I was massively into Tintin as a kid in Ireland and when I met my Belgian wife she introduced me to this and I loved it. I was hoping I'd find it mentioned in here already!
Did something change with how the locations are managed? I tried to add myself and used the lookup for London, which then gave a lat/long as part of the address, like your examples. But then I noticed that I was all alone and the "rest" of london in a 30+ group have their location without lat/lng.
Yes, I had to make a change about urls in order to support locations from all around the world. lat/long ended up being the only unique thing in common.
When I updated the way meet.hn handles location, I migrated all city ids like the one you mention "gb-London" to a new one using lat/long.
The problem is: when users select a location, they can end up at another (close) location suggested by OpenStreetMap. To mitigate this pb, if locations have the same full name or OpenStreetMap id, I don't display them in the location selector.
Also, I put locations of type "city" first to nudge users into selecting cities more and hopefully end up with less problems of this kind.
I made a (now deleted) root comment about this, but saw someone else commented about it to.
All the links people have in their profiles basically doesn't work anymore. Maybe you could at least setup a redirect from the URL without the coordinates to the one with the coordinates, assuming when they set up the link, they used whatever first result you got back then. Basically run both versions (not literally), but redirect from the old one.
Good practice to keep URLs alive one way or another for as long as you can, as effectively all the links the initial group of users put no longer works as expected.
Obligatory shout out for the Techmoan Youtube channel, he loves these things and has had a bit of quest over the years [1] for new and interesting ones (and lesser alternatives). All of his latest ones come via a Ukrainian company, Millclock [2].
How were they selling a dollar for 80 cents? The actual food is more expensive on grubhub than ordering through the restaurant, and then there are multiple fees on top of that.
Tons of marketing/advertising. The free GrubHub+ subscription through prime probably burned through a lot of cash. I doubt Amazon was paying them very much (if anything) to Grubhub. Then you have all of the corporate staff (around 3k based on google search) who are highly paid.
And the competition from UberEats and Doordash, who also are constantly promoting discounts, free orders, etc. so there's almost no way they can recoup actual costs let alone turn a profit.
But there is the cost of hosting, developers, drivers, etc.
And that's all cost that is not borne by the restaurant.
And there is a limit to how much people would pay to get something delivered. So they're probably pricing the delivery, etc less than they've actually paid.
We've seen this before and we'll see it again. There are lots of people who will pay for things below cost. Sometimes that cost comes down but a lot of the time it does not especially in relatively affluent countries. I don't have a personal driver or chef like I might have in some places. I do have some other house/yard services but very occasionally and I consider them luxuries.
I always wondered if the promotions were handled with restaurants more like "we (the platform) recoup our promo losses via the regular platform fee you (the restaurant) pay regardless" or more like "if a customer uses a promotion, we (platform and restaurant) split the loss, unrelated to the regular platform fee". Like when I use a platform promo for reasons well beyond trying a new place for the first time, am I screwing the restaurant, the platform, or some combination?
Mostly the restaurant, at least in the case of these companies' "free delivery" membership deals. Restaurants pay a higher commission on those orders. (Whether that's enough to outweigh the operating deficit built into their current pricing I have no idea, but some fraction is being passed along to their merchant "partners".)
It was an all stock transaction, so they maintained an indirect stake but it was significantly diluted: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_Eat_Takeaway.com Meanwhile Just Eat Takeaway investors got taken for a ride.
The degree to which startups with unsustainable business models can be called pump and dump schemes is debated. I wasn’t suggesting they committed fraud, but they definitely put their best foot forward before that transaction and believed it was in their interest to sell.
Also it’s not just unrelated 3rd parties, Enron was included because: “Enron falsely reported profits which inflated the stock price, they covered the real numbers by using questionable accounting practices. Twenty-nine Enron executives sold overvalued stock for more than a billion dollars before the company went bankrupt.”
all of it, including its future, was valued at $7 billion, but there was never $7 billion in cash. Maybe it was $700 million in cash paid for 10% of it, which would value the whole thing at $7 billion. If that totally-made-up 10% number happens to be the right number, then it hasn't lost much at all overall, but the investor who paid that has to share the sale price with a bunch of other shareholders who paid less. So, this owner lost money, but the firm did not necessarily.
(I'm not saying this is what happened, and maybe a quick google would get us closer to the actual numbers, I'm just saying you have to pay attention to the wording of what is being claimed; media likes to exaggerate.)
what has disappeared is "belief in the future prospects of this company to bring in profits worth $7B" which was why the last investors invested, and why the early investors set up the kitchens and other frameworks to support those hopes. And it's not that the opportunity wasn't a good one, perhaps a competitor "won", or perhaps there are too many competitors trying to share the $7B pie.
> I wish I'd spent more quality time with mine while I could
Absolutely! My parents were never always that healthy but would love a long walk and meander. I had a period where I didn't go home for a few years and when I finally saw them again it was shocking how much they'd declined. A couple more years since and now they can barely walk more than 10 meters without stopping in pain. Now it's so bad we can't even walk to a corner shop nearby. When I think back that only a few years ago I could've gone on a long walk through London with my father, it stings. Now it's a case of "what next" with their health.
Of course it seems like you have to learn this lesson "for real" for it to sink in, which is the sad bit about life...
Like many people here, a no-name double edged metal safety razor: I think I got this for around $25 or so with a set of 100 blades and 3 soaps; compared with disposable razors, this has been amazing - a better shave, a nice experience to it and so cheap. it took me about 2 years just to get through the "free" box of blades for it.
Secondly a set of silicon coated spatulas for cooking. These have saved me so much food waste and have made cooking for 2 a lot easier.
Thirdly, few magnetic digital timers I've stuck to the fridge. I've found these brilliant when cooking, it makes it much easier to track when doing several dishes. I start one when I begin cooking as an "overall" time that gives me a reference and then I've two others that I'll use as needed when doing something specific during the overall meal cooking. It's made it much easier to keep everything on track.
And finally a VESA mount bracket for a cheap standing desk I have. I'm not sure what took me so long but having a mount for the monitor instead of it being on the desk completely changed the space available and made it so much more useful. I have a very small workspace so that was a driving factor.
I do this all the time even when I know I'm at the right place as my friends have young kids and I usually turn up around when they might be in bed, so I tend to just message my mate I'm there to see that I'm ready and outside. Both of us are in our late 40s.
This is really nicely done! Great work. I fell in love with just how efficient these can be and it explained a lot about why many of the trig and other mathematical functions implemented in 8-bit computers are they way they are.
Here's a rather wonderful original document from the BBC Research Department (I had no idea that was a thing) back in 1969 going over just what makes them so great (https://downloads.bbc.co.uk/rd/pubs/reports/1969-10.pdf).
If all you've come across are Taylor approximations, these things can seem a little like magic at first.
Yes, the title is very much clickbait, granted there's some discussion SWE related matters but really they're referring to the "tech industry" as whole, and which industry isn't squeezing at the minute...
Some nontechnical workers in the industry, including marketing, human resources and recruiters, have been laid off multiple times.
I was in the exact same experience (and I'm also very risk averse), and I would say yes and no. Like most things it's complicated. But to keep it short I most certainly grew the most in my career – meaning in engineering, people, presenting, everything – by taking the plunge with a new role and the challenges it brings. You're forced to learn and adapt and taken out of your comfort zone.
I think even in a great company you are going to hit a ceiling that is hard to grow past even if the opportunity is there – there's politics, there's other priorities, there's always something that will get in the way. I found swapping job was the only way to "push reset" on that side of things enough to have that rapid burst of growth.
What I've very slowly learned is things tend to work out. If you've got some savings built up and not too much in the way of hard responsibility, I'd explore the option.
