The Slippery Search for Creativity - <AUTHOR> https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-slippery-search-for-creativity/#! <comment><USER2> The bottleneck is vetting and implementing well. There are plenty of ideas floating around. People love to volunteer creative ideas. When a HackerNews post recently asked, they got flooded with them. (I suggested "dynamic relational" as the Next Big Thing.) And sometimes it just requires luck for something to catch on.

<comment><USER3> Ideas do not necessarily translate into creativity. All Humans have ideas. But, extremely few ideas are creative.

Most ideas are like monkeys tapping on a keyboard - that is, it doesn't take much to propose ideas that 'bend, break, and blend' (as the one author describes the process). Children do those things well, but children rarely create. Creativity requires things like bounding, insight, awareness, extrapolation, and intuition among other things. And, the truly creative person usually knows that what they're doing is the 'creative' thing to do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> _> The Beatles, one might argue, found the perfect middle ground — familiar enough to want to sing and dance along; dangerous enough to rattle parents._

Heh. Whether you think the sexual revolution was good or bad, whether you think the Beatles had anything to do with it or not, it's a remarkable fact that parents thought their music dangerous at the time.

<comment><USER5> To be fair, they did publish a song about LSD, a _drug_ that had only recently become popular, as I understand it.

<comment><USER6> Beatles would not have become popular if they had not incorporated themes of drugs, sex, etc.

<comment><USER7> Not sure... The Beach Boys seemed squeaky clean at the beginning of their recording career. By the time Smile and Pet Sounds came out, I think people knew about their drug taking (great albums!!!) but many who know their early work have never heard "Our Prayer" for example. I think they got their fame on the G-rated stuff and were able to push genre boundaries later. I think it's the same with The Beatles, although I'm not positive- hard to imagine a time when people were not familiar with Sgt Pepper and The White Album...</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Building algorithm for Trending News/Topics of a Country - <AUTHOR> How would someone go around if they want to build  an automated system which shows popular stuff for the day in the country?<p>Like I would assume gather twitter trends from twitter all day, get all articles url from top news sites in that country and check facebook graph for that. <comment><USER2> For major news sources:

Guess it by correlation. E.g. Google for something that appears on every BBC news page and observe the order google returns the results in to infer popularity. Do that for all the countries major news outlets.

Run all the sources through OpenCalais to collect features.

Present the features.

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting.</comment></comment>


Niki recommends you the best local service and fulfills it too - <AUTHOR> https://sg.news.yahoo.com/niki-recommends-best-local-fulfills-too-100000690.html <comment><USER2> If only it existed for windows phone, then I would probably get the app just because of the name</comment>


NASA's new WB-57F (high-altitude aircraft) flies for the first time in 41 years - <AUTHOR> http://www.globalaviationresource.com/v2/2013/08/10/nasas-new-wb-57-n927na-flies/ <comment><USER2> I got to see an English Electric Canberra flying at a Temora Air Museum flight day. Very impressive machine and it boggled my mind that it was originally introduced to service back in 1951.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8OwMQ3JXKU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8OwMQ3JXKU)

<comment><USER3> Love it. I have only seen the static one at RAF Cosford, they are really nice looking planes. IIRC the one there is white and fitted out for reconnaissance.

<comment><USER4> Presumably Anti-Flash White?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti- flash_white](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-flash_white)

<comment><USER5> Highly probably, since several Canberra squadrons were equipped with wither Mark-7 Thor (US) or Red Beard (UK) tactical nuclear devices.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The comments on that article are great too:

>> The ap-22s-2 Full Pressure Suits were my biggest immediate problem. The suits were ADC hand me downs, all going over age. New suits were finally procured after numerous equipment failures, but depot support managed to keep the suits going pending replacements. The suits did their job on at least seven occasions of cockpit pressurization loss at altitude and allowed the crew to return safely to base.

</comment><comment><USER7> Is it my browser or is this website disabling right clicks? Javascript needs to die...

<comment><USER8> Not just you, it's doing it for me also.

Probably caused by:

        (function($) {
            $(document).bind('contextmenu dragstart', function(event) {
                var target = event.target || event.srcElement;
                target = $(target);
                if (target.data('ngg-protect') || target.parent('a').data('ngg-protect') || target.attr('id') == 'fancybox-img' || target.attr('id') == 'TB_Image' || target.attr('id') == 'shTopImg' || target.attr('id') == 'lightbox-image' || target.hasClass('highslide-image') || target.parents('.ngg-albumoverview').length == 1 || target.parents('.ngg-pro-album').length == 1 || photocrati_image_protection_global.enabled == '1') {
                    event.preventDefault()
                }
            })
        }(jQuery));

It's extremely annoying when sites do this...

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Maybe I missed it but where is the necessity for using such an old airplane for doing what they're doing?

<comment><USER5> Companies do not build similar airplanes nowadays, as there is no tactical role for a high-altitude high-speed unarmed medium bomber. Yet NASA needs to do high-altitude high-speed research.

<comment><USER10> So why use this instead of U-2 or SR-71?

<comment><USER11> U-2 is notoriously hard to fly (at altitude the difference between optimal cruise speed, tearing the wings off or stalling is _12kn_ ).

SR71 is horrifically expensive to fly and service plus it's engineering is complex (and the jigs don't exist anymore) and expensive to maintain (lots of fancy titanium parts) and the airframe hours are better spent on doing what the SR71A was built for.

The 'nice' thing with old planes is they are comparatively simpler to maintain and where often 'over' engineered by modern standards so are more forgiving.

<comment><USER12> That's a good answer. A data visualization would be something like a 2-d graph of altitude vs airspeed and in theory something could be made to fly over every point on that plane, and NASA does aeronautical research over every point on that plane.

Unfortunately real aircraft only safely fly inside weirdly shaped polygons on that graph. And the U-2 is a really pointy narrow little shape that crosses all the Y-axis altitudes but the speed is restricted such that its shape is practically a line both above and below the plane can't fly so no data or research is possible off that narrow line. If you merely want to get to 70 Kft then its awesome, if you want to take engineering data or science experiments at exactly 352 knots not 351 or 353 knots, and 70 Kft, then unless you're very lucky you're not flying a U2 on that research mission.

That's the secret of the U2. Everyone knows back in the good old days it was developed and flown in months for no cost compared to the F-22. However the engineering criteria were staggeringly different and there's a big difference between "fly extremely high without crashing while carrying a camera" vs "outfly and outfight every tactical fighter aircraft and missile system on the entire planet, everywhere, under every circumstance" and the difference is about 19 years of development and about a trillion bucks. There is no management secret or space alien technology secret to the U2, its just a very restricted aircraft that barely flies under ideal conditions, but when it does, it can fly higher than any plane built up to when it was designed...

Add a third dimension of cost and you've got the slightly bigger polygon of the SR71 but it costs a bazillion dollars per flight hour. So the Z-axis to the graph of cost. The SR71 is like a skyscraper compared to the new plane.

The plane in the linked article is pretty cheap. It can fly in the part of the 3-d graph where the U2 can't and at maybe a hundredth the cost of the SR71. Also if can fly at speeds much slower than the SR71 at altitude. Its a pretty cool research tool.

A really bad car analogy is NASA already has the worlds most expensive, fastest pneumatic torque wrench in the world AND also has the longest Phillips blade screwdriver in the world. However they've just obtained a pretty high end adjustable crescent wrench. Superficially, "aren't they all just tools?" "Is there any difference between those tools?" "can't they save money by having only one tool that tightens things?" but in practice that doesn't really work and having a new tool in the toolbox is going to help quite a bit for some of their jobs.

<comment><USER13> These old spy planes are perfect examples of what you can do when you build something for a single purpose.

Planes like the F35 are designed by someone who read a bunch of blogs about the perfect way to design a plane. You don't design a plane, you design a plane framework on which you can add whatever feature the customer asks for.

A lot like SW design these days. We all know this doesn't work well and yet...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> That plane is oddly attractive.

<comment><USER15> Beautifully functional.

Here's another purely functional ship, the Wilga, formed by its mission: [https://duckduckgo.com/?q=wilga+pzl&t=ffsb&iax=1&ia=images](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=wilga+pzl&t=ffsb&iax=1&ia=images)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Such a cool looking plane. Great to see it has a new purpose in life.

<comment><USER17> As a child raised on Gerry Anderson's designs, this is how aircraft should look!

<comment><USER4> The inevitable link to a pic of a TSR2 - which is what the future really looked like in the 1960s:

[http://www.airliners.net/photo/UK---Air/BAC- TSR-2/0979919/L/](http://www.airliners.net/photo/UK---Air/BAC- TSR-2/0979919/L/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Article is from 2013. Is anyone familiar enough with flight trackers to see if it is still in use? The tail number is N927NA.

<comment><USER19> Looks like it flew yesterday [https://www.flightradar24.com/data/aircraft/n927na#988ff01](https://www.flightradar24.com/data/aircraft/n927na#988ff01)

<comment><USER16> That's a strange flight pattern, any insight into it? Erratically gain altitude, make a long run and then a tight spiral back down before returning to land?

<comment><USER20> There's a pretty strong weather system in that area, and that looks like a flight pattern to try to figure out what sort of risk the storm has in generating tornadoes. Head out in case there's another area that could use a little extra info, and then come back home.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Does anyone know why the ends of the wings are missing in some of the photos?

<comment><USER22> Runway clearance - the wing droop at the tips is low enough to possibly hit the runway lights (usually below 18" high). They remove them for high speed taxi tests, and for the actual flights they temporarily replace the "high" lights with mid-height ones and install the wingtips.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I got the restoration but I didn't get what this plane is actually to be used for. Why do they need this plane? How will it help open up the first tourist hotels on Mars? Seems going backwards to space exploration.

<comment><USER20> Aeronautical research. The Aeronautics part of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration isn't just a bygone relic. Their most visible projects are their space side, but they do a fuckton of research into making planes fly better/faster/safer. They do research on new control methods of planes, new geometries, how weather phenomena affect planes, etc.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Business.txt - Standard Proposal - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/fesja/businesstxt

<comment><USER2> The idea of a text file at the root isn't a bad one, but the format of the document should be far more descriptive.

Have you looked at <http://schema.org/docs/schemas.html> and the examples there?

Everything in the example given is encapsulated by schema.org and that would describe it in a way that was unambiguous.

I know that schema.org has been dismissed because "The problem is that it's too complicated for a non-developer", but I would say that for a non-developer this file is also too complicated. Most non-developer small business owners can barely use FTP or use the Wordpress admin. These people don't have a robots.txt and won't create a business.txt

I would argue that making business.txt schema.org formatted and then to use a simple generator wizard to produce it would be more accessible to the small business owner than giving them a text file to edit.

<comment><USER3> That format is perfectly valid YAML, easily parsed, and just as easily created. It needn't be any more complicated than it is. I could make a WP plugin to support it within a few hours.

<comment><AUTHOR> let's work on that WP plugin dan! ping me if you want

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> So more senseless errors in my error log and more traffic caused by robots requesting a file that doesn't exist?

While I applaud the idea, can we please, please have a meta-tag or header that points to the location of this file if it's available?

We don't need another favicon.ico nor robots.txt

<comment><USER5> You'd rather a robot hit your frontpage— and by association, your application- than hit your 404 static page?

Instead of generating errors from 404s (a lot of noise), try generating errors from the same repeated 404s.

<comment><USER4> The robot will very likely hit my frontpage anyways, so I'd rather have them look (and not find) for a meta tag there than to produce an additional 404 error which will, depending on the content of said page, waste a considerable amount of bandwidth.

Besides, my frontpage is either heavily fragment- or just page-cached anyways - especially for anonymous user - so it can be served directly from RAM for all intents and purposes, so a hit to the frontpage is really, really cheap.

<comment><USER6> > an additional 404 error which will, depending on the content of said page, > waste a considerable amount of bandwidth.

Because your 404 should be one of the heaviest pages on your site, full of graphics and surprises. Why not make a full-featured game specifically for your 404s?

<comment><USER7> Crawlers don't (usually) download graphics, much less from 404 pages. They aren't regular browsers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> hostname.com/business.txt is wrong.

You are supposed to use the /.well-known/ subfolder.

<http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5785>

If you plan to implement a "standard" please try to review the RFCs that have covered this ground before. There's probably already a standard which may fit. If not, there's probably one that's close you could propose a change to. And if you're trying something genuinely new, you'll at least be on the right foundation.

<comment><USER9> Interesting RFC. Do you know of any implementations of it?

<comment><USER7> There's a registry hosted by IANA: [http://www.iana.org/assignments/well- known-uris/well-known-u...](http://www.iana.org/assignments/well-known- uris/well-known-uris.xml)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I like the idea a lot, but as it stands the format is pretty US-centric. I've written up some suggestions on how to fix this at <https://github.com/fesja/businesstxt/issues/2>

The core problem is definitely that many small business sites, especially restaurant ones, are really terrible outdated, and really not run by someone who would understand the concept of "upload text file to server".

So perversely, storing the information centrally would be easier, but who would you trust with it? The temptation to create a walled garden and "monetize" all that juicy local business data would be very strong for the maintainers. And then everything falls apart into small localized non- interoperating fiefdoms again, and we're back where we started...

</comment><comment><USER11> Why not just use Microdata (which Google already supports):

[http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...](http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=146861)

</comment><comment><USER12> I think this usecase is already covered very well by microformats and the various metadata standards that already exist and are supported by Google, Facebook et al.

I'm not sure the argument that these are too complicated for non-developers really works here, after all uploading a file to the root of a web directory is likely also too complicated...

<comment><AUTHOR> Apart from the really complicated thing for non-developers, another thing I don't like from schema is that it seems to targeted to websites like Yelp or Foursquare; but not too the original local business website.

The owner of the local business is the one who knows which is the correct address, phone, opening hours, menu, etc. All the other websites (yelp, foursquare, google places) can be wrong. We just need the local business to tell the rest of the world which is the correct data.

<comment><USER12> I'm not sure I follow your logic here, micro-formats are part of the HTML of the local businesses website, search engines and other crawlers can collect and parse this data . This is just like the local business owner telling the rest of the world which is the correct data.

If updating the HTML is too complicated for the website owner (fair enough!) then this should be taken care of in the respective CMS.

I don't mean to sound negative, I know It takes some thought and time to put out a proposal like this :-) Just in this case, this seems to be a problem that was solved a long time ago...

[http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...](http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1211158)

<comment><AUTHOR> go to <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4438320>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> "Without business.txt he would have to go to all the websites like Yelp and Foursquare and..."

No. No no no. This is not how the Internet is supposed to work. I search for a restaurant online hoping they have a website with this information on it. If it's a chain, I can find the local location and know the information is correct. If it's a local place with a website, the information is probably outdated anyway because they don't edit the site when their menu and hours change ... which means they're not going to edit business.txt to reflect the changes. So I'm really trying to find a phone number to speak to a human or listen to the answering thingy so that I can verify their hours.

This proposal is to help automate updates on _other_ sites when the restaurant changes their menu or their hours. The only way this is going to work is for the computers that help manage the restaurant are also providing information to the website. Need to change the menu? Great, the changes are also pushed to the website. Changing the hours employees can clock in? Comes with a requisite change to operating hours and is reflected on the website.

<comment><USER7> The only way the Internet is supposed to work is by routing packages to the machines with the right IP address.

<comment><USER14> There are many RFCs by the Internet Engineering Task Force which go beyond this definition.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is already a solved problem. Microformats, while only moderately successful, can embed all relevant information in a standardised way.

</comment><comment><USER16> I like this idea very much and its simplicity, but it seems inevitable to me that going down this path will just recreate RDF[0] and RDF Schema. A sort of a semantic web version of Greenspun's tenth rule[1].

For those of you who want to quickly get up to speed on RDF/Schema, "A Semantic Web Primer for Object-Oriented Software Developers"[2] was to me a very good introduction.

[0] From the W3C primer on RDF: "The Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a language for representing information about resources in the World Wide Web."

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspuns_tenth_rule>

[2] <http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/BestPractices/SE/ODSD/>

<comment><USER7> I'm an RDF kool-aid drinker, but removing friction for adding somewhat structured content is always OK for me. I'd rather have a standard way of converting from the business.txt format to RDF than not have the data at all.

<comment><USER16> Agreed! With the caveat that it should be both to and from (using some standard schema). Replied elsewhere to OP and addressed this as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The schema is rather US-centric. For instance, many countries don't have "states". They may have other divisions, in the 0..N level range, with other names. It would be better to research and use a current, established format for international addresses.

<comment><USER18> _Falsehoods programmers believe about addresses_ [1][2] is long-overdue. "There is a current, established format for international addresses" is probably one of them.

[1] [http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods- programmers-b...](http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers- believe-about-names/)

[2] [http://infiniteundo.com/post/25326999628/falsehoods- programm...](http://infiniteundo.com/post/25326999628/falsehoods-programmers- believe-about-time)

<comment><USER19> Line 1, Line 2, Line 3, Country should cover just about all cases.

Ask yourself if you really need to break out the specific components of the address. In this case you don't. As long as the user knows the correct local format, it's fine.

<comment><USER20> The txt file isn't just about the user though, it's to aid in indexing useful information from the site, so having some sort of breakdown into nested administrative divisions is something that makes sense (after all, I don't just say "I'm looking for a steakhouse in the USA" when I'm trying to decide where to have dinner). Of course, administrative divisions introduce their own problems and work against the whole human readable / human writeable nature of what they're trying to achieve.

On the flipside, even Line 1, 2, 3, country isn't sufficient for all addresses. If you have an addressee, additional delivery information (eg a department), need to include a rural route identifier (eg for Canada), or need to store/use bilingual addresses (again for Canada) then you need more than 3 lines. If you want to talk edge cases, having a country code means that places like the Haskell Free Library and Opera House ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haskell_Free_Library_and_Opera_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haskell_Free_Library_and_Opera_House)) can't be correctly addressed.

Hell, even the Falsehoods programmers believe about time doesn't come close to capturing the intracacies of lunar/lunisolar calendars (eg those with 13 months in a year, or a variable number of months in a year etc).

I guess that my point is that you need to find the balance of utility and complexity. If you need to be able to store every format of everything you wind up with either a hugely complex schema, or a single field that contains everything (and may even not capture everything completely), but that's not useful for anything except end-user display when the user is able to parse (or make a good guess at) the data.

Unfortunately there isn't a single winning approach - so unless you draw an arbitrary line your specification can't encompass every edge case while maintaining simplicity and achieving what it's set out to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> How well does the business.txt standard hold up against malicious behavior? For example, what happens if I want to defame Restaurant X, so I make restaurantXsucks.com and put a business.txt file in my root directory with the same address and contact information? Currently, Google Places (the service that puts stuff on Google Maps) mails a PIN to the address and requires verification before listing to mitigate this problem -- how would business.txt mitigate the problem?

<comment><USER22> More simply, you're saying that this solves the updating issue but not the trust problem. This is true, but currently it's no better than what is being proposed.

Google places is good but I doubt Yelp does anything, for example, and a ton of other sites. And most people don't even know to trust google places more anyway, they'll just trust the top result on google.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> So just skimming through the comments here, the "standard" alternatives to the proposed business.txt include (but are probably not limited to):

• HTTP Headers

• Meta-tags

• <link rel="business"> tags

• RFC 5785 (/.well-known/ folder)

• Microdata

• Microformats

• RDF Schema

No wonder we are in <http://xkcd.com/927/> territory...

</comment><comment><USER24> Add links between these files and you have web pages!

</comment><comment><USER25> Regardless of the format of the content, I think that it'd be nice if files like this would be placed in /.well-known/[standard] in accordance with <http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5785>

There are already too many magical files cluttering up the root.

<comment><AUTHOR> Is it being implemented? I mean, I can find <http://www.ietf.org/robots.txt> but not <http://www.ietf.org/.well-known/robots.txt>

<comment><USER7> It's supposed to be used by newer specifications, not change existing ones like robots.txt. That would create too many problems with existing applications.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Why do business people try to push business standards as technical solutions? That's not what standards are for, they are for technical problems. It looks like DRM to me: a technical solution to a social problem or a broken business model.

TL;DR: there are existing solutions, micro-formats for example.

<comment><USER27> But then how will fesja be able to tell everyone "Hey, I created a web standard! /flex"

You're right. No research was done. Author just threw information that he thought was important into a text file and called it a day. RFC 5785 says to put the file into the .well-known folder, the author only thought about United States addresses when making this, and as you stated the problem has already been addressed.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't know what's the correct word for this, and even if it will arrive somewhere.

The only thing I know is that there is a problem local businesses and website providers have. And there isn't an efficient solution yet. I've propose a solution so we can discuss it and see if it makes sense. That's where we are now.

About going international, I'm from Spain, so of course I will be the first one interested in having an international "standard". People are already giving suggestions in github!

<comment><USER28> How are microformats not an efficient solution?

Looks like you made a worse version of hcard, <http://microformats.org/wiki/hcard>.

Adding a frontend to keep a hcard updated would be what makes this more accessible for business workers/managers.

I've used this on one site for several (six??) years or so, examples at <http://microformats.org/wiki/hcard-examples-in-wild-reviewed>.

<comment><AUTHOR> If i have to make a plugin out of the vCard RFC (<http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc6350.txt>), i kill myself before ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> How about internationalization?

Shouldn't this be self-descripting - like indicating language code (use ISO...) of the narrative/description?

Also, how about country codes? I mean - some people use U.K., some UK, some England, some United Kingdom, etc

</comment><comment><USER30> This – in some form – is probably a good idea. Recently, I've worked on a few Business Improvement Area projects and one of the hassels for BIAs is keeping up-to-date information for each business (i.e., hours of operation, services, description, etc). So, this type of implementation would be great.

I think what I really get from this is that each business needs some form of public API.

</comment><comment><USER7> Now we need a reviews.txt so that we don't need to give control of the reviews to less than trustworthy parties.

I propose:

      [company/product name] (URL)
      score: X/Y
      [review text]
      --
      [next review...]

E.g.:

      Frank's Pizza Place (http://franks.geocities.com)
      score: 8/10
      Good service and food. Doesn't accept credit cards.

<comment><USER31> You want to trust the businesses being reviewed instead? This also wouldn't stop these sites choosing which reviews to show. The best solution is to find a site you trust.

<comment><USER32> I think he's suggesting you would host this on your personal domain, reviewing other services. Yelp/etc would then act as an aggregation of these reviews, rather than the hosting company for them.

<comment><USER7> Yes, that's it, though it probably shouldn't require a particular position in the URL, so that you could e.g. put it on Dropbox, make it public and link it from somewhere.

As long as it was called reviews.txt and had that particular format, it'd be valid.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Does anyone have the contact of people in "Data harmonization" team of Google, Facebook, Foursquare, Yelp, etc? Could you share this idea with them to see if we can discuss it further?

my email is javier at touristeye.com

<comment><USER33> Google already supports the schema.org formats for this exact info. (e.g. [http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...](http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1211158) and surrounding info)

Please don't take this the wrong way, since I think it's great that you are thinking about these problems, but :

It's not clear what advantage your format offers. On the other hand, it has some pretty clear disadvantages, including generating massive amounts of possibly useless web traffic, not just on the server side, but on the crawling side, since now getting business info takes two requests, instead of one (when it is embedded in a schema.org format on the page).

Additionally, without some tag that tells you whether business.txt would exist, you get to check for _every website_. This will slow down crawlers.

Given at least most of the companies on the crawling side of this want to support/support the schema.org markup version, ISTM you would be better off spending your time making simple generators for it or adding support for it to wordpress/et al.

FWIW: I have no comment on whether text formats are better than schema.org or anything like that, but to a large degree, it's irrelevant, because getting a large number of folks to support something they believe is already a solved problem is very very difficult.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Is it missing fields for e-mail and logo? Or have you specified this actually somewhere (i.e. not just examples?)

I think this is great idea, however Google has something like this already (microformats based) <http://maps.google.com/help/maps/richsnippetslocal/> maybe adopting this would be easier?

<comment><AUTHOR> about the fields, check out the docs [https://github.com/fesja/businesstxt/blob/master/structure.m...](https://github.com/fesja/businesstxt/blob/master/structure.md)

about rich snippets, go to <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4438320>

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Wouldn't it be easier if this were XML instead of plain text? I assume the goal is that software can easily interpret the data.

<comment><AUTHOR> We want to be a human friendly file. If we had a JSON or XML file, it would be too complicated for a non-developer to write or read it. On this way, I think it doesn't matter if the website is done in wordpress, drupla, static files, flash, etc. It's just a simple file.

Also, we are following the same pattern as the robots.txt file.

<comment><USER36> I would strongly suggest e.g. JSON or XML - if you can upload a website, the chance are that you could also create something like this. There would of course also be a template where absolute noobs could fill in the details and get correct output. With our current tools, implementing a clear text data storage seems like a pretty stupid idea - everyone would have to implement their own parsing. With e.g. JSON, there are libraries for every language and it has validation.

<comment><USER37> YAML, or the format used by Python's configParser or PHP's INI files (don't know what it's called), might be easiest. Less syntax and formatting.

I'm not so sure about the proposal itself, though. For local, small businesses, how much can we assume about technical ability? If they have to pay the people who did their website to keep it up to date, how can we be sure they'll use it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Yext (<http://www.yext.com/>) offers a paid solution for exactly this issue - they sync local business info across 35+ different sites (Bing, Yahoo, Yelp, etc.)

Disclaimer: My significant other works there. But I wouldn't recommend it if it weren't useful/relevant/awesome.

</comment><comment><USER39> Shouldn't we be using XML for this???

<comment><USER3> Perfectly valid YAML

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Tried visiting <http://www.touristeye.com/business.txt> ,was throwing a 404 error. Is it just me or?

<comment><AUTHOR> 1\. we are not a local business ;) 2\. this is just a proposal for now. If many websites support it, we will implement it!

<comment><USER40> My bad,didn't notice that the listing is also for people that are planning to support it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I would just change my Google Business owner profile and my own website if I have one. Who cares about the spammy copy sites?

</comment><comment><USER42> This is a really cool idea. As a small business guy, this is definitely worthwhile and usable. Please keep working on this.

</comment><comment><USER43> Why not just use <http://ogp.me> ? A lot of sites are already using it.

</comment><comment><USER44> Use a micro-format. Problem solved.

</comment><comment><USER45> If google adopted this, it would save so much time and trouble. Very good idea.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks! Let's see what the big ones think about it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Great idea. Added one for our company. It took just a couple of minutes.

<http://pierlis.com/business.txt>

<comment><USER47> My browser is failing to render the address properly, it reads as "Poissonnière" so the diaresis is breaking. Probably need to double-check how you serve the file, and make sure the charset and encoding match.

<comment><USER7> Yeah, '; charset=utf-8' has to be appended to the Content-Type header.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> I like the idea of having a standard place to find this information. It's still _for robots_ though isn't it? Why not include this information in robots.txt?

</comment><comment><USER49> Good idea but tough to scale!

</comment><comment><USER46> fesja: add a list of businesses with the file to the README. This will show others how many adopt the format and motivate to do the same.

<comment><AUTHOR> done!</comment></comment>


Xkcd: equations - <AUTHOR> https://xkcd.com/2034/ <comment><USER2> Could anybody please explain? I can read only the chemistry pun HEAT -> H²EAT

<comment><USER3> Here you go : [http://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2034:_Equations](http://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2034:_Equations)</comment></comment>


ShowHN: Qwiki for your web accounts (GitHub, HN, Netflix, etc) - <AUTHOR>

Remember that Qwiki demo at TC Disrupt last month?  I figured something like that might be useful, but for your morning routine of checking your various web accounts.
http://verbaljuicer.com
It's currently a Safari extension and uses the very good OS X text-to-speech engine.
There's a JavaScript API to add scripts for any other website you want to track.  If you write a script for a new site, email it to me at david at davidcann.com and I'll add it to the gallery.
Stats: I made most of it in about 3 days, then polished it for another 3 days.
What do you think?  Should I port it to Chrome? <comment><USER2> I'd love to use it, but I'm on Windows 7 with Chrome.

If you port it I'd be willing to pay $ for it, maybe have a free version with those default sites but a paid that allows more sites to be integrated and allow users to submit their integrated sites?

Well anyway, nice idea, shame I can't use it :-(

<comment><AUTHOR> Yea, I'd like to port it to windows and chrome, but this was just my MVP.

Do you know if the Windows built-in text-to-speech is any good?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Wow! I am amazed by this.

Some out-loud thinking; I wonder if you can apply this to news delivery in full. What I mean is, If I could submit a URL of the NYT business column and request that every morning, your app email me the mp3 file covering the whole column or just one article.

Essentially I can be listening to my morning paper on the go rather then reading it or needing a browser.

Very cool app! Nicely done

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! That's a great idea and they actually already produce an audio podcast of the NYT and WSJ each morning on Audible. I could definitely see automating it for other news sites and blogs, etc. In fact, that can already be added using the javascript API!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Its great to see others like Qwiki and verbaljuicer getting and or interested in the alarm clock content space. Our alarm service(sleep.fm) speaks weather reports and soon(<http://sleep.fm/coming-soon>) wakes and tells you if your airline flight is delayed or on-time.

Though we only speak and repeat up to 8 seconds of alarm info. Were interested to see in time how this upcoming industry plays out. Does the general population want to hear just a buzzing noise, 5 to 8 seconds of personalized alarm info or hear an alarm voice reading 10 minutes or more of alarm personalized information? What can people grasp upon waking up?

Myself, I set three alarms and finally by the 2nd or 3rd alarm im able to grasp the weather condition and what the temperature will be around.

Id love to try this when you have a windows version available. Good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> Sleep.fm looks pretty cool. I can see that working great as an iPhone app alarm clock.

If you don't mind me asking, what are you using for your text-to-speech engine? Google's? A licensed web service? or something on your own server?

<comment><USER4> thnx.

We're using something we created on our server to stream to the site and our iphone app. Using Google's free 411 type engine would be awesome though; yet not sure if you can mix music into the background of the voice with theirs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is awesome, please port it to Chrome.

Also, any chance you can release the source for the page plugins you've already written? A couple aren't working for me (for example I need the weather to search google.co.uk not google.com) and it would be nice to be able to just make a quick edit rather than starting anew.

<comment><USER5> For anyone else looking for the plugin sources, they are embedded in the Verbal Juicer homepage.

With Firebug/Webkit dev tools, navigate to: body > #appsCode and the plugins and you can copy-paste into verbal juicer's create window.

For UK users, changing the weather code from google.com to google.co.uk seems to be all you need to do.

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually, it's even easier than that! You can edit every plug-in right within the interface. Click the Edit button, then click "Go" on whichever plug-in script you want to edit. That page will load and the Go button changes to an Edit button. Click that and the code editor interface pops up. Change the URL and click Save!

I should redesign that Edit/Go button interface to make it more clear. A couple people have thought they can't edit the plug-in scripts.

<comment><USER5> I stumbled across that later, much easier :).

I seem to be getting a weird bug where after a while the code editor window pops up with 'undefined' in it and I can't do anything further. Uninstalling and reinstalling the extension seems to fix it, but I lose my plugins. Sorry I can't provide much more detail than that, if it happens again I'll see if I can figure anything else out.

An even more awesome feature request than porting it to Chrome for me would be letting me use JQuery in the plugins.

p.s. If this functionality was wrapped up into a slightly more stable standalone app, with really basic alarm clock functionality, I would pay for it in a heartbeat.

<comment><AUTHOR> Eek, sorry about that bug. I'll look into it. Admittedly, I haven't done extensive or automated testing yet.

I agree JQuery would be a good addition and not difficult to add.

A standalone app would be nice too... that would make it easier to preload content and minimize loading delays between pages! A standalone app would also give me access to AppleScript, so it could integrate with Mail, iCal, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This great, and I am already thinking of plugins to add to it. The speed it takes to switch from one section to another could easily be increased by loading the list of sites on tabs in the background as it is reading off the data.

And, yes please port it to Chrome.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a great idea... I'll have to look into what control extensions have over tabs. I agree that the page load time is currently a weakness.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Just watched the demo video. Cool stuff.

How does it handle authentication? Based on an existing cookie?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Yea, it's a browser extension, so it injects javascript into the page.

Your data is never transmitted to a server... it's all done locally in javascript and the text-to-speech is done locally via the plug-in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Looking at your HTML Code:

\- Don't pollute the global namespace

\- Use Event binding instead of attribute events. Avoid inline JavaScript

\- Delete comments before deploying (and compress HTML, JS, CSS)

Nice and simple design. Would like to see how this works in Chrome.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback, csomar. I will definitely be cleaning up and streamlining the code when I make it cross-browser and cross-platform.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Clickable: <http://verbaljuicer.com/>

</comment><comment><USER9> This looks pretty damn awesome. Please port it to Chrome!</comment>


John von Neumann and stochastic simulations - <AUTHOR> http://understandingsociety.blogspot.com/2015/12/john-von-neumann-and-stochastic.html <comment><USER2> For more on the view that stochasticity fundamentally parallels reality, an interesting read is "The Dawning of the Age of Stochasticity" by David Mumford [1].

I also think it's interesting that methods like Hybrid Monte Carlo were inspired by a physical-reality-first idea. It makes it seem like this is somewhat of a chicken and egg problem.

[1] [http://www.stat.uchicago.edu/~lekheng/courses/191f09/mumford...](http://www.stat.uchicago.edu/~lekheng/courses/191f09/mumford- AMS.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER3> What's the current state of the "stochasticity" view presented here? I've always thought of Monte Carlo as being a convenient way to avoid expensive analytical solutions, rather than a reproduction of a stochastic reality, but I'm not a frequent user of the techniques.

<comment><USER4> Depending on the quality of your model I think it can be very much a good approximation of "stochastic reality" (ie. the real world probabilities).</comment></comment>


ASK HN: TechStars startup weekend right now - <AUTHOR> Can I get a little help with a market validation survey??  I will happily repay the favor anytime!
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSf8URhWCUk1t1D_EQifo4VErxHGXdoixTkpd45G-kQbfA0ocw/viewform <comment><USER2> It looks like you are developing a system for better political discourse.

[https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSf8URhWCUk1t1D_EQif...](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSf8URhWCUk1t1D_EQifo4VErxHGXdoixTkpd45G-kQbfA0ocw/viewform)

<comment><AUTHOR> Hopefully I will have something to show you soon</comment></comment>


Facebook, MySpace Confront Privacy Loophole  - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704513104575256701215465596.html

<comment><USER2> All browsers are leaking the referrer information, so any unique url representing a user will do this: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_referrer>

<comment><USER3> And without the referrer a good chunk of the web will break. How many web frameworks and CMSes have a cheap redirect(HTTP_REFERRER) or similar in their code?

Also, forget analytics. Without referrer information you will know nothing about your traffic sources.</comment></comment>


If Jeff Bezos wants to help low-income people why not just pay them better? - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/sep/14/jeff-bezos-low-income-people-pay-amazon-workers-better <comment><USER2> Wow this is ridiculous. The fund is aimed at homeless and educating early. This is not relevant to anyone he employs. Some people are so ready to get their pitch forks. Damn.

<comment><USER3> Walmart recently learned that paying people more than enough to get off of government benefits would more often precipitate better engagement and loyalty to the company, resulting in less frequent turnover, etc. ([https://qz.com/work/1094309/walmart-yes-walmart-is-making- ch...](https://qz.com/work/1094309/walmart-yes-walmart-is-making-changes-that- could-help-reduce-income-inequality-in-america/))

Amazon has yet to learn this one little trick. They think they're being clever by underpaying unskilled labor and leaving them to rely partly on government benefits, but then they end up having to make up for it by hiring more often, losing time to training, having to load up schedules to make up for lost time (making each employee more expensive anyway), and ultimately defending themselves against nasty articles documenting their work practices.

If Walmart--the company which practically invented the practice--can move on from it, so can Amazon... a company that's mastered the art of reinvesting profits both for continual growth and to dodge Wall Street payouts for well over a decade.

<comment><USER4> If Americans are so keen to pay people better they should vote to elect leaders who will increase minimum wage. But they don't. So it does seem that the majority of voters don't care enough to increase minimum wage.

If Americans would like people to have proper access to healthcare, they would not make it dependent on having a job and make it a universal right funded by the government, but they don't.

I actually am an advocate for higher wages for all, and more government subsidy of healthcare, education, and access to daycare / pre-school; but we can't leave achieving these to whims of each business or the largesse of billionaires.

Americans recently elected a president who enacted tax cuts that benefit Jeff Bezos and the wealthier segment of society, at the expense of government programs that could benefit the poor, the homeless, and the children in need of care.

Also, from a purely business viewpoint: Walmart employs drastically more customer-facing retail employees compared to Amazon thus (1) their morale and behavior has a direct impact on the immediate customer experience (2) the training costs (hence the cost of replacement) is higher due to the need to train soft-skills and customer-facing skills etc. Amazon does pay hard-to- replace employees way above minimum wage, including software engineering, marketing jobs, automation, managers, etc.

<comment><USER5> Race, abortion, and an irrational fear of taxation are enough to keep people voting against their self interests. These are important factors to consider when trying to understand voting patterns in the U.S.

<comment><USER6> > irrational fear of taxation

Curious when it becomes rational? Literally every federal income tax bracket is more than the taxes on "tea" before the revolutionary war.

Most of us making decent money in high-cost world city are paying 50% or damn near close to it in taxes.

What is left to tax? If you start taking much more from me I simply quit and move to the third world where I can retire today with my current savings.

This whole meme of "irrational fear of taxation" is ridiculous. Those that make money pay 50% or so in taxes, and we aren't seeing a whole lot of return for that money. I'd pay 7% more if I moved to the Netherlands today, and get a whole lot more than 7% in additional value.

<comment><USER7> What is left to tax are the rich who pay nowhere near what you do. They are also why you are both dissatisfied with your post-tax income, and, to a lesser extent, underwhelmed by what it buys for the government.

<comment><USER8> There's the old adage: the liberals don't care for the poor. They just hate the rich.

The point is that, if a tax system relies on some, even arbitrary structure, there will always be a way for a rich person to pay less by restructuring, and the cost of restructuring will always be worth it the richer you are. The main problem of this tax the rich fuckery is that the supposed rules usually bleed onto the middle class in 10 to 20 years due to trying to make the ends meet. Also, the unsolicited spending, of course, but that's another story.

<comment><USER9> Perhaps we should tax something very human that nobody can escape?

Economy can be displayed as flows of money, labor and goods. We should look hard at these flows and think where even the rich can't evade by restructuring.

I don't have a pre-made solution, only ideas. The crucial idea is that one rich person is a person after all. What do people do? They consume, give money to others and export funds. Catch them when they do that. They can't avoid eating and sleeping.

Therefore switching the focus of taxation onto things nobody can avoid would be something society needs to contemplate and perhaps tackle. A completely novel way would be something I call affluence source tax. It is similar to a value added tax, however it is levied on everything a rich person does: buying stuff, paying for labor and rent, bartering, and especially for exporting funds!

Forget taxing legal entities because they are always being restructured to minimise taxing. Just look at the people themselves, not the legal entities.

Probably this wouldn't be the granddaddy of all taxing solutions, and most surely the rich will be successful in stopping this, but at least nobody can stop me thinking about this problem.

<comment><USER10> So you are going to tax the necessities? Right, only the 'rich.' How do you define 'rich'? High income? What about the small business owner who retires, sells, and gets that one large payday? You gonna tax her like she earns that much every year? High net worth? What if that net worth is structured so it looks like some other entity controls it? The very wealthy will employ clever people to beat your plan every single day and twice on Sunday, just like they do today. Buffett pays a lower rate than his secretary for a reason.

<comment><USER9> No, flat tax everything. The trick is: catch the people not the companies. Because the rich consume and send funds a lot they will be taxed a lot.

Now to your example that some other entity controlling the net worth, this won't help because if the rich person wants to buy a private jet with the help of that other entity, the other entity will just pay taxes instead.

Because people are taxed, not companies, rich people can't avoid taxation. It is just an idea.

<comment><USER7> Fwiw, they don't. They can't. They have vastly more money than they could ever spend on themselves. The majority of their income is just directed back to towards protecting and growing their capital.

The flaw in the entire capitalist premise is that this investment is assumed to be an implacable driver of productivity, but as the market is purchased (a free market is either for sale, or it's not actually a free market - it's a manipulated market), investments flow into non-productive asset classes, freezing consumptive momentum (ala Thomas Picketty's book).

Moreover, the sale of the market makes zero-sum games more attractive, since, without the protection provided by competition, squeezing resources from others becomes more attractive than creating new opportunity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This was my exact thought when I saw he was donating his money. How about encouraging unions and providing healthcare and better pay?

<comment><USER12> Would you rather he just donate nothing and keep everything else the same, rather than donate? The scrambling to condemn this act of charity doesn't make any sense.

<comment><USER13> They're not condemning the act of charity, they're condemning the working conditions he subjects his employees to.

Yes, the act of charity is better than nothing but it seems people think that money might be better spent on improving the quality of the jobs he offers from the dismal self-destruction they are famous for. Also pointing out that donating to charity ends up being tax deductible so it is truly the most selfish public display of giving and that treating your workers with human decency would be a selfless act he seems unwilling to do.

<comment><USER14> > Also pointing out that donating to charity ends up being tax deductible so > it is truly the most selfish public display

i mean, he still ends up with less money. he just doesn't get taxed on the money he gives away.

one could argue that donating is more tax efficient than paying workers more, because then _their_ income would be taxed.

<comment><USER15> > _donating is more tax efficient than paying workers more, because then their > income would be taxed._

Eh? Taxing a corporation less is better than having its employees earn more?

<comment><USER14> I was talking about tax efficiency in that post, not any grand moral claim.

although since we're on this topic, I would note that the US already spends as much or more money per grade school student than most of the European countries that we look to as models. this leads me to think that just shoving more tax dollars into the bureaucratic rube goldberg machine might actually be less impactful than a targeted charity effort.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Why should Bezos pay them better if he can get the state to compensate the workers?

A new study found that 700 Amazon employees in Ohio are on food stamps: [https://www.businessinsider.in/A-new-study-found- that-700-Am...](https://www.businessinsider.in/A-new-study-found- that-700-Amazon-employees-in-Ohio-are-on-food-stamps/articleshow/62511480.cms)

<comment><USER17> The right way to look at it is that workers already on state support are people who already have a bare minimum wage lower than which they won't get out of bed for. i.e Amazon would have had to pay LESS if the state support didn't exist.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> because charity is an ideal for stroking his ego while writing off taxes.

</comment><comment><USER19> Because profits convert to a valuation multiple. Currently Amazon enjoys a sweet sweet PE ratio, so it's more efficient to maximize profits, get rewarded by investors, and then donate personally.

</comment><comment><USER20> Why not give A's to C- students? Because it sets an inaccurate perspective of the rest of the world's expectations, setting them up for future failures.

Homelessness is a real problem that requires creative, focused and ambitious solutions. If Bezos can even partially match Bill and Melinda Gates' accomplishments the world will be a MUCH better place ([https://www.businessinsider.com/charts-bill-gates- loves-2017...](https://www.businessinsider.com/charts-bill-gates- loves-2017-2#4-extreme-poverty-is-slowly-going-extinct-4)). Here's hoping Bezos gets some singles in philanthropy paving a path to home runs.

<comment><USER21> Perhaps Bezos will make investments in research on cost effective air conditioning for warehouses.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I so wish this article went full wonk and went instead into the structural incentives and policies that cause corporations to behave in this way.

Instead we got a piece about how CEOs use philanthropy to boost their image. It leans more on a moral argument against the practice while ignoring the practical, political barriers put in place that prevent CEOs from actually doing anything about addressing wealth disparity. It almost gets there with the lobbying against tax, but not quite.

Corporations are structurally sociopathic. They are legally bound to maximize shareholder value above all other concerns.

<comment><USER23> Exactly the reason why unbridled capitalism is terrible. I'd imagine that if we had a genocide going on today, a company like Bayer would be rewarded by its shareholders for manufacturing Zyklon B since the only reason for a corporation to exist is to generate profits right?

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Because it's expensive and has low PR value.

</comment><comment><USER25> Maybe because if he paid people at amz more, he has to face the shareholders? If he does it privately, he answers to himself.

</comment><comment><USER17> Poor logic. Without state support or food stamps Walmart or Amazon would pay the lower wage employees even less - because the food stamps establish a minimum bar which the employees can expect. Without that support, the market for low wage employees would be even more competitive resulting in lower wages

</comment><comment><USER26> > "Bezos has long been criticised for his glaring lack of a philanthropic arm, > long after he became the richest man in modern history"

Bezos only just became richest person in the world this July 2018. It is perfectly reasonable for him to wait till he gets rich enough to claim the richest person title once before entering philanthropy. Also, he is only 54. Give him a break...most CEOs haven't even retired by them.

Also as CEO, Bezos has a fiduciary duty to make as much money for the company, which might unfortunately mean paying workers market rates. However by starting his own personal philanthropic fund, he can spend money for that however he believes best helps people, without worrying about what is best for a company.

</comment><comment><USER27> This doesn't make sense to me and are not mutually exclusive.

Amazon Inc. employes and pays people, where as a CEO he has certain responsibilities and duties, and is answerable to the board, which he needs to take into account.

Here he's donating his personal money which does not require any such considerations and he can do what he wants.

</comment><comment><USER28> Because he'd go out of business and then couldn't: grow and create billions of wealth for everyone, create and improve new technologies and have thousands of employees gain a bunch of skills and then have to downsize and employ less or raise prices which will kill their competitiveness and harm millions who buy their product.

They are following the rules. The rules have given us soooooo much over the last 100 if not 10 years. They can be vastly improved but lazy, monolithic ideas that take no consideration of cause and effect is the wrong populist movement to effect meaningful change.

<comment><USER29> I imagine it's much easier to maintain a company culture where everyone is directed toward only profit than one where it's well known they are passing out extra goodies and everyone would like some.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> He has an ethical responsibility not to. This is a big problem I have with capitalism and publicly traded companies. It's a problem without an answer, since I don't intend on trying other forms of government. Ultimately, his responsibility is to the shareholders. If mistreating employees is legal, and is in the best interest of shareholders, he has a responsibility to mistreat them. Doing anything else is unethical. We can haggle about whether it actually helps shareholders, especially in the long run. We can even encourage more corporate responsibility. At the end of the day, this is a tough issue to get around. This is why we need regulations with teeth.

<comment><USER31> I think you're mixing up "ethical" and "legal" responsibilities

Putting humanity first over shareholders is not an "ethical" problem

<comment><USER32> He doesn't have a legal responsibility either. This is a myth. CEOs have broad discretion to act in ways that are beneficial to a company.

Costco is not acting illegally, or even against their own interests, by paying workers higher wages. They can make the very true argument that paying higher wages results in happier employees that reduces turnover (and therefore training costs), increases sales (since employees are more knowledgeable about products), and results in happier customers that increases repeat visits/member retention.

If the shareholders disagree with the way that the CEO is maximizing company value, then the correct response is to replace the board through a vote, who will replace the CEO.

There's no legal or ethical argument here. Costco doesn't exist in a hypothetical world where everything stays the same, but wages get reduced to minimum wage. Taking that action has costs for Costco, and the end result may or may not result in an increase or decrease of company value. Hypotheticals aren't valid legal cases.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Amazon is a publicly traded company. As CEO, even though he has a lot of sway, Bezos has a responsibility to maximize shareholder value. Half of that is maximizing profits. Half is controlling costs.

<comment><USER34> That old myth:

[http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-warren- shareho...](http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-warren-shareholder- myth-20180816-story.html)

<comment><USER35> Not the best article - if it's a myth why does Senator Warren need to introduce new legislation?

<comment><USER36> Because it looks good, and companies need some pressure to adopt new practices that go against their institutional assumptions, even if the new practices are better. Not sure if I agree with her about employee votes or community votes or thresholds, but they're interesting ideas to think about. Obviously it's not getting passed anytime soon, so I read it as a starting point for a conversation. I think both make logical sense, thinking of it as required unionization and an adjustment to require companies that have more power than towns take those towns into account somehow. Definitely an approach to think about.

Occasionally, industries will ask as a group to be regulated because it's too hard or risky to take a step on their own, even if they all agree it's a good idea. Salt would be an example where the big companies all generally agree they can easily reduce it without anyone noticing if they all do it at the same time, but if only one does it they'll taste noticeably worse. So the only way they can figure to start reducing salt is by getting a regulation written to make it happen.

It's a curious system.

<comment><USER35> I'm actually interested in proof it is a myth - but this article is not it. It's an ad for Senator Warrens re-election campaign</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Linux Kernel LTS release is now for 6 years instead of 2 - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/09/android-users-rejoice-linux-kernel-lts-releases-are-now-good-for-6-years/ <comment><USER2> This is good news, but I'm slightly surprised with the attention this got here and other circles because this actually is nothing new and just a PR move by Google.

From [https://www.kernel.org/category/releases.html](https://www.kernel.org/category/releases.html):

      3.16 	Ben Hutchings 	2014-08-03 	Apr, 2020
      3.2 	Ben Hutchings 	2012-01-04 	May, 2018

These are just currently supported ones, there have been several other releases in the past with 5+ year support (like 2.6.32 and 3.4 from top of my mind). These were also (not coincidentally) selected kernels of older Android releases.

Edit: Digged here a bit more: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_kernel#Maintenance](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_kernel#Maintenance)

      2.6.32 December 2009 to March 2016 (6 years)
      3.4 May 2012 to October 2016 (4.5 years)
      3.10 June 2013 to October 2017 (4 years)

<comment><USER3> The future dates you are quoting were recently updated to those dates, see eg. [http://web.archive.org/web/20170501160354/https://www.kernel...](http://web.archive.org/web/20170501160354/https://www.kernel.org/category/releases.html) (also they're just from an unexplained column called "projected EOL")

Last year the announced commitment was just 2 years: [https://www.linux.com/news/44-linux-kernel-long-term- support...](https://www.linux.com/news/44-linux-kernel-long-term-support- release-now-available)

<comment><USER2> I'm not sure I get your point.

> The future dates you are quoting were recently updated to those dates

Nope, I see same dates there (except 4.4 which I didn't quote in my above comment contrary to what you seem to be claiming)

> also they're just from an unexplained column called "projected EOL

Just like the current page: [https://www.kernel.org/category/releases.html](https://www.kernel.org/category/releases.html)

> Last year the announced commitment was just 2 years

My post quoted other kernels, not 4.4, which this news article is about. My point is that a kernel version doesn't get 6 year treatment for the first time thing as this PR/news piece paints it out.

<comment><USER3> Ok, my mistake about the quoting.

About the substance, I think the public commitment for 6 years for 4.4 has more relevance than just PR.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have mixed feelings. The modus operandi should be to get upgrades to the current stable kernel frequently enough, not to backport bugfixes to 6 year old kernels.

<comment><USER5> As long as Linus refuses to provide a stable driver API, this won't happen.

OEMs will only pay to write custom drivers for a SoC once, and that means you'll be stuck with one kernel (or any binary-compatible version). Every device requires entirely custom drivers for this, because ARM has no device enumeration.

Until Torvalds finally stops being so stubborn on this, Android and IoT devices will have such a short lifetime, and people will have to continue backporting fixes to ancient kernels.

<comment><USER6> Does FreeBSD or NetBSD have a stable ABI?

<comment><USER7> The kernel ABI is stable between major version numbers. It is never intentionally broken between majors. More importantly, the kernel APIs are very stable, which seems to be intentionally broken on Linux regularly.

Userland ABI is much more stringent, pretty much any commercially used OS will maintain compatibility for old applications indefinitely, Linux and Free and Net BSD included.

<comment><USER8> > which seems to be intentionally broken on Linux regularly

Please provide evidence to back the claim of intent. This comes across as if you're implying malice, when it's far more likely interfaces change in the natural course of development where there are no restraints like abi/api stability commitments.

<comment><USER5> Torvalds himself said he's breaking it intentionally to prevent people relying on it.

<comment><USER8> Was this in a mailing list thread? Got a URL? I'm unaware of this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This seems to apply to 4.4; according to [https://www.kernel.org/category/releases.html](https://www.kernel.org/category/releases.html) 4.9 has not been extended, so it only applies every few years that there will again be six year support.

<comment><USER10> 4.4 is Google's base to develop Nougat

If, as per the table below [1], they've already moved on to 4.10, then 6 years is a long time to support 4.9

[1] [https://android.stackexchange.com/questions/51651/which- andr...](https://android.stackexchange.com/questions/51651/which-android-runs- which-linux-kernel)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> how time flys!</comment>


Show HN: A plain text HN reader - <AUTHOR> https://mm.dwyer.co.za/hn <comment><AUTHOR> Hey all, I didn't have long so this doesn't work on mobile and it has very limited functionality (shows the plain text of articles on the front page of HN).

I wanted something that

a) loads fast (articles are pre-downloaded and parsed every 10 minutes so that I can serve up only static text)

b) emphasises text (CSS shamelessly stolen from [0])

There are a ton of other HN readers out there, so would love to hear if this is a look/feel that others might be interested in using. The text is pretty buggy for some sources (article extraction is a really hard problem) but in the morning when I have a few minutes I like to spend them reading text instead of closing tracking cookie overlays :)

[0] [https://perfectmotherfuckingwebsite.com/](https://perfectmotherfuckingwebsite.com/)

</comment><comment><USER2> Looks appalling on mobile, which seems like a wasted opportunity given that's one of the platforms one might want to use this on.

</comment><comment><USER3> did you scrap Original links contents ?</comment>


Kobayashi Maru - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kobayashi_Maru <comment><USER2> I'm glad they mentioned the Star Trek paperback where each of the crew members remembers their own experience with the Kobayashi Maru.

It didn't just start with "Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan". It was really central to that movie's theme. (Captain Kirk's insistence that he doesn't believe in no-win scenarios.) It was such a good distillation of his character that I wasn't surprised they brought it back for the first movie in the rebooted franchise.

</comment><comment><USER3> "I don't believe in a no-win scenario." Probably Kirk's best quote and a valuable life philosophy.

<comment><USER4> A nice bumper sticker slogan... Indeed there are perceived no-win scenarios for which you can cheat or redefine the rules somehow or even redefine what winning means. In my opinion (and many others' as well) you can't lead anyone if you don't know how to lose right.

Death is a perfect example. Especially preventable death of a child. You can't even grieve properly if you can't accept loss.

But let's talk about infosec, the entired discipline of incident response is founded on the expectation of security incident,as in security in some way was compromised or reduced. The whole point is to lose well! As in you responded well so the loss in security was minimized. You still lost because your attacker was able to get past your defenses and reduce security. Or perhaps one might say it is only a loss if confidentiality of data was breached. Ok, you did everything right and due to human error 0day exploits that abused attack vectors outside your threat model, your crown jewels were lost. What then? If you accept loss, you communicatr the data breach effectively, follow your plan for such a no-win situation. You simply can't lose right if you can't accept loss and losing right is not winning. You lost what was important to you,that process cannot be reversed and it was not preventable.

I think as a philosophy murphy's law gives a better perspective.

<comment><USER5> You limit your example to a perfect world scenario in which IR is the only reactionary discipline.

If you want to see just how much Kirk was right look at any major breach and how companies react to it for example the Equifax beach.

Yeah their IR team might have dealt with the no-win scenario as you mention, but their senior management Kirked the hell out of it by selling stock shortly after the breach was discovered to ensure they don't their fortune and then the corporate machine was set into play to ensure that the company gets mostly unscathed from the entire ordeal.

So IR did their job, they fell on their swords and what not, but the execs, the lawyers, lobbyists an the PR folks just shrugged and said that's nice let us show you how it's really done.

<comment><USER4> I don't get what you are saying. Infosec teams are part of the company, if they choose to capitalize on a breach, good for them. They still lost, like i said earlier, making the best out of a loss does not change the fact that there was a loss. Their brand reputation will always be inferior because of this. They accepted loss so they tried to lose well. Not accepting loss would be to not be prepared because your security is too good or to refuse to disclose the public because of consequences right?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> See also:

[https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/2747/symbolis...](https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/2747/symbolism- of-the-mind-game-in-enders-game)

Winners do use cheats, I suppose.</comment>


Windows 8 is unusable by mouse, here's how to fix it - <AUTHOR> http://www.fixingwindows8.com

<comment><USER2> All these claims of W8 being "unusable"... I don't understand the use of this word.

Once in a blue moon, there comes an event that makes the Internet completely unbearable to me, no matter where I go. New, high profile product launches are typically this way. The outrage on the Internet when the iPod was announced, the iPhone, the iPad. When WP7 came out. A new update to Ubuntu. Any change in Google or Facebook. All labeled by the Internet as horrible failures. The last version is always the best (until you get used to the newest one).

There exists a set of loudmouths with nothing better to than rile up the hivemind, and rile they do. A potentially good product is dead before it even goes live, based on misconceptions, "viral" videos, and preconceived notions based on misreported facts and wild, irresponsible speculation. Imagine if the Internet culture was around when DOS was replaced by Windows.

Microsoft knows what they're doing. And if they don't, they'll figure it out pretty quick, or they'll die. Guess what? This is a beta "preview" release. No Windows has launched without a tutorial since at least Windows 95. If Windows 8 is a failure, it'll be because of wild, speculative bullshit, not because it's a bad product. Using a computer is not intuitive by itself. All your complaints would be equally valid going from Windows 8 to Windows 7.

<comment><USER3> Well, they _seem_ to know what they're doing: pushing a unified, one-size- fits-all interface (and I've tried to honestly use it, on a desktop, for a day; without a touch interface, it feels very clumsy). The trouble with one- size-fits-all is obvious: it never does. Note that the linked site is not only "riling up the hivemind," but also proposing solutions to the UX problems _as present in the Consumer Preview_ (because there's nothing else publicly out there to base the suggestions on).

That's _constructive_ criticism if I ever saw any - and loyalty to the brand as well: that site doesn't say "eh wind0z3 iz teh suxxorz, hate hate," but "I like Windows, but these are the specific problems I see with Win8 as it's currently presented; this I propose to fix the issues".

<comment><USER2> The solution in the article is "add a taskbar" or "bring the desktop back". That's not fixing Windows 8, that's completely ignoring it.

<comment><USER3> Have you actually _used_ the W8 CP, or read the website? The desktop is still there; and that taskbar is there as well, but it's hard to discover (most of the UI elements are hidden by default, and it's not even obvious they exist). Most of the changes proposed are not UI overhauls, nor Metro killers, but more of a repositioning of various elements _when using the system without a touch device_.

In other words, you seem to be doing quite the same thing you accuse others of, but in reverse: "you're either 110% happy with the perfect UI in the new release, or MS haters." The UI has potential to be useful, but it currently feels half-baked (and there isn't time to finish such major changes between a CP and RTM versions); perhaps W9 will finish and polish it?

<comment><USER2> The desktop is there as a backwards compatibility crutch. It's not discoverable because Microsoft doesn't want you to discover it. XP Mode in Windows 7 isn't discoverable either.

I take exception to the "either a lover or a hater" comment. I have plenty of criticisms of Windows 8, like I had many with Windows 7. But if there's one thing you learn about trying to talk some sense into the Internet, it's to not waffle on your position. Look at how quickly people picked up on "one single consumer reportedly didn't like the Windows 8 beta, therefore Windows 8 is a complete failure!" bandwagon. Now imagine the responses any reasonable debate would garner if someone said "I think Windows 8 will be good, but one thing I don't like is..."

Yeah, the very next response would be "see, even Microsoft lovers hate Windows 8!"

<comment><USER3> Well, let's get that out of the way, then: "see, even Microsoft lovers hate Windows 8!" ;o) Anyway: you do have a point with waffle-resistance; but "talking sense into the Internet" sounds a bit futile...especially when the Internet is trying to do the same, with senses that are incompatible to yours. The video is indeed somewhat unfortunate (note that I've actually watched it _much later_ than this discussion started) in that it's easy to latch on, instead of the - somewhat positive - rest of that site.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> And here I was, thinking it was unusable by keyboard.

But sure, this would help with the discoverability problem _a lot_. "Oh, there's a lot of useful contextual options...somewhere, maybe." Once you know where to look, that is - a chicken-and-egg problem.

The impression I got from the Customer preview was "Not on a smartphone? No touchscreen? You're not worthy, go away." Well, that's good to know, too ;)

</comment><comment><USER4> I would be very surprised if Microsoft took that advice.

This is good user-interface research though. UI developers take note.</comment>


Show HN: Fresh-baked rustic sourdough bread, delivered within 20 minutes - <AUTHOR> http://getbreadbox.com/yc <comment><USER3> I guess I'm just at a loss as to what is even remotely "hacker"-ish about this.

It's a bakery that delivers. That's great, I guess, but there's nothing particularly _technical_ about it. They're not using tech in some unusual or interesting way to cut down on delivery costs, or make bread in a different way, or anything. It's just... a bakery, that delivers.

There's a Web form to order your bread through, but in 2014 that's not really any different than having a phone number to order your bread through used to be. (It looks like there's a mobile app to come, but if all it does is show you a menu and let you order it would fall roughly into the same category. Table stakes.)

I was talking with a relative of mine who's been in the grocery business for decades over the holidays last year, and we were joking around about how it wouldn't be long until someone started touting home milk delivery -- something that was commonplace before most homes had TV sets, or even radios, much less computers -- as a "tech startup." This isn't _that,_ of course. But it's close.

<comment><USER4> They're doing something that doesn't scale in order to learn more about their potential customers. It doesn't have to make sense as a long-term business in order for them to get good data out of it.

<comment><USER5> My hats off to folks that execute on something.

What's the end game? It seems like premeditated failure into murderously brutal markets where distribution is painful. If they're going to do it themselves they're going to learn quite quickly that it can only work in about a dozen metros. That's a 20 million a year business with margins that will be tiny....

Doesn't butter my bread.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Strange business, if that's what it's going to be. I've never had a sudden craving for a loaf of bread and wished I could order just that online. Not that I can't already; the local grocery store has a delivery service, and they bake their own bread every morning. I'm sure there's at least one bakery that delivers in the city, and there's a half dozen restaurants on GrubHub in my area that offer some kind of bread delivered.

It'd be a strange thing to pitch to investors too. I don't hear of much VC funding going to low-margin fresh food businesses. Bakeries generally don't make many billionaires; I think the entire Cinnabon company was sold for $30M some years ago. Perhaps they're going to pitch some kind of scheduling / routing / dispatch technology for delivery businesses?

Edit: Nope, missed the link to their real site. They want to be a bakery that delivers for free.

<comment><USER7> There's a high end bakery in the mission called Tartine where people queue up every day to buy $13 loaves of bread. I could never justify the expense but from the line outside I'd say there are definitely a lot of people in SF who can. You might have a hard time scaling this outside of really posh areas, but I'd bet that if you can make a profit delivering 5$ loaves in SF that you could do it for cheaper with the same margins in less wealthy areas. Good luck to the OP!

<comment><USER6> I'm skeptical there's any profit selling $5 loaves in SF. How many can one driver really deliver per hour, 3-4 trips? $20 per hour in gross revenue is barely enough to employ the driver and his fuel, let alone the bread, bakers, managers, facilities, taxes, health licenses, marketing, customer service, payment processing, etc. unless people tip _very_ generously.

<comment><USER8> solution looking for a problem

<comment><USER5> Yup. Gotta find a problem and a solution and make money at it. Otherwise, it's not survivable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> What a brilliant way to validate an idea. No online payment processing, no fancy dropdown modals asking me to make an account, just pay when you get the bread.

I hope it stays this simple.

<comment><USER10> I've ordered pizza from several chains that use exactly the same process for their online orders, and have done so this way for years now.

No account is mandatory, although such functionality is offered if you want to save your preferred pizza toppings, your address, and so forth for greater convenience during future orders.

You can prepay, if you want, or just pay the delivery driver once the pizzas have been delivered.

I'm not really sure what needs to be "validated" here. This approach has been successfully used by many other organizations offering the exact same type of service.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hi everyone!

Thank you all so much for your interest in this!

The spike in interest from HN has been totally overwhelming, so while we are thrilled with the validation of this concept, we are running out of stock and falling behind on delivery schedule.

I'll be sure to reach out individually to everyone who submitted an order.

We can't wait to launch this service in a way that can handle demand spikes like this -- thank you all for yor support.

Edit: for reference, we've had orders for 150 loaves of bread in 2 hours.

<comment><USER11> So you achieved your goal right? Historically bakeries are very 'spikey' in their demand, a friend of mine runs one and they spend 3AM to 6AM making donuts and bagels which they sell out of between 6AM and 7:15AM, and then sell maybe a handful or two for the rest of the day.

Given the complexities of bread, it would interesting to hear a post mortem about ways you might both account for spikes without compromising delivery times, delivery scheduling to make maximum use of delivery resources, and even recipe variations to support those goals.

<comment><USER12> There is a donut place in Berkeley that works very similar to that. The reason for them is that there are a lot of large-scale orders that want the donuts for breakfast (e.g. the school dining facilities).

<comment><USER5> 150 tiny orders is like cutting down a forest with a herring. Catering events is where the real cash is at. Large universities like Stanford operate like cities with 100s of autonomous departments free to choose whichever vendor/s they like.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Just picked it up (two people in a black Prius :)

They seemed swamped (they were 10 minutes late and were visibly frazzled) but upbeat. Bread was decent.

I suspect that if you go into pastries, you probably can command a higher margin (I really dislike keeping desserts in the apartment, and "dessert on demand" definitely would be appealing)

<comment><USER5> I could also get used to delivered deserts.

Esp delivered by quadcopter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> That's very cool, but jeez is that really in line with the price of baked bread in San Francisco? This morning, 3,50€ bought me half a kilo of 5-cereals focaccia, two loaves of cereal breada and half a kilo of white bread. That's bread for a eight people lunch. That's probably one of the few things I'm gonna miss about Italy when I'll leave.

<comment><USER15> I suppose you're located in the south of Italy, as in the north (Milan for example) bread (standard, not multicereal or special ones) is around 4-5€ per kilo. NB I'm Italian now in Luxembourg and one of the thing I miss is the quality of bread (here it is generally not very good, too many "boulangerie" of the same brand, Fischer, with all the same bread / taste). And of course it is even more expensive...

<comment><USER14> Tuscany, small province town. Those prices in Milan are crazy, though!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I wonder where the bread is being baked. SF has some pretty strict laws around the quality/inspection/safety/licensing of kitchens (even home kitchens) used to create food for sale. My girlfriend wanted to sell lamb cakes during Easter season a few years ago (we saw an indication of demand and absolutely no supply from established bakeries) and while figuring out how to do it at minor scale (planning on 25-50 cakes) we became aware of these inspection limits. It seemed like it was going to be a lot of footwork to handle and was discouraging enough to not follow through on at the time.

Maybe they most likely won't run afoul or attract any legal attention for this test run for a single day. If it proves to be popular then it wouldn't make sense to do it out of someone's home kitchen, of course.

<comment><USER17> Thanks to the Cottage Food Act, as of 2013 it's super-easy if you're relatively low volume. It's a self-inspection (as in, "follow this checklist") and a cheap registration so they can track you down if you cause some kind of outbreak.

See: [https://www.sfdph.org/dph/EH/Food/AB1616.as](https://www.sfdph.org/dph/EH/Food/AB1616.as)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> In one place on the front page, it says delivery takes 18 minutes. In another place on the same page, it says 20 minutes.

Not that 2 minutes makes a difference, but the numbers should be consistent.

I like 18 minutes because it sounds precise.

</comment><comment><USER19> Is it a mobile oven? The bread gets baked as you drive to the delivery point? :D

</comment><comment><USER20> I'm disappointed with the comments here about this future YC applicant. Can't we think bigger than a food delivery app?

If you read the homepage, you'll see their tag line is "Fresh bread, snacks and coffee beans. Delivered in 18 minutes." Now, let's remove the baked goods accoutrement for a second and focus on the "delivered in 18 minutes or less". Isn't this the very real problem Amazon is trying to solve for themselves? Isn't there tremendous value to dynamic delivery logistics?

To be clear, I don't know these people, nor do I know if delivery logistics is their endgame. If they're bakers, then all the previous critique is warranted.

But if I lived in SF, I would sign up to see what they're up to.

<comment><USER21> >>I'm disappointed with the comments here about this future YC applicant. Can't we think bigger than a food delivery app?

Yeah, it was incredibly depressing to visit a really nice web page, become interested, and then read the top comment which basically dismisses the entire thing as "not hacker-ish" enough. Mind you, that comment is coming from a guy who blogs about mostly political topics...

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I might be worth looking at where kozmo.com went wrong with a similar attempt during the dotcom boom.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kozmo.com](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kozmo.com)

<comment> rkuykendall-com What makes you assume something went wrong? It sounds like they were doing really well, but the bust hit them extremely hard, like it hit many others.

<comment><USER23> According to the S-1 for the IPO that never happened, they spent nearly as much on delivery as their total revenue. Seems like they weren't doing _that_ well.

[http://www.secinfo.com/dRqWm.5c8t.htm#1jjz](http://www.secinfo.com/dRqWm.5c8t.htm#1jjz)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> It's refreshing that instead of putting up a fake landing page and pretending to be an established product, they're just coming right out and telling us that this is an experiment. Very cool!

</comment><comment><USER25> Bravo for doing things that don't scale. Good luck here & I hope this works out. Happy to help read through your YC app as well. ayo at hipmob.

</comment><comment><USER26> Wouldn't it be a logistic nightmare when everybody wants their bread delivered at the exact same time (breakfast)?

<comment><USER27> In an ideal world, they'd adjust the price according to demand. But, realistically, no one's gonna shift their schedule to get cheaper online bread.

<comment><USER16> Then there will be complaints that surge pricing for bread is price gouging when people need bread the most.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Oh boy. That's nice. Could you deliver to São Paulo, please? Pretty please :) But seriously, that's quite a great idea. If you can deliver in time, it would be supremely convenient. Reminds me of the milk bottles that used to be delivered by the milkman early in the morning.

<comment><USER29> And while you're on the way to Sao Paulo, mind stopping by in Tokyo? it's impossible to find decent bread here...

<comment><USER30> Sadly true. I'd have paid $20-30 for a real life loaf of bread that you couldn't roll into a golf-ball sized nugget between your palms.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> So, a bakery that delivers? The tech industry sure is expanding its scope.

</comment><comment><USER32> I clicked through to read about how they plan on running it long term. They will carry a very limited number of products, and every delivery person has all the products stocked in their van. They then route the nearest delivery person to you when you order, so it's kind of like a mobile coffee shop.

I don't know if it is possible to make it profitable, but it is definitely a service I would use. It is a pain keeping bread on hand because the good stuff only keeps for a day or two.

<comment><USER33> > It is a pain

...in French speaking regions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Please let there be an API.

Home Sensors + ifttt + Bread Box would be a good alternative for morning alarms :-)

Or make it integrated with the navigation app on my cell phone. Based on traffic status, it'll schedule bread baking. After I park my car near my office, I can pick some freshly baked bread on my way.

Or integrate with a voting system that hooks with GitHub. The person who makes the most awesome PR of the day gets a basket of healthy bread delivered to her/his home next morning.

</comment><comment><USER35> Given I'm now hungry as a bat out of hell, I guess you already nailed the website both in content and in pictures.

Now if only I wasn't based in Italy...

<comment><USER36> I can't imagine it's that much of a struggle to find good bread in Italy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I rather deliver a great "give yourself upworthy's advantages for your content" and break my own sourdough...

But this is a startup that jumped the shark of meaning of startups. If they told me they had angel money, I'd be very concerned about investing in startups myself (if only I could)

which remind's me, I need to feed my sour starter today!

</comment><comment><USER38> Finally. But i'd prefer to get every day a fresh loaf @7am, and then you can really save on delivery costs. And give me a $2-3/per smaller bread (cuz u don't go through it in a day) if I subscribe like yearly.

I'll give it a shot though.

</comment><comment><USER39> I could see this being economical with quad copter (drone) delivery. But, home delivery from a car? Man, the gas expenses (among other car related expenses) would eat the profits to a bare minimum. Especially driving around SF.

<comment><USER40> Bicycles are your friend in the likes of SF :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Which bakeries source your breads? The Mill? Tartine? Acme? Would love to know which before I buy! (though I might buy anyways because I think this is awesome). Awesome Webflow site that is simple and to the point.

</comment><comment><USER42> Brake Bread in the Twin Cities area has something similar with its subscription service, delivered by bike.

[http://brakebread.com/](http://brakebread.com/)

</comment><comment><USER43> Placed an order at 4:35 PST, still nothing? Safe to assume they got swamped?

EDIT: See the update now, seeing as how they had my phone, it would have been cool if they texted me.

</comment><comment><USER44> Am I the only one who thinks this might not be about the bread?

YC has funded delivery-as-a-service before. If you were going for that, a stunt like this could be brilliant.

</comment><comment><USER45> I love bread. I'd use this if I lived in SF.

</comment><comment><USER46> Does SF not have Jimmy Johns? They'll stick some oats and sesame seeds on a roll if you ask nicely. They are freakishly fast.

</comment><comment><USER47> Just got our delivery now, fantastic service. I hope the unit-economics work out, because I'd certainly use this, yc or not.

</comment><comment><USER48> Oh man... I would love some fresh, warm bread right now. breadbox is going to set a trend with this stunt.

</comment><comment><USER49> Seems like a good idea to me. I submitted my info but didn't hear back. Did anyone get a response?

<comment><USER50> I've been waiting about 10-15 minutes for a response myself; guess it's not automated?

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> I need this up in Lexington, KY. It's the San Francisco of Kentucky! ...Or something like that.

</comment><comment><USER52> Do you guys know about SpoonRocket? It's only in the East Bay, but seems conceptually similar.

</comment><comment><USER53> Add to subj: "only in SF"

</comment><comment><USER54> I like the picture on the site, it's from one of my favorite wineries - <USER2>

</comment><comment> rkuykendall-com Do you tip? or just the $5?

</comment><comment><USER55> Maybe the business they're validating is an HN-specific PR firm :)

</comment><comment><USER56> by glancing the title this comes to my mind first: [http://www.nick.com/shows/breadwinners/](http://www.nick.com/shows/breadwinners/)

</comment><comment><USER57> it was only this morning that I was thinking, I wish someone could buy me breakfast from the nearby Au Bon Pain while I work on campus. This would work too. Great idea!

</comment><comment><USER58> somewhat OT, but: if you have never tried baking bread at home (not even sourdough, beer yeast is ok) you should definitely try it, it's incredibly satisfying.

</comment><comment><USER59> What the world needs now is on demand bread.

</comment><comment><USER5> Is there anything similar in Paris already?

</comment><comment><USER50> Anyone else not receiving the text message?

<comment><USER60> Same here, check my above comment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> Dat sexy bread tho..</comment>


A further W^X refinement – OpenBSD - <AUTHOR> https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=155899373514678&w=2 <comment><AUTHOR> For the uninitiated: W^X is feature of memory pages being either writeable xor executable, so never both. This works for many applications but trips up applications which JIT, like most Java or JavaScript runtimes.

This is about doing something smarter with those: essentially disabling syscalls from those JIT pages. It can't stop return to libc attacks but it's something!

Also, If you're not familiar with some fun OpenBSD security tidbits, I recommend people check out pledge and unveil, which the article references.</comment>