random5634

Separately, another area where upside / downside risk of providing feedback is no longer good is in feedback to rejected candidates for positions.

Folks have said this can still be done, but our office was burnt by giving feedback, and the person in general likes to argue with it which is already a drain.

So anyways, no more feedback to folks not hired - period! Luckily this applies to all hires, you don't know at the early stage if someone is in a protected class.

Female founder friend (non tech space) was in a female focused incubator / competition. She got only one set of somewhat critical feedback - ie, lacks experience in X and Y which are key in product space Z.

She posted a comment on her social media focusing on this feedback as "criticism" that came from a sexist guy "of course". It was pretty easy to draw the line to the three panelists, one of whom was a guy. Ouch.

In a previous life, I'd worked in a awesome (female led!) product company. While I had no experience prior to this, I quickly realized that the product itself and its quality etc was almost irrelevant to success, the X and Y mentioned by the male panelist was unfortunately everything, which you'd only know if you were in the space itself. The female led company I worked for was bought out by a (male led) competitor, who then using much strong x and y skills - cleaned up. Company I worked for got basically nothing.

Fast forward - my friends business not doing so great, she asks me for feedback. I said nothing other than enthusiasm. Partly because I was really enthusiastic - she'd put her heart into this project. But her comment on social was in my mind - I had no desire to be next sexist guy "shooting down" an idea

She's out of the business I think mostly. Anyways, this parallels the take of the article.

it's been productized for employee theft as well when tied into register systems. Most checkouts probably have that (or many do). Register doesn't balance, find clip of employee taking the $20, train model a bit better for next time. Find some scan fraud - train model off those clips etc.

The problem is in part the anti-nuclear folks don't want the problem to be solved. So you can build a skyscraper 100 feet tall in a high earthquake zone, but you can't build a container. The normal approach (france etc) is to recycle and then vitrify the leftovers and store in a container. You get much shorter half lives, much less waste. So even if it comes out the container, it's still "in" something. Of course, you can build a reasonably secure container as well.

The issue is they regulate so

a) you simply can’t buy them - while other countries tried to get n95s and equivalent to everyone the us blocked sale to reserve them.

B) price cap everything which means things like hand sanitizer can’t be bought through normal channels because retailers can price to deter hoarding or incentivize production because it sells out at capped price right away

Apple is a complete walled garden, and plenty of folks have migrated to their phones for example - they actually want an experience that is very predictable and can be trusted. Apple charges HIGH amounts of money as a result of this level of user trust. I also think users are more likely to spend money inside this garden - I know I do because it's much harder to get screwed there. I'll subscribe to an apple app long before I'd do the same on a random website.

The trick is to do exactly what they tell you not too immediately.

Masks don't protect against covid - jump on Alibaba and buy some.

Don't buy extra toiled paper, there will be no limits on its sale - immediately do a order on amazon prime. Because within a few days there will be price caps on the sale of TP (increased prices would deter hoarding) so everything will sell out right away.

I think people have really learned this by now - as SOON as the announcements come that there is nothing to worry about and they won't do price caps or other things, they will be doing exactly that soon.

Places like Alibaba do seem to continue to function - masks are maybe 50 cents per mask instead of 5, so folks buy a lot less, but you can still get a few for $5. Same with TP, it's not dirt cheap per roll, but you can get a few.

I mostly consumed news stories via google news - so my exposure was relatively narrow

I’m also interested- I consumed primarily on IOS via google news carousal - that icon meant fast and clean

God - if remote code execution exploits are an EU right we are screwed!

It really makes me realize HN is not user focused. You can have tiny code and fly a popover ad into a users face with a 20 second cooldown before the x to close appears. Users HATE this. Pages are ALREADY scored on speed etc. AMP was a subset of HTML that simply removed entire classes of features that hackers and developers abused to shove crap at folks. Honestly, the size difference, request count differences also were FAR higher than I expected on the AMP side as well - which also illustrated that developers left to their own devices will push whatever garbage they can - go to the media sites pushing the anti-google messaging - you are SLAMMED with trackers and crap on their regular sites. Privacy they yell as they track everything with MULTIPLE trackers.

There was a win with the AMP user experience. The fact that it had to come from google is embarrassing.

This debate comes up repeatedly on HN - HN is really not a good spot for it I don't think.

HIGHLY predictable behavior - some users like that. The apple walled garden, the apple billing flow, the AMP subset of HTML etc - all hated here.

Too many users have been burned by developers flying interstitial ads over the content (still happens) with a tiny unhittable x in a corner that comes in 10 seconds later. It's not the size of the content (that was already ranked), it's the absolute crap that hackers and developers shove down users throats.

I get it, you don't see or chose not to see the value in this. But there is value, at least for me and I'm sure many others started learning that the AMP icons meant less crap.

Focus was on a "user first" - NOT developer or hacker first approach.

So a ton of the stuff that HN folks demand (being able to do dynamic third party javacript ads and tracker loads, DOM modification after render - gone - you just are totally blocked.

If you try targeting AMP (or just consuming AMP) you'll pretty quickly get what they are going for.

For example - AMP websites really do not reflow that often (or at all). I've never I don't think had something move when I was going to click it even early in page load.

I've found a lot of complaints about AMP are developed / hacker focused complaints. If you switch your mindset to users, including non-tech types, the value becomes more obvious.

But yet these users never deploy a non-google debloated world.

Billing on line is the same thing. Unless you are on a trusted site (Amazon / Apple) you can just get hosed trying to cancel subscriptions with jack up pricing etc.

Same thing with spam - at some point users stopped trusting the hackers and developers and migrated to more controlled worlds (ie, gmail etc) which blocks HUGE quantities of the junk.

I just wish hackers spent some time trying to make users experience and lives better rather than the constant push to spam them (EFF wanted to pass laws banning anti-spam measures), now AMP (which was amazing) is being attacked endlessly and the list goes on.

Google has a commercial reason for pushing this stuff - the web was turning into a trash bit (flyover ads with audio etc etc).

Same - despite all the hate I liked AMP.

Hackers / developers seem to insist on the non-AMP sites to bloat sites to absolute trash and back. If I saw the amp logo, I knew that was the one to click.

Abusing users with bloat is supposedly some great freedom worth fighting for, but AMP forcing these developers into a much smaller box that they can't screw with users as much on I just loved AMP.

I think a lot of the HN hate comes because AMP I think prohibits random third party javascript ad libraries. So obviously it hits folks where it hurts, but the web is much nicer to browse without all the junk.

This is interesting - normally AMP is great and I'm (generally) a fan of it. But somehow they messed up AMP here - I've not seen that before. The AMP page is really poor (third party blocking, time to paint, even JANK is here - shift after load).

The non AMP page is 1.4MB and 45 requests, the AMP page is 400KB and 16 requests - normally this means AMP just blows everything out of the water (despite HN hate). Something is messed up here that AMP is so poor, initial server response is terrible.

I was only partly joking about extensions. Definitely disable them all for this testing.

Interesting. I did some work overseas in out of the way places - did supernodes used to be potentially very close to you if you had your own network that was limited back to larger internet?

Agreed - Teams is good enough, but a bit laggy and things like backgrounds lagged for users WFH.

Huh? If everything but one browser works, the suggestion will be to avoid using that browser unless you can show the expensive equip is doing something wrong.

So firefox doing nothing more than a connection reset message does not help at all.

A trouble ticket that says chrome works, wget works, curl works, IE works, but my firefox browser with 10 privacy plugins does not work - is NOT going to get a good response from you support contact.

God - skype went to hell - absolute garbage new interface etc. It's something maybe with their tech stack that does not handle realtime audio etc and then on design side it's all non-usable social network type stuff?

I honestly could not believe how badly they trashed skype - instead of it becoming WhatsApp it just imploded at least for my use case.

I use teams, while confusing it seems miles better than previous effort (zoom still by far the best for video).

Actually, I just went to it and it's much clearer and better than it was. It is a year for me now.

That said, here is a recent BBB complaint. When I cancelled 2 years ago it was worse (no option to chat, you had to call and they left you on hold).

--- Complaint Type: Billing/Collection Issues

02/16/2021

I am nearing the end of a promotional offer from the NYTimes which offered a 1 year digital subscription for $4/month. I don't plan to continue a subscription at the full price and logged into my account to cancel my subscription. Within my online profile, there is no button labeled "cancel my subscription" or any similar option. I am only given the options to change my email or password, or update my card. This seems like a serious abuse to me a customer to decide whether or not I want to pay for the service. I have now been chatting with an agent for 15 minutes and still haven't been given an option to cancel my account. As of right now, I've been chatting long enough with a representative to fill out this BBB complaint and still haven't had anyone help me close my account. I have screenshots of my entire conversation with the agent if that's helpful.

https://www.bbb.org/us/ny/new-york/profile/publishers-period...

----

It's not that every fly by night website does this (NY Times is not exactly fly by night), but enough do that people really hesitate to sign up outside of the more trusted Apple walled garden - I know I do because I don't have time for this.

MyHeritage was even worse though, surprised there are not more lawsuits, they somehow found out my NEW card number after I cancelled my card to avoid them.

So while Apple is allowed to run their store their way without the scammers getting into the mix, I'll keep giving them my money happily. That said, HN devs and these types of companies all hate it I'm sure (not realizing that this is why apple phone users spend so much more - the well hasn't been poisoned by their stupidity)

I know about this - it’s actually worse and very serious if you underspend.

Almost all the higher ups are paid out of budgets based on how much you spend- so the supervising agency gets their 15 percent admin fee, your managers are part of the indirect cost pool etc.

If you spend 50% of budget it is game over upstairs. And you lose the money at year end, and future allocation is dropped. And all the budgets in long chain up get messed up. Almost nothing gets more attention and priority than this.

Ya - if you look at list of complainers - folks running loot boxes, lock in uncancelable subscriptions etc, crazy privacy violators (Facebook). there is so much money in this though I don’t see how they don’t get political folks to force apples hand - joined by a surprising number of HN devs - the focus on what is best for user is long gone

Which ends up doing almost nothing in terms of actual tracking.

No kidding. The first sign is how intrusive it all is. The second sign is how ineffective it is at anything web / crime related people actually care about (normal people).

On HN it's like - go ahead and let me cable company and cell phone company track / sell and target me on my browsing history (wildly intrusive), but random website doing pet necklaces, try to stay on top of all the popups you need to shove at your users (who will all say OK) so you can show your page.

If you can't share the data you buy up the other companies into groups and then are just using it "yourself" etc.

Google is facing a 5B lawsuit over incongnito mode. The fact that someone goes overboard with this crap is not unreasonable.

Apple has focused pretty heavily on the user experience, developers be damned.

I know this is not popular on HN (ie, anti-trust claims to allow devs to abuse users the way they can elsewhere).

They haven't been stupid / annoying about it. You contrast their controls with those outside ios.

The russian site I visit with the cookie notice, they can still track me and what am I going to do about it? So the cookie notice is both annoying an ineffective against bad actors. On iOS, I decline a permission, and it's done.

This is one of the major features yes. On iOS apps are totally prohibited from their own payment flows in app / on platform - it's completely banned.

This is extremely noticeable in a couple of areas.

Subscription - you get an email from apple BEFORE renewal, and can easily cancel subscriptions - all located in one place - no phone calls or other stupidity (try cancelling a myheritage account by contrast!)

They have integrated monitoring so if you delete an app, it will ask if you also want to cancel out the subscription for the app.

The prompting for purchase and trials is VERY explicit. So for example, NY Times has a banner (not on ios) saying signup for $1/week. Great, you do it. Then you find out that in a month it switches to something like $15/month- I mean, the scams and tricks are endless off app store.

Especially with elderly relatives or younger folks or just folks who don't want to be hassled with this game playing, these features are what make using apple so nice and help drive the premium users are willing to pay (which can be ridiculous!).

One tip - if you have elderly folks, scan their bank statement / cc statement 1x per year, you usually can save them thousands on auto-renewing stuff they no longer use.

Seriously, imagine the compute and requests costs to assemble a large git pull.