Hacker News Reader

52358on Ask HN: What are you working on? (September 2026)

an adhd focused todo/kanban web app

52358on The FTC wants to ban tough-to-cancel subscriptions

I still have a membership to Planet Fitness from 5 years ago that charges to my account every month

while I had no problem signing up online, you can only cancel your membership in person at your "home" location, or by sending them a certified mail letter formally request cancellation (which I have tried and failed apparently because I never heard back)

I now live on the other side of the country, so it feels ridiculous to spend money on a flight ticket just to cancel a gym membership

worse, Planet Fitness requires you provide bank account/routing number for payment, so there is no way to cancel payment unless I switch bank accounts

52358on Meta’s Adversarial Threat Report, Third Quarter 2022

or US adversaries (ie Russia, China, Iran, etc) are not as active on FB properties

for example, there may be more US campaigns targeting WeChat or Telegram or VK

52358on 12,000 Facebook employees, 15% of its workforce, may lose jobs amid quiet layoff

content reviewers are not employees, they are contractors through third party companies like Accenture, so likely not included in the 83K employee number

52358on The 1857 Utah War

"all career advancement and social status is dependent on your position with the church" -- this is bullshit, at least in my experience.

I lived there 2012-2017, never had an issue with dating/making friends/getting promotions at work. There were of course many women that would only date mormon men, but the non-mormon population was big enough that I didn't think about it much.

I worked for multiple tech companies there, had plenty of non-mormon co-workers (and bosses!), and while people did talk about mormon things sometimes in social settings, it was never pushed on me, nor did anyone make a big deal that I wasn't mormon.

I should mention I lived in downtown SLC, which is arguably more liberal/secular, and I worked for companies both in and outside the city.

52358on Oncall Compensation for Software Engineers

Meta is the same, it can suck. I was on a team that got down to 4 eng once and everyone was oncall for a week each month.

52358on Facebook’s Retirement Plan

yes, she was just a product manager

52358on Snapchat’s product is booming

Apple does not allow adult content on the app store. For example, OnlyFans does not have an iOS app as a result. If Snap were to openly embrace adult content, they could risk getting booted from the app store.

52358on Snapchat’s product is booming

Some other things to mention: the premium content is almost exclusively in the form of stories, which disappear after 24 hours of course. Sometimes creators offer extra services at an additional fee or if you buy a lifetime membership or whatnot (duck/face rates, custom photos/videos, phone calls, etc), all of which go through the Snap app. Some even have a menu which they re-post on their stories daily ($20 for a custom 3 minute video, $10 for a 5 minute phone call, etc, etc). Sometimes these are also sold as "packages". Photo/video archives in the form of links to folders on mega.nz and similar websites are other assets commonly sold this way.

52358on Snapchat’s product is booming

I wonder how many people here are aware of Snapchat's thriving underground OnlyFans-like ecosystem. I also wonder how much of that is driving Snap's user metrics.

As far back as 2014, I remember there being a huge ecosystem of "premium" snaps (sometimes known as "prem(ium) girls"), whereby you would pay the account owner a one time or recurring fee for access to a "premium" snapchat account where the owner posts nudes/etc, essentially OnlyFans-like content. Owner would typically accept payment through any number of ways (paypal/cashapp being most common), and "customer" would provide proof of payment by sending screenshot of receipt that the owner then confirms.

The premium account owner would also typically have a free/open account where they would post free content / teasers/etc, essentially marketing/advertising for their premium account. They would sometimes also market their account on Twitter and Reddit and especially Tinder (and one less popular app by the name of Whisper), much like OnlyFans content creators do today.

As far as I know, this preceded the popularity of OnlyFans and remains a popular use case for Snapchat. I don't use Snapchat much myself nowadays, but I used to be a customer of many of these premium snaps years ago. When I do log in once in a while, many of these accounts are still active, though some are also advertising their OnlyFans.

I think Snap officially bans this practice, but by nature these accounts are private and the owner adds users on a one by one basis, so I don't imagine they get reported a whole lot.

The fact that the content is ephemeral surely helps and is probably one of the main reasons the content creators choose Snap as their platform. Snap also tells you when users screenshot your content, which would often result in getting banned from the premium Snap. Unlike OnlyFans, which cannot get in the AppStore and is relegated to being web-only, Snapchat is mobile-only, making it harder for users to download the content, which is another appeal for these "premium" content creators.

52358on Anonymous takes down websites of Defense Ministry, RT and Kremlin

that's cute and all, but I don't think the invading forces get their orders from the defense ministry website

how does this change anything? feels more symbolic than anything

52358on Overstock Has Had a Wild Week

I did a software engineering internship at Overstock circa 2013-2014, and have a couple interesting stories myself.

However while an intern there I heard a story that Patrick Byrne locked a team of engineers in a room and didn't let them out until they implemented bitcoin payments into Overstock. Do you happen to know if this story is true? I remember at the time that made Overstock one of the first bigger mainstream websites to support Bitcoin.

52358on Meeting online has become the most popular way U.S. couples connect: study

it will be interesting to see what happens once facebook dating goes live, since that's sort of meeting people online through friends

52358on Long-Form Question Answering

did you bother to read the article? It's in the very first line "To help advance question answering (QA) and create smarter assistants" -- aka messenger bots / AI assistants / etc

52358on Spotify in Talks to Buy Gimlet Media

I think they have already? https://open.spotify.com/playlist/37i9dQZF1DWTUm9HjVUKnL

52358on Facebook open-sources a speech-recognition system and a machine learning library

isn't Portal supposed to have it's own voice assistant, Aloha or whatnot?

52358on Facebook open-sources a speech-recognition system and a machine learning library

you're forgetting about Facebook Watch, which allows pages to monetize their videos through an ads program just like youtube

52358on Ask HN: ShirtJS order problems: troubling silence

I have successfully purchased 2 shirts from them at the beginning of March and it did take until April for them to arrive, being only 2 states away from them. I had a very hard time getting any response from their custom support until right before the shirts arrived.

I did order 2 more shirts at the beginning of April and have yet to see those yet..and custom support is gone again.