approve this, send to print device now” button may help?

There is a step in the flow called "Design Review" that has an image of a person's fingers holding the card. People click through it anyway.

If you already have the mental model of "this is obviously not really what they're going to make; this step is just in my way", that mental model isn't always shattered by seeing a preview.

https://imgur.com/1N7jqx9

Time to plug in DALL-E!

Another “favorite” of mine is where they list nice looking t-shirts and bedsheets on Amazon, but when you look at the remaining pictures you will see that you are not getting the fancy item. Instead you are getting a plain white item with a picture of the fancy version printed on it.

For example, a white T-shirt with a picture of another T-shirt printed on its chest. Or a white bedsheet with a picture of a fancy bedsheet printed on it.

Those are bot-generated rips of real content.

I sold custom designed tshirts for around 10 years using a popular online merch site. I made every single design myself from scratch, putting hours of effort into each design. It made me a few hundred dollars a month pocket money.

Bots started stealing the more popular designs by taking the preview photo (a photo of a person wearing my tshirt), showing that photo in their store, then sending people a cheap tshirt with the entire photo on it.

A T-shirt with a photo of a person wearing my T-shirt.

It was hilarious until they started doing copyright takedowns on my own designs, linking their site as the source, and had my entire account banned and all remaining sales money held.

Of course support doesn’t exist these days so 10 years down the drain.

> they started doing copyright takedowns on my own designs, linking their site as the source, and had my entire account banned and all remaining sales money held

Sorry to hear that :(

> For example, a white T-shirt with a picture of another T-shirt printed on its chest

That's hilarious, I'd love to have one like that

Reminds me of the “Xbox box” problem experienced on eBay when trying to buy the Xbox 360. People were getting away with it because the listing was explicit that this was just the box that the console came in.

I saw at least one example of some youtuber doing this with ps5 to fsck with automated scalpers on ebay. I forgot the exact details, but if the retail price was $399 (or whatever), he put an ebay ad for "Literally just a piece of paper with an image of a PS5 playstation 5 new box printed on" (so no human buyer would get confused), set the price to $450 or something like that, and sold probably 10 of those.

P-P-P-Powerbook... https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/p-p-p-powerbook (2004)

the meme has evolved since I saw it last generation... might have peaked at "one xbox one x box" though

https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2F9...

edit: replaced reddit post with reddit/media. Not sure if it's better but more direct at least.

The sneaker auction sites are notorious for this stuff, it is all too common for people to post “size 11 men’s” sneakers for what seems like a good price, and when you get them you find out it was toddler sizing, not adult.

This is why shoe sizes should simply be in centimeters. A scam like this would be impossible in Japan.

So, what's the story here? People don't read the listings close enough and accidentally buy miniature items? All the examples listed had accurate dimensions in the listings and didn't seem deceptive. They were also useful items if, for example, you do want to hang up very small clothes which some people do.

Caveat emptor.

Sometimes they aren't featured prominently enough, especially for the cases that you wouldn't even think that you'd have to check (e.g. a doll-sized object that doesn't mention it in the title).

You can give a bit of charity to people.

I use and like the Logitech M187 mouse. I bought my first one in my brick-and-mortar store. Now on the second one.

Some reviewers stupidly give it low stars because they ordered it online and thought it was regular size! The word "Mini" isn't enough to tip off everyone.

One thing that is not obvious about this mouse is that it has inherently faster speed: more pixels per inch. It's perfect for working in tight places where you have little table space.

I mean, if you do an A/B test with another mouse with the same computer, and same computer-side mouse settings, you get more cursor movement per wrist movement with the m187. 2K pixels horizontally in the space of about an inch-something.

> One thing that is not obvious about this mouse is that it has inherently faster speed: more pixels per inch.

> I mean, if you do an A/B test with another mouse with the same computer, and same computer-side mouse settings, you get more cursor movement per wrist movement with the m187.

That's just a bug in the mouse. Certainly nothing "inherent". You should be getting the mouse sensitivity you configure, not that plus a discretionary boost from the mouse.

...these go to 11.

I already have the host-side cursor speed pegged at maximum. I'm getting exactly the speed I want; other mice don't deliver it.

With my wrist resting on the table in one place, just by jiggling the critter between my thumb and ring finger, I can make the cursor jump from one edge of the screen to the other.

You never have to move your hand!

Yet it still has the precision to do pixel positioning in graphics work. (Well, not really; the OS's precision enhancements do that.)

A similar phenomenon happens with Instacart deliveries.

Shoppers will often mysteriously substitute an item with the tiniest one available in the store. Most likely this is to lessen the load associated with delivering the item.

I once ordered a child-size bicycle for my adult self not because of duplicitous marketing but bc I didn’t take the time to read up on how mike measurements are made.

I think that the problem may have been that there was a Stonehenge monument on the stage that was in danger of being crushed by a dwarf.

I'm confused about the effort. Why ship tiny hangers versus a brick? Do the miniatures help them in a dispute? Or are they counting on it being so hilariously stupid that the recipient keeps them for entertainment?

Disclaimer: I can't read the article. But this is my understanding of this particular scam:

It's not that they advertised normal hangers and sent small hangers. Technically, they advertised small hangers. You can't tell that from the photos (no size reference) so most people just assume that they're selling big hangers. They design the listing as misleadingly as possible, so that you have to read very very carefully to catch it.

If they just shipped a brick then they've committed fraud. If they ship a product that's technically exactly as described, then in a sense it's the buyer's "fault" for not being more careful about what they were buying. Many buyers will even blame themselves once they realize and not issue a dispute.

Surely there's a practical concept of "fit for purpose" here? At least in some parts of the law, there's a standard of what a reasonable person expects from a statement, like presenting a hanger or Xbox. A teeny hanger or an Xbox box are not fit for the standard purpose so there is clearly still a scam even if dressed up a little.

> It's not that they advertised normal hangers and sent small hangers. Technically, they advertised small hangers. You can't tell that from the photos (no size reference)

Did you look at the photo in the article? You can easily tell that they're tiny hangers. If those were normally-sized hangers, the hooks would be something like 5 inches in diameter.

>If they ship a product that's technically exactly as described, then in a sense it's the buyer's "fault" for not being more careful about what they were buying.

It's probably still fraud. If it seems dishonest to the average person, it will probably seem dishonest to the average judge. The law is more sensible than most people think.

I'm not a lawyer. I've just sued a few people.

> * It's probably still fraud. If it seems dishonest to the average perso*

Nothing was hidden! There was no deceit! If I say I’ll take your money if you let me, and you let me, you were not defrauded. You may have been taken advantage of. But it’s not fraud. (Also, they now have your money. To pay lawyers with.)

Shipping a brick gets their account terminated. Shipping miniatures means when there is a dispute or refund attempt "You didn't read the item description. We had the item specs in their showing the item size, not our fault." I don't know about other market places but this has been a scam on eBay for decades.

I've used Aliexpress for 5 years and never got scamed. Yes, Alu has issued, but What i read gere is ridiculous

Why do trucking companies put "not responsible for thrown rocks" on the back of their trucks?

The trick doesn't have to hold up in court. It doesn't even have to hold up in the website's fake court. It just needs to convince the victim not to bother fighting.

I get Spinal Tap vibes from this.

obligatory -- https://archive.ph/8aSpT

This is hilarious. Reminds me of the "your graphic here" so called "custom" t-shirts on amazon that will be delivered with the words "your graphic here" printed on them, and somehow have 5 stars

I cannot get past the captcha loop. Is that typical?

They're blocking tons of people.

Those links rarely ever work on my iPhone, but Internet Archive links always do

Iirc, it has to due with their infrastructure and DNS queries. The short of it, as I understand it, is they try connect you to instances far away from your geo location because it gives them a longer time to process legal takedown requests. So some DNS do something that conflicts with this, and so they serve up the infinite captcha instead. I have this problem if I use cloudflare for domain name resolution, but it goes away if I use something else (like Google, my ISP, etc).

Edit: found it, cloudflare truncates edns, which is why archive sandbags requests that are boot strapped with a cloudflare dns lookup:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36970702

I think it is affecting more than just cloudflare users. Also, we should be, imo, pointing fingers at archive and not cloudflare because they strip the edns for privacy reasons. Archive's response is just that they don't store that, which isn't a great excuse. And I think this gets worse with encrypted DNS, which should be fucking standard these days. My reading of it felt like the classic dev move of "that's not my problem, that's other people's problem" (https://imgflip.com/i/8559hq)

> I think it is affecting more than just cloudflare users.

It is absolutely hitting more the Cloudflare users.

It's not that old edns issue (tho might it be tangentially related).

Yeah I think people think it is just cloudflare and so they get blamed when it is archive pulling some fuckery. I mean I get that it's a small team (or just one dude?) but still it is annoying when devs are like "rtfm" (in spirit) but there actually isn't a fm to read... It's why I don't open issues on GitHub...

P.S got a typo there? the -> than?

It's hitting tons of people. ref:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38141513

tl;dr It's not (just) Cloudflare. Lots of (all?) DNS providers are giving out IP addresses that send users to unskippable captcha pages. The DNS providers get those IPs from Archive's own NS. So Archive is the real source.

It depends on where you are in the world. I get Captcha IPs from Quad9 (9.9.9.9) if I query from FL,US - and good IPs if I query Quad9 from Romania.

As of today, these IPs are good:

  5.188.6.118
  23.184.48.154
  94.140.114.194
  178.17.174.208
  179.43.151.41

domains:

  archive.today
  archive.ph
  archive.is
  archive.li
  archive.vn
  archive.fo
  archive.md

No promises about tomorrow or even an hour from now.

They block iCloud Private Relay users. Might be catching you.

Honestly it should be common knowledge to always read the description/product specs before ordering products online.

If the miniature-ness isn't mentioned it qualifies as a scam, but if it's actually mentioned this is just a story of careless people being punished for their carelessness.

This is one-sided and unrealistic. There is a lot of information in a typical listing (including a lot of nonsense), and I absolutely promise you have bought things without reading all of it. Some information should be at least in the title, some at least in the first sentence of the description, some at least in the image, etc. Point being, it's all subjective, and sellers can and do exploit this.

There's no need to exclusively blame buyers as a blanket statement in all cases where the missed information is somewhere in the listing. It's uncharitable and unreasonable. Importantly, it's also the attitude taken by shrewd consumer-harming businesses in under-regulated spaces.

It's not about blaming, that was not my intention. I agree with you in principle, in an ideal world reading the description carefully shouldn't be necessary, but as we don't live in that world, and as you said sellers do exploit that, reading the description is shrewd to avoid surprises.

Well, the description often doesn’t entirely include the dimensions but you can figure it out on the “shipment details”

An personal anecdote. I was looking through Amazon for some sculptures and there were many mythic figurines. While most ads showed the figurines in context(next to a book, desk lamp, smartphone etc), some simply included 3D photos of the figurine on neutral background and priced very high.

I saw one particular figurine priced at € 89.99/- with lots of good reviews(also photographs in neutral background with nothing else for context from “verified customer”) and detail quality and assumed that it has to be big, that is a lot of money as other ones with pictures in context were much lower or 2/3rd of that price.

The description was all about history, build material and beauty of the producr. So I happily order it without much thought.

In few days, a tiny children’s thumb sized figurine arrives in my mailbox. When I got in contact with the vendor, they cited that the dimensions are clearly on the shipment details and they refused to process a return unless it is a defect product. While I could have contacted Amazon directly, I decided to keep the figurine anyways on my desk as a reminder to myself about being careful when shopping online. These days, if I see something on neutral background with evasive details, I just avoid the product entirely.

(For those curious, the same figurine is available on AliExpress and Temu in price range of €5-€12)

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