preinheimer

The classic stories brought a smile to my face for a long time.

I wish some of the privacy focused GA alternatives had SOC 2 reports, or ISO 27001. We’re working towards our first SOC 2, which makes it hard to incorporate anything without one into our product.

On prem is a lot of work, and not something i want to approach lightly.

I think there’s a related problem here: spammers (often doing cold outreach) are very happy to use gmail to send their wares. Gmail provides no mechanism to independent mail servers to report those people.

I feel like the post paints with a really broad brush. The author is targeting one specific segment, while also linking to a wikipedia article with a much broader definition "A mastermind group is a peer-to-peer mentoring group used to help members solve their problems with input and advice from the other group members."

Microconf offers Masterminds, they're basically acting like a matchmaker. For your entry fee (determined by ARR) you get introduced to 5-7 other folks at a similar level. Your group then meets up on a regular cadence to discuss topics. My group has been meeting every other week for 6 months or so. I joined for our new project, so $250. We don't get speakers in, but we do get access to a great group of folks to bounce ideas off of, outsiders to offer opinions, and occasionally hold us accountable.

About half our drop has dropped off (and we've added someone new on our own), but I've gotten a fair amount out of participation.

https://microconf.com/masterminds/#fees

People who want to release a new, cross browser, extension are left in a crappy position.

Chrome won’t accept a new manifest v2 extension. MV3 extensions have lots of problems in chrome, and are even worse supported everywhere else.

Google needs to reopen mv2 to new submissions until they’ve got things figured out, and the other browsers are on board.

Prior to covid I was paying for a business coach/group (not yc, just paid with cash no equity). We had monthly group meetings and I had a one on one with my coach every month.

The value I got out of the group took a huge nosedive when we went remote. I felt like many of my fellow attendees weren’t fully present in our group meetings, and the one on ones weren’t the same. So I left.

Just putting stuff on Zoom doesn’t make it the same. I think a lot of orgs are struggling to make things work in the new medium.

I really think Shopify should lean in on their offerings here. The checkout experience across merchants who use Shopify is great. There's a "Shop Pay" button, you click it, and you're either at the "Confirm Purchase" page or maybe get an SMS to enter, then you're at the "Confirm Purchase" page. You've skipped entering your address and credit card number.

Buy from a board game store one week, a tea maker the next, and some niche youtuber the third, all without re-entering your data.

I think it only looks insane because Google is “free”. I’ve been running a SaaS profitably for about a decade (and with employees for half that time), we’re still well below that.

We’re plausible customers for our new thing because we wanted to take a privacy first approach. No need for a cookie banner, no weird permissions or opt out. Just a functional website. I understand GA is crazy powerful, but for what I’m actually using Plausible is so much easier to use.

Adam Conover did an interesting episode on the mechanics of a bank failing in the US, and how the FDIC practices for this moment.

It's in The G Word, their episode on Money. https://www.netflix.com/ca/title/81037116

I know SVB was an early partner for Stripe Atlas[1], I hope they've got other options now, and not too many companies get really hurt here.

[1] https://www.svb.com/news/company-news/silicon-valley-bank-pa...

Another +1 for Hover.

People in Quebec deal with Revenue Quebec for both provincial and federal taxes, the CRA website won’t affect them.

First, that was an amazing breakdown of what's happening. If you enjoyed reading that you might like Folding Ideas breakdown of Fortnite - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPHPNgIihR0

Second, I've personally become very wary of any mobile app that introduces multiple currency types. There's gold, and rubies, and power balls, and stardust! At some point pretty early on I decide it's not worth it to figure out how much things /actually/ cost and delete the thing. My understanding is that the math shows companies that microtransactions are the winning move over and over again. I hope that eventually there's enough grumpy consumers both parties become worth serving better.

Years ago I was told that in Canada house number + postal code was sufficiently unique to deliver mail. This made sense to me in a design, it drastically cuts the amount of information that needs to be read off the envelope.

Then I bought a house that shares a postal code and number with a house on the street behind.

It’s had me wondering what the minimum viable address for any address in the country would be.

40 miles is pretty far. That's pretty easily an hour long commute, and maybe one you weren't planning on making.

In Canada we had something of a long running case against a father who let his kids ride the bus on their own: https://globalnews.ca/video/7151336/court-rules-against-b-c-...

People used to talk about "The Popsicle Index"[1] which is the percentage of families in an area comfortable with letting an elementary school aged child walk to the nearest store and buy a popsicle on their own. These days parents don't get to make that decision, the entire community makes it for them. Any dissenting opinion can result in losing your kids.

[1] https://home.solari.com/the-popsicle-index/

They've copied 100% of the text, images, styling, etc on the public version of our site. They have changed a few colours in some select images to better match their theme.

I'd guess that they have 0% of our product copied.

Are non-US companies required to care about the DMCA at all?

We actually bought an EV cert years ago!

Modern browsers don't actually give them any special display features these days, so it doesn't seem worth it.

I feel like in a race to the bottom we have the most to lose. Both reputationally, and as like a real company with assets worth suing for.

Thanks.

They haven't cloned the actual product, just the marketing copy on the public site. We've been around for ~10 years, so we have plenty of history with search engines, and a reasonable amount of organic links spread around the internet.

It's incredibly unlikely they've cloned our actual service (which would require hundreds of proxy servers around the world). They've cloned the marketing part of our site.

They've had several options for employees to liquidate some of their holdings before now. They've generally only been open to current employees, but one a few years ago was also open to past employees.

I thought our ventalation was fine. Then we got at CO2 sensor for covid related reasons. When we replaced our 30 year old windows the numbers went through the roof.

We updated our air exchanger to fix the problem. Venmar and Vanee are two big brands in america.

Which is exactly how much loyalty the drivers owe the companies!

On a related note, Lego is cancelling Mindstorms. So if you were dreaming up an advanced train city with Mindstorms as the brain you'd better stock up now.

https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/28/23428766/lego-discontinu...

The Great Ball Contraption (GBC) videos are pretty good: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VCmwskpxyCg

Really interesting ways to move balls around.

As someone who likes lego and programming, I love this answer. But I hate how hard lego has made it.

Yes, with some work you can make your train stop and go. But I don't think there's a good track switching solution that's lego only and automated. There's an aftermarket motor thing that connects with USB. The lego only attempts end up unwieldy and usually lacking in reliability (e.g. https://rebrickable.com/mocs/MOC-11841/1963maniac/train-trac...)

The Duplo trains ship with pretty neat functionality out of the box: lights, whistle, brick reader that activates an action when it sees a certain brick. You can't recreate this with lego with just a single power brick, as it's four things: sensor, light, motor, sound. Lego train can only do two.

We picked up the Aranet 4. Things were fine until we replaced our windows with fancy new ones. Our air quality plummeted, CO2 > 2200.

We got a new air exchanger installed, connected to our existing forced air hvac system. It runs at a low speed 24x7, which keeps things at a reasonable level.

It has a few settings like: continuous, 20 minutes/hour, 40 minutes/hour, and "humidity control". Nothing for CO2 control though. I have aspirations to hack the control module and make it care about CO2, but I've also got two kids and a startup so who knows how long that will spend in the backlog.

Maybe happening more often with the wildfires these days