read

Maybe it wasn't an irreversible decision for the blog author personally. But it can be an irreversible decision. I've seen it.

And a question: is the incredible laywer who gave you this advice an immigrant?

  The voices that interrupt the stillness are the ones
  that are the daemons.

  Redefine success as "learning something interesting".

  External success is a mistake.

  - Paul Buchheit

The opposite of insecurity, having high self-esteem, can be detrimental to success : http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-20756247

I also wish this text didn't say things that can't be proved to be true. It's hard to continue reading falsities.

It becomes hard to see that text with low weekly expenses($2500), close weekly revenue ($1000), and good growth rate (5%)

  One of my mottoes is that if you want to get unusual
  results, work fast and work cheap, because there's more
  of a chance that you'll get somewhere that nobody else
  did.

  Nearly always, the effect of spending a lot of money is
  to make things more normal.

  - Brian Eno

What could make them take Bitcoin more seriously than the threat of them being harmed by it? It wouldn't be surprising if the whole thing was orchestrated by a Bitcoin startup. And its an easy trick to pull too. You stuff printed letters in a mailbox and they find their way out there. How could anyone prove who did it?

Frankly it's impressive :) After a whole day on HN nobody brought up this possibility. There's also a lesson of strategy here. When you are not making progress being direct about something, try doing its opposite.

What I'm more curious about is how they'll follow up without making it too obvious that they are advertising. How will the make the now worried pizza owner casually bump into a promising Bitcoin company that protects them from extortion and all bad Bitcoin things? Run an ad in the paper or local TV?

I'm not sure how true that is and I might be able to prove it.

(1) One way it could help is: if I could get feedback about where I went astray. That's what I want to know when I'm downvoted. I don't care about a karma point, I care about learning something new.

Which makes me wonder: would it help to ask people explain why they downvoted something -- even if their username doesn't get attached to an explanation that becomes public?

(2) Here's an instance where it actually helped: [1]. Me explaining in [2] why [1] was downvoted (which was at something like -1 at the time) lead into [1] being voted again and [2] being upvoted too for clarifying the situation.

(3) This comment is aligned with HN's own request for providing feedback about what's good and bad for HN comments [3].

(4) You should be alarmed when you see a guilty word like "never" used. Particularly if you are the one using it. It's an alarm that indicates you are going to an extreme to justify a position. If what you say is evidently true, you wouldn't feel the need to try hard to qualify it. Or at least, when I made this argument in [4] people voted 20 points for it (which you dang can verify as an administrator).

(5) These arguments suggest reviewing the site guidelines and it's hard to dismiss them as useless. They could improve HN.

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7285865

[2] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7288741

[3] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7605973

[4] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7565441

I fully understand if what you've discovered studying downvotes is that dealing with them differently leads into more problems than it does dealing with them with the advice of "don't post about being downvoted". I also understand if you are not willing to deal with those problems now. But saying "it never helps" sounds far fetched. You are claiming there's nothing that can be done about downvotes, ever. That's a strong claim to make, especially in a field that's only 50 years old.

In Emacs, Ctrl-<up arrow> moves the cursor ahead of a block of code. If you had a for loop for example, with a blank line where the for begins and a blank line where it ends, and the cursor was at the blank line where it ends, pressing the two keys Ctrl and <up arrow> would put you in the beginning.

How would you do this in vim? Would you have to first gauge how many lines of text up you should move?

A better response would have been to zoom in at the main argument and say the most important thing there is about it.

If you aren't downvoted enough you are probably not revealing anything controversial.

Esc requires you twist your entire left hand sideways up to hit the Esc, whereas Ctrl requires you move only your left pinky to hit the Ctrl.

Ctrl is more efficient.

The keyboard allows you to navigate too, without the need for a mode.

And (c) about editing. Why type an extra character (i for insert) to let you insert? Why not just type to insert?

It's also not true that it's impossible to make other editors work like vi. evil-mode in Emacs lets you work like vi.

One measure of effectiveness would be: to count the number of keystrokes needed to do something in vi compared to other editors.

That's not a bad thing.

Maybe this is why a Lisp processor doesn't exist. Not only do you have to know Lisp well, which only a minority of programmers do, but you also need to want to know hardware. Which is something software people don't want to do. This guy already has a leg up.

For some strange reason I can't explain it's easier to imagine a software guy building hardware than a hardware guy writing a Lisp.

If you are going to build a Lisp processor, then you probably don't want a Lisp compiler or interpreter in the traditional sense, which is what Racket gives you. Maybe what you want is an interpreter in hardware.

You could avoid multiple input and multiple links with cookies. That wouldn't require a login.

Users might not even know what a cookie is, so they don't ask for one and instead they say the simplest thing that comes to mind: an account. They don't know what the options are in technology. They barely know what they need, and they most definitely don't know what they want.

  People do not know what they want. They barely know what
  they need, but they definitely do not know what they 
  want. They're conditioned by the limited imagination of 
  what is possible.

  - Massimo Vignelli

Is it because 30 people typed text like "how do I create an account" and you interpreted it to mean "I want an account"? And even if they did explicitly say they want an account, which force made you interpret that to mean what they said?

What happened exactly?

From the article: small adjustments to how employees think about work

The key word there is: think. It's surprisingly hard to change what you think. Even if there was a feature for incoming email to not interrupt you, you still wouldn't turn the feature on.

  It's not cheating to copy.

  - Paul Graham

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7902219

(I didn't try it.)

Typing speed is the bottleneck when you are racing to discharge a thought. It's what the article calls: “transcription fluency”: How quickly and fluidly you can get down — “transcribe” — the stuff that’s in your head. ...you don’t want a bottleneck between the ideas they’re forming and the writing.

What you suggested doesn't address how you get to the final outcome. You suggested: Code gets read 100x more often than it gets written. Well, good code is, bad code isn't. How do you produce good code?

Plus, writing code isn't only about writing but also about deleting; IDEs don't have autodeletion. And typing isn't only about typing. It's also about moving to the place where you want to type.

One thing I want more from IDEs is auto-movement within the same file. Emacs has this to some extent. Pressing Ctrl+<up arrow> jumps up an entire function, because Emacs (in Linux) is cognizant of the barriers of a function [1]. Emacs on Mac OS X doesn't, and it's the #1 productivity killer for me when coding. It takes too long to move. I might stop using Mac OS X precisely because of this [2].

[1] - Or at least whitespace between lines of code or basic blocks.

[2] - I haven't stopped using it, because you can't get a Debian with working wifi on a MacBook Air. So, ironically, typing speed is a bottleneck for me when the OS doesn't have good hardware drivers, and that wasn't an issue with paper and pencil. Things get complicated fast; I hadn't seen that coming.

I don't understand crypto very well so I wish the article explained things in simpler terms. Shorter would be better for me.

That's the important question: what software do you need to install on a computer to make end-to-end crypto possible for web apps.

(The good kind of crypto that can be trusted.)