Comment by mrwizrd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mrwizrd | Hacker News Reader

Unless you're in your 70's, YouTube doesn't allow you to buy premium if you were born on a leap year, because their age calculation is broken, and it thinks you're under 18. Google One works fine. Support will suggest that you change the birthday on your Google account, which breaks account recovery processes that depend on you furnishing matching identity documentation. Mind-boggling.

Because nobody at YouTube has apparently ever encountered this problem, I ended up having my partner buy a family plan. As much as I hate paying so much a month for YouTube of all things, screen-off background play is a paid feature on iPhone, having one of the two accounts on your TV showing ads is absolutely infuriating and I'm not sure I fancy risking an account ban for anything they can associate with someone costing them ad revenue.

So you're paying them to not fix a bug in their system, am I reading that right?

I wouldn't expect google to mess this up but then again someone probably calculated value produced vs project cost and tossed this one at the bottom of the pile 10 times already. 66/100k people (0.066%, close to the definition for a rare disease) would be born on 29th of feb on a uniform distribution, probably minus another 5% or so because february is in many places the least likely month to be born into. And out of those people how many actually put in their real birthday? Still odd to mess up a subtraction though.

Google is now outsourcing development to low cost countries. They dont care about quality much

> As much as I hate paying so much a month for YouTube of all things, screen-off background play is a paid feature on iPhone

I know you're on iPhone which limits your choices but I'll mention this here anyway, could be useful to someone. Firefox has an addon[1] to fix that. It's very simple and basically just disables the events that tells the page you've switched tabs, and for Youtube hits sends a random keyboard event every N seconds.

I've used it for years and it's great. I can't imagine paying Google of all companies for a feature like that.

[1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/video-backgro...

That should be a top comment here as it is most annoying and prevalent bug of all presented in this thread.

Fascinating. I presume you were born on Feb 29 of 2004 or earlier. What did the system do when you tried to purchase? I'm curious how the error manifested. Thanks.

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