chaz

Apple is such a massive company, it's easy to forget that each of these variations sells millions of units to customers who want that one product.

For example, many pilots have an iPad Mini for maps and charts. In a cramped cockpit, the regular iPad is too big. With much faster graphics and support for Pencil 2 it's a big upgrade, so I fully expect this to be the #1 choice for that crowd.

I would encourage you to try it out. The expectation on the other side is extremely low -- no one expects a conversation or honestly more than a two-word pleasantry. And the camera defaults to the back camera, so no one sees anyone's face.

My last call:

  Me: "Hello?"
  Them: "Hi. Can you tell me which can is soup?"
  Me: "Can I see the other one?"
  Them: "This one?"
  Me: "That's cream of tomato."
  Them: "Thank you."
  Me: "You're welcome."

I toured the main FedEx hub in Memphis several years ago. They have many buildings that sort packages on high-speed machinery.

In one building, there was a long line of parcel trays, each carrying a single item. The trays would move fast down the line and, at just the right moment, tip the parcel out and into a bin below, each for a different flight. Because of the tray's speed (and the trays don't stop), the tipping needed to start well before it was over the bin, at a precisely calibrated time. A video of these machines is here, at 1m 45s: https://youtu.be/xytmh6t3Grk?t=105

It was one of the few sorting buildings that was air conditioned in the hot Memphis summers, and not for the humans. The humidity affected how quickly the parcels slipped off of the tray, and they might end up in the wrong bin.

Dozens of times per day. It's on my bookmark bar, and I click it routinely: https://www.amazon.com/afx/slotselection/

Even worse, the US Surgeon General claimed that masks are "NOT effective" for the general public. https://twitter.com/Surgeon_General/status/12337257852839321...

> Give them money, while the company is apparently still going to worry about milking advertising dollars out of me?

Does Zoom have ads? I haven't seen any. I believe all of the ad tracking is for the reverse: Zoom wants to see if their own advertising is effective. For example, if they buy an ad on Facebook that you saw and then you install the app, they can attribute the install to that ad and measure ROI.

These are the same kinds of assumptions that lead engineers to think they can build a [any product] clone in a weekend. It's unlikely that the problem or constraints are nearly as simple as one may think.

Consider: single auth across all the state's services, external APIs, identity verification, address verification, employer ID verification, federal/military ID verification, income/tax verification, phone verification, bank account information, translation into multiple languages, accessibility features, etc. Also, there's probably a lot of legacy infrastructure and process.

Also, if "ability to burst to 10x normal filings per week that might happen once every 40 years" wasn't in the spec, I think they were right not to engineer for it.

> culture of litigation in the US

"Sixteen countries have shut schools nationwide, impacting almost 363.1 million children and youth. A further sixteen countries have implemented localized school closures to prevent or contain the spread of COVID-19."

https://en.unesco.org/themes/education-emergencies/coronavir...

People aren't searching for the service -- they're searching for the content. It's a very long tail of keywords that brands have used across millions of emails.

There are hundreds of guides out there -- Google for the one that works for you. Though, I don't think you'll find anything that pays per click -- usually they pay on conversion (someone clicks and then buys). Google AdSense might work better for you.

It really depends on the brand and the type of email that you're sending (new product, content, abandoned cart, etc), and each email marketer needs to test for themselves. I've seen more textual emails work well when it's a welcome letter from the CEO or founder, but it's not a rule.

Broadly speaking, ecommerce is still a very visual experience at every step. It's really rare for me to see emails without images.

It's a bit all over the place. ELB -> EC2 -> RDS Postgres. S3 for the storage of the emails and images, CDN'd by BunnyCDN. Hetzner for background job servers. Digital Ocean to run headless Chrome (browserless.io) on Kubernetes. Will consolidate a bit next year.

Drop me an email: [hn username]@milled.com

Yup, good idea -- just a link + landing page to see what inbound queries come in. Will explore it! Thanks.

Thanks for relaying that -- really appreciate it! Marketers, designers, and copywriters are definitely frequent users of Milled, so I'm building some new features for them in the coming months. If she has any ideas or requests, please let her know that she can email me any time: [my hn username]@milled.com

Great ideas -- thanks! A couple of people have suggested similar, though selling to hedge funds.

Right now, I think the greatest growth is still from adding more brands and making them more accessible (improving search and navigation), to yield more traffic. Spinning up a new product and sales channel might be a distraction, but definitely worth thinking about as the site grows.

The site was built from day 1 with SEO as the primary user acquisition channel. So most of the engineering effort has been to ensure that the images are saved, all of the text is preserved, and all links are crawled to their final landing page. The last one has been especially challenging, with all kinds of tracking links, blocked crawlers, and bad HTML -- all while trying to avoid click on any unsubscribe link.

I use Skimlinks for monetization. I could rewrite the links, but for now I am just using their drop-in JS script that rewrites any monetizable links automatically. Very easy (though they take a decent cut).

The vast majority of brands have no problem with what the site does, and use the site frequently for their own purposes. A handful have asked for the emails to be taken down, usually because they send discount codes that they only want to distribute to their direct mailing list.

Thanks -- will fix on next deploy! That typo has been there for ... 2.5 years. Appreciate the fresh eyes!

I asked around a little bit, but generally just built it. My hedge, though, was to time-box dev to a few weeks and then show it to more people for feedback before spending additional dev time.

I didn't. Instead, I manually subscribed to hundreds of newsletters myself to get started. Eventually thousands. It wasn't until 4 years in that I added the ability for brands to add themselves. Prior to that, they could only request to be added via an email form.

The thing keeping me sane was a lot of work on backend tools to streamline the process. A ranked queue of brands that I had sourced from various places, and automatically-generated email addresses.

I was running email marketing for a brand, and I noticed two things: 1) we spent several days to create each email blast, but the traffic / revenue impact was over in < 24 hours, and 2) I subscribed to dozens of competitor emails for research and I was tired of them.

My hypothesis was that a site that could collect them would be useful, and that it could help extend the lifetime of an email's content effort.

Hey, I built this! Solo founder and profitable. Stack is primarily Amazon SES + Rails, and affiliate monetized. Happy to answer any questions.

I understand why one might expect r/The_Donald and r/ChapoTrapHouse to have similar results, since they're both politically extreme subreddits. But after having worked in SEO for a pretty long time, I can't conclude that Googlebot is evaluating political affiliation with n=2 examples on n=1 sites. Instead, incoming links quality/quantity, popularity, competition, newsworthiness, age, and dozens of other ordinary differences between these pages and queries are usually the reason. Even the underscore in The_Donald likely matters.

It can get pretty frustrating to rank #1 or #2 for a query, and not rank at all for a slightly different, higher-traffic query, like using the plural, a hyphen, different capitalization, or an article.

r/The_Donald is "quarantined" by Reddit, which means you get a gateway page if you visit for the first time, asking if you really want to visit it (try an incognito window). In the HTML, you'll see that there's a "noindex" metatag that Reddit is instructing Google not to index it.

Also, np.reddit.com seems to be excluded from all search engines: https://np.reddit.com/robots.txt.

I'm not sure why Bing is ignoring both the robots.txt and the "noindex" metatag.

That's only useful if all of the photos that I want to search are already on my iPhone. I can't search from a different device, and I can't search the hundreds of GB of photos from years ago because they don't fit.

> When companies like Google say they have to have a copy of your pictures, they are lying.

Did Google actually say that? I think they just built a product with different trade-offs than Apple Photos.

I think the reminder is just that backups are necessary, and cloud isn't a required condition. I had a bare-metal host turn off my server because they were concerned I was violating the trademark of a big company with what I was serving. That big company was my client and I had permission, but the host shot first and asked questions later (actually, I had to call them when I saw the site went down).

> But why the F... would my bank want to notify FB that I am using their app?

Probably for ads: either measuring ad conversions, or building ad targeting/exclusion buckets. For example, your bank can exclude your devices from their FB ads because FB already knows you have their app and presumably a customer.