Correct regarding the 9am comment. I live 30mi west of Boston and it is essentially an automatic 90min if I were to leave my house at 730am. For reference, it is 35min w/o traffic. Natick, MA seems to have become the "I can't afford Newton and Wellesley" town. Prices are crazy.
I thought the removal of physical toll booths from the Mass Pike would help. I have seen absolutely no benefit.
I've had a bit of experience with Route 9 in Framingham. You have this one light near a Whole Foods which causes a massive backup, it can go for miles. The reason? There's another street that comes in at around a 30-40 degree angle to route 9, and it gets its own light cycle rather than having an on-ramp.
Big problem in RI, if you've ever driven down to the south county beaches on Rt 1, you'll actually be on a "highway" that has 6-7 lights. Why not just have off/on-ramps? Infrastructure is hard, apparently no one wants to spend on that.
Couldn't agree more. Also didn't want to be that person tracking calories ... but now that I do and can look back, my perspective is more of "let's face it, losing weight is not easy" and those people tracking were doing hard work.
But you realize, finding your macro deficit combined with an app like my fitness pal makes it SIGNIFICANTLY easier. Losing weight becomes simple arithmetic.
Alcohol is rough. So many people have no idea what a drink actually contains calorie wise. Even the new and popular alcoholic seltzers will list something like "100 calories", and then the nutrition facts will list something like "5 carbs". With 4 calories per carb ... 4 * 5 does not equal 100. It is more accurate to just take the calorie count of 100 and divide by 4. Now you have a 25g of carbs drink, which is fine, but you need to factor that into your daily tracking.
Alcohol has calories per gram, but it isn't required to be listed. This makes craft beers very interesting. Take a 16oz can of some double IPA at 8% and boom, you have around 320 calories in that one drink ... or 80 carbs if you look at it that way.
I've tried to simplify it a bit with this calculator that actually factors calories/g of alcohol.
I need to do more reading on this calories per carb thing. I don't get it at first glance.
I also hated the "if it fits your macros" type thing. I'm not a body builder, what do I care? But when you see the real impact of what you're about to eat it actually frees you quite a bit (assuming you generally eat well). I'm actually happy to grab that extra piece of cheese because I can easily take the calorie hit, I gotta eat something, and some protein and fat seems better than carbs.
I did the math on craft beer last winter, and cut back on beer for a bit, but it never stuck. 2.5cal per ounce per % abv. It would not be unheard of to drink half a POUND of calories in an afternoon, say, watching football. As I've switched to wine, even when I have more than I should and input the numbers, I simply cannot believe my eyes in terms of how FEW calories it has. I overestimate my consumption to be "conservative" and yet it still barely makes a dent in my diet. It's amazing.
I've done dry january a few times, and never saw a bit of benefit. But a month is a short time to see a trend, and it's not a time when I'm training for a race or doing much cycling; most of us are indoors a lot, maybe you have a dessert once or twice a week when normally you'd have none, and bam, you get discouraged and it feels like cutting out alcohol entirely makes no difference at all. Again, when you can see the data on a day-to-day (or even minute by minute) basis, it's so freeing.
Looking at myfitnesspal right now, my 'goal' is 2220kcal (which I think is a 500kcal deficit since I set it to lose 1lb/week). goal 2220, -470 food, +1141 excercise and I've got 2934 left to 'spend' for the rest of the day. It's amazing to get to work and have more than your entire BMR left to eat.
I used to think Dane Maxwell of The Foundation was the crazy one, and all those infopreneurs with blogs were geniuses.
I’ve since realized how wrong I was. Dane’s big thing was about interviewing small businesses, finding a pain and then being paid to solve that pain with a saas product. Seems pretty logical to me now.
Some brilliant mind who lurks on HN should create a competitor to eBay. Not some online yard sale where you have to meet people in person for the exchange, but a nice online marketplace for people to sell their stuff.
If this already exists, do tell.
In my opinion, eBay for sellers (outside of maybe the power sellers. I've sold <100 items) is a nightmare.
I sold a Tiffany necklace a few months back. The buyer reported to eBay it was fake and I was ordered to refund the seller and they could keep the fake item. Long story short, over a span of a few weeks, I was lucky enough to get an original receipt from Tiffany and supply it as evidence, which almost still did not work.
More recently, I listed an old iPhone with a "buy it now". Sold in like 30 minutes to someone with an "@god[dot].com" email requesting I send the phone first and then he will pay me. It took a week or longer for me to challenge this. I even have settings to disallow certain types of eBay users based on ratings etc. eBay still charged me a listing fee.
I had success doing a non buy it now sale after that. Maybe that is my only option now.
I don't even feel like getting into how slow their seller admin tools are ...
You're right. We're about to launch a mobile app and working on getting it working on browser as well.
Bitcoin is a barrier but our goal is to eventually be currency agnostic. It does enable us to do escrow properly though with 2-of-3 multisig, and it also ensures that people control their own money.
it is certainly a barrier, but if sellers recognize that sales over bitcoin has lower costs (cost of fraud) - certain items should show up on these marketplaces and people knowing about that tech will be really happy to get bargains... or so it should work :)
OP has relatively specific bad experiences with ebay. How does OB exactly prevent similar cases? Being decentralized and based on bitcoin does not help against fraudulent buyers or buyers wasting time by attempting to negotiate unreasonable terms.
They are built on top of those technologies, but the user isn't exposed to any of the technical complexities. Seriously, go to openbazaar.org and download it, see for yourself.
No, I'm not going to install software just for accessing a marketplace. That's just silly, because now I have to worry about compatibility with my OS and a wealth of other problems that comes with running applications natively (e.g. is it compromised by a 0-day, since I doubt it gets as much attention as one of the big browsers)
I never understood how this works. How does a16z, USV, and BlueYard make their money back? That's why I've been hesitant to deal with this stuff because I don't understand the business model.
They didn't invest in OpenBazaar, they invested in OB1, the company who is leading development on OpenBazaar. I'm a co-founder of OB1 and we monetize by offering services to users on the platform, not by monetizing the platform directly (no fees).
The contracts between users are all cryptographically signed in a system called Ricardian Contracts. At any point each party has a digitally signed copy of all the information they need to proceed with the trade.
Because this is a protocol for decentralized trade, and a network to engage in trade, there's really no terms of service or privacy policies that can be enforced between users. They connect to each other completely P2P, the devs or anyone else can't enforce anything between them (and don't even know a transaction is happening).
Is this a sorta "we had no idea so much of our revenue was derived from pirated content" play sorta like Youtube, then, but for an active marketplace that's actually maybe just filled with fraud?
No awareness by the company and no easy ability to enforce terms before users make me wonder why the heck I'd ever want to try to sell or buy something on that platform. Seems like craigslist but with too high a bar of entry for the good-intentioned non-fraudster non-tech-savvy users.
OpenBazaar looks like a great project, but with $4.25 million in backing from VCs, it does not look like a charity project. How do you plan on monetizing your work? It was not clear to me from the OpenBazaar or OB1 websites. I only ask because many great products work well when VC money is supporting it, but then are seriously degraded when the company needs to start showing revenue and then a profit.
In an ideal world, maybe from selling consulting to commercial sellers? In reality, I see absolutely no overlap between the kind of business who would ever consider paying for FOSS consulting and the kind of business who would trade on a more chaotic version of eBay.
But could an IPFS distributed system provide reasonable search, e.g. competing with eBay's new search-by-image?An open, distributed market can be worked by closed, centralized search engines. If they design the market they are a prime candidate for becoming the dominant search engine layered on top.
1. A direct order. The Bitcoin goes directly from buyer to vendor. There are no protections. This method is only used for small value transactions or transactions where the buyer trusts the vendor.
2. A moderated order. The Bitcoin goes into an escrow account (a 2-of-3 Bitcoin multisig address) and there is a third party moderator who will resolve a dispute if one of the parties feels wronged.
Note that if there is no dispute opened in a moderated order, the buyer and the seller can release the funds without the moderator even knowing they were chosen for an order.
There's nothing to prevent listing flooding, but the rest of the network will just ignore nodes that are abusive. There are also third party search engines that crawl the network, and they'll block spam themselves for their users. Rawflood is an example:
Currently the vendor selects a list of moderators they are comfortable working with, and then at the time of a sale the buyer selects the one they prefer. If a dispute is opened the moderator the buyer picked from the vendor's list will resolve the dispute.
What's in it for the moderator? I assume they get a cut of the escrow?
How is the moderator's reputation visible to a buyer? If there's some kind of rating system, why would the reviews be useful at all? After all, any situation where the moderator has to act will leave one party pissed off.
This seems like a lot of complication just to buy something on the internet... unless what you're buying is heroin. In which case the whole 100% p2p thing starts making more sense.
But how do moderators become moderators in the first place? How do I, as a prospective buyer, know that all the moderators aren’t all pre-chosen by big sellers (by fair means or foul) to be sympathetic to them?
Regarding “reputations”: Remember Goodhart’s law: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”
This is a real hard problem. Bad people make everything bad for everyone else. The problem is more about the US market laws and scalability I think.
Large companies like eBay have to take fraud and customer support costs and weight it against their company vs you as a seller. It would take a company that cared more about sellers than their own bottom line.
The customer is always right. Middle men like eBay have two customers though: the buyer and the seller. They support the one that helps them the most and let the other get burned occasionally.
The thing I miss most about ebay are the independent sellers of "crap" - not sure how else to put it, but basically the random people who dig out stuff from the their "attic" and put it up for people to bid over.
You know - what Ebay was originally set up for.
I mean - one time I found a bucket of bolts for auction; just a bunch of random rusty bolts someone had in the back of their shed, they decided to auction off. And wouldn't you know it, a bidding war happened. That bucket of bolts went for close to a $100.00 by the time it was all over.
Those are the kind of stuff I like to see, and the kind of stuff I like to bid on and/or buy. Not the mass-produced junk from China - if I want that, I'll get it from Amazon or Ali Express (and I do).
You can still find this on Ebay, but it isn't as ubiquitous like it was in the beginning. I personally think their decision to compete with Amazon instead of sticking to their core users really changed perceptions and user base. Maybe it's better for them, but for users who like auctions, finding something similar that is trusted as much hasn't been easy (there are a few).
What platforms do you suggest as alternatives for finding your aforementioned independent sellers of valuable items? I think OfferUp and LetGo seem viable.
I agree completely, also their platform is just so slow and full of bugs. It simply looks like they havn't changed anything in the past 10 years.
Edit: Forgot to mention that their search is so bad, they mix search results with search phrases previously so it's impossible to find things I am looking for.
Years ago I sold an ipod on ebay after Christmas. My parents bought me one and a family relative also bought me one.
My account was suspended for fraud even though I provided proof of purchase for the item. I left ebay/paypal and stopped using it when I realized that they could arbitrarily hold my money for 6 months even though I provided legit proof they were wrong.
"In my opinion, eBay for sellers (outside of maybe the power sellers. I've sold <100 items) is a nightmare."
I wouldn't argue too strongly with you there. I've sold loads of stuff on eBay (about £50k worth over the years, apparently!), and there are problems too often. People try it on, so I have to send -everything- via recorded mail, which is expensive, so then people complain about the postage cost, even though I always put them up front.
I've had quite a few completely fatuous claims made against me when selling, one of which said there were parts missing, when I'd actually said those parts were missing in the listing. eBay refunded him and let him keep the item.
Whenever I have an issue now, I just say 'send it back, I'll refund it' as this is invariably the path of lowest friction. Dealing with muppets is a cost of selling on eBay that has to be factored into the equation, alas, and it's worse than it ever has been; here in the UK around 2000 it was pretty 'niche' and only serious people seemed to be on there. But after a few years (and a few newspaper articles along the lines of 'quit your job and make a living on eBay') it started getting like it is now.
Non paying bidders are a pain to sellers, but it means nothing to eBay so they don't do anything about it.
The upside, at least, is that when you buy on there, you're well covered. Had a dodgy 'reconditioned' cylinder head turn up a few weeks ago. Returned it without even having to pay postage, which was a relief - in the past that would have been £400 I'd never have seen again.
I had a summer of eBay nightmares in college. I was supposed to help a relative sell an attic full of old clothes and knick knacks. Nothing was buying because I was a new seller, so I put some old video games on to bolster my score with quick sales. Everything went well until one person reported me for not including the box & manual (which was never mentioned in the listing) while another claimed the disc was counterfeit. After these two headaches, my relative complained about having to give some costume jewelry up for $7. At that point I decided it wasn't worth the trouble. Final profit was $97
There are definitely ways to improve the process. Maybe a "middleman" has to provide an appraisal or validation for the jewelry/electronic before making the listing. The true obstacle with any new competitor is network effect. When normal people want to sell local, they use Craigslist, when they want to sell nationally, they use eBay. Any chaff has already been taken by the big guys, and what is left isn't worth the fight.
Lollipuff (YC W'13: https://www.lollipuff.com/) does exactly this for higher-end women's fashion -- to directly address the issues you had with your Tiffany necklace (though I don't think they support Tiffany today). All the items get authenticated before listing by professional authenticators, without needing to take items in hand. This provides more-than-ample evidence in the event of a dispute (the authenticators are well known in the field!). Then Lollipuff walks buyers & sellers through the process to ensure a safe transaction -- including instructions on shipping, which can also be a frequent gotcha for high-end items.
I wonder how much eBay has been impacted by this type of "wedging". I would use eBay primarily to buy/sell musical instruments but Reverb took a pretty big chunk of that market and provides a better and more trustworthy experience than eBay, at least in my experiences there.
I know there are a few fashion-related sites like this out there and I'd guess there are other "Reverb for X" sites as well.
I'm sure there is still a fortune in the long-tail but specialty sites seem to be more of a concern than a direct competitor.
Ebay doesn't charge a listing fee for the first 50 items per month. If the buyer never pays you should open an unpaid item claim after three days, then call ebay after four days and have the claim closed in your favor. If more sellers did this the buyers would get filtered out of ebay. In the future you can use buy it now and require immediate payment to prevent this entirely. Verifying the authenticity of commonly faked items does not have an easy solution and I would not buy or sell anything like that on Ebay. Any place that allows the sale of items like this will have tradeoffs.
Some alternatives to Ebay are Ebid, Etsy, Rakuten/buy.com, Amazon, Bonanza(allows cross listing with Ebay), Swappa for phones, uBid, Jet.
As long as there a dishonest people, you're either going to be a nightmare for sellers, a nightmare for buyers, a random nightmare, or you're going to have a lot of overhead to have competent people in a scalable organization arbitrate everything.
Sellers and buyers can now use eBay Authenticate to get independent confirmation that goods are as authentic. It’s starting out just focused on certain types of handbags and luxury items but expected to expand over time. https://www.google.com/amp/s/techcrunch.com/2017/10/16/ebay-...
Seems like Facebook would be best positioned to do this. They already more transparency than Ebay/Amazon with regards to who you're dealing with. They also have regional buy/sell groups already. Integrate with some shipping platforms and they'd be on their way.
I've actually thought about that idea and even did some initial prototyping for a mobile app. But the idea I had was a more usable/less scammy version of craigslist specifically for local commerce. Initially, I was thinking of limiting the goods to electronics and then expanding slowly to other items.
I have the same problem with Amazon. Both of them favor the buyer because customers trusting their platform is a huge selling point for them. As a seller most people are honest, but enough of them are not for it to be extremely annoying.
Problem is you have plenty of scammer sellers too.
Amazon is the worst for a seller, much worse than eBay. It's completely in favor of the buyer over there, and can easily be gamed. Saying something is damaged, waiting to the absolute last second of a 30 day "trial" to return it. It's horrible. I will never sell anything on there again.
For the payments layer, yes, but not for storing the actual marketplace data. Blockchains aren't great for storing data apart from maintaining a transaction ledger.
When we started building OpenBazaar we specifically avoided using a blockchain apart from Bitcoin for payments. It was the right call I think. There are plenty of other decentralization tools to use apart from blockchains, like IPFS, which OpenBazaar 2.0 is built on top of.
The only purchase I ever done on eBay was in 2002 for a PocketPC. It never came. I reported the seller. They said 22 others were scammed and PayPal, their partner in crime, said that they couldn't reveal the seller's personal detail unless by court order. That was the only UX data point I needed. Never used eBay again.
Naively, alert his bank that he was stealing money from everyone and share the PayPal email with them. I wasn't aware at the time that I could take the matter to small claims court. PayPal offered no assistance as far as laying out what my options were. They were fine with it, it seemed. Zero on actual customer "care."
Before even finishing your comment, in my head I was saying "compared to vue.js where the tutorials instantly clicked for me". I'm no master js guru, and agree completely with you.
I'm blanking on his name but this sounds like the teachings of The Foundation (thefoundation.com)
I have no affiliation, but I recall podcasts where he repeats over and over that you just need to interview small biz and find real pains they'd pay for.
This is pretty good project. I can help you out in SEO. I have done various projects where main source of earning is Adsense.
If you wish to colloborate and grow it mail me vivek at eyuva.com
So true. I started side projects so many times without staying consistent and it created this self fulfilling prophecy of "I'm not good enough at coding, I can't build a real web app". Then for http://www.averageweather.io I finally decided to just keep working at it every day. After a few months I was comfortable with python, Django, js, heroku, and postgres to the point where I felt I could build anything I wanted if I just put in the time.
