skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The kernel of truth of that response is that you won't get more certainty about an estimate by adding more uncertainty, no matter in how much pseudo-scientific cargo-culting mumbo-jumbo you cloak it. (Unfortunately, HN readers don't really like sarcastic commentary which requires reader to think it through. Time is precious, and we just want to be coddled, give me your opinion ELI8 straight, because there is no time to think!)
> That's why Google is leaving: They don't want to redeploy the entire network from scratch.

I don't think the "from scratch" part really matters here when they were a percent or two done at most, and they have to pay to fix the roads anyway.

It's more that they don't want to deploy a network at all.
Brilliant engineers are still there. We haven’t gotten stupider as a species in 30 years. It’s the economics that changed.

As people say “They don’t build stuff like they used too anymore”.

First we started going cheap on the materials. Now we are going cheap on the engineers too.

Why pay a senior “brilliant” engineer $$$$ when a fresh out of college “average” engineer can write the “same piece of code” for $$
I agree. Here's the current Secretary of State for the Department of Health and Social Care in England: https://twitter.com/MattHancock/status/1089864139835670528

He's the most tech-focussed minister we have. He's pushing tech pretty hard, so for him to be saying this should be a clear signal to the industry.

See also the consultationn for the online harms white paper: https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/online-harms-whi...

It's really weird that this extremist position ("any removal of content is censorship, and censorship is always bad") is so prominent on HN whenusers of products have shown, every single time, they they don't want it.
As somebody who was using the Autobahn quite a lot I’d say most people go between 120 and 160 when there is no speed limit. But it depend on the conditions
just call them "posts" or "microposts" if you don't like "toot"
Indeed, so I usually promote Adorama or Wex nowadays for USA and UK respectively.
it's a well-known christian cathedral. It's a pretty big deal, sure. It's a big church so it's a place of worship. What else is it?
While Amazon Germany (afaik) does not yet have many of the problems of Amazon US (I often hear on HN about fake products and the fake reviews of TFA), what really annoys me is the completely different products as one. I was looking at a drill, it's variants included a jigsaw. The reviews were almost all for the jigsaw and at some point, Amazon even removed the notice which variant was reviewed. Utterly useless.
Definitely a good manager, but Hofstadter's Law says that's still too low. :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hofstadter%27s_law
I used Trello to manage my projects, but a few months ago, I discovered Quire. It's pretty easy to use and it has a list view. Which is great for my teams to dump ideas, and i can moved them to board afterward for tracking the project's progress.
Not related, but this is traffic micro simulation Reinforcement learning framwork that my previous research group started: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=P7xx9uH2i7w
This is why keeping distance and decelerating slowly is important (also saves your brakes and uses less fuel)
I disagree.

Let's say we are in an area with a 60km/h speed limit.

Going 60 km/h you do need a wide gape between cars.

But once you stop at a traffic light you should leave enough of a gap to see where the types car in front of you touch the road. That way you are not too close to get around the car if it gets stuck.

When the light goes green, lets say the first car accelerates slowly and only reaches 30km/h by the time they cross the traffic light. If every car behind waited until there was 1.5 car length gap, then only half the cars would get through compared to if they all accelerated at the same speed at the same time, maintaining a smaller gap until they cross the traffic light.

You only need the large gap once you've accelerated up to a much higher speed.
Well, in the most extreme form, you'd wind-up with something like the poisson distribution [1], where your chance of finishing each week would be the same.

This is not entirely implausible but it produces effects even more paradoxical/pathological than log-normal. Here, you could give a correct estimate of the expected time for a project to complete as 50 weeks. You could then reach week fifty and again give a correct estimate of 50 more weeks required. And then you could finish the next week.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisson_distribution
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The interesting thing is that by the central limit theorem, the mean of a mean is normally distributed. This is extremely helpful. Here's what I suggest you do:

Same size your stories to small values. Do 30 stories in a sprint and take the mean. Do 30 sprints and take the mean of the sprint. What you get is the mean amount of time to do a sprint of 30 stories. What's amazing is that this estimate will be normally distributed. You can measure the variance to get error bars.

Of course 900 stories to get good estimates ;-) However, imagine that your stories averaged 2 days each. Imagine as well that you have a team of 10 people. That means that you will finish a "sprint" of 30 stories in 6 days (on average). 30 sprints is 180 days -- the better part of a year, but you probably don't need a 95% confidence interval.

You will find that after a few sprints, you'll be able to predict the sprint length pretty well (or if you set your sprints to be a certain size, then you will predict the number of stories that will fit in it, with error bars).

The other cool thing is that by doing this, you will be able to see when stories are outliers. This is a highly undervalued ability IMHO. Once a story passes the mean plus the variance, you know you've got a problem. Probably time to replan. If you have a group of stories that are exceeding that time, then you may have a systemic estimation problem (often occurs when personnel change or some kind of pressure is being applied to the team). This kind of early warning system allows you to start trying to find potential problems.

This is really the secret behind "velocity" or "load factor" in XP. Now, does it work on a normal team? In my experience, it doesn't because groups of people are crap at calmly using statistics to help them. I've had teams where they were awesome at doing it, but that was the minority, unfortunately.
I've been on Firefox since 2014. Never looked back.
Yes, this is philosophy of science and technically an axiom. But it's not an arbitrary one. It's saying that "it exists <=> something would be different about the world if it didn't exist <=> it's in principle observable (though its impact) <=> can be studied by science". Call it my lack of imagination, but I don't believe it's even possible to disagree with this axiom; alternatives don't make any kind of sense.

EDIT: looking at this "axiom" from another angle. Imagine that I claim that atoms are really built out of Zeta faces, that are exactly like quarks, but have smily faces etched on them. I also claim that it's in principle impossible to tell a difference between a Zeta face and a quark (hypothetical quark, after all it's all Zeta faces). They just are there. At this point you could correctly observe that since the universe would look precisely no different whether or not there are smiley faces on quarks - there's not a bit of information distinguishing these two hypotheses - my claim is absolutely meaningless and a waste of time. This generalizes to all kinds of invisible, unmeasurable magic faries under the bed, etc.

(It's probably a well-trodden philosophical ground, but I don't know who to read to find a decent discussion of it.)
>ack and ag (the_silver_searcher) are two distinct tools. The latter automatically excludes .gitignored and binary files, just like ripgrep.

Only I've never been able to make ag (or pt, another similar too) respect .gitignored and other such settings as good as rg does out of the box. Plus it's slower.
Because e is more scientific.
I do this but only with best and worst case. Any estimate with a worst case of more than 5 days need to be broken down again unless it's a known quantity. Thanks for the link, I had no idea this was part of 6 sigma
Best digital health accelerators in EU
I don't think our discussion can come to any compromise. You seem to believe that not doing anything is a good thing, and the API is already ideal. I have a different opinion. Well, it's okay to have different opinions.
> If you take the students who performed at the 10th-25th percentile in any school in one year, on average they would do better the next year because of reversion to the mean.

This is shoddy reasoning that assumes that each school year is an independent trial. In reality, school years build on each other and usually success in the next year requires familiarity with and competence in the previous year's material, so a more reasonable assumption IMO would be that those kids' next year would if fact be closer to a normal distribution with a mean at the 17.5th percentile.

It's certainly arguable that some of the reason for the school's success is that they're selecting students into classrooms in which they're all 10th-25th percentile which lets the teachers zero out the effect of them having fallen behind without the stigma of being "the dumb class" if they were tracked that way inside another school. But if that's the case, isn't that a rather valuable effect?
If this fascinates you check out Sam Bur’s youtube channel, a city planner playing Cities Skylines with foxus on traffic stuff.
Those variable speed limit signs are meant to be enforced by average speed checks with cameras. I'm not sure what's going on with that, I know there are delays, but there's signage that says there are regular speed cameras.

So if the cameras work, we'll have to do exactly what they say or get fined for speeding.
Tesla goes online only. Is it too radical?
The reason the Fibonacci sequence is used is because we don't think in an incremental scale but in a logarithm scale. In other words, we think that some simple takes 1 day, a more complex takes 3 and a even more complex takes 5 days. Usually we don't jump from 1 to 2 days when thinking about a task effort.
Machine learning is cool. But, my opinion is that self driving cars are not the right problems to solve in cities.
Best data visualization tools of 2019
Fake reviews are common on Airbnb.com as well. New hosts just request their friends to book their house and then pay them back for the same. In this case Airbnb may even benefit (unlike Amazon) since they receive their non-refundable fee when a friend books the house.
If regular time estimation has tricky statistical properties when combining multiple estimates, story point estimation is just hopeless. Especially on a Fibonacci scale. When estimating, nobody thinks that an 8-point story is the same as eight 1-point stories. Even the metric itself is nonlinear!
Ask HN: Service where I can ask questions to a local in a country?
I want to ask some questions to a local person in, say, Egypt. Is there such a service?
German prosecutors charge former Volkswagen CEO with fraud
That would not be much different from a drop down of Mastodon instances then?

For both it's a bad way of doing it because people with their own domain can't use it for email and the Mastodon one would be too long to select something.
In that case, the perception that current hardware security is good enough needs to change.

Or the cloud vendors could start offering compute running on new, more secure hardware - e.g. special VM types marketed accordingly.
Kalman and Bayesian Filters in Python (2018)
The problem is not that this looks like a stupid business. The problem is it deliberately misleads and fools people.
It reflects well on the individual taking the initiative and giving the money, it reflects badly on every country where this is needed to give disadvantaged children equal opportunity.

Every rich person in almost every country in the world can spend money to improve education for disadvantaged children. So I fail to see what makes the country looking good here.
The other thing you can always refer back to is that the accuracy of an estimate increases the closer it is to finishing it - that is, it's very inaccurate at the start. This is one of the pillars of the agile way of working - you and your team can give a fairly accurate estimation for what can be finished within a week or two. Not so much for a year.

The longer estimations are very much due to changing priorities and a developing environment and understanding of what is being built though, hence the inaccuracy.
Imagine a tradie saying it'd take 1week to finish remodelling your kitchen, and then it turns out they couldn't. As a professional, it's your responsibility to educate the client on the issue - most technical problem could be explained to a layman if the context is set up properly.

The problem occurs when the client doesn't want to hear it.
SOA and the Tar Pit of Irrelevancy (2009)
Because their infrastructure failed. Nature is forcing it out of its tiny trench and on to the roads, where it’s getting cut by cars. You can see the state of it in the link below.

https://gizmodo.com/when-google-fiber-abandons-your-city-as-...
On side streets I heard the quality of workmanship dropped even further, from micro-trenches with cabling a few inches below the road surface to cables that were barely covered and eventually becoming tripping hazards.
I work in a Danish municipality with 7000 employees where we replace around 2000 people each year of which half are education-interns[0]. So I think it’s fair to say that we have a good deal of experience with hiring people. I’ve been involved with quite a few of these processes, and I’m truly fascinated by how many resources and how much effort Americans seem to put into hiring.

Our data shows that if you filter by education, then it’s actually relatively easy to hire someone who will perform well. If you get 100 applicants and pick the best 10 based on their A4 sized application letter, their education results and their CV, then you’ll typically end up with a pile of at least 10 people who are going to be good enough. Hell once you build that pile of 10 people, you don’t even have to read through the rest of the applications because it really won’t matter.

I say this fully aware that hiring the wrong person is the most expensive mistake any manager can make. It’s just that people aren’t really unicorns, and good enough is good enough.

Part of our success is how we onboard people. Because we do use resources on hiring people, we just save them for when people are actually hired. We try to make sure people get the best start they possibly can, because we have found that achieving great employee performance is our responsibility more so than the fresh hire.

As a result our interview consists of 30-45 minutes of small talk where we try to find the person with the best chemistry to fit in their coming team. Don’t get me wrong, once in a while we do get an interviewee who flunks completely, but it’s very rare.

We have tried a lot of the tricks by the way. We’ve done code reviews, we’ve done whiteboard algorithms, we’ve done live code and it really, really didn’t help us get better workers but it did waste a tremendous amount of our time.

Our process is a little different when we hire managers. They get to go through a more standard HR process with personality tests and such. I’m not personally sure it helps though, but I don’t have any data to back that last statement up.

0: I’m not sure what they are called in English, they work for half a year as part of their education.
UI programming and not requiring users to install anything are pretty big. You also get automatic syncing across devices, which is nice for things like RSS feed readers.

Don't underestimate the importance of the abstraction layer either! There's a lot of crap it's removing from the equation. You don't have to worry about cross-platform support, installing prerequisites, trying to deal with the program insisting that it needs MXYZPT32.DLL and can't find it when you go to run it...

The downside is that it's feudalism. But, hey, under feudalism, you don't have to defend your own land!

There are downsides to outsourcing defense of your land to the local lord, of course. The lord can force updates and sell your likes to the Rooskies, and the profitable enterprise that enables him to defend your land is the industrial-scale farming of human eyeballs. Maybe it'd be better if 7-11 carried Snow Crash sidecar nukes - i.e. if there were decentralized, open-source platforms that could do all this stuff - but I don't think they do.

Yet. Growth mindset.
What an unnerving concept! I think there are many more people with better algorithmic understanding of the problems. I am more of a 'bang on the problem with a stick until it kinda works' type meathead with a few cheesy SIMD tricks up my sleeve.

I am hoping to move on, but I admit I do have a "few more ideas" in that area - possibly even slightly less 'meatheaded' than previous outings. Maybe (although everything looks better on paper).
I find this very useful, since I have used Asana for several years now. Thanks for sharing this!
Ok that makes sense.

2nd stupid question:
I though gravity acting on light was a 'light as particle' thing, rather than 'light as wave' thing? If that were the case gravity acting on light as particle manifesting in light as wave doesn't seem consistent.
That really only works for high-demand, current products.

Back when I used to be engaged with Amazom I wrote a lot of reviews for out-of-print secondhand books that I borrowed from libraries or bought from specialist shops. I was usually quite harsh with my reviews but was often the only reviewer and usually the book was out of stock at the time.

People seemed to appreciate the long-tail reviews and I was up in the top 100 UK 'most helpful' reviewer list.

If I had only reviewed books I'd bought on Amazon I would have written about 10% as many reviews.
At the same time, I don’t think that if you were truly serious, you’d do your deployment with a completely unproven technique.
Have you tried Reddit?
That is the description made by DataCamp in their post trying to bury the issue as well as possible. Meanwhile, the other side tries to keep the description general out of respect for the victim, presumably seeking to not spark a discussion over the details of their clothing and demeanour.

Apparently the exact details are serious enough that they could gather a 100 signatures on a letter about it and DataCamp itself felt they could not simply remain silent.
In the world of small medium projects often the major issue is that software engineers give estimates for writing the software but customers take that to mean time to actual delivery in production and a lot of the time have no idea how big a task deployment and integration are...or don't even have a plan for that.
Focus* typo...
Google could have attached to the poles, the city even fought AT&T to let them on the poles without a proper CLEC license: https://www.courier-journal.com/story/news/politics/metro-go...

In return, Google did not use said pole attachment rights, damaged roads and left broken infrastructure & promises.
> 1. Use inputs from both AOA sensors, if they disagree by 5.5 degrees, disable MCAS.

Great, and now you have the other problem the MCAS was supposed to mitigate (the tendency of the MAX to do backflips).
As others have pointed out, taking a term that has a specific legal definition to relate to an illegal practice and broadening it to cover both legal and illegal activities doesn't seem like a great idea if your aim is to try and increase people's understanding of the markets. It just adds confusion. This is a shame, as your point about markets not being a level playing field because different participants are able to execute on information in different ways is worth making, especially in the context of new types of exchanges.

An analogy would be to redefine all killings (lawful or otherwise) as "murder". It's not helpful. Words have specific meanings in specific contexts, so lets stop overloading them so much when we don't have to.
>But when you advocate clearly for your needs as a professional, people are generally reasonable.

You should do all this but there will still be times when people are unreasonable, it's just human nature.
In this Telegram made many nice choices. It can be end-to-end secure but it is also a viable Whatsapp alternative.

Sticker, channels, bots and supergroups are essential to attract communities.
The equivalent of 'slowing down' for light is stretching out (increasing) the wavelength. It reduces it's energy in the same way that gravitic deceleration reduces an object's kinetic energy, but without affecting it's 'speed'.
>> and then standing your ground when they pruessure you to lie to them.

spot on.
220% also works fine if each one of the projects is "practically unique" to you / the team... this happens >50% of the time in the real world, imo, because some fields have very little transferable skills/experience from project to project... a large percent of stuff is genuinely new every time and never repeats even if it's "basically the same thing as that other project"! (Or team composition changes.)

Problem is the fact that you can only justify with a straight-face 45% (100%/220%) of the estimate you give to the client... Then you need to get clever at "bluffing" your way at "inventing" another extra +35% of work that you can't imagine/explain, but you know for sure that will come out of the blue - you know there's this extra 35% work needed for sure, you just have no idea what this work will be. Then finally you can say with a straight face that 20% of estimated time is for unforseen circumstances. There's two ways to see the same math:

(1) 45% + 35% + 20% = 100%
(2) 100% + 100% + 20% = 220%

The world would be a much better place if clients / managers / project owners etc. would just accept that 55% of time & cost for software dev is unknown-unknowns type of unexplainable/unimaginable-at-project-start-stage-work. That's just how it is! If the problem was really clearly defined and understood, there would likely already be an off-the-shelf software solution for it that could be used instead of paying developers to build custom software!

If we could just be honest with people and show them formula (2) instead of a make-up-ladden version of (1). But people don't, so we get to play the damn elegant-bullshitting game over and over again...
>the processes to get things certified are political and hand-wavy

The big processes that make everything less cowboy inevitably lead to the build-up of people that only do politics and processes and are far removed from actually desigining code.
Escaping surveillance is easy: "forget" your phone in a friend's bag.

And in 1985, you did not have Tor or public wifi allowing you to access the whole world with no effort in an anonymous way.

Look at how terrorists and criminals evade surveillance now: it is incredibly low tech.
Indeed, and I'd add that we are going cheap because we can, thanks to computing power.

As a matter of fact : computing tools make a lot of things easier and cheaper (which is good). But the setback is a tendency to "laziness" in the whole process...
I haven't worked for aviation yet, but from what I have seen in other areas that need certification processes, the system is setup in a way that invites gaming it. In Europe, most certifications are performed by competing private companies. That cannot possibly go wrong and erode standards, right?
What stunned me was that the German legal system is going after the managers who made the decisions, not the engineers who implemented them (undoubtedly under duress).

In any other country -- and especially UK/USA -- I'd expect to have seen a bunch of engineers forced into plea-bargain deals an a bunch of managers "retiring" to Monaco.