My five cents for a guess: they've used the email as an index somewhere, which massive amount of data now depends on and they keep pushing forward the need of migrating away from that because it'll be painful and take long time.
Yeah, but imagine the first engineers at ChatGPT back in 2021, some thrown together group of people who knew frontend the best from OpenAI, a research lab, to create a quick prototype UI for chatting with a text generating ML model. Of course they'll take some shortcuts, that's to be expected. All of this is just guesses though, but seen similar things play out many times. Of course, at one point someone needs to step in and pause for a moment to plan ahead for a bit, but depending on the leadership, it isn't always so easy to do.
That's a good guess .. but I bet they are also paying price for this in support costs .. I'd be curious what percentage of their support tickets are related to this (also the require you to cancel subscription, create a new account, create a new subscription if you want to change a pro account)
I’d say the consumer front end is more of an afterthought. It also seems like something they want to get rid of at some point so that they have to deal with the resellers like Microsoft did in the 90s with MS Windows
ChatGPT is just a consumer of their identity/auth system though, same as their core product - the API. Considering ChatGPT came much later, it seems irrelevant.
The model might be fine (I have questions, but let's assume it's reasonable), but I don't think anyone could use the UI for more than a few minutes and not realize it was a hack job.
For one fun one, on mobile web (android/chrome) you can't insert a space in the middle of a "word" you created by deleting the space between two words. The deletion is immediately reverted by some JS abomination.
It's one thing to call that an unimportant bug, but it calls into question a whole chain of decisions leading to that moment, and it's far from an isolated incident. As always there's a relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/463/
Car company makes innovative new car engine for their vehicle. A user wants to get a replacement key made for the vehicle, but company doesn't have the process in place to make replacement keys:
Are you fascinated by this hypothetical companies level of discipline? Or would you consider it negligent and inept?
If the car in question were the probably most hot software in town and the user wants to change the photos on their profiles, I'd find it very interesting if they kept the discipline to focus the whole team away from such a low-priority change and into the priority of keeping it the most hot software in town.
Let's keep in mind that OpenAI is a small company (in people terms), and they are fighting toe to toe with Google.
Heck, if they mess up a quarter they are probably dead.
Besides the fact you're completely shifting the goal post here on analogies, changing email address is a pretty normal feature of any service pretending to be serious. Also, you seem to have the belief it is impossible for such a large company with such investment to work on multiple things simultaneously.
Even if that's were true, I would be very surprised if this caused a loss of even 0.0000001% annual revenue. Going to need more 9's in that number.
edit: If you don't understand why this is actually important, realize that they're burning billions. They don't focus their devs on things that generate revenue, or the light will go out.
OpenAI has no idea what is the cause of the problem, but once OpenAI has built a general intelligent system, they will ask it for a way to fix this bug.
Philips Hue also doesn't allow for an email change, and they've been around longer than OpenAI. And if you want to delete your Philips Hue account to create a new one with a new email there's considerable pain involved if you have a house with many Hue products.
You can use 3rd party apps/tools to get around this, FWIW.
I use OpenHue on Linux. On iOS I've not had much luck finding a quality app, however a long time ago I did find a good one for Android...(I just don't remember the name, sorry.)
The account login crap is ridiculous, considering you don't even need internet to use their stuff. The lack of needing a login was the whole reason I bought into the ecosystem to begin with.
> That requires extra hardware in your network though, right?
It requires a Hue bridge, but all the official Hue apps need that too (unless you're using the new Bluetooth support, which very few people are). You shouldn't need any other hardware though.
> The advantage of their hosted services is that they can get through NATs without any additional hardware or software.
Locally, it doesn't really matter, since everything just goes over the local network. You're definitely correct for remote access though, but I hardly ever need to control my lights remotely.
Neither does Replit, and your Replit email has to match your GitHub if you want the two to talk. I guess this is what running and not walking looks like.
Thanks, but.. this was true as of some months ago. And I definitely was told by support that my [personal] email couldn’t connect to my [consulting] GitHub email account. I re-arranged quite a lot of my tech life to connect the two, per Replit support.
But I’ll double check tomorrow and reach out if I find anything worth sharing.
Yep, same here. Fortunately they don't seem to use it for anything yet, somewhat begging the question of why it's there in the first place. (It doesn't need to be stored in a user-visible way if the only purpose is as a poor/annoying "proof of humanity" against sockpuppet accounts).
Update: I just checked, out of curiosity – seems to be gone now?
Google only allows email changes if you didn't create it with a gmail address. When I found this out years ago I immediately scrapped that account and created a new one with a non gmail address before there was too much on the original account.
That might be technically true, but in practice not an issue. I have a Gmail account, so the primary address is fixed because the address is the account, however I use a different address to sign-in, and Google recognises those addresses as being on that account. For pretty much all uses my account has a different email address.
You cannot change your google email itself .. because there's no other reference to identify you with them. But you can use your email as the "inbox" for all other services. OpenAI doesn't have an "inbox" .. they accept other "inboxes" so they should allow you to change it.
I'm on board with this, imagine the headaches and development costs of adding this feature and 100 other QoL features. It would absorb energy and complexity budget that could be spent on core product features.
Phone either, I’ve moved countries and no longer have access to the phone number I signed up with. I was hoping they’d address this before that number came up for reassignment but maybe not at this rate.
To be clear, we will redact personally identifying information and do other things to prevent someone's past HN activity from causing them any trouble in the future. We certainly don't want to cause anyone any trouble and will do whatever we can to prevent that. Our concern is only to avoid gutting past threads and ruining them for the others who participated in in them and for future readers who may find the content of the discussions interesting.
Which is great. The redaction of information from places like Reddit that has taken place makes some discussion/references unreadable now. Decade old HN threads still retain all their juicy context.
Can you confirm you have sought legal advice on whether the policy of not deleting user data on HN is compliant with GDPR and whether is indeed compliant (or not)?
YC has a legal department, and they do ongoing analysis to determine our position relating to the different privacy regulatory systems around the world. As I said in the other reply, we’re willing to go to great lengths to protect people’s privacy.
FWIW this is widely accepted best practice, and Art. 85 GDPR is also very clear that data processing for journalistic, academic, artistic or literary expression is exempt.
Steam also has usernames that can't be changed. They added changing the actual email address associated with your account, but your original email address as account name is frozen forever, for old accounts.
That's wild. I guess I've never experienced it because I still have the email attached to my nearly 15+ year old Steam account.
Some tangently related anecdata: VRChat has a pretty strict email-changing policy. You need to confirm you own both the VR account and the original email account. Reasonable, but can be tricky if you don't have access to the original email anymore. I was able to navigate it but yeah, it's not always simple.
Your email is your identity. If they allow you to change your email, what they should refer you by, your passport number? Was kind of easier in the times of usernames, but these are long gone
According to Gemini, it's because OpenAI uses the email as the unique identifier of the user. But if that were the case, it's probably an week's project for a single engineer at most. I thought there was a better reason for this like some security measure for such a fast growing company, it never occurred to me that the reason could be so simple
Allowing users to change emails is surprisingly tricky:
- if they verified their email, are they allowed to change it?
- if so, can they use the new email for anything as long as it’s not verified, or does it stay in pending state? for how long?
- if it’s in a pending state, can someone signup with a "pending state" email?
- does the email change need to be validated by sending a validation email to the previous email addresses?
- once changed, can an email address be reused for another account? That’s a dangerous one but if you don’t support it you end up shamed on HN with "OpenAI doesn’t allow me to create an account with an email address that used to be associated with an account on their platform but isn’t anymore"
I’m probably missing 10 more bullet points.
I bet most comments in this thread didn’t think beyond "UPDATE accounts SET email = $1"
[OP] amukbils | 2 months ago
embedding-shape | 2 months ago
guestbest | 2 months ago
clickety_clack | 2 months ago
embedding-shape | 2 months ago
tobyjsullivan | 2 months ago
[OP] amukbils | 2 months ago
NewsaHackO | 2 months ago
dabockster | 2 months ago
guestbest | 2 months ago
ukblewis | 2 months ago
efskap | 2 months ago
TZubiri | 2 months ago
[OP] amukbils | 2 months ago
mgiampapa | 2 months ago
hansvm | 2 months ago
For one fun one, on mobile web (android/chrome) you can't insert a space in the middle of a "word" you created by deleting the space between two words. The deletion is immediately reverted by some JS abomination.
It's one thing to call that an unimportant bug, but it calls into question a whole chain of decisions leading to that moment, and it's far from an isolated incident. As always there's a relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/463/
motoboi | 2 months ago
Total focus on the main product, which is the API.
efskap | 2 months ago
spiralcoaster | 2 months ago
Car company makes innovative new car engine for their vehicle. A user wants to get a replacement key made for the vehicle, but company doesn't have the process in place to make replacement keys:
Are you fascinated by this hypothetical companies level of discipline? Or would you consider it negligent and inept?
motoboi | 2 months ago
Let's keep in mind that OpenAI is a small company (in people terms), and they are fighting toe to toe with Google.
Heck, if they mess up a quarter they are probably dead.
JohnMakin | 2 months ago
motoboi | 2 months ago
nrhrjrjrjtntbt | 2 months ago
dietr1ch | 2 months ago
dkobia | 2 months ago
oytis | 2 months ago
nomel | 2 months ago
edit: If you don't understand why this is actually important, realize that they're burning billions. They don't focus their devs on things that generate revenue, or the light will go out.
DANmode | 2 months ago
aleph_minus_one | 2 months ago
(for those who don't get the reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TzcJlKg2Rc0&t=1886s (31:26 - 32:13)).
Marsymars | 2 months ago
eek2121 | 2 months ago
You can use 3rd party apps/tools to get around this, FWIW.
I use OpenHue on Linux. On iOS I've not had much luck finding a quality app, however a long time ago I did find a good one for Android...(I just don't remember the name, sorry.)
The account login crap is ridiculous, considering you don't even need internet to use their stuff. The lack of needing a login was the whole reason I bought into the ecosystem to begin with.
lxgr | 2 months ago
The advantage of their hosted services is that they can get through NATs without any additional hardware or software.
gucci-on-fleek | 2 months ago
It requires a Hue bridge, but all the official Hue apps need that too (unless you're using the new Bluetooth support, which very few people are). You shouldn't need any other hardware though.
> The advantage of their hosted services is that they can get through NATs without any additional hardware or software.
Locally, it doesn't really matter, since everything just goes over the local network. You're definitely correct for remote access though, but I hardly ever need to control my lights remotely.
browningstreet | 2 months ago
breakfastduck | 2 months ago
They can get away with not implementing even basic stuff, becauase their core feature is all 99% of the users even care about.
lxgr | 2 months ago
Then again, they have LLMs that can just deflect all "change email" related questions to an FAQ article containing the "wontfix" information...
amasad | 2 months ago
Perhaps there is some weirdness if you’ve signed up with GitHub. Feel free to email me and we can take a look: amjad@repl.it
browningstreet | 2 months ago
But I’ll double check tomorrow and reach out if I find anything worth sharing.
kundi | 2 months ago
lxgr | 2 months ago
[1] https://support.claude.com/en/articles/8452276-how-do-i-chan...
richardw | 2 months ago
lxgr | 2 months ago
Update: I just checked, out of curiosity – seems to be gone now?
piskov | 2 months ago
QuiCasseRien | 2 months ago
I created an google account, use it on my android smartphone and buy some app, many years ago.
It's 2026 and Google still doesn't allow email change.
danpalmer | 2 months ago
reorder9695 | 2 months ago
danpalmer | 2 months ago
[OP] amukbils | 2 months ago
TZubiri | 2 months ago
greatgib | 2 months ago
lucasban | 2 months ago
haunter | 2 months ago
esterna | 2 months ago
monerozcash | 2 months ago
>Paragraphs 1 and 2 shall not apply to the extent that processing is necessary:
>for exercising the right of freedom of expression and information;
dang will randomize your username on request though, which is compliant. Everything else on your profile you can delete yourself.
tomhow | 2 months ago
j_w | 2 months ago
GeoAtreides | 2 months ago
tomhow | 2 months ago
monerozcash | 2 months ago
Invictus0 | 2 months ago
jaggederest | 2 months ago
Since 2003!
accrual | 2 months ago
Some tangently related anecdata: VRChat has a pretty strict email-changing policy. You need to confirm you own both the VR account and the original email account. Reasonable, but can be tricky if you don't have access to the original email anymore. I was able to navigate it but yeah, it's not always simple.
VariousPrograms | 2 months ago
ItsDedo | 2 months ago
oytis | 2 months ago
wizzwizz4 | 2 months ago
TZubiri | 2 months ago
piskov | 2 months ago
Because client doesn’t know it, inserts can be slow in cross-db environment.
Guid is always better (can be client generated), and modern guid versions can be ordered chronologically
oytis | 2 months ago
lxgr | 2 months ago
esafak | 2 months ago
thiht | 2 months ago
esafak | 2 months ago
Reubachi | 2 months ago
esafak | 2 months ago
lxgr | 2 months ago
accrual | 2 months ago
mopsi | 2 months ago
8cvor6j844qw_d6 | 2 months ago
I guess development teams are all focused on feature delivery and research.
[OP] amukbils | 2 months ago
piskov | 2 months ago
Saying from experience getting flagged previously while reporting changes in OpenAI’s policy regarding medical and law advice
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45777828
thiht | 2 months ago
- if they verified their email, are they allowed to change it?
- if so, can they use the new email for anything as long as it’s not verified, or does it stay in pending state? for how long?
- if it’s in a pending state, can someone signup with a "pending state" email?
- does the email change need to be validated by sending a validation email to the previous email addresses?
- once changed, can an email address be reused for another account? That’s a dangerous one but if you don’t support it you end up shamed on HN with "OpenAI doesn’t allow me to create an account with an email address that used to be associated with an account on their platform but isn’t anymore"
I’m probably missing 10 more bullet points.
I bet most comments in this thread didn’t think beyond "UPDATE accounts SET email = $1"