skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
1. On-the-fly keyboard macro generation. I use M-[, record, M-]. f9 to execute. (C-x e, e... if function keys not available) Even very small, one-time, but repetitive tasks can be automated.

2. First-class functions that can be bound to anything. I always bind "goto-line" to a single key (like f7). That alone saves me lots of time. And custom functions work the same way. You can put a macro to insert that if __name__ == '__main__' in python scripts with a single keypress, or with a "M-x <function_name>".

In addition to language boilerplate, you can use these facilities to help enforce arbitrary coding standards. I have a function template for C that adds a comment "/* end <function_name> */" after the close bracket, for example.

These facilities apply to any file you might want to work with. This is in addition to whatever editing modes might already exist for the language.

3. Working in text-only terminal on a remote server is only slightly different from working on my desktop. Not having to manually sync files or mess with X configuration is a huge win for me.
From the first paragraph of the post:

On the way, my co-founder and our CTO stopped me and said “I’m resigning. And I’m going to tell the team why.” He then told me that he had lost trust in me as a CEO and as a person.
Having met Schwartz and his team, I think you'd be surprised by how he describes his role: it's simple. That's why he can do the job at a young age.

Burger King sells a well-known product in a predictable market. They don't invent crazy new things. They operate efficiently and scale operations that work.

Facebook pioneers technology and products that the world hasn't seen before. For Facebook to do so well requires a combination of grand vision, operational effectiveness, recruiting and managing ultra-high caliber talent, and more.

Burger King isn't an "easy" business to run but it's a well-defined business with a simpler playbook than a company like Facebook.

I'm sure BK's investors are great advisors but I suspect the company's success is because of the highly capable team tackling a market with a well defined playbook.
It started with being interested, but as I said, the more people I meet, the more I'm just bored by them.

Travelling didn't help at all. Yes, nots of friendly people, but also lots of aggravating tourist assholes (interestingly, I find American travelers to be very nice, but many Australian or English travelers seem to be assholes, maybe just the ones I met?). Also, too many rugged, handsome, self-absorbed, sunburnt surfer types who play the guitar, are full of themselves, and generally very opportunistic and shallow in how they deal with people. Just can't take them seriously, as they don't seem to take anybody seriously.
I've done it when I incorporated my consulting business. I didn't know how to do my own payroll.

Hey, it happens, oh ye wise and holy one!
>Burger King Is Run by Children

I don't think Businessweek could have come up with a more patronizing headline if they had tried to.

Kudos to Jorge Paulo Lemann, William Ackman and others who can see value regardless of age.
even so, didn't you notice extra money in your business bank accounts?
Agreed. In the word of "the dude" - "You're not wrong, Walter, you're just an asshole".

Asshole is probably too harsh a word, but considering that "futurestack" was already taken as a domain and as a twitter account and both were in active use and related to technology, naming your conference "futurestack" seems a bit lame. Perhaps they could have done more to communicate what the official domain / twitter accounts were. (i.e. make them more prominent)
Salespeople who sell products by providing false information are committing fraud on behalf of the company and should be fired.
Making sure your bills are paid is the responsibility of any adult. If you're running a business, messing up your taxes should be one of your deepest fears.

The general sense I got from the story was: We were young and stupid, but instead of doing drugs, we convinced VCs to give us $3.8 million, which made us believe that we knew what we were doing.
What are you expecting? He's trying to keep his company afloat and keep enough of his reputation intact in the case his company dies.

True honesty is rarely rewarded in failure.
It is also fraudulent and could lead to litigation against you. I have no sympathy for companies and people who do this.
I think you failed to read the entirety of my post. Of course firing is a normal part of company operations - I stated that explicitly, multiple times in my post.

Mass firing however, is not.

Hiring will be imperfect, no matter how hard we try. Once in a while someone bad will make it into the company, and it's of great importance that the company identify and fire these people in a timely manner.

Note the last part: timely manner. Unless a company has been completely asleep at the wheel, there is no scenario under which people will suddenly go "woah woah woah! these 200 people must go!". To let go of so many all at once suggests you either weren't policing bad hires actively and let too many under-performers stick around for too long (and are just now getting around to cleaning house), and/or suggests a knee-jerk overreaction to some stimulus, and now you're about to throw some baby out with the bathwater.

Firing is normal. Mass firings are not.

And your "empiricism" is backed by your own personal anecdotes. Funny. In any case, I agree that individual firings can be morale-neutral (never morale-positive, despite your claim). When you fire Bob, who's been underperforming, only the people who work with Bob hear about it. Everyone knows Bob is hard to work with and not very good at his job, and people don't feel threatened by Bob's firing.

This isn't true when you're firing 200 people. People in the company hear about it, but they don't know everyone on the list - in fact, they may not know anyone on the list. So now the "obviousness" of the firings isn't so obvious, and people start wondering just how bad these people were to get fired, and they start wondering about their own performance. This is the start of a bad cycle, and morale is going to drop no matter which way you play it.

Firing 1 person has a tremendously different dynamic than firing 200 people.

So, we agree that firing people who can be saved is a good idea. We disagree fundamentally on whether or not mass firings are a good idea.
And the salesman gets a nice commision from the sale while the developer gets to work an extra 20 hours that week at no extra pay.
I challenge you to come up with a plausible name for a conference series that has an available twitter handle and dot-com domain.
You appear to have a personal stake in this story. Rather than sling mud from behind the wall of a 6 minute-old throwaway, why not address your issues in the open? Better yet, why not address them with the author?
Doctor then rejects patient

No, it's worse, the doctor overrules the patient forever because patient can't science.

There are good arguments for compulsory vaccination (excepting legitimate medical issues). On the other hand, this essay is horrible. It's a doctor's fantasy of magically shutting up All The Stupid People That Don't Listen To Him. If Sheldon did this on Big Bang Theory it would be played for laughs because of how outlandish it is.
Show HN: Stereo Helper Cam
Do you happen to know if the preview release of Gosu for Java 8 also supports IDEA 13?

Edit: Just tried it, doesn't seem to work yet. Hope this is coming down the pipeline soon.
Although a valuable cautionary tale, is it really wise to make a post like this, associated to the company name, for the whole world to see?

As a post-mortem, I would understand, but surely not a good idea when your company is still trading.

Existing/prospective customers are going to read this, and it's not going to fill them with confidence.
Part of me tires of these ivy league automatically gets CEO crap. How does success on Wall Street translate to operating burger company, other than knowing how to keep shareholders happy?

Why can't Jorge just find a badass manager somewhere who knows how to operate the restaurants to a T and put her in charge?
Don't feed the trolls...
It boils down to not having a handle on the general ledger, which if not suicide is at least reckless self-endangerment. But I think it is plausible for someone who is administrativaphobic. But there is a reason this is mistake #1.
here the video presentation:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7KrWI-3P_is
For a fun variant of this problem, see the 2008 Underhanded C Contest: http://underhanded.xcott.com/?page_id=17
Thanks for the info. I think we can conclude that BMW is better at mass producing transmissions than Tesla. The BMW is only slightly lighter and slower to accelerate.
Who determines the age considered to be "excessively young" for a CEO? I'd imagine the most obvious metric is stock performance, and it speaks for itself in this case.
Staying somewhere cheap gives you a tangible advantage but also puts you at several intangible disadvantages. At my first startup in the UK, we decided to base out of Birmingham instead of London, which reduced our living expenses by 70% and allowed us to really stretch our seed funding. But we ended up having to commute to London frequently for important meetings. Also, one could argue that we might have accomplished more in less time had we had continuous access to expertise and contacts at scale. Eager to hear other thoughts and experiences.
Trust, and the reasons behind it, are subjective. If you have different perspectives or additional facts, perhaps it would be more constructive to just state them rather than posting vague hints.
In the UK Burger King has been absolutely destroyed by McD's and Subway on the highstreet. The only time I ever see a busy BK is in their monopolies in motorway service stations and inside railway stations.

Is it different in America? Still relevant?
Or use some sort of a freemium model much like the one they ended up doing anyway.
The New StrongLoop API Server Provides A Look At Future Of API Deployment
I'm not conflating them, they go together. Digital money is better than dead trees, or metal discs. Cryptographically secure algorithms are better than goons with a printing press. Bitcoin and other crytocurrencies enable both.

I also recognize the vast majority of fiat is now tied up in digital forms. The actual amount of physical paper money is negligible. But the overhead induced by the entire system being based upon dead tree leaflets, is that it is irrevocably slow and the discretization makes no sense in a digital medium.
If it bothers you to do it in person or you feel like they might convince you otherwise despite your intentions, just send an email to all parties involved. As far as contracting goes, I don't think anyone has any grounds to get mad (though they might). It is the nature of contracting. That is why you are contracting and not working full time (although really, in the US, it is the nature of pretty much all work--at will employment). Be polite.

If it helps, remember this: they would absolutely not hesitate to let you go with less notice than you plan to give them, oftentimes not for performance or anything negative but simply because the company is cutting costs. This is your version of "cutting costs."
Except that if you do your books, you'll say "I should have $X in the bank" and then you look at your account and you have 1.5$X so you know something's wrong.

At least, you should.
That's a somewhat different use-case though because the alternative (text-messages) always had some sort of price tag, and iMessage wasn't around when WhatsApp started.
When the State Takes Kids Away From Parents: Three Perspectives
Seems like a lot of beanplating around "it wasn't actually compelling to enough people to make money".
No, I don't think that if we let the government restrict or influence our actions when it comes to unhealthy habits next thing we know we'll all be living in fascist Italy.

Fascinatingly, if you read Wikipedia's article about fascist Italy [0] Mussolini's rise to power sounds more like something the war-mongerers ("our president is weak") on Fox News would support than what a nanny-state advocate would support.

[0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_Italy#Fascist_regime...
Aren't 401Ks mostly voluntary programs? I'm not aware of anyone being compelled to invest into them.
I think this is an under-appreciated point. Science is really concerned with inquiry into the world (broadly defined), while doctors and engineers are concerned with improving the world, typically by applying solutions that are based in science to specific problems that have been tasked to them. A lot of the difference isn't apparent even at the undergraduate level, where much of science is presented as true vs. false, rather than as this edifice built on bricks with wildly different levels of epistemic uncertainty that looks quite different to different observers.

The boundaries between these things are pretty fuzzy, though, (even though the cores are distinct) and many doctors and engineers engage in research, while most scientists spend a fair amount of energy on developing tools and techniques, which are often more engineering-type challenges (fortunately we don't practice medicine frequently). Nonetheless, there are often very large discrepancies between the mindsets and approaches of the typical scientist vs. doctor vs. engineer.
There's the rub: it's not about you or what you want. There are already enough people who cannot be vaccinated -- people with egg allergies, people with compromised immune systems, etc. Furthermore, vaccines don't always take, so there may be more unvaccinated people out there than we actually know of. Herd immunity works by everyone who can participate participating; the more, the better.

What irritates me about anti-vax more than anything is the selfishness and privilege that goes along with it. "I don't need to put a vaccine in my child's body; if herd immunity really works, then my children won't be the problem!" Never mind the fact that every person this child comes in contact with now has a greater risk for infection, or even transmission of diseases.

Lastly, your usage of "convinced" really rubs me the wrong way. Granted, you have a "right" to believe whatever you want, but if you trust that evidence-based science is correct, it's really not a "take it or leave it" kind of situation.
Screwing up your personal taxes in a consulting business is a debacle but also a rite of passage for consultants. It happens to everyone.

Screwing up payroll tax withholding for employees is financial catastrophe. You've taken money from your employees on behalf of the government, but then kept it. Your liability in that case can be criminal, maybe even if you didn't deliberately defraud the government.

So, those two cases are not comparable.
There are a few moments in recent history where I wish I had been. This is one of them, along with the day after the 2007 iPhone keynote in the Android 1 offices, and when the French company realized they'd built their trains 1cm too wide for a thousand platforms [1].

[1] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/french-rail-o...
Twitter actually has specific rules for parody accounts: https://support.twitter.com/articles/106373-parody-commentar...

Does not seem like he was following them.
> Isn't it like branding/marketing 101 get the twitter handle, get the domain, etc?

Dropbox was at getdropbox.com for a while before they were able to purchase the dropbox.com domain.
I always wondered what Joel's workday is like. How he divide up this time between Fog Creek, Trello, and Stackexchange.
There is a line that can be crossed where you take away people's ability to make decisions. This happens via court order

Yes, most disturbing in the story was how the woman took her children into a place she thought was trustworthy and she could talk openly, but instead her words were used against her to rob her of agency.

Antivaxxers can be pretty horrible, but there can always be something worse.
Really uninformative headline. Hmm, what would be better? Maybe "Management Mistakes Founders should never make"
(not all of use are reading this for the startup stuff, believe it or not)
If you kill Yudkowsky, then the evil AI will take over since he won't be there to save the world. Therefore harvesting his organs won't be worthwhile. (He actually believes this).
Ah, OK. Fair point.
My 4 yr old daughter loves Robot Turtles. That anyone can say that is testament to its awesomeness. The board game format is part of the appeal and allows a kind of interaction (with you) that'd be missing on iPad. But check out code.org for a software alternative with comparable goals.
That's actually very true, I'd forgotten that. But maybe this transition will be a challenge for him to increase his capacity and taste.
I think people put up with this because StackOverflow is considered a technical Rank Badge. The higher the score, the more opportunity and respect you receive.

I agree that pedantry is a big problem but it also occurs on HN. Rather than closing topics they should redirect those "off-topic" questions and answers to a new forum.

Or... someone should create SLACKoverflow for these off-topic Q/A's. I am sure it would be helpful and receive lots of page views to boot.
The title was badly editorialized. Submitters: that's against the guidelines. Please don't do it.
We've had issues with our state taxes because we changed from an LLC to a C-corp and even though our lawyers took care of everything at the Delaware and Federal level (as far as new tax IDs go), they completely forgot to do this in California where we operate. They're not large liabilities thankfully but it's been a persistent headache for going on two years.
PHP turtles
New Cloud9 Development Environment
eu-west-1 had some network connectivity issues earlier on that are now thankfully resolved.
We were seeing particular issues with instances that were behind ELBs that had x-zone balancing enabled (only to instances in eu-west-1b).
Square launches IFTTT channel, lets your transactions trigger almost anything
Vimium is really good for mouseless vi-like browsing in Chrome though.
https://vimium.github.io/
Alternate theory 2: "Rich families" are more likely to have seen that there is reason to distrust the government and medical establisments.
> If Dalton’s idea of the platform was really to create a Twitter-like messaging service he should have made it easier to access.

This is actually the complete opposite of what happened, and I think the key to where they went wrong.

Dalton created a Twitter-like messaging service as a way of showcasing what App.Net could do. But he seemed very intent on downplaying the service and focusing on App.Net as a platform. This is what caused all the confusion; most of the actual users of App.Net were primarily users of Alpha, and anyone who was creating a product with the App.Net platform were facing the confusion of people thinking that's like creating a product with Twitter. I believe the reason Dalton did this was because his dream was for him to solely care about the platform and for other developers to provide all the apps. But nobody else was going to provide an Alpha clone, nor should they.

What Dalton really should have done was immediately spun off Alpha into its own full-fledged product. Give it a snappy name (heck, Alpha isn't too bad, certainly better than App.Net), give it its own domain, and make it very clearly a distinct product from App.Net. Then he could brand it all he wants as "built on top of App.Net" or whatever, and having login, etc. go through the app.net domain, but ultimately it should have been immediately recognizable as what it was; a Twitter-like messaging service (with much better features), that was built on top of App.Net. Just like a third-party app would have been.

This would have made it much easier to understand. People talking about App.Net would be obviously talking about the platform, people talking about Alpha would be talking about the messaging service, and trying to encourage people to build new apps on top of the App.Net platform would have made far more sense than convincing people to build new apps on top of what they think is basically just a Twitter clone.
They don't mention Amazon specifically except in the title and the final sentence.

I recall, when I signed up for my free year of AWS, that it required a valid credit card. They claimed to only target providers that need essentially only an email address.

I think that detail makes the title incredibly misleading.
A while ago I wanted to work on a GTK app on cloud 9. With a little work, I was able run a vnc server and install a websockets-based vnc viewer on their infrastructure. It allowed me to view the GTK app in my browser.
Mental note: no free credits for StackMonkey.
shouldn't moving a locked car set it's alarm off?
Thanks, Daniel.
> Classy move.

Seriously, the only thing this does is make it clear someone is childishly trying to screw over a company by making them look bad. It really won't work here.
I graduated from undergrad last year working at AWS. Of ~30 engineers on the team, there's 2 of us using emacs. The other guy is around his mid 30's.
In their open source teams? They probably do.
I've thought a lot about this and I feel like it makes sense pre-seed to do this. Save the cash, invest it in the business, and then when you raise money move to San Francisco/Bay Area. It's really tough to grow outside of SF, I feel like. But if you're bootstrapping yourself... Then I can't see many reasons to come to SF.
You shouldn't really be able to go through a startup accelerator without someone hooking you up with an accountant... much less raise millions of dollars of investment.
My friend worked at CP+B for a while (he's now creative director at EVB). I don't think he worked directly on the BK stuff, but I think he did have a hand in some of it. What he did actually work on was most of the Dominos commercials, (the LARPing and exploding car bit), some Best Buy stuff, some viral things. We used to get private youtube links of a lot of their commercials before they aired.
You can give a medically informed body that understands the issues much more deeply some authority over public health policy, while still being able to think about those issues if you're interested. They wouldn't make all decisions for you, just those that have such a broad and important impact to society as a whole that irresponsible individuals wouldn't make choices that could have a net effect of significantly harming others like skipping vaccinations does.

Perhaps we could call that authority "civilization."
The odds are heavy that the doctors don't understand the math either https://www.mpib-berlin.mpg.de/en/media/2012/03/new-study-ph...

I used to think "if I could just punish/control other people the world would be so much better because I'm so smart." But then I went through puberty.
Great Jones and Bowery is in NYC ;)
Why would you wonder this?
Doesn't that just make you a target when The Revolution(tm) comes?
Well, that is naturally going to depend on the balance of work you need to do. If you have 12 months of nose-to-the-grindstone product development ahead of you, social connections are of less value. But if you are still spec'ing your product, or doing testing in focus groups, or other such things you'll benefit from those readily available connections...

Maybe I'm dreaming of having a large lab in the countryside, and a tiny office in the city.
So all of your users data is going to be stored in random places? I don't see how anyone thinks this could feasibly work unless everyone is suddenly cool with loss of trade secrets, the wholesale giveaway of intellectual work, and complete loss control over data/content.

Unless I'm missing something?