skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not sure why you were downvoted; I think it's a great question.

I don't think it's that hard if you look at it systemically. If the problem is parking, none of the JerkTech startups are solving the problem, they're just shifting the burden. And they're probably making the problem worse, as now they've created a financial incentive for people to occupy hot parking spaces so they can get paid to leave.

On the other hand, if the problem is "rich people don't have enough time", then there are plenty of ways to solve that. Indeed, Uber basically set out to solve the problem of "rich people don't have enough time and/or feel important enough". Thus the fleet of fancy cars. That created value.

I think solving small problems across a large number of people is fine. Look at entertainment. There are plenty of video games that created value one quarter at a time. Or today, $0.99 per. It's not like it cures cancer, but as long as people end up having fun and are happier, that seems fine to me. However, in my view that excludes operations like Las Vegas and Zynga, which create very little fun and a lot of compulsion, which they then use to extract cash.

I think the hypothesis that rich people generate more value given more time is... unproven. There are plenty of people who are rich because of their cash-extraction skills, not their value-generation skills. Many of them do it in ways that are negative sum. For those people, the best thing you could do for the world is to waste their time.
Huh? Flexbox will certainly let you do this: http://plnkr.co/edit/taXhuM4tetbNTlaKyjDr?p=preview (you shouldn't see any of the red box, just the green box)

Am I misinterpreting what you mean?
you run a few tornado instances behind nginx.
Re the auth issues, why not let people clone / download a zip direct from you, skipping the github auth.
> it's like Mencken said: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

H.L. Mencken?

The Internet appears to ascribe that quote to Upton Sinclair.
I like Mr. Victor a lot but I'm not sure I agree. I think the way CSS is implemented either doesn't jive with the paradigms many programmers use to approach problems or perhaps it is just laziness?

I meet a lot of programmers who are generally pretty smart and capable completely throw up their hands when it comes to laying out HTML via CSS. It's just rectangles being displayed on rectangles. It's nothing complex like displaying three or >3 dimensional information on a manifold. I am confident I could layout anything anyone threw at me, and CSS is just something I've picked up over the years.
What are you thinking of?
It exists but apparently is not used for consumer purchases: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merchant_account#Level_2_or_Lev...
nice, thanks, wtsui!
Right now they are taking all of the money for themselves, but in the future, if the service becomes popular, you will likely see them work directly with restaurants and share the revenue. The whole point of this service is to make reservations into something that can be bought. This obviously works best with the cooperation of the restaurants.
You are a gigantic douchebag. You are trying to take a tax on top of something that did not need to be taxed. You are really representative of the problem with the startup scene and whenever I tirelessly defend it to my numerous friends throughout the bay I have to go 'see people like this give us a bad name but most are not like him.'
Parking isn't undervalued. People just pay in time, not money. Better to say that it's inefficiently priced. Shoup's "The High Cost of Free Parking" is the bible on that: http://www.amazon.com/High-Cost-Parking-Updated-Edition/dp/1...
They certainly don't need him, but why don't they want him?
The receipt already contains the payment number and the purchase content UPCs. No need for uncertainty at all.
"What is your business model?"

"Extortion"

"Well, it is a time-proven way of making money; and you may go to jail, so I can see you are not afraid of risk... like a true entrepreneur!"
Sorry! When I searched for the quote, I even typed in "sinclair salary". No idea how Mencken crept in there.
This is really just ticket scalping for reservations. Yes, the restaurant could employ this themselves, however it's not going to benefit the consumer. Since it's gone mainstream (in terms of I'm a developer in New Zealand and my restaurateur friend already knows about it) - this is likely going to be trialed and implemented in a few places if it works out. It's already been introduced in bars and clubs as "bottle service", unfortunately you were just the guy who got caught up in the pitchfork-protests.

As a consumer, I'd hate for this to become a thing. Likely it's only going to work in SF because of the amount of disposable income. In other parts of the world it may work, but I doubt it would become mainstream.

Don't feel bad, this will blow over. Plenty of people have written and developed far more sinister applications that would have a far greater impact, but alas they didn't strike out. Hah, unfortunately for you, you got publicised pretty fast.
Great response. I'll pile on:

Many people retire at 50 or 60 and don't die until 80 or 90 these days. Thats 20 - 30 years of living often while dealing with very high medical bills and health problems which can make work impossible. Everyone (not just programmers) should realize that their retirement situation is similar to professional athletes.

Programming is a hot field now and won't be in 20 years. Everyone in every country in the world is learning to program. Thanks to the internet its going to be a global employment market. Competition is going to go up. Salaries are going to go down.

Movies and popular culture say you have to enjoy your youth. I can sympathize with that, but as much as it sucks to work hard during your twenties, it would suck a lot more to work hard during your 60s or 70s when you are less healthy. Don't procrastinate.

If you save 60% of your salary you can retire in 13 years.
If you save 80% of your salary you can retire in 6 years.

I built a tool that does this math for you:
http://networthify.com/calculator/earlyretirement
Scalping is unethical, whether it's a guy on a streetcorner or Ticketmaster. Some performers go to great lengths to prevent it. How is this guy surprised that many restaurants find the idea of scalping reservation odious?
please do mention that this is available on releases >=10.9
I think understanding conditionals lies somewhere between "well how do I use this stuff?" to "Eureka!"
This is exactly right, from the creator of ReservationHop:

"To be honest, I haven’t spent a lot of time thinking through these questions."
http://brianmayer.com/2014/07/how-i-became-the-most-hated-pe...
The path forward, with benefits for restaurants and our entrepreneur here, is this: see if people are willing to pay for reservations at in-demand restaurants. If so- great. You clearly can't scale this without getting restaurants in on the game. So- partner with the restaurants. Charge $20 for a reservation. Give the restaurant $10. The restaurant made extra money, their no-show rate goes down, the diners already have skin in the game and are likely to spend more than average patrons, and our main man here makes some cash.

To me it seems like an innocent-enough experiment. If he wants to scale it, he'll have to make it work for restaurants too. And if he does- great! Margin-stressed restaurants get an extra source of income.
Also, if you have to reserve something under a name that is not your own, perhaps you are doing something restaurants don't want you to do.
I do not understand this logic.

What original ticket purchaser? Scalpers aren't like eBay. They have bought up the tickets from the venue at certain amount, depriving others of a limited resource at that same value, and now offering it a higher value to people who didn't have the means to buy it as fast as the scalper.

The disruption the scalper is introducing into an existing system benefits nobody but themselves.
The boot2docker devs had made it clear they're not going to add any vbox-specific bits to b2d, but I've been successfully using the ISO linked from this article (which I expect will get updated to 1.1 shortly, or if not there's instructions to build your own):

https://medium.com/boot2docker-lightweight-linux-for-docker/...
It looks like the flamewar detector knocked this way off the front page really fast, any chance a mod can check it out?
The restaurant probably gets about the same amount of money on average, if not slightly more. It's easy to say that the jerk that uses this kind of app leaves less of a tip or takes up table space longer without spending more but on closer examination I don't see why this would be the case. They likely just pay more overall, and the app gets the extra.
Because talking to a human for 30 seconds is that much of a chore when making a reservation?

And how, exactly, would that do anything to prevent reservation scalping without adversely affecting the user experience of making a reservation or making life even easier for reservation scalpers? Probably it will be easy to use and easy for scalpers to screen scrape, or the UX will be a some kind of CAPTCHA-filled monstrosity.

Now that I think about it, forget about restaurants and reservation scalpers; if you could develop a truly superior CAPTCHA replacement, that would be orders of magnitude more valuable.
> "you will likely see them work directly with restaurants and share the revenue"

Why wait for the future?

If some startup thinks that selling reservations at restaurant X is profitable, they should be partnering with restaurant X right now to sell their reservations. They should be sharing in the potential downside with the restaurant -- if they book reservations they don't sell, and the restaurant has to turn down paying customers, the startup should pay some cost for that.
It's totally undervalued. Ask the average person if they think the price of parking is right and they'll probably claim it's outrageously high, when the existence and apparently enough-to-be visible success of this app prove the opposite is true.
OR people are frustrated that so many douchenozzles have had their rent-seeking ("making it better") institutionalized that the opportunity to set this jackanapes's minor brain fart on fire and watch it burn is too wonderful to pass up.
No, because the final ticket purchaser would have been even happier with the ticket plus the extra cash he would have had if he had not needed to buy from the scalper, and/or the venue or promoter would have been happier with the extra money that is instead taken by the scalper.

Come on, this is obvious.
I think you're being downvoted because life isn't just about creating something. Basic accounting is an important tool for any adult living in this world. I would argue the knowledge of managing finances is more important than programming, because it applies to everyone, regardless of your career path.

Debt, loans, mortgages, interest, investments, retirement plans, etc. These are important things for everyone to understand. When I look around, I think a lot of people would be better off if they had a better understanding of finances, but I rarely look at people and think their lack of programming know-how is holding them back.
"Is this even legal? Is it ethical? ... To be honest, I haven’t spent a lot of time thinking through these questions."

I'd suggest that this is exactly the issue.
Well I understand that feed manipulation is expected. After all, everyone knows they manipulate their feeds to expose sponsors and advertising. I have no problems with the actual manipulation.

My problem is with the goal of the manipulation in this case. Its not something like "persuade people to view pages". Its (as I understand it) "make people sad" or "make people happy". As someone who personally battles with emotional episodes, could something like this have inadvertently triggered an episode for me? Can I prove it?

Some people have put forward the argument that advertising is by definition a mood influencer and we see it everywhere. However, that doesn't mean that we allow all advertising. We frown on tobacco advertising because it influences people to buy an unhealthy product. We frown on displaying unhealthy bodies because of the impact it has on our self-images.

tl;dr; I'm not saying feed manipulation is bad. I'm saying the goal of the manipulation in this case was potentially ill-conceived.
I’m canceling the reservations 4 hours before if they don’t get bought

4 hours.

somebody else may use that slot

Emphasis on 'may'. The restaurant may also not get a last-minute call for a booking or a walk-in client at the right time.
Most of programming involves figuring out what to do, not doing it.
Scanlab deep web search engine
Juggling a full time job and rent makes things difficult :( I try.
> Also, if there were a minimum for commenting, there should be a minimum for posting, which might leave new users with interesting projects out.

I don't get that implication. The commenters, if seen as offering mentorship, should necessarily be more experienced than the people they're trying to help. Otherwise, what's the point?
Arguably the removal of XLST/XML from the stack of tools browsers support(ed) in favour of JSON/JavaScript (or Anything-including-XML/JavaScript) is a good thing.

I still think there are some good ideas in XML/XLST/SAX/XSD/RELAX NG -- but I think it's clear by now that web developers will not, or cannot, leverage the (rather minor) benefits XML can offer over json/javascript (richer datatypes, mostly -- javascript has gotten so fast that I don't think there's any real benefit to xml+sax over JSON in terms of memory/performance -- so once you throw away all your xml tools as well, there are little benefit remaining).

Generally you can implement pretty much anything else on top of javascript. I do think we could use a better/different rendering model -- having documents/HTML as the base isn't a very good idea. Not sure what the answer would/should be -- seeing how Apple abandoned display postscript, I don't think PDF is the way to go -- perhaps something closer to GL?

I'm a bit of a 90s luddite when it comes to "shiny web apps leveraging javascript for max bling" -- I much prefer gracefully-degrading html+css apps slightly augmented with javascript. But for better or worse, the immediate future clearly belongs to "download code over the internet;run it". Currently we're stuck with js+http+dom as the only real write-once-tweak-for-ever-run-most-places alternative. I think short time success will go to frameorsk like Elm and clojurescript that compile-to-the-browser.

And at the rate of progress we seem to have, I don't think we'll see great platform for delivering apps/objects/runable data in the near future. We appear likely to move the visual basic worms of the 90s to javascript worms of the 10s -- never gaining any decent security or privacy -- because there is no demand for it.

Luckily, well-designed "apps" based on html+css+conserative js can still be great, and have great performance, so I'll try and stick with that, and I'll let everyone else continue to design blogs that can't be read without running "actual" code on the client. For no real benefit (to the user -- to those selling ads/behavioural data the benefits are more tangible, but I'm not a user of that -- I'm just a victim of that).

/rant.
Because it's very hard to get small businesses, especially restaurants, to signup for unproven new services. This is why you had companies like Groupon spending millions on hiring local sales people.
I said that was the point. Not that it succeeded at it. I fully acknowledge that it is broken all the time. However, if you want a loose control over the visual characteristics of a paragraph with some images, than the base html and css for floats gets the job done. Want columns? Yeah, you're screwed.

Seriously, most of the headaches from css come from trying to get it to do things that were not goals for the designers of the language. This is not a bad thing. But to believe that a turing complete language would have been a panacea is dangerous. And likely wrong.
I think if you strip down this article, it's saying that something could be as powerful as CSS with fewer primitives given more composability.
"But what I’ve lost isn’t just a set of structured sounds, but the world those sounds create, a world you can live inside: Bach on a snowy afternoon, hard blues on a long night’s drive, the background mood in a restaurant or at a party (or, increasingly, any public space not yet colonized by ESPN on flatscreen TVs). Music is color. When you’re young you’re the hero of a movie, and the Heifetz you play in your car or the Velvet Underground you first try out sex to isn’t just background, it’s location and weather. You feel it on your skin."

This was one of the most heart-wrenching things I've read, and makes me really thankful for what I have, and if I'm honest, fearful for what I will eventually lose.

Music is woven into the happiest and saddest moments of my life, and my most important memories have sounds attached to them - from dancing barefoot on a remote beach in Goa with people I've since come to think of as family, watching the sun rise to the growls of a Roland TB-303, to coping with the loss of someone dear by listening to Radiohead's 'Everything in its Right Place' on repeat for hours on end, curled up on my bedroom floor.

I keep a diary - not of places I've visited or things I've eaten, but of moments like these where I've had a powerful connection with people and music. It's an incredibly emotional experience to go back and read through it all - I'm glad I have it, because otherwise I'd start losing bits and pieces of these memories, and with it, my past.

I'm incredibly fortunate in that I've been given the opportunity to work on solving this problem, a problem that I'll undoubtedly face as my tinnitus gets worse and a problem that my co-founder has faced for almost two decades. The next time we're having a shitty day at work, we'll only have to read this to keep on going.
Actually, the problem is that you're iterating through task_structs when you should be iterating through struct list_heads:

struct list_head* head = &this->children;
struct list_head* i = head->next;
for(; i!=head ;i=i->next)
{
task_struct* child = container_of(i,task_struct,sibling);
/* do stuff */
}
You missed the part where these reservations are being held with risk of not succeeding in selling the spots: it isn't that the person who is sitting at the table is less profitable for the restaurant, but that a bunch of reservations are made that might in the end not ever succeed in being sold by the website. Assume for a second that the restaurant also charged for reservations and had cancellation fees for no-shows (which arguably they should, but the economics and expectations works out that most normal customers would be turned off by this): then the risk of the no-show transfers from the restaurant to this website, and it is more clear why this business is just a parasite.
I don't mean to be rude[0], but what do you find so difficult about it? The box model makes a lot of sense, and once you understand that you're most of the way there. I still Google for less-common syntax (e.g. adding a strikethrough style to text) from time to time, but most of it is internalized by now[1]. Code School[2] was great when I was first ramping up as a developer.

I do also have a great memory[4] for tiny, usually-trivial bits of data like: "no matter the z-index of an element, it cannot overlap an absolutely positioned element (with z-index greater than 0) unless it is also absolutely positioned". It doesn't feel like it's any different than remembering various bits of syntax or APIs, but maybe that's a more difficult thing for some people to remember than others - IANAN[3].

Give Code School a shot (go through the whole CSS Cross-Country course). You can get a 2-day free trial here: https://www.codeschool.com/hall_passes/213f3fedb6b9/claim_sh....

[0] I actually started writing this comment ~15 times before settling on an opening.

[1] It's mostly just abbreviations now: I don't think or speak (or type) "background-color", I just think "bgc<tab>". This is due to the fantastic Emmet plugin for Sublime: http://docs.emmet.io/css-abbreviations/

[2] https://www.codeschool.com/

[2a] You might be specifically interested in https://www.codeschool.com/courses/css-cross-country

[2b] I also have an affiliate link if you're feeling generous: http://mbsy.co/7djLz

[3] I am not a neurologist

[4] Terrible short-term memory though - my wife constantly complains about how I can remember "all those coding things" but can't recall what she asked me to do <30 seconds ago.
Those that don't do such abuse, obviously.
Function calls and loops seem like a neat idea, but I dislike the fact they they compile down to JMP. It seems disingenuous. I'd much rather the CPU just be told this was a loop and ran with that properly.
I read this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracing_garbage_collection#Tri-...
This reminds me of domain squatting. Imagine a world without domain squatters (or this): if people need a domain/table, they will just ask for it. If it's being used by someone else already, then they'll try a different domain/restaurant. The supply/demand is not interfered with by anything else.

Now here comes a service where the only person benefiting is the middle man. It's worse for the end user, because now they have to pay a fee to get what could've been theirs normally (or at least would've fairly been someone else's that was using it legitimately). It's worse for the provider, because now their user base's spending money has been diminished a little (less for you).

It makes sense that it exists, but it feels like a selfish thing. It's extracting money from a place that has value, but didn't need tapping.
What? As someone who frequently puts in random names for reservations, I fail to see what is unethical about this

Well, it's not unethical like you're injecting babies with a controversial drug. It's quite mildly unethical - a reservation is a promise. Promising something with a fake name is a little unethical - you're asking someone to do something for you, but offering no avenue of recourse if you don't hold up your end of the bargain. I think in this case that it's unethical to the same degree that taking some ballpoints home from work is stealing.
A good example of the kind of demand I'm talking about is New Year's Eve.

Every NYE people scramble for reservations. Many people will book at 2-3 restaurants to have options. As a result, everyone who is going on that night has a reservation, and everyone who doesn't have a reservation goes to a house party or stays home. You never get walk-ins on NYE (or Valentine's day for that matter).

Sure, maybe trendy restaurants on a busy strip can make up the difference. And maybe this is most restaurants in SF, I don't know, I'm not from there.

But if it's a destination restaurant, it often can't make up lost reservations on such short notice because no one will plan their evening around a chance at possibly walking in to a restaurant known to only take reservations.

Either way, any success he gets will be short lived, as SF restaurants will soon start taking CC numbers en-masse, or selling tickets like Alinea. They'll cut him out of their business, and if he tries dealing with them face-to-face, he'll be blacklisted. The fact that he's already created such outrage on Twitter may seem encouraging to him, but he's basically already killed any chance he has of creating goodwill.

Recently someone in our city tried scamming restaurants for free stuff by claiming to be a member of the press, was outed on Twitter and swiftly blacklisted by every restaurant in the community. When you run a business that has capital costs potentially in the millions for 5-20% margins if you're lucky, you don't react well to people scamming you.