Dave Taylor answers practical tech support questions about Apple devices, social media, search engines, and other consumer technology.
HN links it for how-to answers, such as Safari's old RSS feed display and settings to open search results in new tabs.
As I say, I think much of the issue here is that he's generalising based on tech books which have higher costs (they're bigger, cost more to print, store and ship), sell in smaller volumes and go out of date faster (leading to far higher numbers of returns).
Full breakdown here but the publisher is basically getting about 50% of the list price so your $30 is already down to $15 by the time it gets there:
http://www.askdavetaylor.com/how_do_the_costs_of_publishing_a_book_break_down.html
He's probably right that tech books are broken but I think it's important to distinguish between technical books and other books which don't share the same model.
What a Clubhouse profile looks like: https://www.askdavetaylor.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/clubhouse-set-up-profile-3.png?ezimgfmt=ng:webp/ngcb8
I don't see anything on the picture of the data sample that isn't on the profile, which appears to be visible to anyone with a Clubhouse account: https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/fkWQSg-hl1V2-fwpS2VJy3CGR0zBx7YgZAlB1gdvpr1YYxLrOTvlwr9vQ7VcymtQza2Kn3EdLjwWPRb5-A21mvl9uNjyqi_ealPcx2-CWoS4iVoVw6S0PRV5TVh8EjhMyTITGk_F
The Clubhouse user ids also appear to be sequential, so this looks like a pretty low effort endeavor.
Perhaps a more nuanced reason is that you don't know it got lost in some spam filter. Out of sight, out of mind...
[1] https://consumerist.com/2012/01/04/how-facebooks-message-spam-filter-lost-me-a-free-tv-and-blu-ray-player/
[2] http://www.askdavetaylor.com/how-to-check-facebook-spam-email-messages-folder/
[3] http://www.cosmopolitan.co.uk/entertainment/news/a42460/another-secret-message-inbox-facebook/
[4] http://uk.businessinsider.com/facebook-filtered-message-requests-inbox-hiding-messages-deaths-users-2016-4
Which in turn, I'm sure wasn't inspired by this post here (June):
http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/6/how-twitter-will-be-worth-a-billion-in-a-year
Or maybe it came from one of the 1.2 million pages that has the phrase "twitter and payment" somewhere in it but no mention of twitpay:
http://www.google.com/search?q=twitter+payment+-twitpay
Or inspired by TextPayMe, which did the exact same thing with phone numbers instead of twitter usernames?
http://www.askdavetaylor.com/0-blog-pics/textpayme-welcome.png
Here's an example of what I'm talking about (notice the border):
* Finder in 10.4: http://miki.samborsky.de/files/article/2008/LeoIcon/Tiger-Finder.png
* Finder in 10.5-10.6: http://www.askdavetaylor.com/3-blog-pics/mac-finder-places-movies.png
* Finder in 10.7: http://gavinsmith.me/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/Screen-Shot-2011-02-24-at-5.54.29-PM-560x436.png
And whitespace is one of those things that really helps to make ui usable and clean.
You missed "the right amount of" before "whitespace".
That's not true; there is a very, very specific alert shown before Facebook accesses any phone numbers. I'm not making this up, it's just how it works. Facebook does not get anything "whether you like it or not". They get the information if you specifically allow it, and only if you try to enable the Sync feature.
Hell, here's a screenshot if you don't believe me: http://www.askdavetaylor.com/6-blog-pics/iphone-facebook-sync-profile-pics-3.png