skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How should the software engineering process look at a small startup?
I joined a pre-seed startup about 4 months ago. Although I've enjoyed the job thus far and have learned a lot, I've become overwhelmed with the lack of a software engineering process.

Our planning consists of our CEO laying out a goal for our team, giving his estimates of what should get done in future sprints, and then asking us to add it in our tracking app and to get started. At the same time during the sprint, our other co-founder will add feature cards or ask why features that he's added before have not been prioritized. This is combined with a fairly large number of bugs that roll in from previous features. I've raised to our founders how this technical debt and no process is hurting us and causing us to miss our goals. They agree that the lack of process is a problem, and asked me to come up with a solution; at the same time they continue to emphasize our need to maintain the same high coding velocity. I don't mind coming up with the process, however the need to still maintain the same velocity is worrying.

I get that maintaining a high engineering velocity/getting out as many new features as possible is critical; investors want fast progress, so it's what our CEO pushes for. However given that all the features we put out are rushed/buggy and add on technical debt that is hurting us in later sprints, this seems like a bad situation. My naive viewpoint tells me the trade-off that we're making (dev hours for project management) is hurting us.

My questions are:

1) How should the software engineering process look at a small startup? When now successful startups were in their infancy, did they have a similarly chaotic software engineering process and how did they make the PM vs Dev trade-off?

2) Does it make more sense to embrace the chaos until we raise funding, then prioritize adding more structure and a rewrite of core features of the product?
Will meet similar fate like Twitter, Snapchat...
Understood. No problem.
Daisy/Quake - she was great as a hacker, and I'm so sad about that electricity guy who died, but wow, someone who can fly and break bones or collapse buildings, that is not just a brawler, that is objectively more awesome than being a hacker and I'd trade my scripter job for being able to fly in a heartbeat.
There's no reason a for profit company can't ship an open source project. :)

MongoDB is an open source project, and the MongoDB company is a for profit corporation that ships the database and sells support and services related to it.
No, I built this myself and the hardware is supported on my OS of choice. I tried FreeBSD on it recently to deal with an issue I had on ZFS (was related to a bug in ZoL during bad hardware failure).
The first is required when you want to later refer to an individual element from the set.

"Consider the set P of providers" means when you eventually refer to p_2, you'll have to note that you mean an element (the second, in some sense) of P. That moved the verbosity around rather than eliminating it.

To me it seems like a much bigger error that "Consider the set P {p_1, p_2, ... p_N} representing providers and the set c {c_1, c_2, ... c_N} representing customers" states outright that the sets are equal in size. I would expect C to be much larger than P.
I'm amazed that, in all of the debates stemming from the Google Memo, I haven't seen anyone point their finger at the unhealthy tech culture as a female repellant.

Look at the work/life balance of your typical engineer in the tech industry. Compare this to the reality of a mother of small children. In our culture, women disproportionately bear the brunt of child rearing.

When there's a work emergency and the kids HAVE to be picked up at daycare, who goes? When a kid is sick, who stays home? When a child is born, who takes several months of leave to care for them?

Consider that many women leave the tech industry or stay away from the all-consuming work culture because they have or will eventually want a family life. It doesn't matter what are people's abilities when they see a job as incompatible and contrary to their life goals.
My point was only that it is not a solved problem. That's it.

(In my first draft) I originally included the detail that I was quite heavy for some time and didn't manage to slim down any until I got the right diagnosis. I deleted that (before hitting "post") in part because I get a lot of flak for talking about myself for reasons I cannot really fathom. It seems I am damned if I do and damned if I don't.

For context: My medical condition predisposes me to retain fluids. I have lost multiple dress sizes and I still don't have the flat stomach I wish I had, though I walk more than 2 hours a day every day and I eat very carefully in accordance with what I have found works to not aggravate my underlying medical condition. Counting calories is contraindicated for my condition. My specialist never once suggested I should try to lose weight when I was 245 pounds and about a size 24-26, because the vast majority of people with my condition are horrifyingly underweight and the condition is quite deadly.

If just working your ass off was going to make you thin, I should be thin. I am not.

So, sorry to have hit some nerve for you, but my one and only point was that this is simply not a solved problem. There are people who simply cannot lose the weight, no matter how much they try, research it, etc ad nauseum.
yeah I was going to comment on the accessibility piece. Never thought I'd be one to say this, but since my job has changed recently, I'm empathizing with people who could be affected by this much more.
I think going into robotics, 3-D printing, or drones (but be prepared to work outside the US) is a much better field nowadays than CS/programming etc. (Of course, if you're so inclined healthcare/physical therapy is also a great field for the foreseeable future)
> without bringing God or consciousness into the narrative.

Are you that afraid of God?

Honestly though, the more you break apart and put together the world through science, the stronger are the signs of a higher order.

The more you take comfort in shallow explanations, the dimmer and darker your world becomes.

Machine learning! Hah! It is nothing more than pattern recognition. Reactions to that pattern are a different thing entirely.
So, you say "what it did not do was claim his female coworkers are inferior". First off, that's your opinion of the paper, ok? That's not a fact about the document. That's your assessment. You might believe it in so strongly it's basically fact to you.

But here's the deal, a bunch of other really smart people think it did do exactly what you claim it didn't. Now what? Are they wrong, you're right? On what basis?

Besides which, if you write "effectively lowered the bar for 'diversity' candidates", actually yes you just claimed that women at Google are less qualified.

Many voices are loudly explain why this memo is offensive. Shelve your own ideas of what you think this memo is saying, and consider them.

As for the emotions, there's a huge veiled anti-woman slant to arguments that take the paper on it's "logical" face value and dismiss emotions. First off, dismissal of emotions is a classic anti-woman tactic. Secondly, you're a human male, you have as many emotions as anyone else. You can separate emotion and "rational" thought.
Right-wing response: The USSR lost because the Communists forced engineering to be ~half women.
Was that the only point of theirs that held any sway with you?
Wasn't that her point? Software development can be a hostile environment for both men and women because of the many socially inept caustic people who work in the industry.
> The obvious example of an offensive claim is that women are more prone to be neurotic.

As a personality researcher, I feel obligated to chime in and clarify that the memo wasn't stating that women are "neurotic", neither in the colloquial nor clinical sense, but that they are on average higher in the trait of Neuroticism in the Big 5 personality dimensions[0], which is a very specific and well defined term, and the scientific literature actually does support that statement when it is presented using those academic definitions. There's nothing opinionated about this, just as much as saying that men on average test higher in the trait of 'Conscientiousness' according to the same model; they're just population statistics based on the most reliable personality measure we have in the field of psychology today. It is a plain misunderstanding of the academic term to suggest that the memo says women are "neurotic" in any other way.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits
And they turn out to be more intelligent than those leaving the crap as well. :-)
I pray for screen readers.
That can be obtained in a much more cost effective manner.
Here's the flowchart:
If you have a personality behavior disorder, you are entitled to respect as a person, but you aren't entitled to behave poorly at your job. Similarly, if you cannot fulfill the physical requirements of a job due to disability, you are not entitled to that specific job.
This seems to be a disingenuous take to me.

I don't think you can honestly say publishing it to 10's of thousands of readers constitutes editorial consultation and advice.

Editing and review consists of find a small (one handful) number of trusted friends and mentors whose insight you value, having them read it and make suggestions and comments, perhaps multiple cycles, and only then publish to people you don't know and are hoping to persuade.

It troubles me that this kind of (IMO) disingenuousness shows up again and again in regard to the memo. Not just in this specific comment, but multiple times whenever someone points out a flaw there is always a response of "but he really did do that, you just took it wrong". No, I didn't, and neither did others. He screwed up.
Could you email us about this at hn@ycombinator.com so it goes into our todo list? sctb and I just had an idea about how we might fix this and it's been an annoying bug for years.
Dung beetles 1 Humans 0
There are so many things left to discover and understand on the planet. Great time to be a scientist, or a maker.
Nonsense, please check your sources; you're off by nearly an order of magnitude.

Death rate throughout Everest's entire history is around 4%, and around 2% from 2000 to present. That's also skewed a bit by 2014 and 2015 being particularly bad years; it was 1.4% between 2000 and 2010, and 2016 and 2017 are both around 1%.

If you have a 10% figure in your head, you must be thinking of K2 or another more dangerous mountain.
I once used Google sky on my phone, and I learned what the milky way looks in my light polluted sky. It has become easy since then, but it becomes very difficult on days of full moon.
Women on average score higher on neuroticism. This is uncontroversial. Neuroticism is associated with some positive outcomes, like longer lifespan. It is not a negative trait, as you might think by the connotations the term has in nonclinical contexts.

You would know all this if you did some fact-checking. The carelessness with which you approach his claims is typical and indicative of a much larger problem.
Andrew Desantis Is Pranking Marc Andreesen on Twitter
By paying more recruiting/sourcing attention to subpopulations they regard as unnaturally thinned by discrimination.
I'm leaving the industry for a while to take care of my 7 month old so my wife can get back into her career as a designer in the tech industry. We didn't really plan it like this, something happened, but in the end I think it's a good opportunity for our family (I get to bond with the kid, she gets to go back to developing her career).

How society judges a stay-at-home dad might be another issue, however.
IMO, being able to show the degree off to immigration bureaucrats is more valuable. Being able to code doesn't let you get better citizenship options, being able to prove to bureaucrats that you have valuable skills does. A Master's in Computer Science from an accredited American school is a great option for doing that. And the OP is from Brazil.
This is the very definition of idealism and being naive about how much your vote matters, when you should give a thought to your 2nd preference and be pragmatic if you are in a non-safe state for your 2nd preference. Do vote trading with someone in a safe state, and your candidate will still get the same percentage of nationwide votes, and your 2nd preference will win.

Again, I am not saying that don't vote for 3rd party candidates anywhere.

There is no equivalence between Trump and Hillary, and if Voting for Hillary in a non-safe or safe state would have been a wasted vote, pity the 65 million who voted for her.
Perhaps, but wouldn't it make sense to compare them to another software infrastructure company, rather than social networks?
it is probably true that women are less interested in current tech culture and this was his entire point. He literally stated how to change culture to be more welcoming to women and make them more interested in tech, for example make pair programming more common and have more part-time engineering positions... that's just small piece of possible changes and he welcomed honest discussion to figure out what is actually feasible for Google...
I didn't read it as such and I wouldn't say it was the point I was attempting to make. (not your fault, I suck at writing sentences)

In short, apologetically generalising, I'm suggesting that humans by nature tend to barely get along ever, and sometimes it is hard to tell what is discrimination and what is just normal work crap.
Strong team with bright ideas!
Also they're still hosting daily stormer. Well, they got booted from their registrar so they're offline, but CF denied to stop hosting them.
If they were thinned out in primary, middle, high school, or in university, how does Google bring those women back with their hiring practices? The premise here did involve "biased graduation demographics", which I assume to mean proper educational credentials for the job.
There is a relatively easy and proven way to eliminate Malaria already:

Malaria was effectively eradicated in all but the poorest areas in the 1950s and 60s through vector management: indoor residual spraying, building better houses, eradicating still water near population centers.

The same can be done in sub-Saharan Africa (the main place it remains). In fact, in the richer areas of these countries, Malaria has a very low prevalence.

It's a disease of poverty. Drugs help, but it's mostly about the vector.
"Imagine software that tracks every person and figures out what they need when..."

aka the status quo.

People are profiting from my data. I want my cut. Screw privacy. I want my cut.

Any one storing or using my data for any reason owes me money.

Sell my address to a direct mail campaign. I want my cut.

Need my health history for some longitudinal study that may ultimately save lives. Awesome. Pay me.

Use my purchase history to recommend a new pair of shoes or sell ads. Woot! Pay me.

Micro target my snowflake demographic for targeted political agitprop (aka campaigning). That's worth at least $50. Pay me.
This is another of the "facts" that Damore's memo mentions but there's no empirical proof for. Do you have any?
This analogy fails to mention that the 90% free throw shooter is much more likely to have the chance get a free throw than the 60%, and that the 90% shooter might be hitting a 90% rate because they've been given a disproportionate amount of free throws in the past.

I will agree with you that this is much more complex than simple logic/analogies.
My web page is still around http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~keithn/ it was mostly done pre 96 .... not that it was really well designed, I just spammed bezels and had a play with this new cool java thing.

its an embarrassingly amusing slice of life :)
Ask HN: What's Facebook's policy on green card sponsorship?
How many days or months after you join does Facebook start green card processing? Is there any stipulations on performance, tenure or manager approval? Does it vary by role like Software Engineer, Data Engineer, Network Engineer or Operations Engineer?
Ah, yes, I agree.
It's awesome. last time, I using SVG to import image to pdf files (using TCPDF). The quality is clearly & beautiful. Now, Thank you for your introduction about another things SVG can do on the website.
Considering the topic of discussion, how sure can you be that archive.is will still be around in a year? Three years? Ten?

As much as I tried, all I could find about it is that it's run by one guy in Czech Republic who's paying $2000/month out of pocket for hosting, and apparently dislikes Finland.
Both Hortonworks & Cloudera are the most similar recent IPOs. Hortonworks is below the offering price, Cloudera has been basically flat. And this is in the context of an insane bull market for tech stocks and the market in general.

So we will see how this turns out. It's been a couple years since they last raised funding so its possible they didn't really have another choice. Chances are if the numbers on the S-1 were truly great they wouldn't have done it confidentially.
Daily Stormer reportedly violated ToS, though when I checked ToS yesterday, it was pretty clear that they didn't outright ban such content, but yeah, they aren't abusing it, they're enforcing the rules Daily Stormer agreed to follow but failed to.
There's no evidence they lowered the bar on skill level. This entire thread is a demonstration of "it's much easier to fool someone than to convince someone they've been fooled"
Many experiences of that. The chinese TCM call that 热气 ("heatiness"). Excess of fried food, toasted stuff etc likely to cause it.

BUT...General message to everyone....anything that seems not normal, and persist more than a few days.... GO SEE A DOCTOR. What is the cost of a visit vs the value of your life? In any case go visit every year to get a checkout if you can afford so. Its a duty to those your care for and to those you care about.
>First off, that's your opinion of the paper, ok? That's not a fact about the document.

Of course it's a fact about the document. Damore does not say this. If you claim he did, you should easily be able to prove it by quoting him saying it. No one has done that, because the accusation is false. The burden of proof is on the accuser. The accuser is not presumed to be telling the truth on the basis of their social standing, gender or the emotional intensity of their reaction.

>But here's the deal, a bunch of other really smart people think it did do exactly what you claim it didn't. Now what? Are they wrong, you're right? On what basis?

On the basis of the content of the memo, they are wrong.
Good to see I'm not the only one who thought it was very demoscene-ish. In fact if you were to say the first 30 seconds or so were CGI, I'd probably be convinced.
If I understand correctly, what they did wrong was applaud the lady's death in Charlottesville.

Is that against a literal interpretation of Google's TOS? I don't know.
inciting violence
This Was the Alt-Right’s Favorite Chat App. Then Came Charlottesville
I agree with your statement, but...

I think part of the problem is what the memo says and what it doesn’t say. It’s entirely plausible that the ‘natural’ ratio is not exactly 50:50. But as of last year, among Google tech workers, the ratio was 81:19, and that’s with all the affirmative-actiony programs Damore wanted to back off on; in the past it was higher. It’s quite a bit less plausible that intrinsic differences could explain all or even most of that big a discrepancy, especially combined with the many anecdotes of discrimination we hear about. Now, to be fair, the memo never explicitly claims that it does; indeed, at one point it specifically says “in part”. But the tone of the memo, the relative lack of time spent acknowledging the large role played by cultural factors, makes it sound like Damore thinks the natural ratio is at least pretty close to the current one. And that’s simply wrong.
I'm thinking of my high school glove, and the glove my dad used to play with me - his was from his high school days. I still have mine, and will play with my son (who is outgrowing his salvation army clothes as fast as we can buy them) when he's old enough. And when he's old enough, I'll teach him to take care of his glove, and when he's grown, I'll get him a good one.
One of Damore's concerns is that Google has already taken an internal, political stance that he is uncomfortable with. If everyone else is allowed to have a political opinion, why isn't he?
The memo doesn't offer direct evidence of Google's diversity initiatives causing harm because the original audience for the memo solely consisted of employees of Google (who would have seen its effects and formed their own opinion from first hand experience). It's often forgotten that the memo wasn't originally meant for the general public.
Perhaps the internet connection could be funded in a similar way to libraries, then.
Yes, I'm sure a generation trying to save for a house under burden of student loans appreciates your sage bullshit advice.

Must really appreciate the lack of affordable health care and never being able to afford a family. But at least you can appreciate it!
You could probably get some $$$ back if you put the car up for sale (as a "for parts or not working/not roadworthy", to avoid any possible liability issues) --- I don't know about the market for Miatas, but I know that there are automotive collectors out there who are interested in cars that have "interesting" histories.
While SVG can do a lot, there are certain things that it isn't optimized for. In particular animating lots of shapes simultaneously. The animation of the globe exploding into a bunch of triangles from the slides is a good (bad?) example of this. Also, there can also be inconsistencies is in the rendering of SVGs between browsers.
That doesn't follow if they're passing the same hiring process. It's not hard at all to get a contact for a phone screen with Google: I've been contacted by Google recruiters on linkedin with a barely filled out profile with one or two unremarkable positions listed. If you're counting the initial discovery phase as part of the hiring process, you're mistaken.
"We didn't really plan it like this, something happened, but in the end I think it's a good opportunity for our family."

Welcome to the experience of parenthood. Best of luck to you, your wife, and your child(ren).
So it's like- I kept looking for software projects leads in facebook groups for my software services company http://inteliheads.com and one day I wrote a script which does it automatically and other day I made it public with name http://keywordsonar.com It's around 2 months for this product and right now 197 users are using it.
So it's like- I kept looking for software projects leads in facebook groups for my software services company http://inteliheads.com and one day I wrote a script which does it automatically and other day I made it public with name http://keywordsonar.com It's around 2 months for this product and right now users that are using product are 197.