skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A problem with this service's model just occurred to me: The way that you get users onto your "new mobile" version of the restaurant is by re-directing them when they go to the restaurant's home page from a phone browser.

What if the users are like me, though, and just avoid going to the restaurant Web site from the phone because we are aware how bad the "usual" experience is.

I'm not expressing this clearly, but consider this analogy: If for ten years a neighborhood in town is "bad", has a high crime rate, routinely plays host to gang wars, et cetera, building a state-of-the-art gated community and community playground in that area won't attract new visitors for a LONG time until that old reputation runs its course.

One of your selling points is that there's "no marketing required." I don't know how you feel about this, but I think that's a losing strategy for a project like this.
You miss the point. There may be cases where "the other guy" actually starts a war against us. But that doesn't seem very common. What is much more common is "the other guy" doing nothing but our own people making up lies about what "the other guy" is doing; you know, inventing a fictional war. In those cases, you're not going to end up dead or living under anyone's boot heel.
Finger, EXPN, VRFY and such have all pretty much been killed off by SPAM and unwanted marketing.

Most users wouldn't want the ability for an unknown 3rd party to try to guess at, or verify, their contact info.
Java?

More serious: Batteries included make it easier to get up to speed. It's also easier to use synaptic as an "AppStore" instead of hunting for everything out in the web.

Though for languages that I am more familiar with, e.g. Haskell, I am more open to hunt myself (or install custom package managers like Haskell's cabal).
we're generally a fickle bunch.
Our basic operating idea at the company is that if people think something makes it harder to get their job done then it's a problem worth fixing. Professionalism in the office is just one example.
Sounds interesting. Can you give an example of how this might work? It hadn't occurred to me that you could do such a thing without physically exchanging money. Everything I can think of off the top of my head would involve tracking code that presumably the customer wouldn't be able to validate is legitimately tracking leads.
I'm just curious. Do you have any example of country (region?) that had a real option of waging war against its enemy but chose to surrender and got worse then it would get if it choose to wage war? (by any reasonable prediction, of course)
Who cares about the Nook? There's only one competing product on Amazon's mind at this point (I'm guessing).
About #2: It's impossible that it's nonsense. To be nonsense, it would require a conspiracy among the field's thousands of practitioners and most of their students and admirers. The alternative is that the practitioners - the content creators - are the conspirators and the consumers are dupes, but the odds are against maintaining a long-running scam on such otherwise smart people (I hope).

It seems much more likely that outsiders looking in on an obscure field resent the work it would take to understand the field, so they bash it. Unlike other complex fields, including any of the sciences (except astrobiology, which clearly is bogus. And maybe evolutionary psychology, which is borderline), lit crit doesn't do much work in the world and most people wouldn't miss it if it were gone. So, that compounds our resentment of having to work to understand it. In other words, it's tough to understand, there's not an obvious payoff for understanding it, so it's easier just to write it off.
Good advice. When I think back to my high school days what I remember most is dread and discontent, despite the fact that I was well liked. The material was boring and had only a tenuous connection to the "real world", where "real world" means the application and practical learning of skills. I would have been better off apprenticing, learning on my own or even being taught by parents.

If anything has changed since my High School days it's that schools have gotten worse. They're more authoritarian and paranoid (cameras and patrols abound in the hallways), are even worse at teaching teenagers anything (look at their abysmal performance. This is a well known problem), and want even more money.

You can try blaming the kids for the problems like hugh3 does, but the fact of the matter is that there are so many people doing poorly in and feeling poorly about school that it can hardly be rationalized away as the individual's fault. The problem is the system, i.e. the schools themselves.
For those who didn't catch ellyagg's point, I summarize.

good: dietary fat,
large portions of pure meat,
any sort of meat,
all-bacon explosion diet,
so-called paleo diet,
most popular diets

bad: all the obviously unhealthful foods people don't realize,
baked potato (as compared to cake, weight-wise),
high glycemic foods

underappreciated and core component of modern fitness: physical strength
Yes, that was the joke. Thanks for explaining.
Ah, my mistake. Didn't know the submitted date.
Yes, that's probably true.
The big deal with Firefox 4 is support for Jetpack:

https://jetpack.mozillalabs.com/

Like with Chrome, and more recently Safari, we can now write Firefox extensions using HTML/CSS/Javascript.
Pseudo-work does not equal work
And actually: Meeting your first wife for the first time can't be repeated.
From my view, the highest highlighted feature was the tabs, followed by the 3 you mention. I counted WebM as Chrome, given that it is Google's codec, but I'm not sure its in Chrome 5 either :(.

Looking further down, I was thinking that WebSockets, Indexed DB, Crash Protection, and the key feature of JetPack (Add-Ons not requiring restart) were all pioneered by Chrome. That leaves The Web Console, which I have not yet tried so can't really comment on either way, and the two givens (HTML5 and CSS3). To my eyes this seemed odd. But I take it you disagree?
Solo founders
looks great. both the idea and the UI of the website and what is shown in the the demo.

some of the comments like creating a website, not just a mobile site, are great too.

but i wonder, what is your target for # of clients?
I would think you would need at least 1000 clients at $15 a month. is that realistic?

according to some results from a google query there are hundred of thousands of restaurants.
i also wonder, were these numbers on your mind when you created the service?
Pitfalls of the Working Game Designer: An Introduction
Eric Mill gave a great talk at Ignite RailsConf in Baltimore this year on webfinger.

While not supported everywhere yet, webfinger seems like a really great way to handle machine-readable profile and account information identified by email address.

Here's a link to his blog post that includes his slides and a video of his Ignite presentation: http://mill-industries.com/post/375-journey-of-self-discover...
I am extremely interested in this, but I wonder why you're doing mobile only? Existing sites are crappy because they don't know any better and doing all the good stuff is HARD. I mean, add in basic mail merge capacities and a place to put a few ambiance ahots of the restaurant and you'd have EVERYTHING my Dad wants me to do with his restaurant's website.
I think it's a mistake to worry about how other people use their time. HN is a valuable resource; so is time. One of the most valuable skills that entrepreneurs/would be entrepreneurs need is time management. They can't delegate that to someone else!

I know that I suffer from the "I should really get off HN and back to work" guilt. And when it hits, that's exactly what I do.
Drowning Doesn't Look Like Drowning
I really like the "watercooler" idea floated a while back: switching HN off for most of the day, and only have it on for (say) half an hour every four hours (around the clock, for all-night hacking and overseas users).

It would increase simultaneity of use, and hopefully therefore interaction, giving better chances for ideas to bounce and gel, teams to form and so on.

This crazy idea of underusing technology to solve a problem is probably something that only the earliest of early adopters/innovators would consider (reminds me of rms's server that emails webpages to him - psuedo-neo-luddite). But whether a good idea or not, you have to admit it would make HN less engaging.

EDIT it could be trialled with a copy of HN, linked to from the front-page (with "open in $n minutes"), and populated with the same new stories. This would keep votes and comments separate. note: I don't it's going to happen, but I'm curious about whether it would work or not. Has anything like this been tried before?
7am - 11pm? So do you have make a lot of sacrifices with your personal life? Like girlfriend, wife, family?

No one person at justin.tv works those hours (and the article didn't say that).

Many people worked long hours in the early days (when I first started here, I worked 12 hours on weekdays, and 8 hours each on Saturday and Sunday). I haven't done that in a while though - it isn't sustainable.
..."the safest course is always" to pay the fee

Well, this has got to be true, right, since there's no reliable way to tell if your usage is fair a priori?
Things that are useful sometimes displace those that are useful right now. news.yc definitely falls in that category for me sometimes. Its also easy to be blindsided when what you are reading seems to have a high payoff at some arbitrary point in the future (with low odds) , and what you are working on is something with a low immediate payoff (with high odds). In short enticing articles about haskell and llvm sometimes keep me from doing the routine things that matter on a daily basis. I would like to believe that this self corrects after a while but I havent collected any data to support this notion.
I read it when I was really young, so it imprinted as an idyllic myth of sorts. I discovered it was just one of a series (most of which take place in China) later on in middle and high school, and by senior year I was reading Water Margins and Romance of the Three Kingdoms in class. Learning Chinese was especially trendy when I entered college in '05, so it seemed fun to dive into something I had carried my whole life.
Cheap market umbrella
Shadeusa Umbrellas has a variety of Patio Umbrellas, Beach Umbrellas, Market Umbrellas & Beach Chairs. Patio umbrella and market umbrellas are the ideal way to decorate outdoor lounging areas as well as protect you.
I don't know if you can differentiate between gambling and investing in real life. Both activities involve making bets with certain payoff and certain probability in mind.

It's often really difficult to know the actual risk you were exposed to and whether your probability assessments were reasonably accurate.
So Jetpack obsoletes GreaseMonkey?
> honorable war fighting

One part of me gets it how war can be honorable. Thoughts about protection, bravery, planning, cunning, destruction of evil enemy. On the other hand I think that this thoughts are cultural imprintment reinforcing primal instincts embedded by evolutionary means in times way before industrial age.

Concept of honorable war in our heads is with such contradiction with any serious war fought with modern equipment that I feel that it's one of these things that made sense in early days of humanity, like seeing danger in dark barely visible shapes, but unlike those harmless artifacts when mixed with modern technology our glitch that makes us think that war can be sane misguides us into doing really harmful and dangerous things.
Wow, that went from "here's an interesting thing about the iPad advertisements" to "HOLY SHIT SOAPBOX" very quickly.
Dynamic Memory Allocator Review
Thanks. I didn't think about that. How much history would they want?
Here's an unorthodox idea: if it sucks so much, why do we need the Android Market?

Yes, by default it requires checking a box in the Settings to install apps anywhere else. But what's stopping developers from marketing their apps through, I dunno, pretty AdMob ads, Reddit posts, Lifehacker write-ups, anything? Or even marketing apps through other means and linking them with Market URLs to bypass all the cruft?

I think it can be done.
The sales cycle may not be as bad as you think. The standard model in restaurant (and market) POS systems seems to be a large up-front cost of many thousands of dollars, followed by a yearly "support contract", which entitles the client to a "free" phone call to technical support as necessary. (Without an active "support contract", I've seen some pretty outrageous hourly rates for calls to tech support, and they will resolutely refuse to answer anything unless it's paid for.)

On top of this, the hardware used by these POS systems is absolutely terrible. The "new" hardware used by wait staff is basically a Blackberry with a tiny screen and a stylus which is easy to lose, sold by Symbol. The menu functions on them are complicated, and last I checked, the replacement costs rival a new iPhone.

...and there's a device out from Apple which attaches to the back of an iPhone and allows users to swipe credit cards through the iPhone. (Sorry Square, I really wish you had responded to even one of my emails, but it looks like that bus has left the station now.)

With competitors like these, you should be able to pretty successfully market a replacement using commodity hardware, open systems, and a yearly "support contract" that would entitle the customers to upgrades, etc.

One of the vendors, "Digital Dining", has only just recently started offering integration of menus into their customer's websites, and it's clunky as hell.

Your bigger challenge would be getting existing restaurants to convert. Once they pay out for one of these piles of crap -- and get it working after weeks of aggravation -- they're reluctant to do anything that might upset it.

But businesses like mine would be very happy to guide them through the transition. :-)

edit: You already know all this. But maybe someone else doesn't.
Build on what has already been said - useful conversation tip
Finger was obsoleted by Web 2.0 where users no longer have unix accounts.

To verify an email address, can't you do an SMTP RCPT TO and then cancel? AFAIK some systems use this to verify that sending addresses on incoming mail are legitimate.
You can do that right now by changing the procrastination settings on your account page.
I disbelieve.

I touch type at about 60 wpm. (Where your top is depends on your coordination, but for lots of people that is about the top.) Therefore it takes 5-6 seconds to type in an 11 word password. By contrast a frequently typed 11 character password typed from muscle memory takes no more than a second or two. That's substantially faster.

In fact even when I'm still learning the password, I type it faster than I can type the original sentence.
It's definitely true, but in a document linked right from the payment page, it's rather self-serving. Taken in context with the rest of the document and the AP's utter silence on what might possibly count as "fair use" in its eyes, the message it sends is more than just cautious legal advice.

It's tantamount to someone running a protection racket pointing out that you're less likely to get hurt paying his fee than fighting it: He's right, but it doesn't legitimize his demands.
A Zero-Energy Showcase: National Renewable Energy Lab's new building
Well, if the internet helped Obama get elected and that counts as changing the way government works, then cartoons have also "changed the way government works" because Eisenhower had an animated campaign ad.

New media creates new ad venues, it doesn't necessarily change what sorts of people are elected to government or what they do once they arrive there.

The internet's ability to change government lies in its ability to connect people, where before you had two guys in a small town with no political power, they can all the sudden become a national force of thousands, two guys in each small town. Hasn't really caused a noticable change in governance yet though, in my opinion. I am young however, so my frame of reference is narrow.
It's probably easier to educate developers than users, because there are fewer of them. Also, developers have more to lose in lawsuits and bad press, while a user may only have their life ruined.
Ha. I gotta laugh. I've seen so many websites that look like this, I have a hard time differentiating some of these startups.

I know it's a proven navigational scheme and sound UI that studies show converts at a higher blah blah blah, but when is some one going to do something new with landing pages? Sheesh.

Okay, on the count of 3, everyone click the down arrow on my comment!
It provides the url for each library.
Now to start asking myself, "why am I wasting all my time?"

We all have the same 24 hours in a day.
Problem is that it's virtually impossible to tell what's a good investment until well after the fact. In money as well as in time.

When I was in college, I wasted a lot of time on Harry Potter fanfiction. I justified it to myself as an investment. I figured that I'd learn how to write better. I was involved as a tech admin on one of the sites, so I figured I could polish my technical skills. After all, where else could a college student actually write code that faced real-world traffic from real-world users? And if nothing else, the fandom was 99.9% female, so I figured I might even end up with a girlfriend.

After about three years of this, I figured "Who the fuck am I kidding?" and realized that it wasn't an investment at all. The hard part of writing is coming up with a believable plot and characters, and fanfiction didn't exercise that at all. I was going into financial software, using Java and custom databases, and so my PHP/MySQL webapp was completely irrelevant to my professional experience. Nobody really respected fanfiction anyway, so it's not like it was a resume boost. And I still didn't have a girlfriend.

Except that in the end, it was an investment. Three years after that, after a couple years in the financial software startup and then a failed startup of my own, I ended up getting back in touch with one of my friends from the fandom , who had since started a job at Google. They were hiring. Partially on the strength of her referral, and partially on the web skills that I'd built up since my time with that fansite, I ended up getting a job there.

Anyone remember Steve Jobs' commencement address, the one with the calligraphy story? It's sorta like that. We keep trying to structure our lives so that everything leads up to achieving our goals, but oftentimes, the goals themselves aren't apparent until we've reached them. It's only in retrospect that we can put things together and say "I meant to do that, yeah really, I did."
At first I was going to mock this author, but then I realized this is one of those articles that needs to be analyzed one level further than just a cursory (mocking) glance. This is something you should read and always remember when you yourself are telling someone that something is impossible.

I was telling a friend that streaming video games would never be possible due to the inherent latency involved, but then onlive came and proved me wrong.

It just goes to show you that you should always be an optimist when it comes to predicting technology.
Amazon S3 Bucket Policies - Another Way to Protect Your Content
Hmm, I'm not sure how we could directly correlate mobile website hits with actual customer visits. Although being able to record those metrics would be a great selling point.

OpenTable/Groupon has an advantage there since they have a very direct method of measurement.
The later discussion at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1434461 has even more information, including the following quote from taviso's twitter: I'm getting pretty tired of all the "5 days" hate mail. Those five days were spent trying to negotiate a fix within 60 days.
Indeed. We had four ideas for apps. None are compatible with their ToS. Calling it an open API is a bit unfair. It is only open from a technological perspective, not from a legal perspective.

Plus, they have all sorts of bans on scraping, etc. They say users own their own data, but if their users use any tools to try to get their data, they block the tools....

It's too bad, because there are a lot of great things that could be built.
Great idea. Like everyone else, I am all for better restaurant websites and no more PDF menus.

I was slightly confused whether this was only mobile or if there was a possibility of building a full website + mobile version. It might help you convince restaurants to use this service if it can handle all of their restaurants website needs in one place.
WakeMate Update
Prince’s Nonsense
I like the idea. As a developer, it's certainly a more tempting business model than worrying about selling ads. The only web app I know of that does this is pinboard.in. They charge a one-time signup fee, and that fee slowly increases as the amount of users increase, so the earlier you sign up, the cheaper it is (http://pinboard.in/signup/). I don't know if it's sustainable in the long term though.
Out of 'the Garage' and into an Office
Partly: that doesn't synchronize with others; it doesn't give the watercooler effect.
Testing Utilities in Django
Nice idea and design. Liked the website design too - pretty neat.

Did you guys use a template for ToS and Privacy. If you have, could you pls share the link?

thanks
I think there's at least one clojure plug-in for each of the main Java IDEs:

Enclojure (NetBeans)
Counterclockwise (Eclipse)
La Clojure (JetBrains)

The other thing that has really improved immensely is "project management" (right term?) provided by Leiningen. Now you can basically do "lein new proj_name", then edit a simple config file in the created directory and do "lein deps" to get all the packages that you referenced.
I've heard the general POS term of existence is 2-5 years, so a lot of restaurants might be inclined to upgrade I would think. However, restaurant owners can be a suspicious lot, and they require more than proof-of-concept by early adopters (not even sure who those would be) to convince them.

We think it's worth the time and the money, and we agree that the current clunky, antiquated hardware and counterintuitive software is a disgrace. It's one of those ideas (upgrading restaurants) whose time is fast approaching.
Unfortunately, coding can be a non-productive use of time. If you're not taking active steps against it becoming so, it is probably a non-productive use of time. This is one of the core insights of the Lean Startup folks that is valuable to all of us: building stuff does not necessarily move the needle for the business, and the difficulty of building stuff bears no relation whatsoever to the business benefits realized by building it.
I dunno...I think it may be more that doing it alone increases the risk that a project may fail, but also increases its innovativeness if it succeeds. I'm reminded of Steve Wozniak's "Work alone" quote:

http://www.dailycommonsense.com/apples-steve-wozniak-work-al...

It seems that basically all truly innovative projects either came out of a single mind or of a small team that worked so closely together that they might as well have been one mind. There seems to be a regression-to-the-mean effect as you add more people to a project: you eliminate truly bad ideas, but you also eliminate some truly good ones too. Many ideas that look bad are really just different.

In some ways, I think this unfortunate, because working on a team is a lot more fun, IMHO, than working solo. But that seems to be the tradeoff.
You can actually finger twitter/stautsnet users using any.io

finger username@twitter@any.io
finger username@identi.ca@any.io
That whole vertical idea is brilliant: if we could convince a handful of pizza joints it would give other like restaurants a high level of motivation to join them. What type of restaurants do you think we should target? Who would most benefit from a mobile site?