Roedou

I wrote to Sainsburys (large UK grocery store chain) in 1993, suggesting an idea for a "self checkout", where you would scan items yourself as you put them into your shipping cart. My anti-theft solution was that they'd weigh your cart as you left, to make sure you'd scanned everything!

I never expected a reply, but was so stoked when I received a letter with a similar generic-but-enthusiastic reply, along the lines of "Thanks for such a creative idea!"

Do kids still get the opportunity to experience things like this? I can't imagine that sending an email to a company's generic contact@ address is ever going to get the save kind of response - and certainly not something that they can proudly pin on their wall for motivation.

I'm stuck at the same point, and would love a hint / spoiler!

It wouldn't solve every issue. Nothing will. But hopefully cameras could prevent the situations that I've heard about directly from people, where drivers wouldn't let them out the car and we asking for their number, or were asking for dates/propositioning them, etc.

And who knows, if the situations you quoted there began with a driver forcing them into his place, or following the rider into her house, then a camera could also have prevented them - or have been clear evidence.

The book "Happiest Baby on the Block" goes into a lot of detail about this. I've not read it, but watched the ~10 minute video that accompanied it.

It was possibly the most useful 10 minutes of new-parent advice we could have gotten. Definitely try to find that book; highly recommended.

Well, we looked at those gigantic pyramids, translated the hieroglyphs in some places to mean that a dangerous curse would afflict anyone who entered, and then went in to explore / loot the places.

So... yeah. That's the level of being willing to ignore warnings that we have to prepare for.

There's every chance this is true. Except I just checked the listing, and it's now $181.

It definitely varies. In NYC, I stayed in a 4000sqft Chelsea apartment, with a private bathroom, grand piano and incredible art, for $125 a night.

It does depend on more than just the city.

There's more details on Rob Walling's blog here: https://robwalling.com/2018/10/12/my-next-act-the-first-star...

What are they wasting? Per the article, this is material that was already destined for the trash.

And now a million people get to enjoy it as an enhancement to their evening.

Except the Touch didn't have a data connection. 'Voice calls' isn't the killer feature of a contemporary smart phone, an always-on internet connection is.

Abacus launched easier this year, to fill some of that gap:

https://www.abacusnews.com

Though they're still more long-form editorial than "here's what happened this week."

Make sure you're signed in, and then File -> Make a copy...

I was in Manila last month, and mostly took Uber; the experience was exactly like using it in the US.

I took one Grab ride, and the experience couldn't have been more different. I booked the ride on Grab, and saw the car coming towards me on the map. Just as it arrived, the driver waved to me out of his car, and then canceled the ride in the app. The car & licence plate were completely different to the one shown in the app.

Next to the driver was sat his friend, who talked to me throughout the 10 minute ride, and gave me his cards in case I needed to book a hotel or ride on my next visit.

When we arrived, I gave cash to the driver (the amount that the app had priced it at originally) and bolted. I couldn't leave any feedback in the app, because the canceled ride had disappeared.

It's hard to tell if this is a one-off weird experience, or a typical Grab ride. Either way, it made me unlikely to want to use it again, and I was planning to go back to Uber on my next trip to SE Asia.

The company has been around since 1981, but you wouldn't recognize it as the same company before ~2004.

https://moz.com/blog/the-history-of-seomoz

I don't know how well known Rand or Moz are on here, but it's great to see this posted.

I feel like SEO has been an area that gets looked down upon from certain sectors. In the 10+ years that Rand built up the company, the industry changed a lot - and he's been a voice for consistently doing things authentically and in a way that makes the internet better.

You'd also be hard pressed to find anyone who has been so transparent in sharing everything they've learned along the way - a LOT of folks in digital marketing began learning from his blog posts and videos.

I'm pretty excited for all his next ventures, and looking forward to the book for his take on advice for startup founders.

Plus, the 'safer-events project' is in response to incidents that one would hope no one has to experience again.

(And despite some harder times, Moz seems to be on the up again; they have some top-class products, should have some interesting new tools over the coming year.)

Good luck to Rand and SparkToro!

I grew up in the UK, now live in Seattle. I've never heard anyone use that.

My wife does talk about "pick up the lounge" though, to mean tidy it up & put things away.

I've never heard 'up to London'; being from Manchester, London was definitely "down South".

Coming 'up' to Cambridge had a specific meaning, of matriculating at the University. For example: I came up to Cambridge in 2002. I assume that the University of Oxford uses it in the same way?

Last time I was in an Amazon Book store, BOTH prices were displayed on the shelf - Prime and regular. Has this changed?

Ask Twitter?

I'm just inferring, but it sounds like it's possible to get a car loan/lease through Uber. It might be more tax efficient to have Uber take repayments directly from your earnings? So if first $X earned on Uber that day go to your repayments, it's worth earning $X on Uber to pay off the car, and then drive on whatever app pays the most.

Great resource. The one name in there I didn't recognize was '7search'; I clicked through, but it seems to have shut down within the last week, so you can probably remove that.

My building has individual mailboxes in the lobby for each unit, and then a bunch of large boxes that packages can fit in.

The mail deliverers put a package in, lock it with the key in the door, then put that key in my mail box, so I know to go get the package out. It's brutally simple, and I was surprised I've not seen an implementation like this before.

It depends on the country. In the UK it's very common, and relatively easy to do the 'premium sms' that you describe.

It's not at all common in the US, and Twilio doesn't seem to support it anywhere.

What happened to Unroll.me?

Edit: nm. This only happened this week, and I missed the news. Just Googled it and found out.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/24/technology/personal-data-...

I'm just coming up to the end of my L-1A visa.

I can attest that the "leave the country immediately if you lose your job" situation is a very odd thing to have hanging over you every single day.

What's the story with gas stations in the US? Are they dying out / being replaced by something else as well?

It seems that cost-to-produce vs. face-value isn't a terribly important ratio. The US has continued making pennies for a lot longer than necessary, though it seems to cost ~1.5c to make them.

I feel like I can add an n=1 sample here; I'm a Dropcam customer, who would describe themselves as paranoid and gadget-obsessed.

I was worried about office break-ins, so I bought things that include safes, insurance policies, and Dropcams. These cameras were WAY cheaper than the cameras & services offered by the alarm companies.

And in January this year, the worst happened: someone broke into our office, and took a bunch of electronics. Without the videos from the cameras, the building management wouldn't have been able to figure out how they got in, and police to be able to identify/prove who it was and what happened to our gear.

I'd definitely buy them again. The only change I'm going to make now is relocating the cameras to areas where they'll cover other parts of the office, and add additional cameras as well.