skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'll disagree slightly with tptacek... this is a genius piece of marketing by McDonalds. It does everything that we routinely see listed on this very site as Best Practices™:

- Respond to customer feedback in a friendly and highly transparent manner.

- Don't sugarcoat things that "everyone knows but no one admits"; they could have avoided showing the graphic artist photoshopping the burger, but everyone knows that they use photoshop, so why bother? Show everything and customers will trust you more.

- Use social stuff like Twitter to encourage customer feedback. It will create a positive loop that encourages others to follow and interact with their main corporate account.

- Respond before something is actually important. This one isn't showcased so strongly - this isn't a pressing issue by any measure - but they still took the time to respond to it and make a brief, informative, and actually engaging video about it, without some external "we screwed up, sorry" event. Interacting with customers like this before problems arise is simply awesome.

Well done, McDonalds.
The rebirth of Netscape navigator, JQuery and XMLHttpRequest happened to the Microsoft Monopoly.
LayerVault introduces Activity Feed.
What you describe is a dysfunctional organization, not a justification for PMs.
How about the HTCs and Samsungs that ran androids and never got their upgrades?
It's an open letter.
I would use IFTT if I could pay them money.

I am wary of building on top of any third party web service, but I free services like this I may play with but never depend on for personal or business use.
Amazing service. Works like a charm for piping notifications from various other apps into HipChat. Can't wait to play around with it more.
No, for making it so that the rest of the team doesn't have to deal with emails from 7am to 1am.

Part of the PM's or manager's job (at least if they're a good one, anyway) is shielding the rest of the team from administrivia, so that they can be productive.
Ever feel like quitting your corporate job and buying an Inn? I did, AMA
Unfortunately no, but it's in our todo list.
Testing for Continuous Delivery with Visual Studio 2012 RC
I don't see why this is controversial, especially if you replace "users" with "owners".
Lose the hostility man, it's not needed.

What about rolling up assets seems so irreducibly complex that you want to rely on a shake-n-bake to get 'er done?
> It's impossible to conclude from the evidence presented that the antitrust action had no effect on the breaking down of Microsoft's monopoly. It's entirely plausible that the enforcement left them unable to respond as quickly to new markets as their competitors, leading to them beginning to get undermined a few years later.

In fact, companies targeted by antitrust (I think it was IBM) have stated that antitrust regulation, by itself, shifted their focus. You are no longer rushing ahead, instead you must be cautious about everything. So it is indeed quite plausible that antitrust actions against Microsoft made possible the current non-Microsoft-dominated era.
Glad you didn't go android. Because their upgrade experience is not any different.
I believe they also have some stipulations on if you're being impersonated they might verify you.
As an American, it is totally bizarre to me that many of my fellow citizens are unaware of electric tea kettles.
I always think of "hand-eye coordination".

Hand = Developers
Eye = Customers, Marketing, C-staff (read: stakeholders)
Coordination = Project managers
"I know they get paid better for doing what i Don't want to do"
You summed it up well. BA/PMs do the dirty work that developers can be shielded from. Dealing with people is always a dirty work but extremely difficult to master. A good BA/PM is one who does this well. If you can tell me that you can get anyone to do anything in a project by your people's skills, power of communication, aggression, I would pay you well and would not want to lose you.
I appreciate the response. I'll have to give them an honest try before making a judgement.
Programmers tend to think that programming is the most important part of making software. However, managers think that managing is the most important part of making software, and business analysts think that defining business requirements is the most important part of making software. Asking a room of programmers about the value of business analysts is going to result in feedback that is heavily biased. As you say, we've invented a narrative of moral superiority, and it's a seductive one.

I suspect programmers are less correct in their assumption than they would like to believe. Probably more correct than the other two groups of employees, but still less than correct. The sad fact is, most programmers (especially non-entrepreneurs) don't "get" what PM's and BA's do, the same way that most managers don't "get" what programmers do, but their role still provides value (if they're good at their job). The nature of their job often involves filtering crap for their programmers, so the better job they're doing, the more invisible they look.

The value PM's provide is enabling specialization of labor. They act as the interface between business stuff and tech stuff--translating business requirements to tech requirements for their programmers, and tech trade-offs into business trade-off for their stakeholders. It's something that programmers can do themselves (especially entrepreneurial ones), but taking that work off their plate lets them focus on technical matters.

Of course, the above is a perfect world, which is about as common as the mythical sufficiently-smart compiler. Which is to say, it never exists and never will. Nonetheless, there are such things as PM's that provide value. My experience is that ones with non-negative value are about one-in-four, ones with measurably positive value are less than one-in-ten, and if you find one you should pay what it takes to keep them around. YMMV.

----

That said, there are reasons why PM's are paid more than their value more often than programmers are. I agree with the majority of these, but I'm restricting my contributions to the portions of my opinions which aren't echoed throughout this thread.
with hugely inflated numbers that assume the best case scenario for time-savings, fancy charts and graphs, and perhaps even a buzzword laden powerpoint presentation during your annual review.
Blue Sky laws typically require investors to be accredited unless there are exceptions. Some states may allow for non-accredited investors to invest in startups, but I don't know of any.

One area that may or may not work would be if your family member loaned you the money personally. That isn't considered an investment since it is a personal loan.

But, in a personal loan, they couldn't ask for equity since that would be an investment.
That's fine by me. IMO, Reddit (as an example) was a great site, until it became popular and the subject material moved to the lowest common denominator. HN would be ruined too if/when you can get away with posts that do not stay within the topics/style that the community was built up from (I would figure that's why politics/sports are explicitly disallowed, and I am happy that such topics are kept off here)

If programmers.SE is supposed to be a site for "professional programmers interested in conceptual questions about software development" and this question doesn't fit that description, turf it. Like I'd expect you to turf "Who are you voting for in the upcoming presidential elections?", no matter how popular that would be.
New MacBook Pro 15″ with Retina Display Can Run 3 External Displays
Layer 7 Introduces the SecureSpan Mobile Access Gateway
Using the query string to bust cache and replacing your assets on deploy is the simple solution that Rails' asset pipeline replaces.

Rails' asset pipeline doesn't delete old assets. That way you don't get inconsistencies when not all of your servers symlink to the new assets at the same moment.
In What Scenarios Does High Organic User Growth Not Imply Product-Market Fit?
this is the case for many larger organisations.
Just a few thoughts on the tax consequences based on a cursory look at the OP's post...

- It appears that the OP will be subject to at least a 15% withholding rate on dividends paid from the US Corp to the Indian parent in addition to the U.S. corporate income taxes paid.

- All IP and IP rights are owned by the U.S. corporation, which will make a future IP migration offshore very expensive. As in, minimum six-figures expensive (possibly even into 9 figures). This could be a serious deterrent to foreign acquirers. IP should be held offshore to the extent possible. Note that holding the IP in the U.S. also has implications for future expansion, as it prevents the use of the most cost-favorable transfer pricing arrangements.

- Worldwide income is subject to U.S. taxation. Their costs will not scale with their income, which will make this very expensive. (U.S. income taxation is preferrable to foreign jurisdictions only if costs scale with expenses, because special deductions or credits in the U.S. tax code can lower the effective tax rate below 10% or even 0%).

Incorporating in the U.S. is easy. The hard part is getting a tax-efficient structure. The OP's structure is not tax-efficient. This will not matter as long as they do not have profits, but it will haunt them once they start having serious earnings or start receiving serious acquisition offers.
We should be happy Microsoft is not a monopoly anymore, and instead of trying to encourage them to come back to that position, we should encourage the competition to even things out some more.
after almost 50 comments, I say let the developers, BAs,PM, QAs all win. After all, we all want to get the project out of the door, make some money on the way and go home.
Then checkout This American Life for an episode on scambaiters that leaves you unsure exactly what to think about the whole mess:

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/363/e...
Botnets often cause little to no perceptible harm to the users of the zombies machines. I've heard of cases where the viruses actually attempted to improve the computers security to keep other viruses out and gain exclusive access to it. But still most agree that fighting botnets is important.

Note that I'm not saying that Secure Boot is significant in the battle against bots, but rather that security is important even if there is not immediate benefits to the users of that particular machine.
I don't think the concern is for the user's data at all. It's to prevent the computer from becoming an uncleanable botnet zombie.
Clickable to the site: https://zapier.com/
Regardless of your spiritual bent... except for every religion that has solitary monks, or hermits, or walkabouts, etc.
Seriously? This is just another advertisement!
Just a tip, if you want to keep with your sports metaphors, and meant to say "a good PM is on the offensive", you probably meant "a good PM is proactive (acts to solve a problem before it shows up)". Describing someone as 'offensive' is saying there is something about them that offends you.
There is never a reasonable case that the owner's control should be restricted. If the internet cafe wants to lock down all their machines, then go for it. If Sony wants me to pay >$500 for a locked down machine that only they control, they can go blank themselves.
Good submission...I agree with other commenters that this is a pretty good counter-meme. I just had to ask if anyone else had issues with the Flash player, as in, not being able to even rewind or move forward (in Mac Chrome). Brought me back to late 90s RealPlayer days.
You've burst no bubble, your ego just doesn't allow you to admit when you're wrong. Your argument was fallacious, regardless of whether the original commentors was as well. He could be entirely wrong, that does nothing to support your failed counter argument. Your argument is structurally wrong regardless of his facts.
Sadly it doesn't recognize the ZIP codes of the last 3 places I've lived; none of them "small" towns or areas either.
As one of the comments at your link shows, this was originally developed at Stanford:

http://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/routemaps/
The subtext I'm communicating is, "if I was in the food marketing industry, I sure would want to communicate to the world that I was legally obligated to adhere to some strict code of conduct". It's a credibility booster.

So I'm going a step further and seeing if anyone can use an advanced legal tool like Google or Wikipedia to find the place that says McDonalds must-absolutely-must use real pickles or exactly the real McNugget coating, no spraypaint allowed, in its food shoots.

I think we've already shot to shit the verity of these photos when we observe that they're browning the burgers on a panini press and then saying "this food is ugly because if it looked like the ad, it would taste like shit". Well, you can say the same thing about overcooked protein as you can about a can of shellac, can't you?
Wow! This is absolutely beautiful.
You claim they responded transparently and without sugar coating anything. So what was the answer to the original question?

Why does the ad burger patty appear thicker and larger?

Edit: So many answers talking about how they might make a quarter pound patty look larger. Anyone can do that. I was addressing the fact that the video in no way covers why they look larger in advertisements. Sidestepping the important question (selling false images, a product made differently) is what makes this merely a good marketing piece, and not any sort of honest explanation from McDonalds.
People could choose Linux for their everyday computing. But they don't for the same reasons they don't use Pine for their email and EMACS for business correspondence.

On the other hand, if they are forced to use it by their sys-admin, then of course they will.
The situation with Secure Boot is bit like requiring admin rights to install Firefox. Neither is likely to trigger antitrust cases anywhere.
"everyone knows that they use photoshop, so why bother?"

I think this is a great comment, but I disagree a bit with the reasoning in this tiny bit of your comment.

I think that it is important that they show exactly how much they "cheat" with photoshop because they only "cheat a little". If you're critical of McDonalds, you will assume that they photoshop and that they photoshop a lot. To combat such a misconception it is important to show how little you need to photoshop by showing "all of it".

But other than that, I agree with you. Well done, McDonalds. I don't like your food, but I appreciate your honesty.
Theory X (people only work hard when figuratively whipped) and Theory Y (people only work hard when treated like professionals) are real things in HR management. But they've largely been superseded by Theory Z (both Theory X and Theory Y have value, but a bit of both works best).
We'll be following up with a post where we'll chat about what went into our new Activity Feed. Stay tuned!
When does high growth not imply product/market fit? | andrewchen
If that's true, then I think we can take it to mean pg really doesn't care about reposts.

Whether the HN culture as a whole dislikes reposts is another matter (in my experience it does not) but it does take one argument away from the people who think reposts are contrary to what we do around here.
Well, yes, check all the boxes. But don't forget to check the "yes, we blatantly lie to you and pay high amounts of money to make it look good" box.

They built an elaborate marketing video on "how our advertising tricks you".
They addressed it directly. When it sits in the box, the steam makes the bun wilt.
Did anyone else read this title and assume that this was a way to make your website scalable to survive a deluge of visors from SatckOverflow.Com (or having a front page article on Hacker News) ?

This actually talks about dealing with the REAL stackoverflow - how to manage your heap memory. I have been too far awys from having to do that that I forgot what it meant. It was a good read - it reminded me to always optimize my development - even if i am using a JVM that manages my memory for me.
But it attacks an implicit accusation in that question: if the food in the commercial looks so different than it does in real life, you must be using different ingredients.

Let's face it, the fact that this ad is getting a lot of talk will be a success, because very few people will watch through the whole video and many, many fewer people will actually keep the logical assertions straight in their head...but the 5-second sound byte is: "McDonald takes on critics who accuse them of food doctoring"...even if 95% of the video is boilerplate this-is-how-you-photograph-products.

I'll admit it, somewhere in my subconscious, McDonalds got an upvote, and I'll probably act on that in a future situation when I am hungry.
What does the asterisk in the title refer to? That usually means there's a footnote, but I couldn't find one. Even tried clicking on it.

I'm going to say that if a startup's blog leaves you with no idea about what the startup does, then it's poorly designed no matter how pretty it is.
I've always gone this route in terms of learning new technologies. If I think a tool is essential or will make the project better in the long run, I use time on the job to learn it. An example would be backbone.js. I recently had to build a complicated UI, and didn't want jQuery soupe (even well tasting soupe), so I went about reading the backbone source and engraining all the details of backbone over a couple of days, then I built the UI and the client and our company benefited from having well-organized, clean code, that is easily maintainable, and also I think it would have been much more difficult in the long run to even build the interface without backbone. As far as languages go, I've never had the "need" to learn a new one for a project (usually Bash,C,C++,PHP,Javascript fit the bill for most anything), and so I've always learned new languages in my free time. Without knowing any specifics, I would caution against using a new language for a client project, since the goal is to build the best app that best fits the clients needs, and using a completely new language is probably going to give you unneeded headaches and not be the best code.

Just out of curiosity, what's the language your thinking about learning?
I once saw a TV segment showing some starlet being photographed for a print clothing ad campaign. The stylist used metal clips (the sort one can buy at an office supply store for holding 50 sheets of paper together) to tighten the garment around her torso. From the front, the dress looked like it fit her perfectly. However, the back exposed a bunch of black metal clips holding back fabric. How does such an ad compare ethically to the specially-made McDonald's burger? A woman with the same measurements buying that same garment would not look as good as the starlet being photographed.
It doesn't generally play out that way. Buying the market is a short-term play, and isn't sustainable. PayPal beat the other payment services because they figured out the fraud problem. Google beat other search engines because they brought more relevant results.

The market, meaning the aggregated mass of consumers, chooses which product is best by using (and usually paying for) the product. That product is the winner. Competition is what drives the individual players to improve their product in response to the market. Without that you have a command economy or a monopoly, both of which are notoriously inefficient and un-innovative.
"So I'm going a step further and seeing if anyone can use an advanced legal tool like Google or Wikipedia to find the place"

I tried that, of course, and didn't find a proper law reference in the amount of time I dedicated to the task. I'll have leave it up to you to satisfy your curiosity from here. Please do post if/when you find it!
Introducing Wikistats: What’s trending on Wikipedia right now?
Secure Boot: Who will control your next computer?
The hypothetical crack would probably be less trivial for end users to use than it would be for them to go and disable Secure boot from firmware configuration.
> Intentionally or not, it's basically trolling for "programmers are great too!" type comments.

Wow, this is not true at all. Just because you don't see the question as useful doesn't mean it isn't.

As an entrepreneur (and a programmer), I am genuinely curious about the situation. We don't pay our PMs as much as we pay our programmers. Does this mean we're doing something wrong? Did we decide this because of our technical bias and should we give our PMs more credit? Why do other companies do this?
Referring to the meat, not the bun.
Did I just hear a photographer say that photographs are one-dimensional?
I know crystalcommerce.com does. They're an ecommerce portal for gaming industry sellers.
Minus the photoshop, the burgers could technically be made to look that way, but the customer is more keen on speed than presentation. Its marketing, welcome to earth.
Photos of ad vs. reality for fast food... http://www.alphaila.com/articles/failure/fast-food-false-adv...
Actually, being in the R&D group pretty much guarantees that you aren't in the income stream. You are in the futuristic stuff stream. If costs need to be cut, guess what impacts current revenues the least?
I'd argue that most programmers don't work at tech companies.
Wanting to move more into ruby (and then rails). Not really a reason, just want to try something other than PHP and I have a bit of knowledge in ruby.
They have lesson plans on the site: http://www.teachwithportals.com/?cat=3
> getting rich by exploiting the gullible

And gullible needs to be emphasized. A lot of people seem to think scammers only get the greedy, which is not true. For example, how are fake charities targeting the greedy? Or the grandparent scam? [1]

[1] http://ago.mo.gov/ConsumerCorner/encyclopedia/grandparents-s...
Teardown of New MacBook Pro's Retina Display Reveals 'Engineering Marvel'