Hacker News Reader

tommccabeon Powa failure – where did the money go?

This company boasted of so many clients but couldn't show any as an example because they were all "pre-launch". Seemed like a big pyramid scheme that no one bought in to.

tommccabeon Zappos’ experiment to end the office workplace

The company encourages its 600 CLT representatives to make personal connections with callers, and to send flowers, cookies, or thank-you cards.

curious, do they encourage this on the company dime or is the CLT expected to pay out of pocket for these 'personal connections'?

tommccabeon Our Team Won Startup Weekend and All We Got Was a Shitty New Boss

Serious question- does the team then negotiate new terms after the weekend for those that do want to stay on-board? Who holds the 98.4% in the meantime?

tommccabeon Ask HN: How Do You Make the Most of Your Commute?

hotspot on the cell phone + laptop means it's just an extension of my work day (good or bad)

tommccabeon Stripe Raises New Funding and Partners with Visa

Really fascinating that Visa is a partnere here when they already own Cybersource, which is a key player in the enterprise e-commerce payment space. The $5b valuation is higher than what Visa paid to acquire Cybersource ($2b) in 2010.

Would be great to see the additional features from Cybersource (tax calculation, address verification, fraud management) available with the ease of integration that Stripe provides.

tommccabeon Show HN: Density – Anonymous People Counter and API

How does your product compare to existing traffic solutions, like Shoppertrak?

tommccabeon CyberSource outages Day #2

Spoke too fast. Just started timing out for us too.

tommccabeon CyberSource outages Day #2

Had an outage for about 30 minutes yesterday afternoon (ET). Nothing today.

tommccabeon Ask HN: Who is hiring? (May 2015)

Diane von Furstenberg - DVF.com - New York, NY

We are a luxury fashion brand, based in New York City, and an Internet Retailer top 500 website. I'm looking to grow our e-commerce team and have two open development roles: E-commerce Web Developer & Junior Front-End Developer.

For the e-commerce developer role, I'm looking for someone who can work with our platform (Demandware) to integrate with external systems, optimize performance, and help us build a better shopping experience. Previous experience with Demandware is great, but I'd like to talk to folks who have experience on other platforms (ATG, Magento, Hybris, Shopify).

For the junior front-end developer role, I'm looking for someone who can work with our creative, merchandising, and content teams to build out new shopping features in HTML, CSS, Javascript.

More information & application information is here. Please mention HN if you saw this!

- E-commerce Web Developer: https://authenticjobs.com/jobs/24292/e-commerce-web-develope...

- Junior Front End Developer: https://authenticjobs.com/jobs/24291/junior-front-end-web-de...

tommccabeon WEB DEVELOPER (DOWNTOWN LOS ANGELES)

Don't forget your two references.

tommccabeon RadioShack Prepares Bankruptcy Filing

How soon until Amazon buys the entire chain in order to get a distribution presence across the country?

tommccabeon What Xfinity Internet Data Usage Plans will Comcast be Launching?

People had to pay long distance fees to call long distance BBSes once. Plenty of power users and hackers came out of that generation.

tommccabeon Why scraping and ecommerce are a perfect fit

thanks for the confirmation. how do you get the product URL in the first place?

tommccabeon Why scraping and ecommerce are a perfect fit

Looks like I'm at one of the retailers you crawl. Recently, our site was getting hit with a web crawler that was following links incorrectly. I black listed several IP addresses from accessing the site and now I wonder if it was this!

Does your crawler obey robots.txt rules?

tommccabeon Ask HN: Who is hiring? (October 2014)

DVF - New York, NY - http://www.dvf.com

Are you a front-end developer? Interested in fashion? Interested in e-commerce?

DVF is a luxury fashion brand based in NYC. We're looking for a front end developer who can craft great shopping experiences.

ROLE AND RESPONSIBILITIES:

* Develop and modify websites and email campaigns.

* Optimize front-end architecture, for site performance and maximum e-commerce conversion, across multiple platforms (web, mobile, & tablet).

* Research and utilize emerging front-end technology in order to achieve e-commerce objectives.

* Daily QA of e-commerce storefront to prevent and address critical interruptions in the customer shopping experience.

* Provide technical assistance to multiple teams to ensure timely execution of merchandise and content updates of the e-commerce storefront.

* Monitor analytics to identify areas of improvement; provide technical recommendations that will drive e-commerce sales and increase brand visibility.

REQUIREMENTS:

* 3-5 years experience working in a collaborative environment.

* Demonstrated experience writing cross browser, standards compliant HTML, CSS, & Javascript for multiple platforms (web, mobile, tablet & email).

* Experience developing on enterprise e-commerce platforms (e.g. ATG, Demandware, GSI).

* Basic understanding of Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator for web production.

* Experience using code versioning tools (e.g. Subversion, Git) and bug tracking applications (e.g. Bugzilla, Jira)

* Familiarity integrating third party APIs (e.g. Google Merchant Center, Facebook, Twitter)

* Familiarity with XML for data manipulation and import/export processes * Familiarity with analytics systems (e.g. Omniture, Coremetrics, Google Analytics)

* Strong documentation skills.

* Proven ability to build strong relationships with cross-functional business partners.

* Analytic strength and strong problem solving skills.

If you are interested, please reach out to me - t.sullivan@dvf.com

tommccabeon Kaspersky Cyberthreat real-time map

Not sure exactly what I'm looking at, but damn - that is a beautiful visualization !

tommccabeon How LinkedIn screwed up our friendship

I've done this, myself. It is really easy to accidentally hit this connect button when swiping on the iPad.

tommccabeon Pilbox: an image resizing application server

I've used Scene 7 for the past five years and think that it is a great product. The cost may seem expensive if you just look at the dynamic resize/crop technology and hosting, but it is a good solution for digital asset management for e-commerce. Our photo studio and re-touchers upload directly into Scene 7 and it has simplified the entire workflow.

tommccabeon Shopify POS

Suggestion for the Shopify folk-

The site doesn't say that the POS supports a barcode scanner, but the video says that it does (and shows it in use). As a retailer, not having a barcode scanner would be a prompt deal breaker[0]. It should be featured somewhere on the microsite.

[0] lack of a barcode scanner isn't bad if you have 16 products. Once you're managing any serious level of inventory, especially with unique size/color combinations, there's so much risk for error if each item isn't being scanned. Then there's speed of service to the customer; it's just quicker.

tommccabeon Salesforce Buys ExactTarget for $2.5 Billion

I use Exact Target, every day, and I'm very happy with their product and their service. I won't speak to the valuation, but their technology and application is great.

tommccabeon The Onion releases fartscroll.js

The novelty of the fart sounds is funny, but the JS implementation is fascinating.

tommccabeon Why are payment forms so complicated?

Threatmetrix assigns a fraud risk/score based on multiple factors, including the geolocation, IP, & browser. Additionally (to your point #1), they anonymize data across their customers and alert if a device has been flagged in a fraudulent transaction elsewhere. On top of their own customers, they partner with Cybersource so there is quite a network of data behind their fraud analysis.

(I don't work for Threatmetrix- but I do use their product as provided via Cybersource.)

tommccabeon Fab stops sending you emails you don’t read, even when you don’t ask them to

This isn't just good will towards the consumer; retailers are paying per e-mail that is sent out, so it is good practice to prune the list of addresses that haven't opened e-mails in a while.

tommccabeon Front-End CSS Frameworks

Should add more context. What makes each one the best?

tommccabeon No Emails on Saturdays

Silverpop has it & also calls it send time optimization. Allows for optimizing the send over 24 hours or 7 days.

tommccabeon Ask HN: Being a manager while programming

I don't know the size of your team or the scope of your work, but I think that it is difficult to be a good manager and a good coder while conforming to a 40 or 50 hour work week. Both positions are skills that are difficult to master and require a focused effort. When attempting to do both, it is likely that one will be done poorly or the role will eat up 80 hours of your week.

My advice- if you become a manager, look for ways that you can support your developers. Look for ways to conteibute code, but Don't expect to be the lead developer on critical functionality while also managing and coaching resources.

There's also a system of balance in the manager and developer relationship. If you are the developer and fail to meet a major milestone, who hold you accountable?

tommccabeon Fear of Amazon Pushes Retailers to Take On Risks of Same-Day Shipping

Amazon can (possibly) pull this off due to their scale and their warehouse technology. I think the other retailers that can be successful are those brick and mortar retailers with thousands of physical locations across the country (Walmart, Target, Staples, Kohl's)- imagine a reverse brick and mortar model where the customer orders from the site but it is fulfilled directly out of their local store.

The luxury apparel market is going to be the next wave of retailers who explore this offering and, could be, successful with it. Shoppers who are spending hundreds and thousands of dollars online expect an elevated level of customer service- same day delivery (like Net-a-Porter offers) is the next step in this personalized service.

tommccabeon Developer Time

Everyone gets interrupted. Why do we (developers) think that we're unique and should be the only ones immune to interruptions in the workplace?

Nearly everyone is going to work better with blocks of time dedicated to their task(s). How about we all (developers + non-tech people) work together to reduce the amount of noise that our companies generate so that everyone can be more efficient?

tommccabeon Show HN: MongoDB + open source e-commerce = Forward

Seems really interesting and promising. In terms of the e-commerce landscape, do you think that this is a competitor to the smaller-mid level platforms, e.g. Magento or Opencart, or do you expect that this can scale up to enterprise level systems and compete with ATG, Demandware, and IBM WebSphere?

tommccabeon Preventing online payment fraud

Good collection of advice- very help.

I use Cybersource for payment processing on an e-commerce site. I've been really happy with their fraud screening service- automated rules, similar to the list in this post, flag certain orders for manual review. These automated rules have been able to catch orders that, otherwise, might have gone unnoticed and saved a lot of time in the process.