skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I personally don't get whole this tip tradition ...

It's a holdover from a class-conscious society in which waiters and waitresses belonged to a different, less privileged class, deserving of gratuities from a more privileged class.

All that has changed is the gratuities aren't gratuitous any more.

> ... just give me the check stating the exact amount I have to pay.

That would require restaurants to pay the staff a living wage, and raise published menu prices to agree with reality (i.e. including tips).
Fractal Social Bookmarking Beta
> It's a strategy to dismantle the Web

Dismantling the Web isn't anybody's strategy (making money is), but in any case, it's a poor strategy nonetheless. One of the most important things I've learned is that all other things being equal, convenience always wins. A strategy that makes things less convenient for consumers is a losing strategy.
VCs downsize amidst funding crunch
Using fractals, this social bookmarking tool tries to encourage users to bring the best resources on given subjects, socially, into an optimally condensed space, thus avoiding the tendency for the quality of content to become more spread out over the internet as the internet gets bigger and the best resources become harder to find. A subject is chosen for a page or 'celll', then branches grow out and branches of those grow out, but at no point are more than a fixed number of branches allowed to come out from any given point. This has the advantage of encouraging users to replace superseded resources and keep the best resources in the a space that doesn't grow. Visiting users are also able to post comments or suggestions for better links as each page has its own built in forum. Using this fractal design up to 256 links can be added in category and subcategory circles on a fixed screen that avoids the need for scrolling and allows users to find things spatially with practice. This opens up the chance of having these menus becoming part of interfaces with alternative control mechanisms, such as wired gloves or motion capture, with a 'safe-cracking' like motion with pinching and unpinching going in and out the interface and the resultant links. Because each page has a unique link pages can be linked together, thus making a fractal of potentially infinite depth as users link pages of theirs together and cellls of those who have created resources they rate highly, in a social menu system. Pages can be voted on, positively or negatively and this feeds the search on the site, which is limited currently due to the early stage nature of it. There are however there are raking tables which show the top rated cellls if users want to find the best resources that way. Free to use, was originally going to be ad funded, but decided to give it away for free. None of my friend have internet to I could do with some beta testers. I hope to create a site where the best experts on subjects, as voted by users, collate the most condensed and organised collections of resources, that are open to debate can be create, and can be also be organised themselves by rated expert organisers in a giant fractal of the state of the art internet resources made assessable with the least physical effort in a social fractal menu of limitless depth and dimensionality.
on AWS free tier, so it can be a bit slow to start up but runs fairly fast after that
The point is that Netflix will, but unlike traditional broadcast and cable, we won't. Unless I'm mistaken, Netflix isn't included in any sort of ratings, the main source of our information about television viewership.

Netflix will indeed have some of the most powerful analytic tools available to apply to their programming, but we have no way of independent verification. Well, I suppose they may break it down in a quarterly report, but they may not have any reason to.

I think lots of people are interested in the viability of this model. Television format entertainment hasn't been significantly "disrupted" by the internet yet and this could be a step in a new direction, but it'll be hard to tell without Netflix releasing their numbers.
It's a funny paradox that China, the "regime that feels threatened by the open exchange of information," can only continue surviving by actively gathering more information than any other government. It seems like they get caught more often than any other spy agency, but I feel safer over-estimating them and contributing this frequency to the volume of hacking campaigns they run. They get caught more because they do more. The gov. has probably the best candidates working for them from their enormous population.
Sam. Breathe.
I agree for the most part with this article. I think the major problem is that apps are being developed that offer absolutely no advantage over viewing the website in a browser - in fact many offer disadvantages. This is what happens when a market crowded with some shockingly bad app developers is combined with ignorant executive mandates that companies must have apps simply to be able to say that they have them.
I'm pretty sure there was a similar blog post with the exact same point on HN a few weeks ago. Seems like a rant about mobile apps not being as good as regular websites is a good way to make it to the front page.
I might be inclined to agree, but to be honest what made me give the show a shot is when I learned that Spacey was in it. Perhaps they won't need to continue to get big name actors though, now that people understand the sort of scale/budget they are operating at.
The article is a little misleading in that it suggests a land-grab. The short links are auto-generated from app names/company names by pruning whitespace, copyright/trademark symbols and so on.

So if your app wasn't already called "Banking", you're not going to get appstore.com/banking.
1. Seriously? I cannot sleep so I will play along; you edited the post at least three times. At first I got an email from hnnotify[1] with:

"I'm aware of its meaning, I was asking why you felt the need to use it."

When I visited the "my threads" link on HN you had included:

"Admittedly I'm pretty tired, but I'm not seeing the error you noticed."

Then I clicked "link" because the thread was so nested we had hit the cool off period and there was no reply link in the long discussion page. At that point you had included the "passive aggressive" line. I typed my response and did a "select all + copy" followed by a reload just to make sure you had not edited it again. I thought it looked like it was typeset slightly differently but I could not identify precisely what had changed. At that point I changed the "three" to "three or four" and submitted my answer.

2. Yes. Before I charge someone (who writes for a living) with producing the most irrelevant sentence I am at least going to try and meet the standards of my 8th grade english teacher. It is funny that the person who knows "what should have happened" is always the arm-chair quarterback.

3. "even if my coment[sic] had been litered[sic] with speling[sic] mistakes." Are you screwing with me? If so well played because I almost woke my girlfriend up when I realized what you did with that sentence.

[1] HNNotify sends almost instantaneous email notifications when you have a reply. It is a great way to avoid clicking "threads" every 15 minutes. But it also comes in handy for petty discussions like this. My favorite is reading comments that get deleted shortly after posting. http://www.hnnotify.com
It's a pity so many people grossly misunderstand Postel's Principle.

Postel didn't talk about off-spec behaviour. He talked about the borderline details, which were often quite hazy in early RFCs. When an RFC says the line length is at most 512 bytes and the terminator is CRLF, does that mean 510+CRLF or 512+CRLF? Postel says to accept 512+CRLF and send 510+CRLF.

If a write a receiver and want to accept 1024 bytes instead, maybe that's a good idea and maybe it's a bad idea. But if you do that, don't invoke Postel's Principle in defense.
Thanks rotw, in fact I'm currently situated in this awkward overlap between having the practical skills but lacking the appropriate papers/documents to get further. I'll move to another location, so hopefully my views will be obsolete by the time I meet new people.
>> It's a strategy to dismantle the Web

> Dismantling the Web isn't anybody's strategy ...

By "web" I mean the public forum that anyone can access with a standards-compliant browser. And yes, there is such a strategy, and making money is the underlying motive.

> A strategy that makes things less convenient for consumers is a losing strategy.

Yes, unless consumers have no choice. Consider the present cell phone system -- it's perfectly terrible, and consumers can't do anything about it. The reason? Each cell phone company sells you a different interface device and tells you what you can and cannot do with it, to the degree that they now can charge you with a felony if you jailbreak their phone:

http://internetlawforbusinesses.com/2013/01/31/how-your-cell...

My point is that a free, public forum has every advantage (as you say) but if a company can prevent such a free forum in the name of making money, they will.
Sorry, but I see way way way less ads in apps than on the web.
I'd say the web is stuck with the mindset that the only way to make money is by heavy advertising or selling you to the ads companies.
That fact is not just fun but incredibly helpful to understand what's going on with this story.

The Cola company is apparently not that altruistic after all - world view saved.
I think this is mostly misguided trend-following on behalf of product marketing people. "Our competitors have an app, why don't we have an app? Let's make an app."

And then, to drive up the app's numbers, put a pop-up on the mobile version of the website with a link to download the app from the app store. Now the marketing genius who came up with this bright idea looks good and deserves a promotion.

With any luck the app fad will be over soon and we can get back to using a browser for all content instead of a different client for every type of content.

With the strides we've made in responsive layout design (WordPress and Twitter Boostrap sites look GREAT in mobile browsers!) there really is no excuse anymore.
Yes. I took some Coursera classes and it was better than reading the relevant Wikipedia articles in terms of how much I learned and retained. Net win for education IMO.
This one seems to have it, titled
"Average annual hours actually worked per worker":
http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DatasetCode=ANHRS
> but if a company can prevent such a free forum in the
> name of making money, they will.

That's easy for those walled gardens: just don't ship the browser and don't allow any in appstore.
Just because it is trite doesn't mean it is not right: because even a stopped clock is right twice a day.
I have a son in 8th grade and a daughter in 6th in a pretty good school system and I do not assume the social studies curricula is doing a better job at this material than Khan is. The kids in these classes are getting series of disjointed factual units punctuated by enrichment exercises that, while more engaging than Khan Academy, are still merely forestalling the point where the kids actually learn history, by reading books that seriously engage multiple perspectives on what happened.

The point then is that it's awfully silly to single out a very basic Khan US history overview, and disingenuous to do so without putting Khan into context; Khan is not supplanting genuinely meaningful middle school history curricula.

Equally importantly: nobody currently uses just Khan academy for junior high history lessons. Khan is not part of a plot to eliminate teachers.

I don't know where you're going with this Rhee stuff. Rhee may or may not have made education worse in the District, because she ran the school system. But Udacity and Coursera do not run K-12 school systems; they have nothing whatsoever to do with Rhee.
One thing that is interesting about this story is the fancy new Coke machines you see that let you choose from a hundred of combination of flavors via a touch-screen was a joint development led by DEKA: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coca-Cola_Freestyle

Basically this was a method to get their foot in the door and gain trust to a point to get the Slingshot project going, as far as I understand it.
If she hadn't been fired, this whole thing would have been one obscure post on reddit and an outraged customer - this kind of thing happens all the time.

If there's any lesson for would-be entrepreneurs, it's about how to handle public opinion.

At this stage it really doesn't matter who was right and who was wrong (it seems clear to me both parties played a part), but Applebee's handling of this whole mess has been a study of what not to do.
Maybe you've never been able to compare a society where tipping is normal with one where it isn't?

I grew up in the USA (tipping) but have lived in Australia for the past four years (no tipping). Restaurant service is horrendous in Australia except at the most expensive restaurants. Food is often brought out at different times for different people in your party. It's not uncommon to go out for office lunch and 1 or 2 people will be waiting for their food after everyone else has finished.

You also can't get your server to do much except take your order and bring you your food. He/she forgot something? You tell them, 10 minutes later you still don't have what they forgot. Need a refill of water, same story. There is just so much more friction to the experience of dining out.
Unfortunately for every clued in person that sees apps for what they are (a return to the past rather than a jump into the future) there are a hundred or more that have no idea about what is at stake here that will happily download your bullshit app.
Rainwater and urine - ok. But when it comes to human waste (the other kind) I'll rather trust our waste processing / drinking water facilities (as well as a couple hundred kilometers of nature in form of rivers).
Brilliant. I'll probably be using this on a daily basis now.
You should elaborate on this idea. If we can understand better why the study of history is largely useless, then we might be able to use that knowledge to reason about why other subjects held dear by traditional academics are also harmful. I think literature is even worse than history. What they are studying are not even facts! Just make believe stories. There is no ROI on make believe nonsense, right?
For some reason, specifying "https" as in your link prevents the page from displaying properly. Try this link instead:

http://xkcd.com/1168/
Why couldn't people (like the nice fellows of pulse) create something which allows these newspapers to publish article from web to a mobile app? One single app for all the newspapers. Pay to subscribe or generate ad revenue, anything. Its really frustrating to not be able to read news on the phone.
Most recent offender: Quora.
If I understand correctly, you want to learn more about the processes Heroku handles on your behalf? There are a few things you could do to get more familiar with the underlying tech:

) Deploy your application to AWS instead of Heroku. This will give you more understanding of what "magic" Heroku does on your behalf. Start with EC2, then build up to Elastic Beanstalk, which is rather similar to Heroku's offering. Also learn about Elastic Load Balancers and Auto Scaling.

) Learn the Xen hypervisor if you want to know what AWS is doing under the hood.

) Cloud Application Architectures is an interesting read - http://www.amazon.com/Cloud-Application-Architectures-Applic...

) AWS System Administration will also (hopefully) be an interesting read, but I need to finish writing it first :P
Couldn't you just electrolyze water locally at small substations and then transport the gases through pipelines? They could be reassembled later near population centers by using fuel cells. Not only would that be a pretty efficient way to transport this energy, it's also a good strategy to make it available during the night.
This is rather disturbing. Event they lower their margins crazily they cannot match say, Nexus devices. Plus this would be a softare-hardware lock-in that Turkish people cannot effort in the future. Very very bad move, if they do this..
I honestly don't see any direct correlation with regards to what you are trying to say. Could you elaborate?

The only reason to have weapons (in a primitive sense) is for killing animals for food and for certain games related to specific types of weaponry (and wars, but why do we want those?). If some individuals feel the need to own a firearm of any kind to protect themselves (or to protect others from the dangerous people out there), then they should be able to buy the weaponry they feel they need/want to protect themselves and the people most important to them.

If it is understood in American culture that anyone around you may be carrying a gun at all times (or perhaps maybe not); it creates good behavior within society through induced paranoia toward people who have a mindset toward committing crimes.
>She knows that if you make less than the non-server minimum wage then the company is supposed to pay you the rest of the wages to meet the minimum wage rate.

Umm....and the federal minimum wage is sub-poverty-level for a family of two or more in the US, or just barely above the poverty line if you're living alone. [1] I know a lot of wait-staff who are single parents that are really stretching every dollar to get by, and that $7.25/hour is a pathetic level of pay to try to support a family on, so I can't really see how "they always make at least minimum wage!" is a valid argument.

[1] http://aspe.hhs.gov/poverty/12Poverty.shtml
Benchmarks ?
1) I thought you were referring to my original comment, i.e. the one whose grammar we were discussing, not a different one that wasn't being discussed. That one, yes I edited it twice, firstly because I felt my one-sentence reply was overly blunt, then again because having decided my original comment wasn't nice, I then felt neither was your [sic], so I added in my point about that too. Not sure it really matters too much when, one again, I made these edits within a minute of posting. I'll show an "edit" mark in my comment if there's a chance someone might have replied and therefore been misrepresented, but why bother when hardly anybody will have read it yet? (You two make changes like this, I notice you at first missed "litered" and "speling".)

2) Again... relevance? The reason I "was screwing with you" was to make the point that spelling and grammar are not the be all and end all. A good point can be made with terrible spelling, and nonsense can be written impeccably skillfully. "Im board of this discussion now" vs. "This discussion fascinates me", one of those is a valid statement, the other is grammatically correct.
> Sorry, but I see way way way less ads in apps than on the web.

Yes, because these "walled-garden" apps are just being introduced, and they want to be on their best behavior for the moment. Sort of like a drug dealer, who gives the addict his first hit free.

Also, I think you meant to say "fewer ads", not "less ads":

http://oxforddictionaries.com/words/less-or-fewer
As an outsider this is my theory:
The reason is to quote as low as a number as possible to make people feel this is cheap. And one place can't start "doing the right thing" and paying a decent salary because they would be perceived more expensive and they would also upset people who are used to the status quo.

I also find it ridiculous that the sales tax is not included in the price written on the sticker in the stores in the US.
But again, I guess quoting a lower price and charging more when the customer has already made up their mind is better for the business.
"Just give them a nice salary."

It's silly naive thinking like this...

Tips exist because they are a way for the customer to give a good server some money directly.

Unless there was a cast-iron legal guarantee that the money from the "automatic" tip goes direct to all low-paid staff (servers and chefs), then I want to be able to give my money to the server direct.
You don't need to learn git/svn and you do not need to setup a repository.
I see your point, but if this were true, then cell phone service (another walled garden of separate fiefdoms) would gradually get better instead of worse. But it's getting worse.
If you don't mind me asking, what exactly is at stake? It's not exactly a step into the future but it's not really a step back either, when you consider apps that access phone capabilities (notifications, for example). For me there's also this notion of apps being registered on my phone for specific actions (want to share a photo? Use the facebook app). There are also places where I don't have net access, so having offline apps can be useful.

In an ideal world almost all of this can be transformed into what I imagine FF OS is trying to accomplish... but until then I am not exactly thrilled about it, but apps are not the devil incarnate either. They're pretty much the status quo.
Heh, that reminded me of this old thing:

http://www.macgui.com/usenet/?author=gm%40trsvax&group=2...

Internal Security Violation
The tree of evil bears bitter fruit
Crime does not pay
The Shadow knows

Trashing Program Disk.
I absolutely agree with this, I recently removed a bunch of news apps from my phone because I found myself using the browser to read news websites even when I had their app already installed.

One of the few advantages of a news app is the occasional notification and even then most the time they are implemented in an annoying fashion. It'd be nice if there was a standard that allowed users to subscribe to push notifications directly from websites without having to install an app. In general it'd be nice to see phone OS's opening up their api's to websites and not only apps.
I thought the point was that if you received poor service you left only 10%, and for dire service you leave 0%, but better be prepared to back that up verbally.
A counter point: in Sweden, where I live, tipping is optional. Many people tip 5-10% if they are satisfied, but service staff are not dependent on tips.

While service can be impersonal, it is usually without the kind of faults you point out. You can generally count on correct service.
Turning "blobs of content" into apps is going to make a lot of money when the Apple TV comes out
Great idea, but I don't like that it added an icon to the toolbar.
I would assume it's not being spammed with false feedback at this time, either, which is rather helpful for that sort of thing.
> The Danish version of the Nordic model is not sustainable.

This piece discusses how government deficits are sustainable. http://neweconomicperspectives.org/2012/12/functional-financ...
This number is vastly exaggerated. Porus was small king of a minor principality( modern day equivalent of a district).
References:
Ancient India : By R C Majumdar,
Wonder That Was India : By A.L.Basham.
I have only hard copy of these books. I don't know if e-book is available or not.
"Lets finish it.."