wrath

I've been tempted to buy a nexus 7 for my kids for a while, but at the same time I've been reluctant for several reasons. Since the XO seems to come installed with many productivity apps I may look at it instead. Not to mention that it looks a bit more durable compared to the nexus.

All that said, I wonder how quickly it will be available outside the US. Walmart.com doesn't ship to canada on many items.

I agree with the others, 3 to 4 months is nothing. As a comparison, it took my current company 2+ years to make enough money that I could live on and 5+ year in order for me to call it a success. Many times during this 5 year period we thought about closing our doors but we knew we had something, the problem was that what we were selling wasn't exactly what our customers wanted. We pivoted a few times and finally something hit. We haven't looked back ever since.

You are probably right that inventory systems are awful for small to medium businesses, so you have a business somewhere. There are others in your space so that always good validation (http://tradegecko.com).

This is what I would do:

1. Learn everything you need to know about the inventory pipeline within small businesses. How they order stock, warehouse it, receive orders, ship it, etc..

2. Blog the living hell out of what these small companies do and how you can make their lives better. This will help your SEO which in my experience is much better than AdWords.

3. If you don't already have one, produce a roadmap for your product. You won't always be able to stick to your roadmap but making one will do the following:

- Help you understand how different you are compared to your competitors. What makes you (or will make you) so special? Why should I buy from you?

- Help with conversations with potential customers that you are committed to them in the long term by showing them a roadmap.

4. Stop blogging about how you failed. I don't want to buy a product from a company that may close tomorrow because they're going to fail!!! I want to buy a product from a company that screams success. Your customers don't give a shit about how bad you are at business, they care about solving their problems.

5. Keep your product simple, be great at solving one need. This doesn't mean that you shouldn't add a contact manager if you're customers are asking for one, but that the contact manager you add isn't at the same level as salesforce has it!

6. Get known in the inventory management community. You'd be surprised how small and thigh nit these communities are. Sure IBM is huge, but they only have a handful of individuals performing outreach.

7. PR, PR, and more PR. Bug the living crap out of every tech blog, inventory management blog (big enterprise types and small types) and every other blog that fits. Don't pitch them "Have you heard about us!?",. Pitch them stories that their users want to read, and by the way, you got your data from Rakasheets.

8. Slowly integrate with e-stores and shopping cart platforms such as shopify.

9. Last thing, be patient! A company isn't built in 3 to 4 months, it's built with years of sweat and most importantly love for what you do. You built a product, which is far more than the majority of the people hanging around here have done. Be proud and "grind" on.

Good luck!

If they are going to ban the feds from attending the conference, are they going to ban the contractors who are working with the feds also? I imagine that the majority of the "security and hacking" type work is not done directly by the feds but by their contractor (e.g. in Snowden's case he was not working for the NSA but for Booz Allen Hamilton).

If they are just banning the feds then I think this is just a press stunt since it won't change a single thing.

At my company I tend to think that we hire very competent developers. Our code base is so complicated (because of legacy code and/or the complexity of the tasks) that developers make mistakes all the time. They are caught by both a peer code-review process and the QA team or support/customers. I trust that you are "incredibly competent" but 1 mistake a month seems very low to me. But what do I know! :)

What type of product do you have? Do you have a QA team? Do you track new and close bug counts from week to week? Similarly do you track regression counts from build to build? Does the code base have a high completeness rate for unit tests? Do you only deploy if you pass the unit tests? What if you introduce a bug that screws up the data, do you have a fallback strategy?

I'm curious because I always had a dream to be able to deploy on a daily basis but I've never gotten there "yet". It's always nice to hear what others are doing for daily deployments.

If we assume that everyone is telling the truth and that there is no back door or drop box, couldn't they simply get the data with man-in-the-middle type software? Getting data from Google, Facebook, Yahoo, and co is nice because it comes to you in a structure way but that wouldn't stop me from trying to get information in many others way, including working with the internet providers to put servers that copy data and direct them to my data center.

I don't get why you're down on this they way you are. You're may be right in your assumptions or maybe he likes this kind of environment and will love it. Who knows.

The "moral" of the story though is the fact that he was proactive enough to do something with his spare time. He wanted to attract attention to his skills and it worked. I hear / read every day about computer science graduates who are still working at a dead end job. Maybe if they were proactive and designed something new or redesigned something old in their spare time (like many of us on HN do with our side/weekend projects), they would get more attention and a better job.

From my point of view, this will be a great learning experience for him. He may or may not like it, but bottom line is that he'll learn a lot about himself and will be a better professional for it.

Unfortunately there's no support organization big enough to implement Linux in the dod. I would think that only Microsoft has the experience to support such customers with endless use cases.

Of course it's evil. Redirecting a user is hostile in nature and was surely done to piss off microsoft. What wouldn't be evil is putting a banner stating that the browser is not supported.

I get that google needs to make money, I'm fine with it, but don't for one minute think they are the good guys anymore. They are as evil as any other public company. Sad but true.

Congratulations... Having gone through a very similar situation I have to say it was the best decision I've made. I sold my first company for less then I could have had if I would have taken the "chance" of going the VC route... but what that enabled me to do (as you have mentioned) is to pay off my house and put a descent chunk of money aside. Most importantly though, it gave me the freedom to try new things once I decided to leave the company that purchased us. Instead of looking for a salary that would pay my mortgage, put food on our table, and pay my monthly expenses (e.g. 100k +), I could manage well on a salary of 35-40k.

Bottom line, for me is that financial security makes me sleep well at night.

My original startup also gave me insight on what I loved to do in a startup and what I didn't love. I personally joined a startup as employee #1 and helped grow the company to where we are today.

Not quite open, but Linkshare and commission junction also have good APIs if you're an approved reseller. If you want to advertise products from a particular retailer you can usually get their catalogue.

It's interesting that when companies like Microsoft are politically correct, we get blast because of it. The on the flip side when they seem pretty aggressive we blast them because of it also.

Personally I like seeing facts not just words. If you're going to be aggressive about your product, fine by me, but.... where's the proof? Where are the un-bias comparison graphs? What use case are you using to prove your point? Without data they all come off looking like two politicians.

All this said, I love SQL Server but never used it at a super large scale though. What I prefer most about it are it's tools which seem to be much more user friendly then Oracles. I'm no DBA though.

I was at his talk this morning at pycon canada. It was a very good talk, the highlight of the conference. I like his approach, although I think it'll be a challenge to get there since not everyone has his "visionary" and api building skills, but someone has to start somewhere. Well done.

I think before you start automating you business and processes you first need to know if your product will get any traction. Spending the time on making sure you have the best possible MVP is the most important thing, IMO. You may be launching a lot of tasks manually and modifying the database directly from the console at first but so be it. The fact is that creating internal tools is very expensive and only indirectly provides benefits to your product.

You'll know when you'll need to build better automation to your product; there won't be enough time to get everything done in a day.

That said, there's a downside to following this approach. When you will need to build automation tools you'll be conflicted with spending your time on automation or on improving your product. Improving your product directly provides benefits, tools indirectly provides benefits. It can be sometimes hard to convince yourself or others that you need to spend x% of your time on internal tools.

Where I work we're at a point where automation is very important. As the CTO of the company I constantly have to challenge the CEO and others that spending money on tools will give us some benefit in long term. The rule (or high level design pattern) that we are trying to implement is for every module of our product, there is a tool to understand the data better for debugging purposes (e.g. a UI to see what step in the workflow the process is in and/or what errors happened, etc), and if data is generated, there's an API/Service to get the data out easily.

I work for a company that relied primarily on Google for it's source of revenue. About a year ago our traffic dramatically dropped because of a change in Google's algorithm. We always had plans to diversify our business but we never did. At the time it hit us hard, but we were able refocused our business. As a consequence our business is far healthier than it was in the past. Google is only a fraction of our traffic generation strategy, essentially we have a sustainable business model now.

It must have been "magical" to be able to hear your own voice played back during those times. I wonder if in 100 years from now people will wonder if we though smartphones were magical.

Does anyone know if the noise in the recording is because the foil is so old and that's the best they can recover, or if that's how it was played back originally?

Instead of these negative articles I'd like to see people write articles helping other have a better experience then they had. You're on the cutting edge of technology and the consequence is that you'll have problems. I've never personally submitted an app to an appstore but from what I've read Apple had similar problems when they first launched.

So easy to say when you're not responsible for billions dollars of licensing fees for Windows, Office and all the supporting products. I think the new metro UI is risking quite a lot and just this change has everyone up in arms. They have more customers then most of us can every wish for and investors to answer to, so let's not start to assume that change is that easy.

Very cool and useful. Could be very useful once you add keyword search and more filtering. Good job.

I have a somewhat off-topic question. How do you get access to these domain names?

I seem to remember a service just like this on HackerNews about 6 months ago. I search hnsearch.com but couldn't find it, that said there seems to be a ton of advice on increasing landing page conversion (page 2, 3, etc..)

http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/submissions&q=lan...

I'm always annoyed at myself and others at work when our site goes down for a period of time and we didn't get some kind of notification telling me so... considering that this has apparently been happening for at least an hour, I'm feeling a whole lot better now.

I don't know if I should feel "okay" about not knowing the answers or if I should feel "dumb". Is this something as a system programmer today really need to know?

I use Divvy also, which I love and couldn't imagine not having it anymore. Any advantage to this one?

Agreed. I don't think my company would use this at the moment until it's proven service that has a good track record and a SLA (what's your up-time guarantee?). That said, I'd use it for my personal projects but not for $19/month. I'd pay about $1/month per monitor.

I must be missing the point to this because I'm having a "huh, cool? move on moment"; but it's the top item on the front page right now. Can someone shed some light at what I'm looking at?

I'm against SOPA and these laws as much as the next guy and I don't agree with many of stances that godaddy takes, but assuming they were really hacked, it's because of idiots like anonymous that our freedom on the internet is in jeopardy. This kind of stuff will simply promote the governments around the world to pass laws regulating the internet.

I totally agree the SR&ED is a huge plus for canadian companies. I've co-founded or been part of many successful startups in Canada and they were in part successful because of the SR&ED program. As long as you design and/or develop algorithms and software/hardware that improve canadian R&D you qualify for the service. $100k spent on the first year will give ~ $60K the next year, which you re-invest in R&D, and that gives you $36k the next (e.g. you double your origin $100k investment in two years), etc...

There's also the IRAP program from NRC which can be good. I've used it quite a few times for small projects. If you qualify for the program, IRAP will match your companies contributions up to a dollar amount, for the approved project.

I half agree, half disagree with you...

When I was looking for investment, and if I was to do it again I never sent an NDA for the first one or two meetings. From my point of view I wanted to interview my potential investors as much as they wanted to interview me. If I'm going to be in bed with these people I better like them. IMO, when you are a 1 or 2 man shop, your first investors will essentially be investing in you as much as your idea. So I never gave away my secret sauce before in the first meetings. I just gave them enough to get them interested. As such, I never sent them an NDA.

Once there was interest from an investor and they want to know more, I approached them with the confidentiality question. Those that wanted to see a demo better understand our secret sauce, read the patent docs that we wrote (but didn't have $$ to file), and/or get to see an in-depth demo had to agree to keep in confidential.

There are ways to tell someone how you're going you're different or going to be better without divulging your secret sauce.

I love it. Probably not for me but I'm not sure if people here are your target audience. We're all techies and we see stuff pretty black and white usually. My father though would love it.

I've never taken the time to know if the following is possible, but it would be really cool this app could automatically get the books you've read from your amazon kindle account or itunes account.

Either way, I could people using it and posting a link on their personal website (e.g. click this link to see a small bio about me, click this link to see what I've read, click this link to see my portfolio, etc..)

If you're really interested I would enhance it a bit, maybe make a video that explains the concept, and try to pitch it to non-techies to validate the idea further. Spend a few bucks in Facebook adds or something like that.

Many (if not most) successful side projects are a success because they solve a problem that someone has. The first someone is typically "you". So if you're not solving a problem for yourself you won't spend any time on your projects. For example, A friend of mine scores little league baseball games every night and was tired of using a pencil and papper. He was interested in learning how to write an Android app, so he wrote one to keep baseball game scores. He has no intentions of releasing it, but assuming he wanted to, a big portion of the work is done already.

I think this is the reason why you see so many task and schedule planners. No-one has "solved" the problem of keep track of your tasks and checking them off. We have a bunch of people annoyed with themselves for forgetting things and writing new apps to solve the problem, from their own perspective.

So look for something in your life that you or a family member repeatedly does, which is boring, not productive and not fun. Write an app to make it productive and fun. Then if it works for you, it might work for others. They may also find it useful.

Say what you want about Microsoft and IE (I'm expecting Microsoft to be bashed as usual in this thread), but for those of us who were developing for the web in the early 2000s IE was way richer in features that any other browser. The event model and the styling capabilities were better and best of all MSDN actually had documentation. There's a reason why IE6 was adopted so much. It "was" good.

Others with better ideas came along and made the web development experience better, but I agree that IE started it all. I have no idea if the web would be better or worst without IE. I would expect that someone else (Netscape??) would have played the role of IE if it didn't exist and we would be stuck in a similar situation. Remember that in the early 2000s developers that called themselves web developers had ZERO experience.

There weren't any standards back then and since many of us had to start writing intranets and websites, and since you could do more with IE6 we used it.