aquark

locking in 4%+ yield

Locking in 4% AFTER TAX yield ... if you invest the $300K and it earns 4% you still can't pay the mortgage interest with those funds

I'm very disappointed with my Surface Pro tablet ... battery life sucks, resuming from sleep is really slow and the keycover needs to be disconnected and reconnected for it to 'remember' it is there. I've owned 4 Surfaces over the years and won't buy again.

I'm not a fan of OS X but seriously considering one of these just for the battery life and it-just-works portable computing.

We use https://www.enchant.com/

It works great for email support, haven't tried their chat features, but is the sweet-spot for us in terms of features and complexity.

They have an API if you want to integrate, though for a web form just feeding it through email works.

Do not use your own corporate domain for user generated content.

Source: been there, done that ... there is no benefit to it and only pain.

Have a separate plunk-emails.com domain that is used for all emails. Or even have a bunch set up and rotate through them. This will mitigate spam impact too -- you will get spam issues even with 100% legit users

Any idea how CA handles (small) foreign companies hiring contractors in CA?

Assuming they did decide to quibble about the classification what can they actually do to an entity that has no legal existence in the US?

1/ Yes, and you also potentially incur taxable capitals gains at a time not of your choosing, which can suck.

We've used https://www.enchant.com/ for about a decade for email support .. it's great, does exactly what is is supposed to and doesn't add a bunch of 'cruft' on top. Had to check our volume, currently over 40,000 tickets in that time.

They do live chat too but we've never used that.

What is motivating you to look for a replacement? We are evaluating grids and AgGrid is the front runner currently though really rather heavyweight for our use cases.

Thanks -- appreciate the reply.

As a future product option I'd love to be able to treat these as standalone terminals, so we can offer a web based POS app (running on a different device) and the phone as a payment terminal without having to deploy our own mobile app.

Question for anyone in the know at Stripe ... does this make a iPhone work like the existing BBPOS WisePOS terminals and able to interact with a web app _without_ any code running on the phone itself (other than Stripe's)

Or is it more akin to the BBPOS Chipper readers and still needs a custom mobile app to interact with?

ie: can a platform built on Stripe use this for their customers without needing to supply a mobile app?

If the teacher is moderately technical then they can gain a lot of flexibility by using OBS (https://obsproject.com/) and its 'virtual camera' feature as your 'webcam' feeding into Zoom.

Then anything you do in OBS is feed into Zoom as a direct video feed and saves Zoom screen scraping and re-encoding the video. You can use OBS's screen capture or better yet pre-download the files and just play them back.

Many services won't accept these 'virtual' phone numbers for 2FA. Last time I tried I couldn't assign a Twilio provisioned number as the second factor on a Google account for example.

Thanks -- to clarify these are spam reports from the end users email host, ie the notification we get from yahoo.com, comcast.net, etc saying an email was reported as spam. So it isn't the user actually clicking through to our site via the unsubscribe link.

I think the best option might be to show something on the site when they are unsubscribed so they can easily undo that .

Depending on the use case some providers will block voip sms numbers.

I have been unable to set up a Twilio or voip.ms number as the phone# for a Google accounts 2FA

I have no knowledge of the ROI involved here, but would love to understand this: Twilio is 0.75c to send a text.

Is it possible for a spammer to generate >$75 per 10,000 people spammed? I've no idea were the SMS spams I've got link to (not about to find out) but they are so obviously spam.

We use SMS for communicating with users and would be happy to more a lot more per text to escape the 'positive ROI for spammers' territory.

I'd be happy to do that for important emails too!

We've run into this issue with replies to texts that the user sent first.

Telecom spam filtering seems to be a ridiculously primitive and wide net. I can't imagine a valid use case for dropping a text sent to a number when that number just sent you a text a few seconds before.

I don't understand why SMS spam has such a big issue with false positives compared to email spam when emails are practically free to send but SMS is much more costly.

(Yes, I know there are a lot of false positives on email too ... but we run into false positive SMS spam issues a lot even though it feels like it should be a much simpler problem to solve).

This looks interesting and bears more investigation. One bit of quick feedback: the initial gif/movie is way too fast to follow if you don't really know what you are looking at.

While not ideal, I think this is a great option.

Microsoft (used to?) offer this for developer support and I remember using it maybe 15 years ago where it was a couple of hundred bucks to open a ticket but you got quick access to a real expert and good escalation.

If the issue turned out to be their problem the ticket was refunded.

For something business critical like this it is a way of signaling to the company that there is clearly somethin wrong with the automated process: a real scammer won't pony up hundreds of $ to get a review they would fail.

I have some custom code to convert CSV files downloaded from my bank to beancounts text format, but it is all dotNet code since that is what I know the text format is easy to work with

Very true, and not only do print statements inherently serialized threads, they also change the timing so significantly that probably your bug disappears anyway.

Your effort here is admirable, but I think you have chosen a very hard market to make an impact in. Some hopefully constructive feedback:

Who is your target customer? A small business owner without a website? In which case listing features like "Cloudfare CDN" and "DDoS protection" won't resonate with them at all.

A couple of other things that jumped out from the pricing page:

* 10,000 for submissions a month is pretty meaningless: if 10,000 people a month are interested in my business I am motivated to spend a lot more than £7.99 to capture and process them. Either make the limits really small to feel like a limit, or just say unlimited.

* support responses in 5 days ... this would be a red flag regardless of price. As a small startup the one thing you can offer is exceptional support (since you don't have many customers to offer it too!). If it takes off lower the expectations, but I'd suggest 1 day even for the lowest plan should be doable (and if not raise the price...)

A business owner doesn't really want a website builder at all, they want a website: lead more with your 'custom websites' page. If £199 is too much of a hurdle for them then realistically they aren't going to be a great customer anyway. Maybe offer a couple of business a free website to have some real world referable examples.

If you are targeting website designers (which are probably an easier to identify market) then focus more on the builder itself, maybe stressing the mobile friendly side (though I don't really see how that helps me if I am a designer ... I won't try and work from my phone).

Good luck!

If nuclear can offer sustained cheaper than average generation then the market would allow a long term fixed price contract — they shouldn’t need to sell their full output at spot rates. Consumers that want predictability could buy on these contracts.

You can -- block the location request and click on 'Open Street View' to enter an address

The dish currently draws around 100W steady state. For many off grid installations this can be a significant addition to the power budget.

We are seeing all email to Gmail sent through sendgrid bounce with this error currently

Email routed through SES is getting through though.

This is going to be a mess to clean up due to automated blocking of bounced addresses

I live rural, though not exactly the middle of no-where, but only option is a 10/1 fixed wireless service. I work full time at home (and run a SaaS company) ... with two young adult kids at home that last few months we have been burning around 500GB a month.

Do we stream Netflix @ 4K ... no, but it is quite workable at low res, the 1Mbps upload is the most painful portion.

My cell data is faster (but 50GB\month cap) so I will use that for large uploads to save time, and also as a backup since we get frequent fixed wireless outages (esp. in summer since any storm seems to cause problems).

I also occasionally spin up EC2 instances to remote to when moving around data to avoid dragging it down locally (usually video). Works fine ... remote desktop to a Windows instance is perfectly usable.

Zoom/Google Meet/etc work OK ... not great, but perfect usuable and a lousy connection is a good excuse to turn off video sometimes!

I hold out hope for 21st century technology some day, but wouldn't switch the trade-off of being more in-town for a faster connection.

Fortunately their support was able to get back within a couple of hours (much faster than the 3-5 days listed on the page) and reactivated the account.

Looks like a mis-fire of the automated suspension system which seems to be a huge problem of these types of systems when you are on the receiving end.

This looks cool. Something I have looked for on and off without create success would be a fully scriptable NLE

Something like this that would support simple fades, transitions, and maybe animation. The kind of stuff you can do fairly easily in a video editor, but with lots of fiddly clicks and zooming in and out of timelines.

I'd like to have a script that let me specify when different source media start, when to apply effects, etc. All written as a basic text file.

Anything obvious out there I've missed?

That number seems incomplete at best .... if leasing is purely a financial transaction it seems odd it would cost €6,000 but lease for just €20\month unless there is a large up front downpayment required anyway. That would be a 25 year payback just to cover the initial cost.

You certainly can't lease an existing €60,000 car for €200\month

What if your auditors ask those questions?