skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When BK disposes of restaurants how much control does it have and how much does the franchisee have. Is it just the royalty or are there some other binds?

If the royalties go higher how easy would it be for the restaurant owner to switch to another fast food type restaurant/franchise. How much could BK (Corporate) block that move?
Or on another, much deeper level it boils down to:

"OMG look we're so HAWT, we're co-founders after all, not gutless employees, and we're only in our 20s, doing all these amazing things, and we have this cool office and all these smart, hip people working for us.. and umm, budgets? due diligence? CPAs? What are those?"
It is frustrating that people will very quickly leap in with "this question is off topic and needs to be closed", but very slow to actually edit the question to make it fit.

IMO that question is valid for that site, but is lousily worded. A quick bit of editing could have avoided all that meta stuff.

If you're ever in that kind of situation just remember that META IS DEATH; and that TROLLS EXIST. This might be an example of Troll by result, and not troll by intent. Ignore, as much as possible, the people who make comments like that because they are not going to be any help to you ever.

You should have a read of the Meatball wiki about trolls.

Another tactic, which is time consuming and ultimately unfun, is to treat them as they treat others and use their own tools against them. Flag their comments as off topic; provide useful counter arguments; stalk their posts and counter the posts at every opportunity; upvote / downvote appropriately. (If this is serious you may want to consider buying votes from MTurk.)
Uber ride SO TRUE
[video]: The Web is dead? – my talk at TEDx Thessaloniki
Even if you register a trademark, it doesn't give a claim to the name that blankets the entire world, and every industry out there.
NYC Bitcoin Exchange Coinsetter Launches Out of Beta
Data Science Weekly Newsletter – Issue 35
This right here is the actual value that YC derives from the existence of HN -- they can correlate these "anonymous" logins with other logins from the same IP space/etc and figure out who's mudslinging against whom.
https://twitter.com/namechallenge
http://namechallenge.com/

I'd go to NameChallengeConf!
More context here: http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-08-29/the-brazilia...

"In two years under Hees the company more than doubled its margins, as measured by Ebitda (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization), Wall Street’s preferred gauge of cash flow. He did this in part by recasting Burger King as an owner of franchises rather than an operator of restaurants and sold off locations owned by the company. This allowed Hees to shove about 28,000 employees off Burger King’s balance sheet. It also meant the company didn’t need to spend as much to refurbish aging restaurants; instead, it offered incentives and lined up loans for franchisees to revamp their locations, replacing dull old plastic countertops with shiny metallic surfaces and futuristic stripes of neon. "
Check out this image from his article:
http://futurestack.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Scree...
I posted this Mitchell and Webb sketch further down, as an example of how to do this well - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UbXTBPN1HhA

Now reflect on your reaction to that piece. Even when on the side of the trader, it is still funny. You can be a trader and find that funny.

This is because of how the characters are treated in the piece. Essentially, it is ridiculing ideas while remaining sympathetic to the character that holds them, which is difficult to do well, but makes for a much more persuasive piece of satire that will be appreciated by a wider range of people.

The piece in Nature however is just preaching to the converted, and doing it in a way that will just entrench the views of anyone who identifies with the mother. Frankly, if they want to publish satirical sci-fi, they should pay someone who can do it well rather than embarrassing themselves like this. It reads like a teenage first attempt at short-story writing.
To be fair, that's a pretty numerically apropos age for HN.
I was under no illusions that this new user was connected with "the real" New Relic. There is no evidence for that. My comments were directed at the person. I should've remembered that there are people who post this kind of thing just to screw around, and that no amount of engagement will turn them into someone of value.

Yeah, I know, "Don't feed the trolls."

Even on HN.

I'll delete my comments, flag the inappropriate stuff, and move on.
WhatsApp also is free for a year, literally costs $1 per year after that, and is for phones, which generally have a fast payment process. The friction is a lot less!
It was always free for the first year and 99 cents per year thereafter.

This is pretty clever, because they get the network effect of a free service, plus the door is open to add premium content or services.
I use It's All Text! (Firefox) to edit text boxes on the Web with my text editor if what I'm going to write is longer than a paragraph.
Yeah, there are measels parties, just like the old days. Though regarding Chicken Pox, to be honest, I'm real surprised that chicken pox isn't on the list of mandated vaccines at this point. I had them a tiny bit on the late side -- at age 8 -- and I still had a pretty miserable time with them, with a 104 degree fever, etc. Making the vaccine just available to health workers seems silly; it's a dangerous disease, even in childhood.
Please stop spamming and allow people to delete accounts. I haven't used AeroFS at all since trying it out over a year ago, later sent a support email to have my account removed and never got a reply. The settings page doesn't seem to have an option to turn off marketing emails. I hope clicking the "unsubscribe" link in the mail did the job today.

However, I would much rather like to delete my account and never be bothered again.
I hope you will be teaching Intro to Emacs. Why else would you impose a text editor on students?
It'd be interesting to see the OP's thoughts on how things would be different if he hadn't started in San Francisco? It may be expensive to live there, but it may be easier to network enough to get the contacts/experience/buzz you need to get seen, compared to starting in St. Louis.
Deis v0.10.0 - Beyond Git Push: The Docker Native Workflow
No. The same wordmark, e.g. "ACME" may have hundreds of registered owners, each for a specific business activity: perhaps a company in Florida sells ACME burgers and a company in California runs an ACME carwash. These companies do not have any claim on the domain name unless somebody is misusing their trademark by pretending to be them or trading off their name while performing the same business activity.

A registered trademark should not prevent somebody from continuing a usage which they were engaged in first, before the trademark was registered. If the business activities overlap then the registration itself should be rejected, if not it is likely to be invalid and can be challenged.

I don't believe that the business activities of is guy and the developer conference are sufficiently similar, I doubt he has any recourse, nor should he have expected any.
You can even get in trouble when you don't owe anything.

Moving in and out of W-2/Corp-to-corp status many years ago, we set some consultants up on W-2. Then we changed up the mix, went back to just me, and I went on W-2 with another consulting firm for a while.

Got a letter from the state tax guys. Even though nothing was owed, we were supposed to file forms with all zeroes on them. There was a fine, yadda yadda.

Unfortunately, logic, reason, and common sense are not a reliable guide here.
I agree. But just because something should happen, doesn't mean that it will.

I don't work with a startup, or even in the tech industry, but this is an issue that takes up ~25% of my time. I have to keep pushing back on sales to make sure that they're not selling something that's physically impossible, or just plain stupid (but sounds good).

This is something that cuts across business in America in general, I think.
Agreed, San Francisco is probably the worst place to be if you want to bootstrap.
Neo4j Brazilian Portuguese Tutorial
I've known a few businesses who "HQ" out of a big city, but usually just with a small sales office. Then they hire almost all of the rest of their staff in very cheap, but talent filled areas.

One mistake I've seen over and over again, don't hire your customer facing staff in those cheaper areas. You really want sales staff/etc. To be in the same area as your customer base
DevOps by any other name still gets things done
The cards aren't charged. You could sign up for several accounts with the same card, and I would imagine it's trivial to buy credit cards with $25 on them each or buy up old ones with less. These cards could also be stolen - one possible reason the information doesn't align in the article. Imagine using stolen cards for authenticating an account that doesn't accrue charges. It's genius.

This also illustrates the rules of efficiencies. If there exists a resource one makes available for a given purpose (signing up lots of developers for free accounts) then you can assume there exists others who will figure out how to get those resources and turn them into something else of value to them.

There's no such thing as a free lunch. There's also no such thing as limiting fraud. It will always be a choice.
ISRAEL should be punished sez GOD the creator
No, it's the same in America.

BK has lagged way behind McDs and Subway on various fronts. Lack of new product items, old technology, minimal promotion, dirty and outdated dining rooms. The last BK near me that hasn't closed down looks like it hasn't had a coat of paint in 15 years. Meanwhile McDs is tearing down and rebuilding new stores ground-up all over town.

Twenty or thirty years ago, in America, McDonald's and BK were literally in a deadlocked battle of the giants. Burger wars! Those days are long gone.
The way I read the post, Seth mentioned a number of readers why he lost their trust.

Specifically:

- Poorly defined co-founder relationships
- Not being explicit about hacks
- Telling a half-truth

You're free to disagree about whether these are the important reasons why Seth lost their trust, but to say that he didn't address the reasons why is just untrue.
Hey there, shoot me an email at yuri@aerofs.com and I'll make sure we've deleted your account. The unsubscribe link should do the trick for any of our newsletters.
The number of people genuinely allergic to vaccinations is small. This means that herd immunity remains.

The number of people choosing not to immunise is larger, and herd immunity is at risk.

So, they're sort of the the same but the risks are different.
I put together a linux machine around tax return time this year with this video card: http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/searchtools/item-det...

It's been working great for me. I haven't tried Crysis or FarCry yet, but I can play Half Life 2 at maxed out settings at 60 fps steady and stable. I play a lot of older games, but Bastion, Shadowrun Returns, Rust, Beatbuddy, Fez, Portal (2), Dust, Civ5 all run beautifully. I realize these aren't latest power games, but considering the topic I think this is ok.

Then again, I am very, very comfortable messing around with drivers and settings. Every time I upgrade the kernel I have to recompile my drivers (using AMDs Catalyst beta 14.6 currently). I don't mind, but you might.
You are insisting that Good Old Games never primarily focused on old games. That is absurd.

My first guess was that there was some miss-communication and tried to be extremely clear on what I was saying. Maybe I am still not understanding you. Are you actually arguing that GoG never had selling and maintaining a catalog of old games as its primary focus?

My second guess was that you reaction was an emotional response to something.

I am trying to understand your point of view. So far I have been unsuccessful.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8079497
Metropolitan Area Outer Underground Discharge Channel
I wouldn't be so quick to assume that the article is advocating for forced vaccinations, but I do think that your reaction to the forced vaccination does hint at what the article really was suggesting.
Clearly not affiliated with NewRelic, and trying to start shit on the Internet.
Don't worry Per. I am not that pompous as you would like me to be :)

Many companies are trying not to be evil either.

We don't have to worry as much about doing evil things.

PS: How's life?
There were free mobile clients for email, Skype, Google Talk, AIM, Yahoo, ICQ, etc.
Same here; the worst is when they want a feature that's technically impossible.
Apple opens up the public beta for OS X Yosemite
I could see the case where I support vaccinating someone against their will. I couldn't see doing that because the person, once, made a bad argument in the doctor's office.
Rultor.com, Merging Bot
"I’ve come to realize that “technically true” is a terrible ethical measure for a (non-technical) statement. I should have held myself to a higher standard. I’ve also learned the importance of overwhelming honest"

So true. There is an immense amount of pressure within startups to 'bend the rules', and I think this hits the nail on the head.
I'd add the Economist and the NY Review of Books to that.
Other people lie, so lying is okay?

You (not you the person I'm replying to, 'you' the company/sales person) that are taking money from somebody based on an untruth. It's outrageous, regardless of how often it happens. I have the right to know what I'm getting for my money. Don't lie to me, ever.
This is why you pay an accountant the big bucks and pray they don't mess up in turn, very frequently if they do the responsibility is still yours. Running a company comes with a lot of responsibilities that tend to keep you awake until the small hours of morning. Details like these can get you, especially because they are retro-active and hardly anybody is in a position to absorb an instant loss of say 7 years remittances for the 100 employees they have. Be very grateful that it wasn't a huge amount of money, bigger companies have failed over things like this.

Also, if you are conservative you'll have a spreadsheet that models your worst and best cashflow prognosis for the next 6 months to a year out. If you find yourself consistently outperforming the 'best' case in spite of an unchanged business outlook then it's high time to start checking things.
Something like this has already been done with I2P minus the cryptocurrency aspect.
Also, anything form Seymour Hersh. Most of his stuff is timely in that there's nothing you don't know about already, but this is the guy who broke the My Lai Massacre and the Abu Ghraib torture scandal. He has access to national defense people that no other report on earth can get.

I would all throw in The Agent about how the CIA torpedoed the FBI investigation in Al Qaeda prior to 9/11 as required reading
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2006/07/10/the-agent?curre...
First I'd like to thank sethbannon for writing this valuable article. As someone with two failed startups under his belt (including one through Y Combinator), I think entrepreneurs being more open about the challenges of startups is a good trend.

FedEx, Evernote, Intuit, Zappos, Airbnb – I’m endlessly inspired by those founders who faced near collapse but simply refused to give up.

These stories can be inspiring, but remember that they suffer from survivor bias. The companies that do go under don't get as much attention in the financial press.

Sometimes the reality is that it's time to shut down. Give up on one thing, move on to the next thing.
Trello is such a fantastic tool, I use it every single day. It has stood the test of time for me, unlike Evernote, Clipboard and many others. This is fantastic news, kudos to the Trello team.
I agree completely! I was only speaking to the point of "how long until it's impossible to miss this", and how the comparison to rent doesn't work because it's much shorter.
This is interesting. What if users have to put in their own inputs for the scripts? For instance, specify start-date and end-date for a sql query, or upload a spreadsheet to do the python analysis on?
And all over Japan, Singapore etc
School yourself at work
A Founder's Guide to Hacking Workspace in San Francisco
Ask HN: How did you train for your 1st Full Marathon?
With couple of 5K races and a Half Marathon under my belt I am finally taking a leap of faith by running the Chicago Marathon this fall.

How did you train for your first Marathon and what were the lessons learnt from your experience? Any advice or tips for the first timers?
There's definitely something to a theory of notebooks. I have my own system and I'm always on the lookout for tips that I can use to enhance my system (which is very minimalist).

I can never seem to find any example pages (scanned or photographed) from others' systems.

This article in particular could have really used a picture.

I sort of understand why, as the contents of mine are usually confidential.
Nice write-up. I find this sort of thing fascinating. When are you guys thinking of tackling more languages? Maybe something that lends itself to static analysis a bit more?

Also how long did that regex take to run on 5.0e8 lines of ruby?
I've done this too. Takes so long to set up all the instructions though.
The best target for fraudsters are victims of previous frauds
Five Tips for DevOps at Scale
First smile I've had all day.
I've had trouble using Emacs to edit remotely via SSH/tramp, but the following ~/.ssh/config settings helped me a lot:

# stop ssh connections from freezing
KeepAlive yes
ServerAliveCountMax 10
ServerAliveInterval 10

# Lets you bounce through an arbitrary number of hosts.
# ex: ssh 1sthost/2ndhost/3rdhost
Host */*
ProxyCommand ssh $(dirname %h) nc -w1 $(basename %h) %p
This sounds really cool! So non-engineers can just click "run" on a system service and get the output? How do you handle small procedures/scripts that require them to put in inputs? Or does that not pop up for you..
My understanding of MVP is that you essentially sell a lack of features. Make something that does as little as possible that someone will buy, not selling something and then figuring out how to do it.
Kudos, Seth. Really refreshing to see this kind of bare honesty, and takes a lot of courage to know that this post will probably be seen by all friends/family/coworkers. Thank you for writing this.
People who are inclined to actually study the issue, form an informed opinion, and be willing to change that opinion in the face new evidence, they absolutely should read up on science.

But everyone else, no, they should just accept the opinions of the experts if the issue is reasonably settled. They're not going to engage in the scientific process anyway, so their uninformed opinion really doesn't matter.
> You can even get in trouble when you don't owe anything.

Yep. I recently got a Texas sales tax certificate for my unincorporated side business. Even though I am not doing anything yet, because I have the certificate every quarter I have to log in to a state website and check a box that says I had no sales. Not doing to on time will cost me $500 per incident (I think).
> It can get you more money though, by increasing the user base and making more happy users. It can make your game sell for much longer.

Does not follow. There is no evidence that you can make more money by simply open sourcing your project. In fact, judging from the number of popular, widely used open source projects reduced to begging for donations, it's precisely the opposite. You may simply be assuming as true the same excuses that pirates use to justify their piracy, saying "Hey, I'm giving you free advertising!", completely overlooking the fact that 1) advertising in itself does not feed the creators, and 2) they're primarily advertising it to people just like them, who'll also simply pirate the product.

Look at the companies making the most money in software. Then look at the companies making money from open source software. Note: not companies that use open source or open up some of their non-core code, but those whose primary product is open source, such as Red Hat. There's a few orders of magnitude of difference in revenues. This despite Linux running the vast majority of servers on the Internet and in data centers. Why is this?

While open source proponents like to live in an ideal world where everybody shares their code and collaborates, the harsh truth is that the vast, vast majority of the world will take what it can and give nothing back. That is not conducive to building a viable business when by open sourcing your code, you're essentially make your product even easier to be taken for free.
Thanks for the commentI just sent an email requesting a meeting today. It will bother me, but I feel like I should talk with him in person about it. Also depending on how things go I can't hold onto my badge, so would need to go in anyway.
Nope, the last time I went to one, it was just closer to my house, and more convenient than McD's. Just luck of real estate really. Their claim of 'flame broiled whopper' just doesn't make me want to go there. Who cares if it's flame broiled or cooked on a stove, it's a burger. And if you can't cook the onions before you put them on the burger then you're just lazy.

I did see them in Russia, several places, and the only thing they had going for them was that there was no waiting. Because nobody EVER went there, that I could recall.
It's hypothetically possible to come up with versions of algorithms that distribute the processing of your data such that each node does not get enough information to recover secrets, in a cryptographically secure fashion.

As a developer though in 99% of cases I'd much rather just pay for a few servers in multiple datacenters and load balancing than waste time researching the above, let alone proving its cryptographic security for my use cases.

It could, however, be useful for cases where you're trying to get over foreign government censorship or oppression against whatever service you're trying to provide. Imagine, for example, a free speech discussion service that was decentralized and essentially un-blockable. Bonus points if its cryptographic system can be designed such that an arbitrary processing node can never be proven from its data alone that it was helping run the service (among other services).
> It happens to everyone.

It happens to a lot of people but certainly not to everybody.

As a rule of thumb in the first two years you simply want to reserve 50% of your gross until you get a better handle on what your deductibles are and what it is that you exactly owe and then you can slowly home in on the correct amount to reserve. Too many variables to get closer but 50% should cover all but the most extreme cases.

Simply open a savings account and park that 50% there right after you invoice. If you're invoicing with GST/VAT/whatever it is called where you live then you get to subtract out the VAT first, then do the 50%, then add all the VAT back in and save that.
I think that may be fairly dead-on. My step-grandfather had polio as a child, and as a result, had his growth stunted, and severe nerve damage in his lower legs, requiring him to wear orthotics throughout his life. As a result, when the polio vaccine was announced, he made damn sure that my stepfather and his siblings all were properly vaccinated.
Reliable UDP (1999)