skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So it's published under your byline but it's not journalism. And thanks for the downmods; confirms my opinion of you is spot on.
Which, in reality, leads to everyone working on random things, just adding features and somehow patching bugs.

No, it doesn't. Bad management and process leads to that.

But often refactoring the system, rewriting subsystems, etc is necessary.

Totally acceptable and something that can easily be included in agile development.

If your software is working, but there is no documentation

This is not a prerequisite of agile development.
I see something like this happening:

Imagine this: you are Google. Raking in billions. PhD level scientists are hired to mop floors, and serve coffee to everyone. You hire top level designers, pay them $250k/year and tell them to improve Gmail.

And they do...Gmail gets better. You make more billions, hire more designers, pay them more and ... tell them to work on Gmail.

You now have 10 designers, "designing" GMail. Come end of year performance review all those highly paid, world class professionals will want to say "I did <x>, <y>, <z> and I deserve a raise". Nobody will want to say "Yeah, GMail is actually great so I left it alone and didin't muck with it, can I have my raise?". So, they go to town and re-design it every 6 months. Review comes and well they all can claim they have successfully re-designed, flattened, styles etc, added custom iframe, windows, etc.

This happens with software teams, that is why so much software is re-written, people don't get rewarded for maintaining as much as for creating. So they have to create, and when things get crowded, that means tearing down and then re-create.
Reconstructing shredded Stazi documents is a similar problem.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stasi#Reassembling_the_destroy...
Why is that surprising? If you're not in the infrastructure business, why would you build infrastructure? It's like criticizing an auto manufacturer for not manufacturing their own tires.

If you mean that AWS prices are too high, I think you're thinking in terms of retail prices. If you have enough volume, AWS will negotiate a volume discount.
> "if you're not giving us everything beyond what we expect... go screw yourself.

I'm not sure how that makes sense. Netflix can't expect employees to surpass their expectations, by definition. I don't see the problem if they're clear about their expectations and send people on their way who either can't or don't wish to fulfill them. I don't know if I have the ability to fulfill their expectations, but I know I have no desire to try and thus no desire to work for them, but I'm fine with other people having different preferences.
> That is, while there is value in the items on
the right, we value the items on the left more.

Agile does not say that documentation is not important, nor does it say that a plan is bad. Documentation is worthless if the software doesn't work. The plan is crap if it no longer addresses the actual real-world requirements of the product.
I'm gonna hold out for the BlueSteel dev board ... Magnum, La Tegra and all the others are pretty much the same tech.
I'm sorry but at some point I can't take it seriously if you just discount everything as bad. So what's "good" quality then?

You also seem to have some idealistic idea of what advertising is. It's not some efficient marketplace to connect people. It is an industry about attention. And no it's not "stealing" as everything in the world competes for attention. It's more of paying to capture that attention as best it can. There is no greater "social function" here.

Society benefits from all things. Again YOU cannot judge this based on some random questions about Wikipedia vs some entertainment publication. The careers of those mentioned in that publication and their livelihoods and families certainly benefit from it so it's all relative and there's no right or ideal.

There might be misaligned incentives for some publishers choosing to maximize revenue (that's not the bad thing since they are businesses) by focusing on improving ad load rather than content. That doesn't mean there's something wrong with advertising, only that that business has become focused on selling ads rather than producing content.

The whole last part of your statement makes no sense to me. Destroy brands? Why? What's that do? Do you know what brands are? They are just reputations, but at a higher level for corporations and product lines. You should read this: http://www.economist.com/news/business/21614150-brands-are-m...

Attention can absolutely be extracted, it doesn't have to "belong" to someone because it's an abstract thing in itself. There is no "attention" tangible good. You have as much of it as you want. It's just a way to think of the value exchange. I'm not sure what you're so confused about but calling others immoral certainly isn't the way to prove your point.
Netflix accounts for a huge chunk of the national bandwidth. They have specialized needs when it comes to hosting that no other company on the planet has.
Hey, we got this fixed up on the original post- waiting for Todd to fix the repost on HighScalability shortly. If there are some more problems let us know. We want it to be accurate. http://www.scalescale.com/the-stack-behind-netflix-scaling/
It's funny - in a historical context - to see Travis Kalanick called "One of the most ethically challenged men in Silicon Valley", read about Vinod Khosla getting roasted for closing his private beach, or watch Paul Graham get skewered for arguing that unionized industries ought to be disrupted by startups on Twitter. Compared to Gilded Age magnates, pretty much everyone in the tech industry is a saint.

Other choice deeds of Gilded Age personalities: Jay Gould would manipulate the stock market at will, tried to corner the market in Gold, and installed his cronies in the New York government in exchange for directorships in his railroads [1]. Leland Stanford supported immigration restrictions on Chinese in his role as governor, and simultaneously employed thousands of them working in near-slave conditions on the railroad [2]. Henry Clay Frick hired an armed militia to disperse striking workers, which led to an actual firefight between them and the picket line [3].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_Gould

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leland_Stanford

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestead_Strike
Is it about that specifically, or is it that the states are forcing these websites to play by the same rules as everyone else? Ignoring laws that everyone else has to play by is something that has worked so far for Airbnb and Uber but apparently something like gambling is a bit more clear cut.
I'm not sure that it does to be honest. UI effects can be disabled on older machines.

Cameras, Cars, Microwaves, Washing machines & DVD players all last 10 years or more easily. A 2006 Macbook had 512MB (upgradable to 2GB) and 1.8Ghz CPU, which is not really much different to modern netbook.
> One thing that is absolutely brain-dead is that (in Chrome) I can't type in maps.google.com and tab-search for my address. I can do this with Amazon.com or Netflix, but not an actual Google property? Weird.

Works for me, and that's definitely one I've never explicitly set. According to my settings, the tab search just redirects to https://maps.google.com/maps?q=%s
It's not the next step because it's anti-democratic. It's a step away from democratic government engagement in the money of a country.

Bitcoin encodes a lot of economic assumptions and values into its design, but there's no practical way for the people affected by those decisions to work to change them, unlike money backed by a democratic government.

I don't need to know how to code to vote in the regular elections that decide how the Fed operates, all I need is to be a registered voter.

The next thing after USD and other first world currencies will be something that gives more power to the people, not less.
The Terrifying Reality of Long-Term Unemployment (2013)
Fwiw Perl 6 only autovivifies anything, including intermediary data structure levels, when writing to a data structure. So nothing happens in this case:

my %h;
dd %h
if %h<foo><bar><baz> { say "Never happens" }
dd %h

prints:

Hash $var = {}
Hash $var = {}
I’ve commented twice on this before, I don’t know if I should comment the same again, but:

The type of development written down in the manifesto, and the type of development used by companies as Google or Facebook, is not in any way acceptable for critical systems. Or complex systems.

The worst part is when that interpretation of agile [1] is used for complex systems, like it is by Google or Facebook and similar companies.

Agile works for web services, for small apps, but that’s it.

Anything larger, or more complex, needs planning, thought, and design. And often needs refactoring.

It’s rare that you can build a system where you don’t have issues with concurrency (and need to do timing analyses) or with interactions between multiple different systems.

I’ve seen these issues even when writing tiny projects like an Android app for an IRC bouncer.

And in any serious development, where your code is going to run critical systems for decades, you can’t just work agile.

----------------

[1] "as long as it works, documentation doesn’t matter", or "always have the newest, shiniest, greatest – no matter about plan or software design" – paraphrased from http://www.agilemanifesto.org/
Switching from bitcoin to litecoin seems trivial. I don't think the networking effects are that strong for bitcoin, especially since the current number of big users is pretty small. It seems like 99% of businesses who actually accept it are just using a payment processor, which could migrate to a new system overnight.

You can point to TCP/IP, but we've seen other protocols come and go. Back in the late 90/early 2000s's AOL messenger was dominate. Now nobody uses it. And that had very strong network effects, it was a messenger system.
It's not just Google Mail that doesn't support proper HTML emails.

The Android mail client doesn't, the iOS mailclient doesn't, Outlook actually feature-retarded between 2010 and 2013, most webmailers break on anything that's not tables with inline styles, Lotus Notes Webmail is actually fairly good but unfortunately depending on the platform the full Notes client uses either its horrid internal engine or something provided by the OS that may actually be IE7 (shit, you design a beautiful newsletter for Mac Notes, and it falls apart on Windows; also weird weird suboptions hidden deep inside Notes make it balk on anything but color/background-color/height/width)...

The only mail client that can render full-featured HTML5 newsletters is Thunderbird.
OMG spent so many hours late at night in my teens on FastTracker 2. This is incredible. Now I'll have to dust off those floppies.
"A 1996 survey found that commercial parking operating expenses average about $500" per year. Construction costs Dallas $13,281 to New York $20,326 av $15,552. http://www.vtpi.org/tca/tca0504.pdf

However, opportunity costs bump that as for example it lowers the density of the area.
These statements from the agile manifesto are directly opposite to any kind of quality software

No they are not. These statements are guidelines and principles to follow, and are not absolutes.

If the requirements (i.e. acceptance criteria) for features you are working on include comprehensive documentation, then this can be delivered in the context of an agile framework.
> Agile doesn't mean "every engineer working on whatever they wanted."

I totally agree. In my experience, it is very dependent on the group. When you are unlucky, you are in a group where for example one person always grabs the interesting parts. Because the group decides, it is very much about group pressure and clashing interests. A bad agile group can be similar harmful as a bad project manager.

One of the worst project managers, I experienced, insisted to divide the work "evenly" to the people in the group -- totally disregarding experience and abilities of the people. In a bad agile group, similar effects can happen.

In non-agile projects, there are dysfunctional groups and in agile projects there can be -- but in the later case, the problems can be worsened.
> > If your software is working, but there is no documentation

> This is not a prerequisite of agile development.

No, but agile says that software is still quality software, even when documentation doesn’t work. http://www.agilemanifesto.org/

It’s pretty clearly written down.
Strapless Sequin Dress with a Sheer Waist
If Arial is the scourge of the world outside of professional design, then Helvetica is the scourge of the world inside. It appears on almost every design, every logo, every brand. I think it has come to be as bleached and unremarkable as Arial itself.

But despite that, the history of the two types and how they came into existence and captured two unique but significant chunks of the world is a fascinating story.
If the primary way information flows between teams in your organisation is by throwing everyone in a room on a bi-weekly basis, you don't have much of an organisation. That's not professionalism, it's bad management under the heading, 'better than nothing.'
A hard ship date and flexible requirements is the way to do it: you force the issue and require your (great) developers to immanentize the software. It clarifies the mind and, assuming you didn't start off with absurd goals anyway, you get most of what you want.

Most importantly, it gets you to ship.
We're treating them like two different products, so no integration yet, but if we see that a sizeable of folks would want to do both or transfer their data over, we might go down that path.
Completely agree with your thoughts on why this phenomenon seems to occur. It's just one of those superficially counterintuitive things that become apparent very quickly.
I've seen that go completely balls-up in several cases. The thing is, even really good developers can struggle to define what a complete and working system looks like.
I honestly believe there's a revolving door of Product Managers at Google that come in, decide to leave their "mark" on a product by making a bunch of arbitrary changes, then move on to destroy other products.

Hard to complain when they're free, but... I do my best.
A software without perfect documentation is worthless.

Without documentation, you have to assume things. Does the train, if the signal is broken, stop or continue running? Does the radiation treatment machine, if you have a race condition, and two commands are executed at the same time, block, or just execute the last command?

Software without documentation kills.
Presumably this issue would not arise when picking fruit from trees?
Welcome to the online poker world ~4 years ago. The only difference (and the question is, 'will this be enough to keep it alive?') is that DFS has the backing of sports leagues (MLB, NFL) that have big lobby groups who can "influence" politicians. Doesn't matter how much money you have if you don't have this influence.

IANAL so correct me if I'm wrong, but assuming DFS sites challenges citing that banks can legally take their transactions (through the UIGEA and thus, "not gambling"), wouldn't NY need to pass a law to bar DFS in the state?
This. 1000x. This is definitely one of the pitfalls of poorly implemented scrum. For bigger companies, scrum tends to be a decision by the higher ups and implemented by the lower ranks keeping middle management is disarray over their role in the change. Moreover as the author mentions agile is about people first, but followed by processes. If scrum teams don't have the power, or empowerment, to change the processes, to become more agile, to remove blockers/impediments, the team burns out / self destructs for the precise reason you mention about spending longer hours achieve the committed (not to mention the committed is affected by the deadlines which are manipulated by management/or worse, external stakeholders) in order to uphold their word/project. To me there is a flaw here.

I do believe scrum can be an effective tool for a few use cases, but people often underestimate the warning signs. "Scrum is easy to learn, but difficult to master." - https://www.scrumalliance.org/community/articles/2011/may/sc...
> It's not about the price they pay. It's about net value they extract. The more value extracted, the higher tolerance threshold.

This is probably the single best way to explain the phenomenon that I've read. You're absolutely right. My boss and I talk about this a lot, and I'll absolutely be stealing this in our next conversation about it.
Whenever the manifesto says “X over Y,” it does not suggest this is a strict dichotomy. I have worked in an agile manner on software that had extremely well-documented behaviour and all sorts of documented, objective requirements.

The expression "Working software over comprehensive documentation” simply emphasizes what matters at the end of the day: Working software. If you need a certain amount of comprehensive documentation to prove that the software works, you incorporate that documentation into your process.

It’s the same as emphasizing collaboration over contracts. I worked for a decade in consulting, I assure you there are contracts with clients even when you use Scrum. You don’t refuse to have any hard, contracted, binding commitments. It’s just that you prioritize collaborating with people over setting up solitudes that communicate by throwing contracts over a wall.

As for responding to change over following a plan, if you can set up an environment where there are no changes allowed to interfere with the plan, by all means ignore change and follow the plan.

But if you actually have changes that matter, you need to deal with them too. But that doesn’t mean don’t plan, or never follow any plan. It just means, respond to changes that matter.

For example... What if you discover that the security for a piece of software need to be updated. You’d respond to that, wouldn’t you? You wouldn’t push on to finish what was originally planned with your fingers in your ears?

These are guidelines. They’re motivating forces. You are supposed to do it in harmony with the hard requirements of your business and domain.
This isn't really an outright ban. More like, the NY government thinks it's illegal. In order to actually stop them, the government has to prove it is illegal in court. My guess is that a these companies will stand and fight. If they let NY shut them down, they are done.
You are ignoring what I am saying – these are guidelines and principles to follow in development processes, not absolute requirements.

If a requirement for the system you are delivering is comprehensive, complete documentation, then you can deliver that. The point is that "comprehensive documentation" without "working software" is useless.
Hmm interesting take on things:

---

“It is clear that DraftKings and FanDuel are the leaders of a massive, multibillion-dollar scheme intended to evade the law and fleece sports fans across the country,”

---

Also I guess a site served from another state considered to be "in state" according to their interpretation. I wonder if these sites can tacitly (hint, hint, wink, wink) nudge their users to put in a different state in their profiles. With a disclaimer and all or just simply make everyone pick a state but remove the states that disallow it. Let users "figure it out".
The main problem I have with Backblaze and AWS is that there is no budget limit on transfers.

I would like to tell the provider; limit downloads to $500, then reply 509 to further requests.
Fox chooses to live stream the republican debate for free
taking something called "protection money" sounds like extortion to me, but now we're splitting hairs.
How many lines of code have you written that are in production with actual users right now?
The argument is:

Agile is impossible.

You have to document every feature before implementing it, because someone else will write software depending on it while you implement it. If you already document and plan every feature before implementing it, you aren’t doing agile, you’re doing waterfall.

What you are suggesting – to plan, document, implement and test every feature one after another – is just waterfall for every problem separately.
Last time I checked, Debian and many other Linux distributions still work perfectly on 10 year old computers.

Microsoft, Apple, Google (and to some extent, Canonical) might have collectively decided that there's no money to be made from people in developing countries with 10 year old computers, but if you look at it from another perspective, this is the perfect chance for FOSS to increase mindshare.
New Deep Learning toolkit is released every 22 days in 2015
Pot and hippie beer offer lessons for a small-business comeback
At one point, they added the ability to see "Tweet Activity" but that could well have worked against them. Prior to tweet activity being visible, I assumed the majority of my followers saw each tweet. But even a tweet with miletone news and a few favourites shows that the tweet was seen by about a sixth of my followers - that's dismal.

All that does for me is increase the feeling that tweeting is near-worthless.

They need to make the time and social cost of interacting with a tweet as low as possible. Even something that's "less" than a heart. Always thought Instagram could do this by allowing liking where the identity of your like wasn't visible to anyone.
Be thankful you hadn't to target Notes, Thunderbird and Outlook like I had to once. I still have the occasional bad dreams from this job.
I wish this observation would be confined to software - it's basically the most annoying - defining - aspect of capitalism. It's on one side the engineers and designers trying to do something for their own sake - and on the other side it's the constant encouragement to change something about a product to lure customers into purchasing the new "improved" version of ... the jeans, the car, the shoes - you name it.
He complains about Gmail not making it easy for developers to make the types of emails I hate the most. It's not very compelling.
No, it is not. Your software might be working later on – and at the same time, someone else can write software depending on yours, based on just the documentation.

Additionally, software without documentation leads to issues like "does the train continue running when the signal is broken?", and similar ones.
With Backblaze B2 you'll be able to do it yourself -> www.backblaze.com/b2 ;-)
Hmm. Yeah, I guess you are right. :)
> But surely, you’ll object, tomatoes grown in small-scale gardens taste better. Not so! Double-blind tasting panels have been unable to pick out the greenhouse tomatoes as lacking in flavour, or tomatoes grown without fertiliser as more tasteful.

Maybe ... but there's a big difference between a store bought tomato that was stored in a fridge for months and a fresh tomato that comes out of the garden of my parents.

One is like eating cardboard with a strange texture, the other is actually an enjoyable experience even for someone that is not big on vegetables (OK fruits if you musts insist).
There are several better failbacks than "most popular store in the US." Starting with "Store closest to the centroid of past N addresses that I have clicked."
These desktop browsers throw the most errors
The most important thing for us is Cost per GB. Right now the 4TB drives we're using are still much cheaper than the 8TBs, so we go with the 4s, but the Pods work with 8TBs if you want to drop the dough on them!
https://translate.google.com/#fr/en/D%C3%A9troit for the curious.
There's this thing called "iframes" with an attribute called "sandbox". And to prevent tracking or other cruft with images or external content, well, writing a CSS filter (url:... values) and filtering out src="" attributes in the HTML is not THAT hard.

There is no valid reason anymore for not iframe'ing your HTML emails any more. Browsers are consistent enough in rendering that you can achieve trivial cross-platform pixel perfection (font rendering aside).