Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

It looks like a product but is secretly a subscription

calpaterson.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 326 posts

Re: It looks like a product but is secretly a subscription

#161

Post by notimetorelax »

abfan1127 wrote: post #25
X-Istence wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Glass-contained milk delivery seems great. Not sure where in the world you are, but Sprouts in the US sells milk in glass bottles. You pay a fee, and you get that back when you return the glass bottle the next time you come in to buy more milk. It's not delivery, but it's a whole lot better for the world than more plastic.

Danzeisen Dairy is available in Phoenix at various grocery stores. I do wonder what the fuel consequences are for the additional weight. It would be ironic if the fuel consequences are more than the plastic they could be in. https://www.danzeisendairy.com

I think it can be net neutral on fuel. You just grab those bottles on your way to the shop when you need more milk.

Re: It looks like a product but is secretly a subscription

#162

Post by geocrasher »

Fun story: My adult daughter lives at home. She does our shopping and came home one day with a toilet bowl brush that was "revolutionary" (my words based on her excitement about it) because it is refillable and can be used to clean the outside and the inside of the toilet.

Recognizing this as a refill subscription, I forbade its use. It sits there, unwilling to be thrown away, and unable to be used. If not for the receipt being lost, it would have been immediately returned!

If anything requires repeated payments to be useful, it's a subscription.

Re: It looks like a product but is secretly a subscription

#163

Post by philjohn »

dsr_ wrote: post #16

Printers. Yeah. Herewith, my standard advice. Buy a Brother monochrome laser with duplex, an ethernet port, and BRScript/3 (their PostScript clone). Even if you're sure you will never need one or more of those features, get them all. Wifi and Bluetooth and NFC are strictly optional, and probably not worthwhile. If you need color printing, send it to a printing company. There might even be a local one. It will be done…

I went for a massive Xerox Versalink for the same reason - it's not disposable garbage, the toner lasts an insane amount of time, and as long as you buy at least one toner cartridge a year you extend the onsite(!!!) warranty indefinitely.

Re: It looks like a product but is secretly a subscription

#164

Post by nwallin »

dsr_ wrote: post #16

Printers. Yeah. Herewith, my standard advice. Buy a Brother monochrome laser with duplex, an ethernet port, and BRScript/3 (their PostScript clone). Even if you're sure you will never need one or more of those features, get them all. Wifi and Bluetooth and NFC are strictly optional, and probably not worthwhile. If you need color printing, send it to a printing company. There might even be a local one. It will be done…

++

I have a Brother printer without duplex printing. I kick myself basically every time I need to print because I almost always need to manually flip/reinsert.

I dream of the day that my printer will die and I can buy a new Brother monochrome laser printer with duplex, but it's been over a decade and I'm pretty sure this motherfucker will outlive me.

(it's also USB only, no ethernet/wifi/bluetooth and ... I dunno what BRScript is. These aren't issues for me because it's plugged into my media server which handles all the networking stuff.)

Re: It looks like a product but is secretly a subscription

#165

Post by iampivot »

dsr_ wrote: post #16

Printers. Yeah. Herewith, my standard advice. Buy a Brother monochrome laser with duplex, an ethernet port, and BRScript/3 (their PostScript clone). Even if you're sure you will never need one or more of those features, get them all. Wifi and Bluetooth and NFC are strictly optional, and probably not worthwhile. If you need color printing, send it to a printing company. There might even be a local one. It will be done…

Try finding an A3 mono laser printer, if you need to print a3.

Re: It looks like a product but is secretly a subscription

#167

Post by johnwalkr »

dsr_ wrote: post #16

Printers. Yeah. Herewith, my standard advice. Buy a Brother monochrome laser with duplex, an ethernet port, and BRScript/3 (their PostScript clone). Even if you're sure you will never need one or more of those features, get them all. Wifi and Bluetooth and NFC are strictly optional, and probably not worthwhile. If you need color printing, send it to a printing company. There might even be a local one. It will be done…

In Japan virtually every convenience store has a self service printer (¥10/page for monochrome).

For the cheap inkjets mentioned in the article, it’s even worse than the author states. I know people that think they are getting a deal buy buying a new printer every time they run out of ink because it’s “cheaper.”

Re: It looks like a product but is secretly a subscription

#168

Post by matkoniecz »

derefr wrote: post #52
zizee wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even for those non-professional uses it's probably better to put the PDF on a flash drive, walk into Staples and print it on their machines I'm not trying to be argumentative, and what I'm going to say might be a "well obviously, duh" comment: This advice is really only applicable to those who have convenient access to a "staples", which is probably only 20% of us here. It is also only convienient if you don't have…

> which is probably only 20% of us here Uh. Shops offering printing-as-a-service are one of the most common things found in every small town, all over the world. They're one of the first entrepreneurialist ventures to be developed in developing countries after electrification (just buy a printer and a computer, and charge $1 to print a page.) Every Internet cafe offers printing. Every parcel shipping store (UPS, FedE…

> They're one of the first entrepreneurialist ventures to be developed in developing countries

That does not mean that they survive.

> Okay, you might live in a cabin 200 miles away from the nearest town.

In Poland such places are mostly gone (some survive near universities) as nearly everyone has printer accessible at home or at work.

Some are at places where people need printing (government offices) but charge massive fees.

> all over the world

World is more varied than you expect.

> Every Internet cafe offers printing.

Not present anymore in Poland

> Every parcel shipping store (UPS, FedEx, etc.) offers printing

No such thing in Poland and closest equivalent does not offer printing as service (exceptions may apply).

Re: It looks like a product but is secretly a subscription

#169

Post by fxtentacle »

singron wrote: post #45
chii wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it'd be interesting to see if this flash drive transport for documents evolves into an email address you send via your phone instead (so no hardware on your end needed).

You can also print documents at staples that you email to an address. They reply with a 24 hour code that you can type into the printer. I'd love a service that would mail you the documents back in an envelope and was still as cheap ($0.15/page).

We use clicksend.

Re: It looks like a product but is secretly a subscription

#170

Post by AnthonBerg »

dsr_ wrote: post #16

Printers. Yeah. Herewith, my standard advice. Buy a Brother monochrome laser with duplex, an ethernet port, and BRScript/3 (their PostScript clone). Even if you're sure you will never need one or more of those features, get them all. Wifi and Bluetooth and NFC are strictly optional, and probably not worthwhile. If you need color printing, send it to a printing company. There might even be a local one. It will be done…

Same, except: Get a HP color laser printer that does duplex printing.

(“Duplex”. Funny word. It seems to be latin for “can slurp the paper back into itself to flip it and print on both sides of the page”.)

In all earnestness, I am 100% convinced that yours is the best possible printer advice for many people! Maybe the majority?

People like me might have the competitive disadvantage of lower reading speed of black-and-white-only text and figures. Or the capacity to employ color for faster ingestion? For people who find that they benefit from readig in color, I emphatically recommend getting a color laser printer. With duplex printing.

Specifically, the HP M254dw has been excellent. I followed online recommendations for it. It has been bulletproof. As a detail, printing on it in macOS seems nicer and smoother compared to the Brother printers I’ve used. iirc Linux printing just worked.

Color has been worth having. For example, there are more and more computer science papers that have colored syntax in the typeset PDF. Printing these to a keel-stapled full-color book using the Booklet layout option in macOS is magic. It’s just great. I read a lot more papers with the capacity to print them like this instantly and on demand. Reading retention is better. Scribbling notes on the margin is magic too. And the little books make great gifts.

—For the keel stapling, there are “long-arm staplers”. I believe they’re also called “lawyer’s staplers” or something like that? I got a Zenith 502 cucitrici da tavolo per cucire con precisione lungo la piega fogli piegati a quaderno. It’s a little Italian tank. It’s great! Beautifully designed. https://www.zenith.it/prodotti/cucitrici-da-tavolo/zenith-50...

They say you can’t buy happiness. I hold that it can be. It’s just not a given. You can’t just buy … anything. Certainly, a duplex color laser and a good long-arm stapler have brought me a measure of happiness.

Post reply on HN