skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As usual, criticism is strongly shaped by experience. My experience is also limited to three or four workplaces, but I have never, ever, seen this "race for points" and definitely not being "awarded" the points at review time. The points don't mean anything by themselves, it's an abstract measure of effort whose value fluctuates wildly, influenced by team dynamics, individual productivity, type of work being done etc etc. Failing to understand that is starting with the wrong foot.
I'm the author of "One Cent Blog" thanks for the mention glad it helped you. One interesting difference between the approach described in my blog post(or any other static method) is that you are not relying on a server or a database that can fall over if you get a lot of traffic from say HN. Having static files is a blessing because it scales wonderfully.

The approach in this post relies on maintaining infrastructure, keeping it up to date and patched which for me is a lot of extra work I'd rather not do. Using a standard VPS it's a lot more expensive too.
A Google Books search for "in town for the season" gives a result in Memoirs of a Peeress (1837) [0] which unambiguously refers to London. (The difficulty is not so much finding an example, as finding an example which explains which town is referred to, since it's "obviously" London)

[0] https://books.google.de/books?id=ZdpPAAAAcAAJ&pg=PA197&dq="town+for+the+season
That's one of the reasons that Scrum doesn't use time-based estimates.
Maybe this is 21inc's vision for the future. They install their Bitcoin chip into all your IoT devices and your devices can then automatically payoff ransoms.
Working with a product design studio 101: Preparation
What translation app do you use (unless it's the built-in one)?
Teletext found its niche.

The Austrian broadcaster ORF even released an TELETEXT app (!) this year [1], available for Android [2] and iOS [3].

An then there is also art, as with every "old" tech. Check out the International Teletext Art Festival [4].

[1] http://futurezone.at/apps/orf-teletext-app-fuer-ios-und-andr...
[2] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=at.orf.teletex...
[3] https://itunes.apple.com/at/app/orf-teletext/id1063231874

[4] http://www.teletextart.com
There's Riak Core which is a framework for distributed systems in Erlang.
I love using teletext over the internet, as it is often much faster than other websites.
MVVM Android Development with RxJava – Reddit Reader
A lot of modern TV's also support a split-screen feature where the left of the screen is regular TV, and the right is teletext. My uncle uses that a lot while watching sports.
Is there any overhead at all in using Steam (or anything) through Docker?

I'm not very familiar with using Docker.
As I get older I find I care less and less about whether or not others like me.

Now, respect is another matter. If I had to choose, I'd rather be respected than loved.
Which teletext service?
In my experience, once it becomes a tracked metric that can be used to destroy a manager's career you can bet the dial will start to move.
I was actually hoping this was about destroying the concept of software/product "relaunches".
Not true. If you have design ready before the implementation starts (as you should unless it is very simple) then you are free to implementation things separately. Just have the interface well specified.
This is also what I see the best-led companies do, not caring about what is Scrum and what it is not, and taking the pragmatist path. One thing I really regret at my current job is missing the Kanban workshop. It definitely appears to be much nicer.
I don't think those are all that true of software in general. Most software isn't particularly new: how many "Yet Another CRUD app" projects are there? And with software you can ship a percentage of the features and add more later, unlike (say) hardware manufacturing, civil engineering, chemical engineering or architecture.

Maybe software is reasonably different in that there are a lot of management level people with little technical knowledge of how the work gets done? I don't know how that compares to other similarly technical industries.
I quite often think the same. I'd love something similar to Cake [0] but then for installers. Copy file to xyz. Shortcut here. Run this method (CustomActions) only if (conditions) etc.

I think the problem might lie in the MSI troubles, where WiX sort off treads in the middle (a bit abstracted, but at the same time you often have to peek into the MSI's and a lot of similar lingo), a C#/other version would abstract maybe a bit too much of something that is quite difficult.

[0]: http://cakebuild.net/
Walmart Agrees to Acquire Jet.com
if you are using a noSQL database like mongo, couch, or even firebase, an _id will automatically get generated when you insert an user. You could create a hash of that _id as your user id.
Drone crime soars in UK as police probe peeping toms and drug-runners
Only if it's untracked. If it's tracked and the responsibility of management it'll go down.
And if you need versioning, just create a git repository on the remote server.

rsync -a ~/blog/ user@host:~/blog && \
ssh user@host 'cd ~/blog && git add --all . && git commit -m "udpate"'
Dutch teletekst has had one for years. Strange, actually, that each country is releasing its own.
I am just baffled by the assumption that such practices only exist to piss off engineers.

I do a bit of planning poker with my team every couple of weeks, despite being a pretty experienced engineer, and it's great. It's been good at exposing assumptions or concerns that members of the team have, or about confirming that everybody is on the same page wrt. what the complexity of a particular task is likely to be.

I reckon that more groups should be doing this, and not fewer.
I reckon most experienced coders can cope with estimation when it's justified (i.e. "can we realistically get this done before <specific, real and externally-imposed, deadline>? And if not, is there a useful subset we can manage?"). The bigger problems come when estimation isn't about keeping promises, but rather a part of some form of scientific management aimed at "getting velocity up".

There's also something of an uncertainty principle here -- more precision of estimation is possible, at the expense of increased expected timescales (partly due to padding, partly due to picking lower-risk approaches).
FAQ about Christoph Hellwig's VMware Lawsuit
I just don't understand how a large carrier such as Delta can get so much wrong. What's the DR plan? Are they using ASNs? A company is product, people, and computers. This is not the 20th century, flight plans aren't filed by telephone calls for these guys.

I've tested our DR plans and we were operational after 4.5hours, optimally. And we were 3 people.

This outage reeks of PHBs doing lots of kicking the can and not a whole of implementing.
When I read this I assumed you meant a dial that represents the current level of technical debt, rather than a dial that represents how much technical debt you're allowed to accrue.

The other interpretation might be a neat solution. Allow developers to indicate publicly what proportion of the time their last tasks took, they should have taken had there been no technical debt. It would handle the communication from developer into business-speak pretty effectively.
I gave this to one son when he was about 18, along with a pretty much complete set of Discworld: http://www.terrypratchettbooks.com/discworld-reading-order/. These were collected over many years, so a bit of a wrench. The best of which might be: "Wyrd Sisters" (Shakespeare), or "The Truth" (Newspapers). He can make fun of pretty much anything, while still showing it great affection.

Neil Gaiman's "The Graveyard Book" is a great book for reading to younger kids. Weird, creepy, but strangely uplifting, even if it does begin with a triple murder. I can't remember which kid took that.

I bought Robert Silverberg's "Nightwings" in the 80s and read it several times. I was going to give away but couldn't find it, so I had to buy a new copy and read it again first. This seems to anticipate a lot that followed, from genetic modification to drastic climate change, but it is essentially about a character trying to cope in a mad world.
Not bad. Y u no HTTPS?
Amazon Is Dominating the Cloud but Is It Really Out-Innovating Its Rivals?
Ecological Wealth of Nations
This is so spot on.
Use the parts that work, modify to suit the teams needs. I've seen this done to a massively productive and happy team.
Blue Origin Software Team AMA
Very few people do construction because they love it. (source: worked in construction after high school) The same applies to most labor intensive jobs with little room for creativity (all of the ones I mentioned).

There is no citation needed to show that society would collapse if essentially all manual labor stopped overnight. To suggest otherwise is silly.
> As I get older I find I care less and less about whether or not others like me.

I came to that conclusion around 13 or 14. It's been a very pleasant and if I had to put it one way or the other, I'd say most people do like me.

> Now, respect is another matter. If I had to choose, I'd rather be respected than loved.

Love is good, respect is great, but fear is the one that gets results!
This is a generalization. In Europe, people seem to try harder at friendships. They consider it almost duty to be a good friend to someone. In the US, people are more likely to consider only the "fun" aspect of friendship. If someone is having a tough time, they commensurately go down in the esteem meter.
I am not much into fiction, my gift depends on the kind of person I gift to, few books I most of the time prefer gifting,

1. The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying by Sogyal Rinpoche, for those spiritual minds. I am a huge fan of this book, I am traveling this week to Dharamshala to learn about Buddhism after reading this book.

2.Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill, for those aspiring young minds.

3. Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer, for my adventure loving friends. I had an intense desire to see Mt.Everest after reading this book, I traveled to Everest base camp.

4. Bhagavad-Gītā As It Is by A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, for everyone, I don't remember how many I have gifted.

5. Imitation of Christ, I have gifted it, but haven't read it myself. It's in my list.

6. Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse
> However, the pessimist in me says "why does anyone really need appliances connected to the internet?".

I think it's important to answer this without any of the qualifications you write after it. No one needs it. It's not even necessarily about how secure it is; if you're paying extra for these features you're just throwing your money away in the name of gadgetism.

You really don't need to fill in that they're unsafe or made with crap components. The truth is that no one would have a need of a perfectly made one.
Public Speaking Lessons from a Hamster – ‘Hamster to Harmony’
That's a great idea if you don't have any customers or constraints.

In the real world, there are externalities that have an impact and require some estimation. Maybe we have to provide new support materials to customers, or finish a contract with a third-party data provider, or change our infrastructure. It's exceptionally hard to do some of these things without being able to make commitments of some kind. Estimates allow us to create a guideline, and subsequently alter either the thing we are going to deliver (i.e. dropping lower-priority features) or the time we are going to deliver (i.e. missing the deadline).

If I hired a builder, and he told me that he refused to estimate the amount of money or time it would take to construct my property, you can be sure I'd move on. I have no idea why we'd consider it appropriate for an engineer to do this.
Search this for 'Town':

http://www.gutenberg.ca/ebooks/sayers-busman/sayers-busman-0...
We are only 3.7 billion years too late to be worrying about this. Earth rocks containing viable microbes have been landing on Mars for billions of years. I can't find a reference, but my memory is the rate is around 100 kg per year.

Edit. Found some references [1 - 3].

1. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11543506

2. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1011.0101.pdf

3. https://arxiv.org/pdf/0809.0378.pdf
In the UK, we have the BBC Red Button. Incredibly useful in a hotel in the morning.
For me, the daily status meeting at my current job has been the only time I can guarantee the team lead will be available to answer questions, as he tends to get pulled into meetings (or is busy marking up tasks or working on code reviews) most of the rest of the day.

At this place, where there are lots of different code bases of various quality and approaches to how the features are implemented has shifted over time, I tend to have questions most days.

I have worked at companies where we're only really working on one thing and I'm familiar enough with it that I really didn't have to ask any questions (they also didn't care much on how it was implemented, either, just that it worked) and daily status meetings were pretty much a waste of our time and ended up becoming more like once every other month.
Well according to this article, now that I've moved, all my friends will inevitably become acquaintances. Of course making new true friends is much harder when you're older. Wow, depressing.
The "problem" with optimization software is that the fun optimization algorithms part is just 1% of the work. The software also needs to be complete enough to handle most of the everyday workflow of most employees at the users' company, or provide integrations to any other software that they use daily (from Excel to a custom calendaring system built by the founder's son 15 years ago).

Some friends are working on a courier dispatching system, which includes very clever optimization for choosing trucks and mapping routes. But most of the effort goes into making sure that the mobile app works on 5-year-old smartphones, and the fonts on the PDF invoices look right, and so on.

If you want to work on just the optimization algorithms, then that can be done only in academia or at very large companies which can afford specialization.
I think people don't understand the reason and given flexibility tend to choose completely counterproductive things to do.

For example the only purpose for points and velocity is to give product owner idea of how much time will have to pass before a thing might even have a chance of being done. It tells him that you, for sure won't get this thing and that thing in next 2 weeks.

The only utility of points for the developers is when doing planning poker. If something gets a lot of points then this means people are not sure how to do it and the thing needs to be discussed and broken down.

After that, points have no use for the team and team shouldn't even be aware of its velocity and how much they burned so far this sprint. Those are the tools just for the product owner and scrum master.

If product owner is satisfied with "it's going to be ready when it's going to be ready" then points after planning poker can be forgotten and you don't even need to calculate velocity. It's still worth to do the planning poker for the sake of the team discussion and so the product owner can deprioritize task that are hard but not crucial.

But turning points and velocity and performance measure is dumbest thing you can get, because then it get's screwed and loses all utility. Same thing in estimations. If manager is going to negotiate estimates then you can as well not do it at all because they no longer carry any real information and are becoming just the reflection of managers hope slightly skewed towards developers hope (which was already overly optimistic).
One week's time before actually answering the questions is an interesting idea. I first thought it would be a momentum killer (and it might have been with less interesting/high-profile OP's), but it seems to be allowing the easy google-able answers to be answered by the community itself, and also allows more time for questions to float to the top.

Please make a post when the team gets around to answering the questions, too.
Strider: Cyberespionage group turns eye of Sauron on targets
I've almost always used story points and actually find them useful. As for the author's complaint, for me the key is this:

> First of all, what are story points? Are they measures of time it takes to complete a story? If yes, then why are they not in terms of time?

I don't think I've ever read the official scrum guide, but ever since I started using scrum (around 2004) the concept of story points was clear: They were "perfect days", i.e. days where you don't have any distractions and nothing goes wrong and everything works first try.

As a fairly experienced developer, I can easily estimate how many of those perfect days will take me to do a task (at least if it's a technology I know). When estimating, the whole team estimates all tasks until there's a consensus (and you are right, ideally, all the stories should require similar effort).

After that, the "perfect day" thing is forgotten, the estimates have no unit and the velocity starts playing it's role.

And here's exactly why I like points: The link between real days and points is lost, it doesn't matter. All that matters is that you completed X points in a specific sprint. Chances are that you'll complete X points in the next sprint. Iterate through a few sprints and you'll have a pretty good idea of what will be finished when.
The Martian is a great gateway for casual readers into sci-fi. One person I gave The Martian to loved it so much the next week they asked me for another recommendation. I recommended John Scalzi's Old Man's War.

He's now reading the Foundation series.
It's not a semantic argument! The BBC is paid for by people who want to use television equipment (modified slightly to account for new technology). It's not paid by taxpayers, it's paid by users.
Breaking news!
Customers finally realised the long-promised gains of automation /s
Is anyone surprised though?
You get less and less of service (having to fish shit out of massive pallets, self-weighting produce, fighting with the retarded auto-checkout) just to pay more and more. Great deal!
Yes, you pay more (or the same for less - it is riddiculous how much cheap filler is now in every single thing that can be cut with it)
You accidentally approached the net neutrality mindset from an utility maximizing point of view.

A central premise of its advocats is that net neutrality is a value on its own. (More like a natural right.) Therefore, utility arguments that might favor a position in disagreement with netneutrality don't apply simply on a value basis.

That's probably the reason you got downvoted.

edit: There do exist a lot of utility arguments in favor of net neutrality. But most advocats use them as parallel constructs for their deeper reason of believe. A simple emotional test one could exercise: If you can not construct a case in which the violation of net neutrality could lead to a greater overall benefit, your position is probably more a believe than a result of rational consideration.
Shameless Plug: https://zammu.in/ is something which I built. It is a CI for static site generators like Jekyll/Hugo/Middleman etc,.
> You may end up never porting that subsystem, in which case refactoring the currently-stable implementation is wasted effort.

I understand this approach, and it works many times. But when the porting is delayed until the last possible minute, it's more likely that hacks are put in because the requirement turned into a hard deadline. Instead of defining a sensible OS abstraction layer, the developers might find and replace "Windows XP" with "Windows 7".
> How the fuck is that any different than my torrenting the epub and reading it on my iPad?

In England authors get a (tiny) fee when their books are borrowed from a library.

Is that not the case in the US?

https://www.plr.uk.com/
That doesn't allow you to install any Linux application, it only allows you to install Android apps that you find outside the Play Store...
The Hidden Cost of Latency in Analytical Applications
Here's the online version of Finland's national public-broadcasting company's teletext: http://www.yle.fi/tekstitv/txt/P100_01.html

The UI of its guide to the Rio games (http://www.yle.fi/tekstitv/txt/P602_01.html) is actually wildly preferable to the web version (http://yle.fi/urheilu/rio_2016).
Don't shoot the dog, by Karen Pryor, about operand conditioning, the effects of positive and negative reinforcement. This is a fun book, and very informative.
I am Product in a large corporation, and it's a certainly a fine balance. In a previous life, I was a developer, and I dealt with similar issues. I have a lot of respect and empathy for the the Tech team. Therefore, I asked my Tech team to inform me when things are getting out of hand -- that's the responsible Product thing to do. I instituted that technical debt is part of our KPIs. If it's not captured, it's not actionable. A few examples:
- Documentation: required when method's cyclomatic complexity is high or method is just plain long (we defined what we consider "long"). Every customer facing method has a working usage example (%), etc.
- Test Coverage: % unit tests (defined by modules) -- higher is not necessarily better, but it gives us a sense of where we stand. % of test automation: manual vs. automated.
- Refactoring delays: # of TODO comments, # of compiler and static code analysis warnings (e.g., “this method is deprecated”) --> that is a sure sign that things will break in the future and an investment is needed.

There's some development work to be able to capture these things, but it gives visibility and power to Tech to inject some maintenance work into normal sprint development.
I'd love to hear what other people are doing.
"it would become easier to spot a fake"

For a theoretical example look at the situation with Wooton desks and their multiple trim levels. They'll just be more trim levels to work around the copyright.

Obviously the specific example of Wooton desks don't matter because that design is about 150 years old. But it is an example of a general class of problem. In my infinite spare time I enjoy fine carpentry for relaxation, as do a couple other people here, and on my infinite list of things to do is make either a copy of a Wooton or make a Wooton / 43 folders mashup. And running off extra copies doesn't take much extra time, and selling extra copies is an interesting way to pay for your supplies. So this kind of thing could theoretically impact small craftsmen not just Chinese factories.
Athletes uses training technology from the future to be robot-like
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