The niche older fashion brands I used to enjoy here are no longer as accessible, in part due to these forwarding services; items are priced higher for foreign buyers who still underpay compared to their domestic supply, and items are becoming harder and harder to find at all as they no longer circulate the domestic market, they just get permanently removed from it. This is despite little change in the market price of such items in other markets/currencies.
Japan is a bargain for the dollar-holder and the market is choosing to price out local interest.
At a previous employer this was a problem we identified (and larger retailer customers) had recognised, although for other reasons. We had developed a size recommendation system for them, that used real product measurements in every size and a method of obtaining your body measurements from fully clothed photos. We also offered a statistical average measurement set for those who couldn’t/wouldn’t take photos of themselves (privacy was important to us, and there was no need to undress).
We were able to give details about fit comfort across many measurements for each size, but this feature was basically unused. 99% of users used the statistical average body of themselves instead of themselves, which actually exacerbates the body type problem.
Another interesting thing about the industry and the grading process we learned; many retailers had no measurements for their own clothes except the reference size. This was much more common of higher end brands.
1 last thing; some global brands actually have the same size name on the same product represent a different size in different region (eg an SKU in size S in US may have different measurements to the same SKU in S in Asia)
Location: Tokyo, Japan
Remote: Yes
Willing to relocate: No, but flexible with timezones
Technologies: Go, Typescript, PHP, Python, AWS, GCP. Others too
Resume/CV: https://www.galaco.me/assets/CV.pdf
Email: josh [at] galaco.me
Senior full-stack engineer living in Tokyo. 10 years experience. Experience in multiple AI startups delivering fast product on top of internal ML models. Looking for a startup that has a vision of what to solve and knows their market; ambiguity and ideation stage is great, I'll help get your product off the ground.
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.
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.
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.
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
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'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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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%.
Never figured out how to use Hertzner. Wanted to try since they get such a good reputation on here, but they banned my account when their system presented no way for me to verify my identity.
The required either PayPal or passport. I have no PayPal account, and their 3rd party verification system only allows passport from your country of residence (signup requires providing a contact address and they pre fill using this address; you can’t change the passport country). I am a British citizen living in Japan, and therefore hold a British passport; there was no way for me to provide a Japanese passport. I asked what I should do to comply, and they banned my account 6 hours later.
I can’t be the only one to experience this, can I?
Japan is a bargain for the dollar-holder and the market is choosing to price out local interest.