Codetown ::: a software developer's community
Brad wrote: I noticed that in the Florida Mall, there are a lot of kiosks and the sellers there want to sell their stuff. I also see a ton of people walking by with cell phones. Would there be any way to help the owners of the kiosks to engage the cell phones passing by pushing an advertisement to those cell phone so that the owner of the cell phone would be aware of the kiosk and we could sell this product to the owner of the kiosks?
Brad, this is best as a discussion, so I added it. Let's talk first about the idea itself (then about the "art of the start")
It's a fact that people don't like unsolicited email, etc...but your idea could enable people to turn on and off push messages. That would let them receive push messages when they wanted, like when they are in a mall, and not at other times that may be irrelevant.
Let's discuss!
Tags:
What if someone were to talk to all of the mall businesses and see if they might try to make a contest using an app.
One of the restaurants could offer a free entree to the winner for example.
The participant would have to go to each kiosk to find the missing something or other.
The winner would then get the prize.
That way the participants would have to visit all of the kiosks in order to win.
A url in the form of a QR-Code might be used to make the whole thing work.
It could be printed by each kiosk.
What if someone were to talk to all of the mall businesses and see if they might try to make a contest using an app.
One of the restaurants could offer a free entree to the winner for example.
The participant would have to go to each kiosk to find the missing something or other.
The winner would then get the prize.
That way the participants would have to visit all of the kiosks in order to win.
A url in the form of a QR-Code might be used to make the whole thing work.
It could be printed by each kiosk.
Codetown is a social network. It's got blogs, forums, groups, personal pages and more! You might think of Codetown as a funky camper van with lots of compartments for your stuff and a great multimedia system, too! Best of all, Codetown has room for all of your friends.
Created by Michael Levin Dec 18, 2008 at 6:56pm. Last updated by Michael Levin May 4, 2018.
Check out the Codetown Jobs group.

Despite widespread industry recommendations, a new ETH Zurich paper concludes that AGENTS.md files may often hinder AI coding agents. The researchers recommend omitting LLM-generated context files entirely and limiting human-written instructions to non-inferable details, such as highly specific tooling or custom build commands.
By Bruno Couriol
DoorDash has rebuilt its Dasher onboarding into a unified, modular platform to support global expansion. The new architecture uses reusable step modules, a centralized status map, and workflow orchestration to ensure consistent, localized onboarding experiences. This design reduces complexity, supports market-specific variations, and enables faster rollout to new countries.
By Leela Kumili
The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) announced recently that Dragonfly, its open source image and file distribution system, has reached graduated status, the highest maturity level within the CNCF project lifecycle.
By Craig Risi
OpenAI's $110B funding includes AWS as the exclusive third-party distributor for the Frontier agent platform, introducing an architectural split: Azure retains stateless API exclusivity; AWS gains stateful runtime environments via Bedrock. Deal expands the existing $38B AWS agreement by $100B and commits 2GW of Trainium capacity.
By Steef-Jan Wiggers
Sophie Koonin discusses the realities of large-scale technical migrations, using Monzo’s shift to TypeScript as a roadmap. She explains how to handle "bends in the road," from documentation and tooling to setting measurable milestones. Sophie shares vital lessons on balancing technical debt with feature work and provides a framework for deciding if a migration is truly worth the effort.
By Sophie Koonin
© 2026 Created by Michael Levin.
Powered by