alteria

At least one news website threatened to shut my (expensive) paid account because I was using a "generic" email address, and as such, was likely sharing my credentials.

They insisted I change the email to myname@myname.tld, which was enough in their books to prevent credential sharing.

Square acquired Credit Karma's Tax business, probably folding it into CashApp

[1] https://squareup.com/us/en/press/credit-karma-tax

[2] https://www.pymnts.com/news/partnerships-acquisitions/2020/c...

You should be able to block those elements with uBlockOrigin or similar browser extensions. I blocked a bunch of the "trending" stuff since it never really contributed positively to my site experience.

The other comments provided a great overview, but I would really recommend read ProPublica's reporting about them [1]

Some very brief highlights:

- They use dark patterns and other trickery to prevent people from filing for free (the vast majority of Americans can file for free via IRS free-file), instead directing them to the "free" up-sell laden product

- Lobbying against literally anything that would make filing taxes easier or cheaper. It doesn't have to be this way (and it's not in many countries), but it's how they make their money.

[1] https://www.propublica.org/series/the-turbotax-trap

But they also have to live without an office and may not have meaningful stakes to make the tradeoff worth it for most.

Presumably this was an office job? It might be a little different with a warehouse job that has very productivity targets set from above.

I don't know if this is a recent trend, or if I've only experienced negative things in the past year or two, (perhaps in the lead up to their IPO?), but I ended up switching away from them.

They closed my account because they suspected commercial use. If I wanted to re-open it, I would need to send in a picture of my ID, and sign some legal documents attesting to my continued non-commercial use or something.

They might not care about personal users because we don't pay, but I did end up switching to different software for the commercial projects I use remote access software on.

The whole presentation I was wondering how much Verizon paid as well.

Between the pricing reveal and the conflation of their 28GHz deployment as a standard 5G experience, it seemed like it was the iPhone sponsored by Verizon.

Is Spotify on Airplay 1 still?

With Amazon I do like that I talk to real people, but half the time they try to give me money instead of actually trying to solve the problem.

It's great that chat is empowered to send $5 or $10, but oftentimes I just want to have my problem solved.

For sure. Like many younger workers, I didn't move into a ultra-high COL area to spend all day in my shared living arrangement.

There isn't a lot of room to optimize for a WFH world with those kinds of spatial restrictions.

fwiw the Adobe Photography plan requires a 1-year commitment (paid monthly) and has an early termination fee if you do try to cancel, so it's not as straightforward.

Yes, whoops!

Yes. I volunteered at an aquarium for several years, and we spent a surprising amount of time learning octopus etymology. It was a top 10 question for adults to ask.

That's correct. It's a very big difference if you think about it. Under the normal arrangement, a customer has to retain for 12 months before the 15% rate kicks in.

Depending on the product, you could be losing a significant portion of your customer base before then. For example Netflix, known for insanely good retention, loses nearly 40% of customers by month 12. [1]

[1] https://secondmeasure.com/datapoints/netflix-disney-plus-app...

Amazon. It may be true that they A/B test the shit out of things, but it feels super clunky every time.

They did, which was the shocking part! If you believe their claims about profit distributions (which you probably shouldn't), the total cost might even average less than $70/mo.

Funnily enough, I was doing research one day and came across a local ISP co-op in one of the Dakotas that was selling rural, symmetric 1/1 for $70 per month. Much better service at a lower cost than in SF (been trying to get ATT to finish their fiber install for the past 2 months).

Unfortunately I don't remember the name, but you could probably find it on one of the FCC maps.

They must massively oversubscribe their services, far beyond ISPs. The advertising probably brings in a lot of profitable users who aren't pushing tons of BitTorrent traffic as well. With the insanely high affiliate commission they're offering I can't think of another way.

I would add the standard caution when looking at averages, that symmetric 1/1 fiber may be pulling the upload value up significantly. Or that Speedtest users have higher internet speeds.

But I really want that stat to be true. The world of American ISPs is sad and depressing.

And don't forget the middlemen that monetize your de-identified data in exchange for providing the service :)

Totally understandable, but I'd strongly recommend challenging yourself. Of course I'm a little biased having done a CS/humanites major at a liberal arts college but there are so many great reasons that people have listed and I fully agree with them.

Sure there are very compelling professional arguments, but I would argue that the most important reason is that studying humanities can make you a more well-rounded person and give you diverse frameworks to look at the world with. Technology products have great benefits, but also great impacts on the world. Humanities can help you look beyond first-order technical rationale and link to historical, social, or political factors and themes that are relevant.

This is especially true if you, like many (though not all) people that study CS, come from a generally privileged environment.

edit: Also wanted to add that the "read a lot, discuss, write a paper, present the paper" grind can be hard at first, but really breeds good skills. Being able to read a text, synthesize it's meaning, and relate it to broader themes is one great skill. Then showing up to class and actively discussing the material is another great skill. Finally writing and presenting are skills that take a long time to build, but used continually throughout your professional life, both formally and informally.

True, but it also is the case that younger folk/non-devs are more likely to live in smaller spaces with housemates.

Speaking personally, I made some optimizations, but there's only so much that can be done with the fixed amount of space that I share with others.

Interesting take, and it does track with my experience as a data nerd. Also, my first time looking at myself on the leaderboards was throughly depressing

This is pretty disappointing. Recently Strava seemed to be turning the corner, releasing new features that users wanted.

Totally understand their need to make money, seeing that they've raised 5 rounds from VC.

However, burning goodwill like this is super counterproductive. After all, most of my riding is on Zwift, I could also switch to Garmin, etc.

Got it, this makes a ton of sense, and explains why Grubhub was able to do the impossible, make money.

Definitely agree that they're winning (the Second Measure blog is fascinating), it just seems like they bought their way to the top at a very high cost.

DashPass is definitely keeping me a DoorDash user, it's benefits are significantly better than Uber Eats pass, but idk if that's sustainable for DoorDash.

This is absurd. Can someone explain to me why DoorDash exists? They're #1 in share, but I get the impression that they basically bought their spot.

Grubhub has been operating in the space forever, is public, and generally had been profitable until VCs came to town. How is DoorDash doing anything than Grubhub? Wouldn't this capital do better in other investments?

From the outside it seems like they've duped investors into burning hundreds of millions of dollars to hopefully build a monopoly in a structurally iffy market.

Excellent explainer that's worth a read [1] and it's HN thread [2]

tl;dr: Interest, payment for order flow, and securities lending (but mostly interest)

[1] https://www.kalzumeus.com/2019/6/26/how-brokerages-make-mone...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20276551

GrubHub is also public, and therefore has a harder time burning piles of cash compared to its competitors (looking at you, DoorDash).