tjbiddle

So - It's a landing page with a CTA that goes to the USPS website.

Oh, wow. Wasn't expecting hardware automation by the title. Figured this would be a piece on how a lot of soloproneurs and SMBs are beginning to use No-Code tools like Integromat and Zapier. I'm an ex-software developer, and I even prefer to use Integromat these days as opposed to writing something myself.

Résumés are boring.

On the employer front: I always hated looking at 1000x pieces of white paper that all look the same. It was mind numbing.

On the employee front: I always ensured I used very graphical resumes that stood out. They always got the attention of the hiring managers, and it was a great filter of either "You're boring so you threw my resume away" or "You're awesome and the kind of company I want to work for by having some fun with it".

NFTs and DeFi was this pump.

New NFT "drop", someone purchases, takes a DeFi flash loan, "purchases" it from themselves for a ridiculous amount, sells it to the sucker, pays off the loan.

I'm bullish on crypto, but this is just another cycle. Same as - what was it, 5 years ago?

Maybe 40k BTC will be the bottom... maybe it'll slowly taper down to 30, 25.. then it'll be quiet for a while, then...

This is pretty easily solved.

"Hey XYZ, it was such a pleasure speaking with you today. I'm going to shoot ya an email in a bit just to follow-up with everything we discussed. Have a great day!"

Or - if that scares you still - just shoot them an email anyway to follow-up and recap without preluding. It gives them the opportunity to change/add/whatever in-text, and they can't say you said something differently because you can point to the email and say - no, we said this (And you didn't correct me).

Open the first page, scroll down and open all interesting articles in a new tab. Work my way through them. Exit.

Sometimes I'll scan the second page if I didn't find enough on the 1st.

I don't know if I can even call it a side-project any more. I stopped working professionally 3 years ago.

Bought an e-commerce business that was making ~$2k/mo profit and ran it on the side while I had my DevOps job.

That project has now turned into ~$30k/mo profit, and I've bought two more e-com businesses that average ~$10k/mo between the two - these are early and I expect them to scale up once I smooth out a few bumps.

I go through phases of a lot of work, and next to no work. Depends if I'm busy on growing the businesses or just want to enjoy the income. I'm out of 95% of the day-to-day operations and I have a team of 3 that handle most things.

That sound legit gives my body shivers.

Lol - So, a 7% raise. Totally reasonable even given standard inflation.

Mate - you're making $4k/mo. Budget some Operating Expenditures! Check into "Profit First" to ensure you're handling your business finances in a proper manner. A healthy allocation of OpEx is 30% of your revenue at your size. Start saving $1200/mo for all OpEx, and use some of that to build your Android app. It'll pay dividends!

> Kentucky residents who were not vaccinated had 2.34 times the odds of reinfection compared with those who were fully vaccinated.

Simple. Not vaccinated != infected previously

Those who are both not vaccinated, and not previously infected, will raise that number significantly.

You learn to shift your weight appropriately, but yes - definitely something to be aware of as it throws you if you're not expecting it. I'm speaking from experience on an electric longboard, but ridden both. I find the scooters you're more instinctively likely to brace on the handlebars.

Spotify has certainly degraded over time. My latest frustration: Controlling external devices via my computer or phone.

I'll often play from my phone and connect it to my Echo speaker group. This used to work so seamlessly - it was beautiful.

But now - it takes 10 seconds for the initial connect. If I hit play/pause there's a 5-second delay to the point where I'll tap it twice, which is also delayed, and then it'll stutter and jump around. And worst of all: I'll hit pause, come back to it in a few minutes, and it's completely disconnected.

Obviously anecdotal, but literally none of those examples I care to use on my phone anyway. Overtime, my phone has just become a glorified camera with some messaging features.

This was exactly my thought when I saw the headline. The air pods are so small, they're not contributing a large part to plastic waste.

It's the same story with trying to get rid of plastic straws.

In both cases, I don't want to dismiss the problem - it's just that there are bigger fish to fry to make a much large impact to the bottom line of plastic pollution.

Now, after reading through the "Our Story" of Podswap's website, I can see that the real selling point is: "Our batteries keep dying prematurely, and we don't want to fork over the cash for a whole new pair."

Recycling is great - keep it as a value proposition, but it shouldn't be the main marketing push here.

Uber & Lyft have missed such a golden opportunity for brining cab drivers onto their platform.

GoJek and Grab (SEA Ridesharing alternatives and "super-apps") both have a "Taxi" option when selecting the type of car you want. I'm assuming it's similar to just merging this "FlyWheel" app that the US has into their own.

I haven't trusted PayPal for years - but I still use them.

My business does ~$100-250k monthly revenue, and probably 1/3 of transactions are via PayPal. I'd never not have them - it helps conversions too much.

But, I made sure to call their support and enable the "auto-sweep" feature, so that I can withdraw everything above a balance that I set into my bank daily.

This way, I never need to worry about too many funds getting frozen should anything go wrong.

Interesting. Looking at the same graph - especially when you tweak it to show only the last decade - you'll see solar is growing very quickly (25% YoY) while the others stay fairly stable. That would have it overtaking oil in 20 years.

Considering we're going to see mass adoption of electric vehicles in the next 5-20 years I think that will happen even more quickly.

Agreed. I spend over $1,000/mo on various software for my business. Occasionally I'll trim the fat, but saving a few bucks here and there isn't worth it when energy spent elsewhere makes far more.

Not that I'm by any means happen with the shut-down, but my transition to BBVA was super smooth. Went to Simple, it redirected to BBVA, followed the instructions to create an account, logged in, verified all my account balances were the same as before.

Now, my only desire is to come up with another solution to replace Simple's "Goals" with something. I loved being able to daily set aside money. I'm thinking I'll just make a self-hosted app for personal use and link up with Plaid, and then it won't matter what bank I use.

Back when I was 12 or so, I remember arguing with my "Computer Teacher" about various TLDs.

I had a similar point that ".com" doesn't need to be a commercial entity.

She continued to berate me in front of the class. I got detention and was told that all my .com domains were illegal.

Ah - the educational system at it's finest.

Use high quality beans, keep them fresh in a sealed container aways.

Grind for the appropriate brewing technique.

Use an AeroPress or a French Press, use water that has been boiled and just finished dropping past the bubbling point.

Let it steep, and stir.

Drink it black, and get used to it.

iOS was 7% of their revenue at $700 million in 2 years.

Had no idea Fortnite was a $5B/year game. That's ludicrous.

I've been stuck on "Confirming Subscription" for the last 5 minutes

Edit: Tried again, but with PayPal, and it worked.

From the original TaxJar blog post:

> For Stripe users, we’re excited to explore ways to integrate better sales tax tools into the Stripe platform, with our technology as the foundation. Stay tuned!

Shopify software is a huge customer for Stripe, and individual Shopify stores are probably the largest subset of TaxJar customers.

I predict this will turn into more sales-tax related features being baked into Stripe, and then implemented as a feature-set into Shopify once the APIs are exposed.

Also, also came to say exactly the same thing.

My thought process: 1. Oh - neat idea! [ Checks website ] 2. Okay, cool. Early stages, but on the right track. 3. Who the hell are these companies 4. Ugh, I'm not going to click on each one to find out. 5. Let's go comment about this on HN. I bet someone beat me to the punch.

> The average size of most vessels has increased exponentially over the last 15 years. The ability to salvage these bigger ships has not," said Peter Townsend, a marine insurance industry veteran.

Well - Either you allow gigantic ships that have this risk through, and set aside cash for when shit like this eventually happens - Or you don't allow them through at all. Learn how to budget for your risk profile.

Plus, some occasional free development from PRs.

The number of times where I would be HAPPY to work on a project for free to fix an issue or add a feature I want - I couldn't count.

Instead, it's always reaching out to support and "Thanks for your feature request - it's not currently on our road map, but I've added it to our list."

I love Zapier and wish them the best. Been using them the past couple years to automate many things in my e-commerce business.

That being said, I come from a software background (As many here at HN do), and I recently found "Integromat" and have completely switched over all my Zapier automations to them. Their price point is much cheaper (Zapier was beginning to charge a few hundred a month for me - and now I'm down to $29/mo with Integromat which could be $9/mo if I wasn't impatient and wanted 1 minute intervals) - but the kicker for me was their UI and just the "programming" mindset that came along with it - I can do many more complex operations.

Just a happy customer - and hoping they have more success to continue improving their product.

Zapier is definitely a better fit for non-tech people, and more simple tasks though.

Heard plenty of stories from friends who worked as a travel agent that told of working with clients for years to plan their dream vacation only to see them or their spouse die before having it realized.

I remember a beautiful sunrise hike up to the Meteora monasteries in Greece... then the swarms of busses filled with elderly retirees coming in after.

Sure, you can visit places when you're older - but it's a vastly different experience.

Why not have both? The world's accessibility has opened up so much in the past couple decades.