skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Review my app / startup: Yobiz
Hi all - I posted this a week or so back, but it fell off the radar before I got responses. So, not sure what the protocol is here, but thought I'd resubmit -- I hope that's the right thing to do!

We are just launching a new application focused on solving some of the lingering problems in e-Commerce inventory management.

Specifically, if you are selling products on multiple online stores (as I was) or are selling products online and offline, then managing inventory is a real pain in the asymptote.

Yobiz eRetail Inventory, Pick-and-Pack, and Ship are for small to medium size online / e-Retailers that want to centralize inventory in one place that is then sync'd with a number of online e-commerce platforms and Quickbooks.

It also provides some insight into actual packing and shipping costs so you know the true profitability of your shipments and allows to you track your packing supplies so you don't run low at the last minute.

Right now, we're offering a trial/alpha but haven't launched the app yet as we're still looking to have conversations with more online retailers so that we make sure to build the right things in the right ways. We are more concerned about building too MUCH stuff than too little.

Feedback, comments, criticism, guidance, suggestions, questions encouraged --

You can find the app at http://eretail.yobiz.com/ips (www.yobiz.com redirects there, for now)
Big Android Market expansion
Self-correction: the "IE8 with a new GUI" comment wasn't made by the engineer. Here's the discussion:

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/dkk3l/iama_we_are_memb...
Is there a company with a NoSQL product that is selling support contracts and is listed with Dun & Bradstreet? What do the reports from Gartner and Forrester Research say? Can I sue someone if something goes wrong. Did the options get evaluated with the corporate IT database committee?

The sad part is that is how it works in a lot of companies and not just a bunch of snark. Since SQL is so entrenched and most IT shops have contractual relations with SQL vendors with lots of money (Microsoft and Oracle), I don't see a lot of ability to get NoSQL into the enterprise environment. Not to mention the legacy software that means SQL Databases are needed, so why add a whole new type?
Is your Android phone spying on you?
Oh. And that was the one thing they seemed to have in common.
Visit Page & Retweet Page for chance to win FREE Professional Resume Refresh
Why must everything end up being a utilitarian pursuit? I don't think it is surprising to many that the brain is plastic enough to absorb certain details subconsciously, but isn't it enough that the book engages us during the time we read it. Ideally, we would like all books to have a long lasting impression on us, but that question is on a slightly different note than the question being posed in the article.
Sadly, jpeg2000 may never catch on until the patents encumbering it expire.
Please, if anyone can figure out a format so my mom doesn't attach 10 mb files that should be 750k, I'm all for it.
Why is first-class access to the Internet a human right? Isn't "ability to communicate freely" the right, and the Internet just an implementation detail?
A web app like http://teuxdeux.com with a color coded feature and team accounts would compliment this approach.
If all Google showed were ads, no one would come to the site. Furthermore, Google is already outrageously profitable. The only real threat is if people start searching somewhere else. Do you really think they would make changes that make that more likely? Google has strong competition in Bing, Yandex, and Baidu. Even if profit were the only relevant motive, short term profitability is not something Google needs to worry about.

It also seems that your argument applies to every ad supported site. Are you contending that the nytimes is in the ad business and not the news business? Is the news mere window dressing for their advertisements? If not, then how are they different from Google?
Please don't use double negatives... shouldn't this read "Why Enterprises are Interested in SQL". (And it's a statement not a question).</snark>
Calacanis was quotes in the article:

@arrington told me he wouldn't sell @TechCrunch for <than $40M last year.TC has ~$6m in revenue/~$1.5m in profits (all TC50!)

If this is true, and TC sold for $30MM, that would be a 20x multiple based on EBITDA. I seriously doubt that AOL paid 20x for an online magazine and in-person conference. That is way above the norms for this type of sale, based on the data I have (I am in publishing; go to http://www.jegi.com and look at their industry reports). In order to justify that type of sale, they would have to have a non-reproducible advantage over competitors but I see none. Either TC had a phenomenal sale, the numbers are wrong, or AOL isn't being responsible with their investor money.

Just my 2 cents.
To play devil's advocate, aren't a lot of these places where it's best not to rock the boat and risk screwups? In other words, they'll learn about new things in good time once they have big companies advertising them and have been around the block once or twice.

Whether that's sensible or not, I'm not in a position to judge, just that in that sort of world, perhaps learning about things a bit late is not a problem.
Contracting or salaried? Because that's very low at least for contract Ruby developers in the US.
There's quite a few ways, here are a few that we're using for our new app (www.yobiz.com):

* Affiliate Networks - Affiliates who target your markets can really drive qualified traffic.

* Blog posts - good, high quality blog posts on topics relevant to your business can drive good traffic.

* Email Newsletter - Market either to established email newsletters or generate a list from your existing customers

* Facebook Ads

* B2B Forums - Participate in the discussions but be cautious about self-promotion

* Get featured in an article - Spend time cultivating press relationships in order to get featured in press.

* LinkedIn Posts

* Local meetups - Attend local meetups in relevant industries and network, network, network

* Mobile Apps - Create a mobile app that drives subscriptions.

* Press releases - really good for SEO and not much else.

* SEO - good SEO will really help make your app visible.

* Social bookmarking: Digg, Reddit, delicious, etc.	Activity aiming to get website posted onto mass-sharing networks.

* Attend conferences & trade shows

* Tweet - be part of the conversation and generate a following with occasional self-referential tweets.

* Video - Video on relevant topics with good quality can really drive traffic.

Hope that helps!
Cannot agree more about your motivation point. Yes college played a role in me meeting some of the most fascinating people, but the rate is not as much as I would want. And as for the challenging subjects part, well I would just say college really made no difference there, well apart from telling me what I should learn.
How to build: OpenJDK and Project Lambda on MacOS X 10.6
My company CouchOne offers commercial support for CouchDB (which consequently has quite a bit of enterprise uptake, contrary to Stonebraker's assertions).

I think there is something to the argument that without commercial support, companies won't be adopting these technologies.
Because NoSQL systems are a tool, enterprises have invested heavily in workforces and capital that are centered around SQL. It's relatively easy as an enterprise dev to get a SQL database that is going to be backed up and restored by their admins. It's ok to lose the odd 'Like' it's not ok to lose the odd deposit.

Since enterprise businesses are generally not built on a freemium/advertising model, they have the resources to buy systems that are accurate first, and then furnish hardware to provide the speed.

Another problem with NoSQL is that while the core database functionality is there, the rest of the tool chain is missing. Show me a NoSQL database that has tools on par with SQL Server management server, or has tools that integrate well with Visual Studio.

Simply put, the use-case for NoSQL is not what enterprises need. SQL fits the use case far more than NoSQL. Keep in mind that a lot of large enterprise applications still run on mainframes. If you actually think about it, most mainframe applications are NoSQL because they are still using datastores so ancient and basic that they are essentially NoSQL.
"STFU and go cash your check, numnutts."
"If I understand your point correctly"

You don't.

"You are contending that Apple is in an equally powerless position"

No, I'm not.

"Yet even the app in the anecdote"

It isn't an anecdote.
Google URL Shortener Gets a Website - open to everyone
Our CPUs are so much faster than even a few years ago, but bandwidth hasn't increased that much (at least not here in Canada). I'd gladly trade some CPU cycles for bandwidth (or same bandwidth, but better quality).
I don't have an Android device, but what you describe is half-way to a fantastic OS. If each application could specify some text for a permission, the installer could then display it to the user ("This application wants to access your contacts for the following reason: Generating barcodes for contacts") and the user could check/uncheck what he wanted.

Obviously, almost everyone would just press "accept" all the time, but users could become more and more educated about security (it's not that hard to grasp that an app needs access to contacts), and that security model would possibly be the best of both worlds.
No, you're missing my point. Consumer hard drives are unreliable because consumers would rather save a few dollars rather than pay for a reliable system. That's one end of the spectrum. The other end is, say a bank, where databases are backed up remotely in conjunction with high-reliability RAID drives to achieve a very high level of reliability.

It's not that we aren't capable of designing systems that are reliable, but rather that we don't value the reliability as much as it costs. And that's because even a crappy consumer drive is 'good enough' for most people, unreliability and all. If it's not, we put in some sort of a back-up system to mitigate the risk.

In the early days of computers, that just wasn't so. If you're old enough, you probably remember having a C64 game on a cassette that you just couldn't get to load. Or a floppy disk that became corrupted because it got heated to over 50°C and some bits got jumbled. Go back even further when only prototypes of these devices existed in labs, and the situation was even worse. Well, most software is more akin to the prototype in the lab than a product on a shelf. It hasn't been thoroughly tested, it is still under development, we don't understand the limitations of the system, etc etc etc.
I remember when I first visited Google a friend of mine who worked there very excitedly showed this to me. I was terribly unimpressed because at the time I was interning at the Jet Propulsion Lab and I had already seen their version of this:

http://lucyabramyan.com/Site/Stage.html

One of my co-workers had built this awesome immersive environment using back-projection, so you didn't have any of the frame boundaries like the Google version did. It was particularly well-suited to viewing the panoramas sent back from the Mars rovers.
I try to look at the bigger picture think how can companies like yours help companies like mine starting up so we can tear down the entrenched SQL forces.
They list straight-to-DVD releases (e.g., http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120131/). They even list TV shows.
Man this is funny, thank God I havent seen the AOL CD in a while
Late to the party but, that word (ambition) doesn't mean what you think it means. It only means "a strong desire to do or achieve something" -- it doesn't pass judgment on how "big" that thing is.

By your (faulty) definition... for you to want to own a world-class airline is ambitious. But for Richard Branson, it's a deal brokered over lunch. See the problem?
Trivial example of what people need to know in enterprises:

“Tell me whether pet rocks are selling better than Barbie dolls in the south?”

What people really need to know:

I already know from existing reporting that 984 orders (18% of our backlog) are already past due. For those 984 orders:

- How many are for one item and how many are for multiples?
- Do we own what we owe those customers?
- If we do own it, is it in the proper warehouse?
- If it is in the proper warehouse, can we find it?
- If we can find it, is it undamaged and certified?
- If it's shippable, do we have enough labor to ship it?
- If it isn't certified, how soon can QA certify it?
- If it isn't in the right warehouse, can we move it?
- If we don't own any, where can we get some?
- Which vendors have it on the shelf?
- Which vendors do we have blanket purchase orders with?
- Which vendors do we have contracts with?
- Which orders can be split to satisfy a partial?
- Which orders are for customers already on credit hold?
- Which customers are threatening not to renew with us?

and (ironically) the most asked question of all:

- Which orders must be shipped to hit our quarterly numbers?

I can go on and on; this is just off the top of my head. We like to pick on enterprises, but this is the shit that really happens all the time. So whenever you get gas in your car, bread on your table, new shoes at the mall, steamed milk in your latte, etc., etc., etc., rest assured that someone, somewhere has asked these questions. Questions that were probably answered using some form of RDBMS, SQL, ACID technology (with really good application software on top of it).
Google URL shortener available to the public
The most disappointing thing about this post is the fact that we're supposed to be preaching "use the best tool for the job" to the young ones. And here is someone that anyone interested in database technologies has heard about and is regarded as an expert denouncing a whole slew of potential database solutions based on the opinion of one person.

And ACM publishes it!
Sentiment-sensing software could aid in weeding hostile online comments
Not to be beating the same drum I always do when it comes to these things, but if you spoof the "Referer:" header in the request to be http://news.google.com/ or similar, you'll always go straight through to the article on FT. RefControl plugin works well for me in Firefox; other extensions may work well elsewhere.

I'll probably stop mentioning this for a month, but it's just such a convenient hack.
Not sure why this is being downmodded. Stonebraker has a history of using his reputation to promote his businesses. Which is fine, but I don't think most people realize how much of a financial interest he has in downplaying nosql. Something his competitors like ahoff and I are very much aware of. :)
Dan (jman73) has posted a follow-up: 4 Steps to Becoming a Killer. Comments and discussion welcome! Post: http://rypp.ly/9XKdvm HN thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1744613
Right now they are only allocating out of one /8, so if they are being too broad in their allocation policies now, then they can start cleaning up the mess when the need the next /8.
and a link to the paper, "Anger Management: Using Sentiment Analysis to Manage Online Communities"

http://research.yahoo.com/pub/3352
> tear down the entrenched SQL forces.

Sounds like a terrible idea to me. What you should be doing is building new things where SQL is not such a good solution, rather than "tearing things down".
I think it looks great, but I'd test if it converts better with the Free Trial button above the fold (most likely by removing or shrinking the header).
As a regular person, I really can't see a 40% decrease in size (of which I'm skeptical) for just jpeg images (not nearly the full "65% of the bytes on the web") being worth the huge switch-over costs. The ubiquity of jpeg is just too valuable.
It's a bit over the top: "Whenever a company chooses NoSQL, he will lose money." - it's not like Stonebraker gets money every time someone sets up Mysql, or even Postgresql, which, IIRC, he was involved with at some early point in its history.
This smells contrived, as if TechCrunch will somehow be cooler if it rebels against its parent a la Reddit v. Conde Nast.
True enough. And in hindsight, I think asking people if they've heard of "NoSql" is somewhat an unfair question. The term itself is s trendy one. I'm sure there are probably people who have fixed more lines of code in NoSql databases than most people have here have written, and don't know that specific term.
Location-Based Mobile Social Network Buzzd Debuts New And Improved Android App
50 Years of Cyborgs: I Have Not the Words
Clickable: http://eretail.yobiz.com/ips/index.php
A pretty good list of rules to go by.

Also I think it's important to have a look at the system which enabled the person to make the mistake.

One story a former colleague told me about a former workplace. The company would issue commission checks every month to their sales people. For some reason, they were using a spreadsheet to calculate the totals. A new hire in charge of the spreadsheet to issue checks did a sort on the names but didn't include the other columns to be sorted together. As a result, some people who just started working there got issued checks for thousands of dollars and some of them took off with the money. It resulted in months of headaches as the company attempted to sort everything out.

The person who accidentally sorted the spreadsheet got fired. However, no one else got disciplined. IMO, the people who allowed this system to be setup and used are the people who should have been responsible.
I'm surprised that in 2010 people still don't understand the difference between PNG and JPG and that each is better for different kinds of images.
HP names former SAP CEO, Léo Apotheker as new CEO and President
I'll admit it was a bit snarky, and written in haste. You said it much better. He wants to play the role of an objective observer here, almost like an expert journalist. But he definitely has skin in the game.
doesn't look too promising. let us know if you are successful.

"Requests to remove papers from the [student paper] database must be submitted to the Turnitin help desk by the institution's Turnitin account administrator."
Don't look at your college degree as a backup plan. Study something you will really enjo (I'm a Poli Sci Major).

I met my future cofounders, employees, managers, at school. But if you want to stay in school "just in case" you need a degree for a job, you are wasting your time. Go to school because you want to learn, not because you want a job.
Study: select Android apps sharing data without user notification
My boss walked passed and I called him over to tell him about WebP and he literally laughed out loud at the name. I said it without a hint of sarcasm and it was the first thing he noticed. Anecdotal I know; but still...
Researchers develop means to reliably read an electron's spin
Russian firm hopes to have luxury space hotel in orbit by 2016
Thanks - not sure why it didn't resolve to a clickable link above.
Crackdown on Zeus Trojan crime ring in progress, 60 charged
I started the clock at the birth of the first computer because, obviously [1], one could not begin to solve the practical problem of developing methods for writing error-free software before one had hardware to test it on.

I'll concede that we seem to be better at controlling the error rates in hardware than we do in software. There are lots of reasons for this; the biggest, ironically, is that custom hardware is very expensive. Therefore, there is little market for highly unstable custom hardware built by high school students. The cost/benefit ratio is all out of whack. It pays, if you're going to build hardware, to take your time and do it very carefully.

---

[1] On the one hand, at this point I expect mathematicians to jump out of the woodwork and claim that their illustrious predecessors were able to theoretically predict the future existence of buggy software as early as the nineteenth century. On the other hand, I have a gut feeling that very, very few computer programmers realized how hard it was all going to be before they actually tried it. Nobody ever does, even today. Gedanken software never has bugs.
Squirrels are amazing little creatures: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/06/science/06angi.html
Senate Votes to Shut Up Loud TV Commercials
The disgrace of the legal services market
Okay, I'll buy that Chrome and ie are a shoe-in, and that FF is probably easy. So that leaves Apple and Opera. Not bad, not bad...
[video] The future of photography. Jump to 1:18:00 and stick with it for 10 mins
Hawking & Mlodinow: No 'theory of everything'
I'd be very curious in seeing a comparison with JPEG-XR, which has a number of nice advantages for photography.
I like the page, very clean and tells me what you're trying to solve. The video was a nice intro and looked very professional; I really like when product landing pages have a video as it really embraces the "don't make me think" paradigm. My only nitpick is with "pick & pack." Is that an industry phrase? If so, I'd capitalize it: "Inventory, Pick & Pack, and Ship without the hassle or the cost. Otherwise, I'd just say "pack" as the "pick & pack" thing made me thing there were multiple products, one for Inventory and another for Pick & Pack.

Just out of curiousity, how many guys are working on this app? It looks fairly polished for just entering alpha.
if you don't want to invest your money... don't do it. be assertive. 2 pieces of advice on being assertive...

1) if he tries to criticize you for not investing... agree with him. example: "you aren't committed to this company." Don't start criticizing him... just say something like "I guess that's one way to look at it."

2) you have to detach yourself from the outcome. you might not be friends, but as long as you don't criticize him... he won't have any real grounds. no one that is a real friend will be mad at you for doing what you want. you haven't made a commitment to fund the company.
That's funny you say that. I definitely have been working a lot on that specifically over the last few years.

I'm actually a hard-core hacker. I'm running technology at Stickybits. I wrote my own Python web framework, and released (what I think is) the best templating framework in any language. (weby templates: http://www.jperla.com/blog/post/weby-templates-are-easier-fa...)
My comment, and especially the "while it's easy to laugh at" intro, was prompted by the original submission title, which had a sarcastic "your tax dollars at work" comment.

wow, it's amazing how people with certain political belief are willing to sacrifice every last bit of intelligence to promote it, even on this site!
And yet they still don't have my block, smack in the middle of the SF Bay Area.
HP Names Former SAP CEO Léo Apotheker As Their New CEO And President
I wonder how much he is being paid to attend that 3 hour meeting
With OLED/IPS etc. taking over in the next few years, will this really support >8bpp or HDR?

Interesting move, Google
Put on some chill music and have a bath.
Tips for small biz to promote their companies on Facebook
I'm still trying to find ways to further monetize my iPhone math game: http://www.mathogen.com

Mathogen teaches kids (3-10) addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division through a cute and colorful pattern matching mechanic (faster comprehension means higher scores).

I thought $2.99 in the App Store would be a sweet price but anything over 99 cents seems like a deterrent.

Does anyone have experience making money with their games on Facebook? If I release my game on more platforms, more people will talk about the game and purchase it, right? I would love your feedback.
I would/will gladly pay. They're asking users who similarly would like to pay and keep Xmarks alive to register here: http://www.pledgebank.com/XmarksPremium

Quoting them: "1,841 people have signed up, 98159 more needed"
WebP, a new image format for the Web
I made a Vim plugin to post to your Posterous blog from Vim, no browser needed