My list lines up with a lot of books that people have recommended here, so I'll try to add a few favorites that haven't been mentioned so far.
Fiction:
1. Ubik - I read a bunch of Philip K. Dick this year, but this was my favorite. It's delightfully mind bending and left me thinking about it long after the book was done.
2. All the Pretty Horses - Beautifully written. McCarthy has an uncanny ability to paint with words.
3. Cannery Row - Short, witty, and full of interesting characters.
Nonfiction:
1. The Idea Factory - A dive into how Bell Labs became such an innovation powerhouse and gives a rounded picture of the figureheads that brought it so much fame.
2. Moonwalking with Einstein - A fun read about a journalist who took researching a memory competition a bit too seriously.
3. Countdown to Zero Day - A fascinating look at the development and deployment of Stuxnet -- the virus built to set Iran's nuclear program back.
I plan to write a bit about that when I finish (Dec 27 will mark one year from when I started). Here are a couple things I noticed:
1) This was my big goal for the year. One book a week that I've never read, instead of getting in better shape, learning a new hobby, etc. Judging from prior experience, it felt difficult, but doable.
2) It was mostly about time management. This was either accomplished with reading incrementally (infrequent) or bingeing over a weekend (frequent). I think if I was going to do it over, I would shift most of the reading into the first couple months of the year where the weather is dreary and not conducive to being outside.
3) Cheating. I've had books (like GEB) on the list the whole year that I haven't gotten to because I knew that they would slow me down and ruin the average. When I would read something that I couldn't get through quickly, I would make up for that by reading books I knew I would plow through quickly. You can see that more towards the end of the year.
4) I truly enjoy reading, and it's something I'd rather do than many other forms of entertainment. This helps immensely when deciding to devote a large amount of time to it.
As others have mentioned, zip codes might not have any geometry at all (point zips), and they are frequently updated/changed. In addition, zips do not follow standard constraints that other defined region types do. For instance, counties are entirely contained by their parent state, but that is not the case for zip codes, as they frequently cross county and state borders.
This is very cool. I had a nearly identical idea a few months ago (and somehow missed your post the first time around) based around feature detection in images, and this is way cooler than what I had envisioned.
In the payment processing section, you mention billing the customer back for the processing fees. I was under the impression that credit card companies do not allow you to pass surcharges onto the customer. Is that not the case when using Stripe, or is it considered a "convenience fee?"
You aren't passing the fee on to the END customer, you are just acting as the payment processor for YOUR customer. You can charge them what ever you want. Apple, Amazon, Google all charge you 30% to use THEIR credit card processors.
So the end customer buying a $20 product still only pays $20, but you charge the store/company they bought from $1. The company ends up with earning only $19, and you end up earning something like $0.50 after you pay the portion of the fee you were charged by stripe or paypal or whoever.
I think this is likely a really bad idea for 'side projects' ... by acting as the middle man here you are taking on a huge amount more liability than you would be if you are using the (non-managed) Stripe connect model where the your customer has their own processing account.
Sure, there is money to be made here, but it isn't free and you need to manage the extra risk and liability that comes with it. What if someone discovers your platform hasn't got the same anti-fraud/verification processes that the larger players can afford by virtue of being a larger player, and decides to take advantage of it?
This, this, this, this. Commented about this issue above but then found this comment here later. I've read about side-project startups that have gone under because they tried to do their own payment stack and lost at the fraud detection game.
Since pro accounts initially cost £6 for month, it turns out that this is low enough that it won't send red flags to stolen cards. ... If there's a dispute on Stripe, there's transaction fees for reversing charges. £15.34 in fact. Since I know I'll lose the dispute, it's cost me, £21.54 to allow some shithead to use JS Bin as a stolen card testing facility.
We had an accounting software that was used in some pretty big Martial Arts schools, we handled their payments through Authorize.Net (stripe didn't exist yet), but in the contract, we told them a reversal will cost (making the numbers up because it has been so long) $25 + the transaction and a bounced eCheck was $30 + transaction. These fees were directly pass through, we didn't try to profit on them.
That said, the number of fraudulent card/check or bounces was 0.
We were the payment processor for a business, not working with skeezy customers directly (like Duet is).
If there is fraud, you bill that back to YOUR customer. Just like Stripe bills you for a bounced check or a reversal, you bill your SaaS customer.
The fraud I'm worried about isn't from a bona-fida customer, it's from a fraudulent customer.
BadGuy uses your service to sign up for BadGuyDojo, and attaches a stolen bank account. 10 "customers" sign up with stolen credit cards, process payment, and the money is gone along with them. A month or two later the credit card companies come looking to you for the money.
The experience you are talking about wouldn't really jive with the real world scenario which this would be deployed in.
I'm a small business owner and you are my client. You and I have a relationship. You aren't a random BadGuy. The likelihood of you purposefully bouncing a check or committing fraud is next to nil. In this scenario, similar to what Duet is doing (facilitating communications and payments between known vendor-client relationships) the SaaS that processes the payments is pretty safe from fraud.
Now, I would never roll this out on any of our SEO services. When we had credit card payments on the earliest version of Linklicious, we fought over $1200/mo in charge backs from fraud or "fraud." After nearly 3 months of our mailbox filled with chargebacks and complaints, we switched to PayPal and only once did we have an obscene amount of fraud (hundreds of signups from stolen French PayPal accounts) at which point we blocked the country of origin for a week and the problem disappeared.
You have to be intelligent no mater what payment method you chose. There are negatives on both fronts.
Have you considered using overlays from route360 (https://developers.route360.net)? They are doing some really interesting stuff with multiple transit types (bicycle, car, mass transit, walking) as well as accounting for elevation changes and incorporating GTFS data where applicable.
1) An application that connects restaurant chefs and managers to local farmers. Local farmers could upload their goods for the week on a marketplace board, and chefs could find things that they would like to cook with for the week and buy them. Typically chefs meet local purveyors at farmer's markets, but for small enough producers, it would save them time and money to just have their goods bought directly without having to go to a central market and run a stand. Chefs would be able to order local goods similar to the way they order through Sysco or FSA.
2) A dribble-like site for artisans. A site to showcase and upvote artisan work and hopefully drive business to them. Baked goods, building airplanes, cedar strip canoe building, kinetic sculptures, etc.
1 is not a bad idea. I have an alternative idea where chefs (and anyone else) can post what high quality produce (heritage breeds, etc) they want and how much they will pay for the produce. Farmers could then bid on these requests. This way rather than having to select from what is available, or the farmer having to guess what the market wants, the farmer grows what is wanted by the market and they know how much they will earn. Rather than grow the tasteless varieties that crop and look good, they will grow the varieties that actually taste good.
Great idea. A contract growing scheme on a small scale. Community groups (churches, neighbors etc) might even want to get involved. Prepayment for at least some of the growing cost would be nice for the growers (CSA style). I suppose a rating system on growers would be needed also.
Yes it could really be expanded outside of the just the restaurant business. Having once had a garden where I grew my own heritage produce I really, really, really miss the quality of those crops - the taste was just fantastic. I now live in an apartment and would pay a significant premium to get someone to supply them to me again.
One final tweak would be to allow people to also select organic growers as well - I personally would not care, but I suspect it would be a big market for this.
Interesting, I hadn't really considered the market outside of restaurants. Typically the price of organic, locally grown (although it doesn't have to be limited to just organic) produce is higher per pound than similar produce found at supermarkets. Do you think that community groups would be interested in paying more, or would have the budget to pay more?
I thought the same thing when I was trying to flesh this idea out a bit more, but the more I've spoken with farmers, the less I think this is the right way to go. The downside to doing this approach is that for many small farmers contract farming is all but assured. What if it doesn't rain when it needs to? What if you have an odd cold snap that wipes a crop? What if your planned delivery date of particular produce is delayed because things aren't growing as well as they should?
These are all things that happen with a fair amount of regularity on small farms, and things that many good restaurants would be flexible enough to accommodate, but it would sort of negate the benefits of planning out menus at the beginning of a season.
I would ideally love to see this idea extend to foragers as well. It would be kind of amazing to have local foragers post their pounds of morels and fiddlehead ferns and see local chefs snap them up.
All these problems are inherent to farming in general and farmers are used to dealing with them. Restaurants can plan around the lack of some produce at very short notice (they are used to doing this now), what chefs lack is a good way to pass the information of what they want grown. A little of this goes on right now when chefs talk directly to farmers about the sort of produce they want, but it is small scale and inefficient. No farmer can commit to growing a specialised crop without knowing the demand for it in advance. It is the sort of problem where the demand is present, but the communication is missing.
Service charges can be adequately split between all employees, whereas an increase to the price of a dish will typically just result in a larger tip to the server that is not split to other parts of the restaurant. Tipping in general relies on a lot of "good actors," between customers determining what they really want to pay for a meal to servers correctly reporting what they receive and tipping out accordingly. A better model is to tell you directly what you're going to pay, and you shouldn't feel compelled to pay any more than that amount.
Uber makes a big deal of this, drivers have always protested when I offer a tip. Taxi drivers, on the other hand, occasionally make noise if I just pay the amount on the meter.
Canada. You don't have to, but it often seems to be expected.
EDIT: if you fail to tip a driver, it's unlikely that there will be consequences for you. Failing to tip at a restaurant you frequent could affect your service in the future.
Well, It's twisted in my opinion. I get a service, but I can't know exactly how much it costs pre-service, and the outcome would be based on "how both parties feels after".
If I don't feel the service is good, I pay less. But this means, I will not be able to get better service ever again.
Tipping should be a reward, an incentive. I'm not the employer. Waiter/waitress is not on my payroll, I should not be the one thinking about their take home pay.
Exactly, especially considering that tipped positions are payed drastically different depending on what state you're in. You shouldn't have to know the employee compensation laws of the state to know whether someone is making a decent wage by serving you.
"The Albers USA projection is a composite projection of four Albers projections designed to display the forty-eight lower United States alongside Alaska and Hawaii. Although intended for choropleths, it scales the area of Alaska by a factor of 0.35x (a lie factor of 3); Hawaii is shown at the same scale as the lower forty-eight."
This story makes me smile. My father retired a few years ago, and immediately went to work on a kit airplane he and a friend bought together. He flies it semi-weekly, depending on the weather, and is working on building another plane on days he can't fly. I fear the day he stops doing "stuff" will be the day he dies, but I don't think that day is coming any time soon.
My list lines up with a lot of books that people have recommended here, so I'll try to add a few favorites that haven't been mentioned so far.
Fiction:
1. Ubik - I read a bunch of Philip K. Dick this year, but this was my favorite. It's delightfully mind bending and left me thinking about it long after the book was done.
2. All the Pretty Horses - Beautifully written. McCarthy has an uncanny ability to paint with words.
3. Cannery Row - Short, witty, and full of interesting characters.
Nonfiction:
1. The Idea Factory - A dive into how Bell Labs became such an innovation powerhouse and gives a rounded picture of the figureheads that brought it so much fame.
2. Moonwalking with Einstein - A fun read about a journalist who took researching a memory competition a bit too seriously.
3. Countdown to Zero Day - A fascinating look at the development and deployment of Stuxnet -- the virus built to set Iran's nuclear program back.