Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | Galaco's commentslogin

If you pause your subscription, Claude.ai breaks. I paused my subscription, and my account immediately transitioned to free. It has removed my invoice history, and attempts to upgrade again fail with an internal error. Their chatbot is telling me to navigate to UI elements that don't exist, and free users do not have the option of human support.

So I'm stuck; my sub is paused, and I cannot either cancel, or unpause and cannot speak to a human to solve this because the pause process took away all possibility of human interaction.

This is the future we live in.


Did you use Google Play to pause subscription? Because Claude Pro says there is no pause subscription except on Google Play and then goes on to explain your problem if that's the case.


Thanks for the info, but I did pause this, not through Google Play, it was via the UI. I received an automated email from them that my subscription had been paused as I expected and will resume in 1 month unless I cancel (I can’t cancel because the cancel UI doesn’t exist in whatever status my account is somehow in).

It’s funny that Claude Pro says this isn’t a feature, because their chatbot gave me instructions on how to unpause via the UI (although said UI does not exist) so the bot seems to know it’s a feature.


I feel like we're just renting our digital lives.


You are.

It’s the same reason why many are becoming evangelists of hosting their own email, note apps, etc.


> This is the future we live in.

It's just a bug. Chill. Wait a business day and try again. You write as if you've never experienced a bug before.


If you’re being sarcastic, you might want to edit your post to make that clearer.


You're absolutely right!


This started a couple of days ago, before this announcement for 4.5 and code v2, so I already waited for it to be fixed.

As much as I hate to say it, I don’t have a large twitter following the only method I have to raise awareness of this issue is to try to piggyback on a big announcement like this in HN, that will have visible discussion, so I don’t always have the luxury of just chilling and waiting indefinitely.


I wouldn't be playing video games anymore if there were no more games with dedicated servers. Not from a moral standpoint, or from a competitive standpoint, but purely from the community perspective.

My youth was spent on Counterstrike: Source playing zombie mod, and then for years mapping for Zombie Escape, as a way to give back to those communities that gave me so much. I was never a mic user, and didn't use in game chat a huge amount either, but over time those regulars would still greet me and say hello. I rarely play now, but even after 17 years, when I show up once a year or so I'm always welcomed back in by all those who recognize me and admins switch to some fun maps (or some less fun ones that I made...), and we have a short catchup on life. Certainly many of these communities are on life-support, and most are long dead, but in all those people who play in these communities are the remnants of the communities who had just a little contribution in shaping the person I am today. I'll never forget when one community held a birthday event for me; for 8 hours we played every map I'd ever made, and won them all, with a full 64/64 server for the majority.

And I would never have experienced this if I hadn't happened to open Counterstrike: Source for the very first time, and my server browser's first entry just happened to be an early zombie mod server.

Shoutout to some of the old ZM/ZE communities: Syndicate Gamers, Plaguefest, i3D, icannt, ZES, Unloze & many more. ZE drove my interest to mapping, which drove my interest in Sourcemod, which drove my interest in programming, which led me to my career, which led me to my wife. Thank you.


iCloud Custom Domains & Mail are filled with bugs. My favourite one is that if my custom email I want to register has EVER been associated with an Apple account, it can never be used as a custom domain, unless that domain is set to catch all; it is impossible to add that specific address; it just errors without any specific message. The original account was fully deleted; going to the arduous process they set up that takes weeks to actually delete the account.

Customer support is worthless for actual technical problems as usual for Apple. Fun extra regarding customer support; if you arrange a support call in a language not native to your region, they honor that, but that information is lost if they escalate the call; the callback is always in the national language, despite explicit requests over the phone during the callback schedule


For what it's worth, I was able to add my custom domain to iCloud under this exact scenario without any issues. This was 3 years ago, so I don't know if anything has changed, and I didn't have the 'catch all' limitation either.


I'm a fashion nerd. I've been working on an outfit tracking app for the last ~4 years (but only really pushed hard on it the last 3 months). I found I kept buying clothes that I never ended up wearing. Either because they didn't fit with what I had, I already had something like it, or it simply wasn't my actual style (although I thought it was). So, I built my own with the simple goal of buying less clothes, and throwing away fewer clothes.

There are plenty of apps that do outfit tracking, with some basic stats. But they all have a few or more of these shortcomings (from my perspective); unpleasant UI, no cross device syncing, lack of detailed usage statistics (e.g. cost spread over time by garment category), some categories just not supported, pushing a specific lifestyle such as Capsule Closets, or just plain focused on recommending what to wear using some mediocre algorithm that doesn't understand cuts and how different pieces fit together; basically only suitable for capsule collections.

These apps all have a lot of downsides too in common, which I haven't been able to solve either yet; ultimately you must start with an inventory of your clothes, and then work from there. It takes ages to catalog and import your clothes, and I haven't found many existing product that lets you export if you've even done it before. And on top of that, you have to be quite rigorous at tracking what you wear; the more data you have the more insight you can get from your choices.

I finally published on iOS a couple of months ago. No traction, and I don't expect there to be. I won't argue that my offering is better than any of the competition, but I've tried most of them (and wasted colossal amounts of time onboarding onto them) and found none fit my need properly. It's still very much work in progress, but I find myself reaching for it multiple times per week to inform my purchasing habits.

https://procloset.app


How do you monetize something that is based on a trait that most lack (vanity)?


To me, vanity is only tangential to the purchasing of clothes, particularly fast fashion, where 'it looks good on the model' is often enough to part with money, not 'will it look good on me', or 'do I need it', which are often never even considered, surprisingly. The individual thinking they will look good is actually not always a factor; it can be a kind of addiction. Source comes from my previous employer (fast fashion related industry).

This app doesn't directly answer those questions, but it gives the data needed to stop and think about the answer (quickly). I don't consider myself a vain person, but I consider myself a person who makes poor decisions with their disposable income (fashion).

The main selling point would be this: You could avoid buying 2 shirts that will be unused then thrown away every year, for the cost of 1 shirt. Save money, and textile waste.

But also, why must everything be profitable? I most I could ever hope for is that the hosting costs are paid for.


I'll just hop in and say I enjoy putting outfits togther, it's fun, it's creative. I don't think of myself as vain, it's more like interior design, it's fun to put things togther that I find pleasent to look at.


Like the entirety of the fashion industry one may assume


Sure, but its a leap in magnitude from being concerned with wearing something to tracking everything you wear.


I just want to say your careers page is amazing. It's an often neglected part of even the most creative websites, so it was so refreshing to see.


Agreed. I shared this careers page with an Anime loving front-end eng connection of mine because the page was so great.


Thanks for the shoutout! Boring careers pages have long been a pet peeve of mine.

We also work on anime image diffusion models, and it would be massive shame if our own careers page didn't highlight the results, haha.


Love what you are doing and as an anime fan I love your website. I would love to talk more with you about this role and what you are doing.

Does a 15 unity expert with 7 years tech director experience in companies like Zynga serve your needs?


All the money they spend still fails at basic UX, creating a finely crafted, polished turd of engineering perfection. I don't see the Netflix experience to be superior in any way to the other big services; they all have their own issues that engineering haven't solved properly, most likely some different ones.

An example (in this case ONE PIECE on Netflix Japan region): My Netflix language is set to English, but I am not in an English speaking country. And yet, all shows have an English description and title, as well as episode lists with descriptions also in English. And yet, the program itself is not in English, nor does it have English audio options or subtitles. And the UI does not indicate if there are English subtitles until I play an episode and open the subtitles menu. This is compounded to be even worse when there are so many shows that are only half subtitled (different rights holders I assume). Why does the UI lie to me by showing everything about the series/movie in my native language except the actual content itself? This is really common in non-English speaking regions, and it looks like a basic engineering failure of looking up their global database content in MY language while ignoring whether the actual CONTENT is available in my language. I suppose this could be a UX issue, but it also looks like an engineering one to me. And aren't those intertwined to some extent anyway?


Netflix has far better UI/UX and features than it's competitors. I'm sure your specific issue is a legit one, but Netflix as a whole is much better


I don't know if Netflix has caught up recently, but during the pandemic times Disney+'s group viewing was a very good feature with good UX, and I haven't seen anything like it on other services


Netflix Party launched in March 2020 for that purpose.


I agree with your example and that this functionality sucks. However it cannot be an engineering issue as it must be technically very easy to implement in a better way. It must be a product/UX/marketing kind of decision behind it or just plain ignorance.


This. There's no technical limitations behind offering an A-Z catalog experience, it's all decided by that VP of user experience who wants to squeeze the most amount of screen / device time out of each user

Am I really alone to notice that each year, our collective UX across consumer (SaaS) software gets worse?


Same situation for me. Basically the only ads I ever see in my native language are for American expat tax services (I’m not American, have never visited the continent and have never expressed interest in doing so).

Sometimes I wonder just how good this adtech really all is when the best they can do is figure out I speak English (browser language) and live not in an English speaking country (IP address) and just assume therefore I am American.


That's probably less to do with Meta and their tech than a marketer setting up their ads in the way you describe (language: english, country: yours). I'm not sure you can even target nationality at all.


A lot of the filtering of whom to show ads to is heuristics to try and target 'high value costumers'. Getting target with very irrelevant ads might just mean you are considered low value by most advertisers so you get served ads from advertisers willing to pay very little per impression.

I'd take as a signal your online cloaking is working as intended. I often get very random ads and recommendations in languages I don't even speak so I think my online anonimity fu is working as intended.

Source - worked with ad tech a few years ago.


I tried after they introduced the family plan, then gave up after a few months since most of the products were (at least then) extremely half baked and missing what were to me key features.

VPN was great, no issues. Calendar was pointless; no way to sync between Google calendar updates; you could import your calendar from Google, but as soon as someone changed an event Proton Calendar was out of sync and you wouldn’t know unless you check in on Google Calendar, thus making Proton Calender pointless.

Proton Pass seemed good except it launched with no way to use it on an Intel Mac. So unusable for me since one of my machines is an Intel Mac.

Drive I tried out but since there wasn’t a way to view photos like their competitors at the time I never did much with it.

Mail was good for years, but the family plan was enough for me to give up. There didn’t seem to be a way to share an email domain with my wife and have each of us be able to access an email on that domain (e.g. [email protected] on her account and [email protected] on my account).

I think Proton has good services once they mature but they had a spate of releasing half-baked products.


Hi! Regarding Proton Calendar, please note that you can in fact subscribe to a non-Proton calendar, like Google Calendar, so you don't need to import anything: https://proton.me/support/subscribe-to-external-calendar. In this case, the calendar would sync automatically.

Regarding Proton Pass on macOS, you can use the browser extension and the web app on any macOS device, and the desktop app for macOS will soon be available too (now in closed beta). Silicon chipsets should be able to use the iOS Proton Pass app as well.

You can easily view photos on Proton Drive now. You can also use the Proton Android app for photo backup (on iOS this functionality is in beta as the moment).

Finally, you can share the domain with a family member - the Proton Family plan supports both custom domain addresses for sub-users as well as existing Proton Mail addresses.

If you're having any issues using any of the services, please contact us at: https://proton.me/support/troubleshooting?product=account, and we'll make sure to look into each of the issues closely. Thanks in advance!


I'm aware of most of these improvements since I unsubscribed. Not worth resubscribing for me but I do follow the progress and am happy to see the improvements.

Proton Drive is quite impressive to me now. Photos beta came along about 2 weeks after I unsubscribed I believe; bad timing on there I think; the Windows support was dangling in front of me for so long with no Mac support or Photo support I gave up waiting and moved to iCloud.

Proton Pass at the time did not have a Safari extension iirc, so on an Intel Mac you could not use Safari. I use Safari (mostly unwillingly), therefore I could not use ProtonPass at that time.

For the family plan, is sub-users a new concept? I was shocked I couldn't have a shared email ([email protected]) + husband email ([email protected]) + wife email ([email protected]) with the obvious access controls you would expect from such a setup.


Glad to hear that you're following our progress! Regarding the family plan, the multi-user support has been there from the time when Family plan was introduced (early 2023). We had previously had it on business-plans only, as well as our legacy Visionary plan.


I wrote a mobile app for managing all my clothes and tracking what I wear every day (I’m heavily into avant garde fashion).

Used it every single day for almost 4 years now, and it gives me informed decisions on what I rarely wear, my favourite combinations, value for money, and what clothes I should consider selling or donating. It’s been great to reduce my consumption and keep a closet only filled with items I can pair well with


> I’m not quite sure what sub I’m reading, what’s user generated, and what’s an ad

I'm unable to tell apart ads properly either quickly on reddit, and given the it's the same user action to collapse a comment and to click an ad that looks like a comment, I've misclicked on ads many, many times. It doesn't help that they place them at the top of the comments section and seem to be deliberately designed to look like gif comments.

As an advertiser I would not be particularly chuffed. I can say with confidence that my accidental ad click rate on reddit is 100%.


Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: