bogidon
Joined 12 years ago
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581
Submissions
139
Member since
Jun 5
[email protected]
View on Hacker NewsRecent submissions
Comment · 3 years ago
Chiming in with something I've posted in the past that I've found reduced about 80% of this spam mail and only takes 10 minutes to set up: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31070730
Comment · 4 years ago
Comment · 4 years ago
For sure. Except I don't think this site provides "official interaction with US government stuff". My expectation is that the government was involved only to create the regulation and the implementation was left to the credit bureaus. Which of course are incentivized to make the conversion rate of this site as low as possibly. So offputtingly sketchy is probably a good thing for them.
Comment · 4 years ago
In my experience lots of unwanted mail comes from credit card offers, insurance, etc. Turns out that unless you have an account with them, all these financial service companies get their prospective mailing data through the credit bureaus. However there is a 2003 law that required the bureaus to create an opt out mechanism, which is available here: https://www.optoutprescreen.com/
Doing this has cut out 99% of my spam paper mail for the last year. Would highly recommend for sanity and as an easy way to cut down some on environmental impact. You can opt out for up to 5 years through the website or permanently by writing a paper letter. I did the latter through one of the "you write digitally, we'll send physical letter" services you can find on google and it's been great.
Comment · 4 years ago
I just spent two months apartment searching in NYC. I talked to many brokers but not one was interested in actively searching on my behalf. The market is incredibly disadvantageous to renters right now. Maybe parent is sharing experience from a different time or has broker connections I did not.
As an aside I also tried to automate my apartment hunt. The main thing that matters in NYC is time to respond. Unfortunately Zillow, StreetEasy, etc are not very easy to automate on the messaging side due to bot countermeasures. It was an incredibly time consuming, manual process. Happily found a great place though.
Comment · 4 years ago
Oh that’s awesome. Thanks for sharing.
Comment · 4 years ago
I have a poor understanding of electrical engineering so I am not sure this would actually work. But I've wondered if one could make a fairly cheap gadget for turning a decent USB-PD supply into a somewhat useful hobbyist variable voltage DC power supply.
Especially with USB-PD 3.1 which has an adjustable voltage supply mode [1] so you are not constrained to only a handful of power profiles. I think in theory you could offer 5V, 9V, and 15-48V.
It would be cool because it would be much easier to carry (keep in your backpack) and I imagine cheaper than a benchtop power supply so long as you have access to a capable USB-C charger. But I'm not sure what you'd be missing out on versus a proper benchtop.
Comment · 4 years ago
I still have an iPhone for now (am waiting for mobile Linux to become just a little more mature) but I’ve turned off iMessage. When I get asked about how I can be reached by IM I tell people they can find me on Signal.
Been doing this for about two years and now ~80% of my personal conversations are over Signal. And most of these friends are not very technical.
I love my little successful rebellion against the walled garden. And it will make my eventual transition away from iOS much easier.
Just a somewhat related personal anecdote, sorry to deviate a bit from topic.
EDIT: Yes, Signal is centralized and I would have loved to use Matrix. But the clients are bad. Email me if you want to build a better one
Comment · 5 years ago
Big plus one. In order to encourage (what I strongly believe to be much needed) experimentation with personal messaging we have to break away from having each. new. client. establish it's own network. Otherwise competition in this field will always be limited. Matrix I believe is currently the most promising answer to this problem.