skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> That is, to Spolsky's credit, the point of HTML being completely layout free is supposed to be the compelling feature.

Except that it isn't. If you want to do anything entirely non-trivial, you have to annotate your HTML with classes and ids, and then hook into this using a complicated declarative language. But, at this point, there is no abstraction gain from

<div class="floating_figure">...</div>

over

floating_figure(...)

Functions are fine abstractions and nothing stops you from providing different implementations for different situations, and these implementations can again use abstractions to deal with a variety of output devices. Nothing here requires you to define layout specifics as part of the document [1].

Moreover, not all the world is just plain sequential text. There are mathematical formulas and syntax diagrams, for example. math.stackexchange.com falls back to Javascript (via MathJax) in order to display formulas; and Lout provides an excellent example of how one can specify the spatial relationships of syntax diagrams [2] while still abstracting over the implementation details (Lout is another functional layout/typesetting language).

[1] Of course, in practice, the world is never so clean, and you can rarely ignore layout constraints entirely; anyone who has ever written a paper containing a non-trivial mathematical formula knows that.

[2] http://i.imgur.com/huD07xc.png
Scientists in Sedans getting Sauced?
> Since he is willing to cancel his reservations, why the hate?

Let's say I'm running a 60 seat restaurant, and he has claimed 10 of the seats for a Friday night. I have bought supplies to cook for 60 guests. If he doesn't sell his 10 seats, I'm left cooking for 50 guests, and now have excess food, which is highly perishable, and can make up anywhere from 30 to 50% of the costs of the dishes I'm serving.

In addition, places that do accept reservations well ahead of time are less likely to receive 'walk-in' guests, as the reputation of only taking reservations discourages people from trying their luck.

He advertises last-minute reservations, so he's probably cancelling his reservations a few hours before service, which is nowhere near enough time to re-book those tables, given that anyone interested would have simply booked at a different restaurant.
As I said, the idea that a sales tax is regressive is simply an artifact of your measurement period. The "rich person" you describe is simply a saver - at some future point he will become a consumer.

Literally the only reason the tax appears regressive in year A is because the act of saving has shifted the taxes to year B > A. This is an artifact of your measurement period and vanishes in the long term.
Right, and you're allowed to occupy it as long as you want. If your friend gives you $5 to let him take it over, I don't see a problem.

This could only be a problem if people start parking cars they would never use in the city, just to profit from these services.
Even if they were popular enough to fill the seats they still lose, as they still lose those employees spending time on the phone to take the initial arbitrage reservation & then they lose time on the phone once again when the employee takes the arbitrage reservation cancellation call.
PS3 emulator boots the first comercial game
I don't think the problem is that CSS is an unnecessary approach to the problem of layout. It is more that it is a poor approach to the problem of layout.

A layout language is unnecessary given a bytcode VM a chunk of memory, code, and an output. The balance is in capability, performance, and understanding.

I have done a lot of CSS wrangling which has given me plenty of time to consider what 'a better way' could be. I doubt I'm alone in that respect.

CSS has three parts. Properties, selectors, and values. When someone is talking about how awesome CSS is they have usually done something clever with selectors. When someone is ranting about getting CSS to work right, they are usually trying to figure out what set of values to put into properties.

The properties themselves are insane. The legacy of incremental development and serving many masters. The options for values are limited. attr() would help my own usage a great deal but Firefox doesn't support it (see here someone complaining in 2011 that they've fallen behind Internet Explorer on this https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=435426#c3).

Actually Properties, values and Selectors are all limited. Selectors are just the least weakest link. Properties could do with a complete breaking overhall (ie. If a document is in doubleplusgoodCSS mode it only supports the new style properties). property values should be the results of expressions in a pure functional language. Selectors should be another expression system with operators and member-check functions, the selector system is close to what it needs to be already. Just a mechanism for user defined groupings (such as attributeContainsPrimeNumberAsHex("class")) and combinators.
You're not wrong that there's a negative correlation between smoking and obesity or Parkinson's, but that is not a reason to take up smoking. You're far more likely to die of cancer or heart disease as a smoker than you are not to die from Parkinson's because you smoked.
Auto and home insurers in fact do pay customers for risk-mitigation actions like driver training and alarm systems, just as health insurers pay for preventive medicine.
This looks like a fantastic tool. Unfortunately I use firefox. That being said, I use similar extensions for other sites including RES for reddit. I will definitely use it if/when there is a firefox extension.

User configurable "hotkeys" would be cool as well so that the user could configure specific keys for navigation.
You could do it in a revenue-neutral way by distributing the additional parking fees directly to poorer people. This could make allocation more efficient whilst redistributing money from richer drivers to poorer non-drivers, whilst being neutral for poorer drivers and richer non-drivers.
Ask HN: Open-Source Alternatives to Keyclick
I'm a fan of keyclick (http://sustworks.com/site/prod_keyclick_overview.html), a tiny piece of software for OS X that produces artificial and yet oddly satisfying audible responses to using the keyboard.

Sadly, it hasn't been updated since 2012 and I'm wary of paying for something that may well have been largely abandoned. On top of that, I'm not totally fond of the idea of handing access to OS X's powerful accessibility features to a closed-source piece of external software.

Any suggestions?
Just to be clear: I agree with your point on focusing on creating value. And after I read your comment, I agree that none of the startups in the articles are truly creating that much value.

However, is it that simple to qualify when you're creating value? If I had read the article before HN's comments, I'd have thought the startup is cool (admittedly trivial and silly, but we have a lot of those nowadays), rather than parasitic. I'd have thought it's just a clever hack in helping more efficient distribution - in the true spirit of capitalism. Yes, while it would shift the value to rich people, it also free up the rich people's time, so they (rich people) can create more value. Assuming that rich people is richer because society decides that their time is more valuable, they can create more value in the same amount of times of some other poorer people.

Of course, that might be not morally justifiable. But creating value and being morally correct is orthogonal.

I'm not living in SF the SV area, but I've a few friends there. Every time they talked to me about startup ideas, I've always felt off about those ideas. I kept telling myself that trivial value is still value, and potentially if it can help many people, the net gain would still be large. How do I know where to draw the line?

Edit: it seems like quite a few people have problem with my post, so let me rephrase the middle paragraph a bit:

Ignoring the mentioning of rich/ poor, parking spot is a commodity. And just like other commodity in life, everyone values it differently. What's wrong in letting people paying for what they think it's worth for? The rich will always have advantage in buying commodity, and that's a fundamental issue in our society, but that's an entirely separate problem to fix, and the solution isn't telling people to stop producing commodity, or distributing them.
In this specific case of parking lot, it's bad either way because a private company is skimming profit from public space.
I wish I knew if this is a business or a project. If it's a business, I wish I could understand the business model.

As it stands, because it's a free app, my concern is that if I use it, then I will probably end up being the product instead of the customer.
Accounting is actually a language. It's the language of finance. You're probably confusing accounting with finance.
Well I thought this is a project where you write django with python generated CSS and HTML, ZODB for db and some other kind of pure python mockup of redis/memcached, and using Tornado to replace Nginx. Now that's compelete-stack python
And of course you can subpoena the racketeers, follow the money trail, and ticket both buyers and sellers. According to the city attorney, it's a $300 fine: http://www.sfcityattorney.org/index.aspx?page=599
There's many ways restaurants can weed out this behaviour, but the fact is, many take reservations purely out of good-will, since customer service is at the heart of the restaurant business.

This guy is basically destroying all the good-will and the faith that restaurants have in reservations, and they're not going to put up with his service.

By the way, what he does already exists, hotel concierges or matchmaking services will often make reservations on behalf of their clients. But in those cases, the restaurant establishes a relationship with the concierge which is mutually beneficial, and trust is created. In cases where this trust is broken, a restaurant will basically refuse to accept reservations from the concierge or service who abused the relationship.
FYI, I suspect that pizza was referring to aabalkan's post, not your app.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

Because nearly every internet business gets it's revenue from advertising, a lot of good people jump through hoops to convince themselves that they have not made a deal with the devil. The downvotes[1] come fast when I point out this moral and cognitive dissonance, usually without any counter argument since they just want me to go away.

When I talk to anyone who's livelihood doesn't rely on advertising or marketing, there is near unanimous agreement that advertising is fundamentally manipulative and dishonest.

Besides the social cost of Advertising, there many other costs[2]. The idea that advertising gives us free web content and services is utter bullshit.

-

[1] The cowardly downvotes with no counter argument have already started. Upton Sinclair is the actual source of the quote at the top. A wise man who got a bunch of downvotes in his time.

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7767811
Lots of kneejerk reactions here. I had the same until I thought about it a bit more. In a free market these reservations should generally go to the highest bidder.

On the one hand you could view it as the site being a market maker and injecting liquidity into restaurant reservations. Whether this is ethical or not is up for debate.
We were taught in school that a bank takes deposits and lends them out as loans but that's not how it really works.
When a bank makes a house loan for example, the house is added to their balance sheet and it becomes an asset that they can lend again, minus a fraction.
It is and always will be a non-profit project, so no need to worry.
Golf Bags
That makes sense. It appears Docker is in fact especially useful for OSX because it can replace a VM with something more svelte and seamless.
Dev's are a funny, unprofessional people. I wish more people were like that.
Odd that in such a candid launch article discussing reaction and site traffic he would skip over things like users created and, more importantly, revenue. In my opinion, this is a model where restaurant goers can 'pay with their pocketbooks' so to speak and my impression is that if this guy isn't talking about revenue- it ain't there and this model isn't going anywhere.
The fact that there is a great deal of statusmongering says nothing about the relative importance of the "real work" and "statusmongering" in the eyes of people involved. So no, it isn't a lazy inference, the original comment made a mean-spirited and totally unsubstantiated claim and I pointed that out.
Also, if the equity is worth so much money, why are they even offering it to you in the first place? You'd think they'd want to keep it all for themselves.
Scalpers do create value. After a complete scalping transaction:

- the original ticket purchaser is happier with the cash received than with the ticket they had before

- the final ticket purchaser is happier with the ticket than with the cash they paid

- the scalper is happy with his/her profit

- the promoter's/venue's revenue is unaffected

So, three people are better off. Value has been created.
2 solutions immediately come to mind for the restaurant:

- sell tickets instead of taking reservations (Alinea's solution, which saw no-shows drop from 8% to 0.5%; it used to be done in London in the mid 2000s, I remember giving my card details over and over again), although that's less practical for less hot spots, where that's enough friction to switch to a competitor;

- ask for ID or a card to check against the name.

How would you cope if either became common practice in your target markets?
I'm pretty sure FlexBox solves the "Why the hell can't I center these things vertically relative to one another?!?" problem that CSS has had for a very long time. Unfortunately, that wasn't the only problem CSS has had. Now we have to wait for CSS Grids, which look awesome and all, but based on history (floats, positioning, inline-blocks, flexbox) I'm not getting my hopes up that Grids will finally make CSS layouts reasonably adequate. (I'm not even raising the bar to 'usable'.)
Its the former. Laws cover payment info. Also, payment info is more valuable to steal, and more compact to transmit and easier to decode from the raw storage data.

Once you have any security in place, it's probably more complicated to NOT include your payment database in it. PCI auditer will actively inspect your payment database attack surface.
Maybe the restaurants could enjoy higher margins if they made great websites which let you bid for last-minute reservations?
They don't pay you for those things, and nor do they pay for them. They reduce your premiums if you have them. That's perhaps a subtle distinction, but it's a critical one.

If you're suggesting that an annual physical exam is the risk mitigation equivalent of a car alarm, then GEICO should have eaten the extra cost for purchasing a car with one installed instead of charging a lower premium because you have one.
I respectfully decline.
Hate to buzzkill what looks like an awesome project, but redhat took this project name already:

http://cockpit-project.org
This is what I want out of a CMS, I want it to be something I can add into an app, not something that wants me to write my app around it.
> Making reservations under assumed names (i.e., lying) is also unethical.

What? As someone who frequently puts in random names for reservations, I fail to see what is unethical about this…

Why on earth does a random restaurant deserve my real name? The transaction going on there is on a different level than that.

> It's easy for restaurants to defeat this: just require diners to show an ID to claim their reservations.

Again, no. If a restaurant demands ID before they seat me, that is a restaurant I will never patronize.
BP loses battle to trademark the colour green in Australia
> just because they aren't creating value to you does not mean that they are't creating value to someone else.

True, but follow that logic, and replace 'create' with 'revoke/destroy'. These apps are proposing a tiering system that favours people willing to trade money for convenience, and _simultaneously depriving those how aren't willing or can't_. So this pay to use system is scalping limited resources at a cost to others, and profiting middle men piggybacking of existing infrastructure. I think the article made a clear argument for why this is not okay.

The proposal that you can require a credit card for each reservation escalates the situation, because now in order to stop scalpers from operating, the bar for entry is raised. If people are independently abusing the system, then this is the logical way to combat the problem. But if it is a parasitic entity then regulation is sensible way to protect the business and its customers (eg. some who might not have credit cards).

Often when these arguments are raised people argue as back and forth as if economics and law are the only considerations. What about considerations towards decency?

How annoyed would you be if you tried going to a restaurant, saw empty car spaces installed by your local council, but people standing in them holding signs saying "Reserved. Yours for $4". Finally, you arrive at the restaurant but get told that is is full. A guy out the front waves you down, 'psst. I have 10 reservations - want one? $5 bucks.' Not only that, the guy is part of an organization that has done it to all the other restaurants in the area.
"BP’s most recent claim on the colour extended to fuel, car service stations and take-away food services."

Yes color isn't a Patent but color psychology means a company can gain unfair competitive advantage and abuse it to own the market e.g. yellow/red for food (association). Colors should not be patentable.
The hope is that this sort of shit hastens the hardening of the Internet to the point where anyone can host whatever the hell they want, anonymously, with no possible recourse for any old asshole to do anything about it, DMCA and laws be damned, and supported by default by all major browsers and operating systems.
The backlash is hilarious.

People get outraged over nothing.

The hypocrisy is ridiculous. Instead of getting upset at how restaurants treat their workers, they get mad at some random guy who makes a few reservations at a few restaurants.

He is taking a bad system and trying to make it better.

Restaurants screw people over all the time, managers and owners take advantage of minimum wage and our tipping culture to make sure almost everyone who works at the restaurant are close to or under the poverty line.

You know why people get outraged? Because it is easy and they don't really have to do anything.
Politically impossible, but my blanket response to "how will this affect poor people" arguments is "give them money" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income
Don't lie and pretend to be an individual just making a reservation for a night out on the town.

Maybe this has value, is good or bad, whatever: but be clear with restaurants that you're a for-profit scalping business making money off their inventory.

The douchiness of scalping reservations can be argued....

But there is not a single logical defense for LYING to the restaurants about being an individual. Writing a blog post about why you're lying doesn't make it okay, either.

Be clear with businesses about what you're doing with what THEY broke their backs to build, and let them opt in if they want. Cool, could be a good service and help some restaurants out or something.

But stop lying. That is douchey, is unethical in every way with no justification, and is worthy of all negative media — regardless of how overkill SF media can be sometimes.

Stop lying.
By far, your most important accomplishment. Don't be modest. ;)
Duplicate post. Extensive discussion here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7986764
It's not my site. I'd force everyone to https if it was
Well, he also claims to only do restaurants with high demand, so if the restaurant can accept 10 extra walk-ins that night instead of turning them away then everything works out.
The "added expense of MS software" is largely a myth. Windows is about 30% more expensive on AWS than Linux, and most startup expenses are dominated by payroll, not hosting. Choosing a platform on price in this situation is counterproductive - you should chose whatever allows you to iterate faster until your product idea sticks with your customers. As a rule that's a platform you know the best, can find help for most readily, and can hire new team members the fastest. Hiring for Microsoft stack in Seattle is easier than in most other places.

I say "largely" because occasional startup will be maxing out their hardware trying to build next Google or next Netflix. If hosting can become comparable to payroll in your startup, then it becomes a factor in the platform choice.

If that wasn't enough, Microsoft has Bizspark program where the give you a ton of stuff for free for startups.
Tibetans inherited high-altitude gene from ancient human
well obviously you're right because you hold the opinion. If someone else held that opinion than it would obviously be wrong because then you would no longer hold that opinion, thereby nullifying the validity of said opinion.
I would love to have vim mode.
I have been thinking about something like this for about a year now...you've done an excellent job! Good luck!
To address your first point.

Let me state your argument in the most general form: You need reason to validate reason.

That is true, but it's completely fine.

Ultimately you have to assume certain things. In Objectivism they are stated as: Identity (A is A), Existence (Existence exists), and Consciousness (And I know it). They are called "axioms," but they are not like mathematical axioms. Rather, they are rules that must be assumed in any claim to knowledge, including in any claim to deny them. For example, if identity is invalid, a claim like "Identity is invalid" would be meaningless.

Another difference from axioms as they are used by mathematicians is that nothing is deduced from these axioms; they are just the prerequisites for induction, any induction at all, from reality.

To address your second point.

First you need to induce the concept of "unit." Then, you can induce the concept "one," "two," and, if you want, other numbers.

Then you can come up with the concept of "addition." I'm not sure how you could deduce addition from the notion of counting numbers. If you'd like to explain it to me (without presuming it in the argument, or any other mathematical knowledge that we haven't gotten to yet), I'd like to see that. I'm skeptical that it can be done.

However, you certainly can inductively observe that groups of things denoted by counting numbers have a certain relationship, and then come up with addition that way, which is induction. And then you realize the causal reason for it being that way. But that is a normal thing in induction. Induction doesn't mean, "there is no cause for this to be true."

To summarize, my point is that the logic is something like observing "If I put one and one together, I have two," but that is induction, not deduction, prior to having addition defined (and then you do it deductively from then on because you already know the rule and you are just applying it).

Though at this point we only know about 1 and 1, we don't know about 2 and 1, for example. So to make it general, and have a general rule of addition, would require more inductive work.

This is all just me thinking through it. I don't claim to be representing Objectivism perfectly on this point, though I do on the first point.
NASA Needs an Indian Tutorial