skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
yep..

this is interesting becase a sprint can always be cancelled -- its just that cancelling it is on management not on the development team.

Its totally legitimate to do occasionally if all of a sudden product management realizes that the team is going in the totally wrong direction vis a vis customer needs.

What management isn't allowed to do, per agile, is change the scope of whats in the sprint vis a vis new stories, and tasks.

because management can cancel a sprint at any time - and its on them, I guess the theory is they'll do it sparingly.
If sprints get cancelled over and over it starts to become apparent that there is a misunderstanding of the user and not the engineering effort.

EDIT: see comments (with @mindcrime) re "agile" vis a vis the agile manifesto vs implementations such as scrum, XP etc. I'm using agile == scrum which is not technically correct (sorry)
Help sell cars. I have a TDI sportswagon and this will be the second performance hit. A couple years after purchase there was a recall to reduce the power a bit via software "upgrade". Seems fuel filters were occasionally failing at high acceleration or with people that used high acceleration a lot. The power drop was minor but noticeable. I suspected then and even more after this indecent that VW knew about the problem but wanted max power to help sell cars during the test drives.
It was an adblock app for iOS 9.
Seriously. This move makes sense without any conspiracy theories. Just look at his other recent blog post about Peace: http://www.marco.org/2015/09/17/why-peace-blocks-deck-ads

It looks like he just felt uncomfortable making money off of his friends' and colleagues' loss. Makes sense, really, even if some posters can't seem to fathom giving up money to sleep soundly at night.
> If they phrased it that way, they probably didn't.

A central point of TFA -- which the grandparent post offers an example of -- is that "Agile" has "failed" because rather than adopting the values of the Agile Manifesto, organizations adopted cargo-cult "Agile" rituals without understanding the principles and purposes of Agile (TFA goes on to claim the "core" point is that non-technical managers of technical projects will always fail, but while I think the cargo cult observation is valid, I think this conclusion is a leap that is unjustified from that observation -- the principles of the Agile Manifesto are non-technical principles and agility and adaptability aren't things that take particular domain-specific skills to understand. Strong top-down directive management that isn't respecting and leveraging subordinates expertise within their respective domains in terms of choices of how to achieve goals -- including technical experts on projects which have a technical component, which may or may not be purely or even principally technical projects -- is going to fail, but that doesn't mean that managers need to be technical if the project is technical, or even that a binary technical/non-technical distinction is appropriate for projects.)
Almdahl’s law is a problem mostly restricted to scientific code and databases nowadays. Almost everybody else can just get more problems to solve in parallel, and split computing power between them. (Eg. you just run more instances of your web-server worker processes.)

And well, databases do not use glue code in high level languages (or at least, do not lock on it). So, outside of the scientific computing community, that's an almost complete non-issue.
"Common sense" tells us that air ticket pricing will be heavily optimized to maximize airline yield and that no effort is made to conform to any naive buyer conveniences or expectations. Although the data is interesting, the premise of this paper is a little weird.
AFWall on Android lets you toggle network permissions per app. It's free software and mature.

AdAway is a hostsfile-based system-wide domain blocker.
Avoiding balkanization in news
That's why (for now and in this case) apps win. You get to make money from ads, and some people pay you a dollar to remove those ads.
That means that there is a lot of room for content producers to improve the customer experience. So far they've just been suing their biggest customers. Hopefully the newspapers will not take that approach.
May I ask at which scale do you operate? Keep in mind that is not necessary (and I believe not advised[1]) to keep all your infrastructure in one kubernetes cluster.

[1] https://youtu.be/-8aUxpVrD40?t=3105
So why didn't data from the monitoring suggest a study was needed much earlier?
This sort of situation is not what refunds on the App Store are typically for. I'm more intrigued if his app gets a colossal number of refund requests if it'll jeopardize his standing with Apple.
That sounds like a really strange idea to me, can someone explain why does people who used to shoot other people count as a cultural minority, as opposed to say, retired policeman, railway worker or any other group really?
> If someone offered me 0.4% for getting their company off the ground, I'd tell them to get lost. That's absolutely insulting.

I think you've flipped the situation around a little bit here.

The point is, it is startup weekend, it's time to have fun, to learn, collaborate and do something interesting and a lot of the guys going aren't necessarily interested in ditching their jobs and going full-time startup. In fact most people came to the weekend without any ideas they actually wanted to launch, simply interested to join an existing team and have fun.

So one of the developers who is like this basically proposed the 0.4%. You make it sound as if Billy said 'hey guys work for me for 2 days for 0.4%'. When in reality it was a developer who said 'Hey look, this is going to be fun but let's agree on something simple, if any startup actually does come out of this, let's all have a 0.4% share even if you're not interested to invest anything in the startup apart from this weekend's work. This way everyone is rewarded without having to exchange any money, and only if whatever we built this weekend actually ends up having value'. And the others agreed with that.

This may not make sense in every situation, but I think it was pretty sensible here and I don't think it was insulting either, particularly when the dev proposed this reward himself, for himself, not as some kind of payment to others for getting his company off the ground.
Knowing him, this could be a stunt.
And lets not forget the great quote “The Internet was so well done, but the web was by amateurs”.

I can't take developers like this guy seriously, he definitely falls in the amateurs camp Alan Kay talks about.
When I click the link it just takes me to this discussion page, not an actual product. Link?
Great. How about HN Shell?
The fact that she by chance happened to have the very same position during normal play gave it away. The probability would be astronomically low.
This reminds me of gaming hardware benchmarks.
Yeah, totally. The only thing I'd add to that, is that in the scenario where you continue to work a day job while you work on the bootstrapped company as a "side project", you can buy yourself a pretty long runway. Of course, that's at the expense of moving more slowly in general. So there's always a balance to be struck.
also work on giving the chef a name please

but seriously, the problem that comes to mind is the crazy complexity requirements that some sites have (must have special chars) but other sites restrict (no special chars). i honestly can't think of a good solution to that though, i always wanted to make a collaborative database of password complexity for various sites
If HTTP was a contract whereby you agreed to look at everything that was sent over then your analogy would make sense. But HTTP is a protocol, not a legally binding contract. So no.
2009-2015, I'm surprised it's only 1/2 million vehicles.
I think it's a careful combination of things:

1) Simple UI and only one "channel". This forces all the users to take part in all the submissions resulting in a diverse set of comments and expertise on any given submission plus many eyes on fact checking.

2) As a result, the high volume of views on each submission, and the simple karma and voting system, quickly highlights the most enlightening comments and directs the conversation.

3) Votes are democratic across all users, this makes the results of voting less "tribal" and more appealing to the entire audience.

4) Branding. HN has the branding as a place for intelligent discussion with high expectations for professional quality responses and specific links to sources, and a minimum of commentary that doesn't move the conversation forward. The community holds these values very dear and they seem to me at least to be maintained pretty well.

In closing though, I think it's the branding and ethos part that really does it. Nothing about the sites simple design forces this ethos I think. And as soon as people stop enforcing the ethos, or in the other extreme, become complete d*'s in doing so, nothing about the technical design of the site will keep it here.

follow-up: When I bookmark anything that I find on HN, I don't ever just bookmark the link itself, I'll bookmark the HN page with all the comments as they are an incredible resource of context and introduction to the topic at hand.
I know this is written in JS, but I'd be somewhat interested in actually using this in a terminal.
As the verge pointed out[1], small publishers do have a way to get paid that will work a lot better than subscriptions.

They'll just put their content on Facebook -- ad blockers don't work inside the Facebook app.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10233010
Unless Bobby has fabricated the emails and slack conversations (and there are 8 other people in the world who would be able to refute them if they were fabricated), I think we've heard it, at least partially, from Billy's side, as well. What has been included is more than damning enough; the email detailing "ownership" is all I need to see, given the terms of Startup Weekend (which are easily verifiable by looking at the website).

Billy came into the weekend with the intention to commit fraud on Startup Weekend and on any developers he could sucker into working with him.
I hate this supposition that everyone should bend over backwards to allow people who make money in a certain way continue making money in that way. Am I the only one thinks that the user's experience should be more important than everything else?

Annoying advertisements are, in practice, the result of people failing to be creative in monetization. Ars Technica, for instance, has done a great job of integrating ads into their website in a way that doesn't bother me or detract from the experience. This is no doubt due to careful consideration of the needs of both the user and the owner.
Apple Self Driving Car Might Be Coming Soon to Roads Near You
Nope, you'll just not go into the store. Let's not go through this again, it's been demonstrated over and over that the analogy you are making is flawed.
I thought ad blockers on iOS only block ads on Safari web pages, not ads within apps?
It's still a bit of a draft document (still missing the last chapter, for one). Happy to change stuff based on proof. That's one of the more dubious ones for sure.
We're talking about extremely low marginal cost. More like a free glass of water or free use of the restroom than a free pair of jeans.
incentivizes you to buy and old clunker ( pre emissions )
and keep it running forever... or a truck...
No, that approach hasn't worked well either. See for instance the failure of Newsstand, which had the benefit of being a marquee iOS feature featured in a keynote.

People want free and no-strings-attached.
See: Johnson & Johnson w/ their drug risperdal: $2 billion in penalties... $30 billion in sales.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/17/opinion/nicholas-kristof-w...
I've been burnt by people like this too. It hurts, you think you've done something wrong. You haven't, and I'm glad Bobby has shone some light on this guy.

Everyone - and I mean EVERYONE should read Robert Hare's work on psychopaths. "Without Conscience" is a good introduction.

There's a saying "be afraid when the pretty people show up.". They've shown up in droves, the party is over.

NB: Also, Billy may own the company, But the contributors own their code and contributions. They can and should control this.
I think that's just a diesel thing.
I think the war analogy is right, but it's a one-sided war where the only people losing money in the ad game are the consumers. It takes a significant amount of energy and bandwidth to download those ads. On the other hand, publishers are not really losing money because you can't lose what you don't have. It's unlikely that people who use ad blockers would click on ads anyway, further driving the point home. Nevertheless, one sided wars do exist and this is one of them.
doesn't this "solution" here actually still leave wide open the possibility of reading inconsistent data?
Harm to the consumer via fraud, and to the environment, yes. But corporations almost never see criminal charges. Fuck the environment for 6 years? Pay this fine. Sell some pot? Fuck you asshole go to jail for 3 years.
Unless Microsoft ruins Office, I can't see it happening. I believe it would take a seriously funded company to implement all the needed features (sure, no one uses all the features of Word, but each uses a different vital set of them), prove that, oh, Excel was safe to run your company/trading on, and provide support.
Don't adblockers already top browser extension "stores" top downloads lists?

Seems like the type of extension that is in fact very popular, rather than some niche one that only a few thousand out of millions of people would use.
We're about to start running with it but I am definitely a little concerned at the failover table. I'm a lot more comfortable when I can achieve 2/3 failure and still be okay although the cost of adding a few more instances isn't too bad.
totally agree that a real project manager will be technical to some degree -- even if just an aficionado / technologist type.

I do like to balance the scales a little and defend less technical leaders -- I've had a few really good non-technical leaders/bosses in the past 20 years. They were so good because they a) respected and trusted their technical teams immensely and b) made a really hard effort to learn from them such they could do the bridging you describe.
Perhaps the noise was poorly explained. What they describe is likely the Exhaust Gas Recirculation (EGR - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exhaust_gas_recirculation ). This isn't a system to game emissions, it's an active component in real emissions reduction.

Still I get your point: manufacturers are clearly going to optimize based on the measured metrics. How do we know those metrics are meaningful in the overall system.
> and the team where some folks are taking 90%+ and others are getting 0.5-3%

I'm not sure how you keep missing this key part of the argument: 0.4% over 20 hours. I've italicized the part which I find ridiculous, so that you can better understand where I am placing my emphasis. Him wanting an equal share for an equal amount of work -- no problem. Him wanting to get a full, post-funding engineer's grant for 20 hours: wild overestimation of his own contribution.
Thanks! I've always wanted to write a NES game and I guess it's easier to begin once you have some code written. This is a nice first step for beginners.
I agree with you. If the consumer doesn't enjoy a part of their experience with your product, you're gonna feel the effects of that whether or not a sympathetic developer helps them out or not.

To me this feels the same as big companies bullying small content producers with DMCA requests. Since these small ad-monetized websites have someone to blame, they've browbeaten someone who only set out to help the actual consumer have a better internet experience.
This is exactly why John Boyd never wrote any books explaining his thought process - his entire point is to drop fixed and inflexible doctrine in favor of striking at the heart of what makes military operations work, and explicitly serializing your mental models is a quick way to convince people to interpret them as a fixed doctrine.
Also cool: white to move and NOT mate

http://www.chess.com/blog/AaronGo/white-to-move-and-not-mate
TIL Stripe does not come up with built in fraud protection.
http://peakads.org/
Agreed. This somewhat mollifying quote gives hope:

>"Using a defeat device in cars to evade clean air standards is illegal and a threat to public health," said Cynthia Giles, the E.P.A.’s assistant administrator for the Office of Enforcement and Compliance.
Also relevant to this discussion: http://peakads.org/
If it's not harming them, they let me take it and it's not illegal then your comparison is a non-sequitur.
It is my honest belief that small, valuable sites can finance themselves through their communities. If they can't, then maybe they not worth running.
From my own perspective, both LibreOffice and Google Docs are both more then capable enough. I know that LibreOffice is primarily a desktop application, but it has a not-so-perfect remote web interface since version 3.5.

But, for filling out forms and keeping the design as it is, I'm currently using a web interface of Office 365. It's a bit annoying to use it at the moment (you can't get rid of the constant "Install Word on Your Device" messages and you first have to upload your document on OneDrive before you can edit it), but it gets the job done.
and doesn't enjoy controversy

So he went all in on something that was already hugely controversial (for weeks regarding iOS, and for years on other platforms). That adblockers would be controversial was blatantly obvious to any of this Earth, and should not be a surprise to anyone.

The world didn't need Marco to get in the ad blocking business. Yet he did in a big way, with a big partnership, and put a big amount of his namespace and reputation behind it.

People infer motives because the notion that this all came as some big surprise rings hollow.
An excerpt from the intro on that landing page of that project or intiative

"It is a movement to create an ad-free Web"

I find this view to be unlikely to materialize. We're in a consumerist-led capitalist economy and advertising is an integral part of it and the web as communications medium is one of its important assets.

This project will fail before it even starts due to the unrealistic end goal advertised - pun intended - on the page.
In Wisconsin you drive to a specific testing facility and, when it's your turn, onto a testbed with rollers under the wheels. They spin endlessly without the car going anywhere until the test is over, when the rollers are locked so the car can drive off of them. During the test they attach a hose to the exhaust.

Engine revs in drive with no corresponding accelerometer output or change in GPS position should be a pretty solid indicator of "I'm in an emissions testing facility right now." Doubly so if there's an OBD-II reader attached.
> I’m sorry to all of my fans and customers who bought this on my name, expecting it to be supported for longer than two days.

Well, that was me. Funnily enough I haven't had a good experience with Overcast either (vs. Pocket Casts), so I think next time Marco releases a product I'll be a lot more skeptical. It's an awkward position too: I know I should request a refund since the app will become progressively less useful as its blocklist becomes out of date, but I would've liked to keep using it until then.

As for the alternatives, I chose to support Peace instead of Purify because the latter has seems to be involved with some mild controversy [1], in addition previous controversy the developer was involved with previously over uBlock [2]. I honestly have no idea if this is innocent misunderstanding or a genuine attempt to mislead on the developer's part (because wording on the uBlock website does seem to have been clarified now), but it was enough to give me pause. So I guess this just leaves Crystal as the main alternative at the moment?

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/3leyux/say_purify_ge...
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/ublock/comments/32mos6/ublock_vs_ub...
Sarratt in his Treatise on the Game of Chess (1808) says:

"When a player has pushed a Pawn to Queen, he is at liberty to make a second Queen, a third Rook, or any other piece which he may deem more useful for his attack or defense".

While this doesn't explicitly say that he must promote to a piece of the same color, it implies it. After all if the piece could be promoted to either color it would make sense to say a third queen or a fifth rook rather than a second or third.
It doesn't "sound" like anything of the sort to me. Take off the tin-foil hat.
>Ideas such as: Send helicopters, not planes, to look for survivors

low range

>•Make survival suits that you can actually fly in

no clue about that one

>•Attach mini radio beacons to the suits or life rafts

Breitling emergency watch from top gear comes to mind
As a point, at least in my implementation, I actually use a byte stream for the 1x1 that is cached and sent to the browser. We do this so that there is no disk read ever for it. We also don't use php/gd, our code is mostly node.js and a little golang with nginx as our front end.

It may seem a little overkill, but I found doing it this way made a pretty significant impact when you have a reasonably decent volume of tracking going on. A good http server of course would cache the image of course, but we just found this to be easier and more consistent for our implementation.
Are you fucking kidding me? You're going to casually call him corrupt and a liar because you're too small-minded to believe he can have a change of heart?
BBC Documentary about Ada Lovelace “Calculating Ada: The Countess of Computting”
My refund was processed immediately.
I used Windows for a little over a decade, then I discarded it one day when I suddenly realized that the proprietary OS actually never taught me anything about computers. Those precious 10 years went to waste. I'm ashamed to say that I couldn't discover Linux until about 5 years ago.
I applaud the move on his part, but should have had some forethought before releasing it. He has skin in the game: profited from Instapaper (essentially an ad-stripper), sells ads on his blog and produces a podcast that profits from ad sales. His advertising may be more acceptable in terms of aesthetics and privacy, but it is an acknowledgement, nonetheless, that advertising is the best possible monetization model and one that is depended upon by many to support what they do. Can it be done in a better way? Sure. Is jeopardizing "publishers'" livelihood the answer? No.

By saying "But my ads are blocked, too," as he did, was not an acceptable solution. If a big chunk of people visiting his site already paid him $3 to defer his advertising, then he's already won. But nobody else with their ads blocked will see that money.

He makes good arguments about both aesthetically and privacy intrusive advertising, but A definite conflict of interest on his part.
* I don't want ads
* I don't want native advertising or sponsored content
* I don't want to pay for content
* I don't want my tax goes to government sponsored content
* I want free independent content

That's me nowadays... I don't even know what's the answer!
Math Fought the Law, and the Law Won
It's posts like these that remind me how hard it is to write idiomatic/correct C++, when compared to something like Python or Java.
I would not want to push people who don't want to have contact with users to do it though - not without highly mediating that interaction. If your users are customers, then you're flirting with PR disaster if you're not careful about really evaluating if they're suitable to do it.
Hi Ben, CEO of Sift Science here. Happy to share what we do to secure and protect your data - jason at siftscience dot com