skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Scrum is badly misunderstood and maybe that's a failing in and of itself but it's really a victim of the developers who sold it as a magical process. Scrum simply can't be implemented as a purely developer process. The backlog exists as a rolling contract between dev and product owners and sponsors.

The most common failure I see is when project leadership agrees to a fixed scope and timeline then tries to execute in an agile way. Agile is the contract. But it's also a tough sell. It requires a high degree of trust to say "we'll pay you $XM in exchange for X sprints of whatever we prioritize with no fixed end state" but that's what you need to be agile. If you layer sprints on top of a fixed timeline, you're just adding needless complexity since your end state is predetermined and how you get there is irrelevant.
Pillow maker Throwboy proves that no entrepreneurial dream is too far fetched
Essential nonlinearities are rife in the little of neurophysiology that we've encountered.

I am more or less sold on (possibly deterministic) chaotic models for things like tinnitus.

That's close enough to "a complex model we cannot understand" for me.
I was not aware what this feature did. Thanks for pointing it out. I generally enjoy reading things even if I disagree with them because they tend to at least give me something to think about.
The guy whose tweets are being used as examples is still hacked and while this discussion is going on has no idea how to fix his account.

The author could've used screenshots, but he wanted to use a live example, so instead of giving the non-technical person a straight link to ads.twitter.com, he just told him he'd written an article on the problem [0]

[0]: https://twitter.com/Fishblogger/status/1132737507827834885?s...
The condo is worth however much people will pay for.

Presumably when person A's old condo is up for sale at 650k there's a buyer.

Person A moved to condo B for 800k, and freed up condo A worth 650k, and there fore someone else with 650k can move in (which in turn frees up their old place).

I dunno what's trickle down if this ain't it.
I agree that Scrum is fragile but not that it isn't agile.

It's agile up to the point that it is broken, which happens often due to it's fragility. That it is easily broken is an unfortunate but unavoidable consequence of its complexity, and common misunderstandings/misuses.

Scrum is complex because large software projects (large as in number of people, budget and expected velocity) are never simple to manage. Scrum is complex because correct usage can not be read from a book nor gained from a qualification - it requires experienced judgement to pick the optimal usage and apply it to a team and project.

Nothing can beat the effectiveness and efficiency of a single strong developer working on a stream of well considered backlog items. That is engineer nirvana! However many projects simply require more velocity than one person can manage. From here, there is a whole spectrum of processes that should be chosen depending on resources and needs. From my experience, full scrum kicks in once you have four or five engineers on the same system.

Product management is a key point of failure in Scrum, true also with other processes. But it's felt so much more when an entire team grinds to a halt and an iteration fails.

If Scrum doesn't feel agile then you are doing something wrong. This is exactly the question the team should be asking itself at retrospectives (doesn't need to be three questions!). What's changing in your process sprint to sprint? Scrum masters are there to facilitate incremental process changes driven by team members, not a system that doesn't result in agile software delivery.
I can't see paying an ongoing monthly fee unless I was dealing with really big and ever changing architecture. Most of the time, I am writing everything into a log because I will want the ability to rebuild everything in the event something goes down.
Amazon reportedly wants to 3D-scan your body for a $25 gift card
We’ve had over 200 years to work things out —slowly. It was pretty much a diaspora of the same mindset throughout with a common language and body of law.

Two hundred or a hundred years ago people put up with a lot. A modern world doesn’t want to wait for things to work themselves out.
I'm sure those tropes are engrained is some truth. Like the "House Hunters" memes we hear.
I do not endorse the use of this method, or any other, in a sales scenario.
Software engineers would dearly love this to be true, but I see very little evidence that it is. I've worked with late-career switchers and I've worked with 16-year-old interns and all points in between and have seen no correlation between age-at-first-contact with this field and aptitude. We are not concert pianists.

Incidentally, concert pianists are probably also not concert pianists, in the setting you want this comparison to apply. Yes, if you want to play with a major orchestra or win a classical grammy, you probably need to have been playing since you were 4 years old. But virtually no-one in our field operates at that level (despite a large cohort of developers who think they do); we are, almost all of us, constrained more by our environments than our potential. If the market for concert pianists was isomorphic for that of software engineering, a late-career switch to concert pianisting would also be reasonable to contemplate.
I'd say the most important characteristic is whether the team can work together effectively.

As an example, one could consider the various people working on an individual open source project as part of a team. And most successful O/S projects rarely require everyone to meet together at the same time.

I personally strongly prefer small teams (I find even 8 members too large), but arguably certain projects may need bigger teams, and I think they should still be able to practice Agile with the bigger team, which scrum doesn't allow for.
>We’ve had over 200 years to work things out slowly. It was pretty much a diaspora of the same mindset throughout with a common language.

Not really. Big parts of Pennsylvania and New York we’re speaking Dutch. A lot of the South was speaking Spanish. A bunch of the hinterland was Francophone.

And that’s just the White people.
I don’t know if you’ve looked around, but US political tensions have reached the point where people routinely deny that our President is our legitimate elected leader and a quarter of Americans support secession: https://mises.org/power-market/reuters-poll-shows-hispanics-.... (Fun fact: the percentage of people supporting secession is about the same as the percentage of white people who identify in polls as “liberal” rather than “moderate” or “conservative.”)

It’s possible for states to get too big and peoples’ values to get too divergent for the political system to function efficiently. The US has been stuck in that state for a couple of decades. Until Brexit, the EU was hurtling headline into the same problem.
Well of course the business can have their own policies. I am just saying what the law is and what the IRS is allowed to require you to keep. You don't have to keep receipts. There are lots of other acceptable forms of documentation.

https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employe...
WTF is a "UN banker". Stop mixing up your stereotypes!
I started a new job where I was not officially a programmer and my machine was locked down so that I could use basically nothing except Microsoft Office, and after a couple of months, I have taught myself to do nearly any sort of data processing I previously did with Linux, Oracle, Perl, Selenium, etc. using Excel, Access, and VBA. Obviously, this doesn't involve that much data, but my previous job was really not "big data" either and they paid for all sorts of expensive licenses.

I'm enjoying myself much more than I used to, because I've escaped the red tape of development and get to solve problems that matter to nontechnical people without intermediaries predigesting the requirements.

If I was starting a business, I would definitely always try to do almost anything with Excel and Access first before deciding to invest in an industrial strength solution whether Postgres, Oracle or "big data".
Thanks everyone for correcting my understanding of story points (which was based on scrum training provided by my current company).

Effort makes a lot more sense, and I particularly like that it tries to incorporate uncertainty as well (I guess that's why they chose story points, to make it vague, since using hours leads to people treating estimates as deadlines instead).
Why is the ‘race to 5G’ a race?
I think you might be underestimating the power of seeing some very subtle opinions over and over online.

In my country I've been seeing a constant campaign of subtle disinformation against opposition figures that is very powerful. You check the "user's" Twitter profile and they'll have a bunch of pro-opposition opinions on it. Then, the "user" will start to express disillusionment about certain people, asking them not to betray "our side" etc. By the end, it's a full blown attack against "traitors".

This kind of stuff is very subtle and powerful. I've seen it over and over and people will get dragged into believing this stuff and it's very damaging.

It's almost stuff straight out of the movie "Inception". You just need to plant that "seed" of doubt and it will grow in a lot people. It might just be the nature of our political climate, so it might not work everywhere though.
Which carrier is that?
I agree that the economics here are interesting. I think it's useful to consider firstly car sharing, without the autonomous aspect.

I think it's a pretty compelling argument for many car owners whose capital is otherwise tied up in a mostly unproductive asset. Particularly in the case where you end up paying for parking during some of this unproductive time.

For the service provider, I think ultimately you're looking at the cost of supplying a vehicle to transport your customer. Where the car is shared, can that cost be lower than if it's a dedicated vehicle? I think it can, because for car owners willing to share, any income is a bonus. It just has to be enough to overcome any inconvenience to make it worthwhile.

And I think that's the point that your "cottage industry" comment misses: the costs of capital and maintenance are immaterial to the service provider. All they need to pay to overcome is the inconvenience and any psychological "yuck" factor.
Jumping from "It's not American" to "Maybe it's extraterrestrial" seems like a big leap. What if they're Chinese?
Yes, and perhaps I did this more when I was working in a big corporation (law/tech). But now that I'm running a startup, most of the time I'm chasing people down it's for business development.

In that context, the recipient doesn't have any need to email me back, and I'm trying to make sure they do. For internal emails, there's already pressure for the recipient to email back sometime-or-other, so it's a different challenge.
> Based on my father and grandmother's interactions, suggesting they call if ever in doubt can be a big help.

However, do understand, that this can lead to the opposite effect of constantly calling on every little thing leading to them becoming even more dependent on you.
Yeah it is the hardest of hardcore PvP games - it involves people having to lie to other people, every game. Throw in internet strangers and an ELO system and yeah it becomes an impossible thing to moderate other than "don't use hate speech or get banned". I just wish I knew what I could do better. Things like this get me down a bit. https://old.reddit.com/r/SecretHitler/comments/b9l1kv/secret...
So you’re saying the EU should be like an XVIII century formational country like the US or even Russia or China or Japan and homogenize?

Maybe let’s start with the French dropping French and let’s have Russia give up some land for eastward expansion.

Once you prove your success there, Africa awaits for unification efforts too.
Thank you for taking the time to write this up. I really want to be pro nuclear because it's already on the planet and it's the best solution for space travel that I can think of, I'm just really concerned like you correctly surmised about the major disasters. Like you pointed out it always seems to be human error or something that should have been avoided. To be completely fair most of the reasons I've got concerns about nuclear are the same concerns I have about fossil fuels, when things go bad, they go really, really bad and a lot of that seems to depend of the type of reactors we've built. Something that softened me a lot on nuclear was watching a movie on a nuclear test facility where they discussed testing different types of reactors. I have realized that there even were different types. Thanks so much for the info.
Who would you prefer own it?
> One gripe I have about scrum, is there is nobody representing engineering, as the product owner represents the business.

That is definitively not be the feeling you should have. In "proper" scrum the Team is supposed to represent engineering. If you, for some reason, don't feel like you can represent these concerns then that is a huge issue. The PO shouldn't be your boss either. At least it isn't so in the company I work for. It sounds like the PO is the boss of that team, if he "keeps you busy". I am super grateful that our Scrum Master knew what he was doing and suggested creating a separate line on the Org chart for the POs so that they are explicitly not in charge of development. The team is in charge and POs are more advisory.

Sounds to me like there are some deeper problems in the company then just the scrum. There are so many red flags in your comment. I don't know if those books are going to help you "play" scrum better, because what you guys are doing does not sound like scrum at all.

Kanbans probably also not a solution. I really like Kanban, but it isn't going to remove the bad elements that seem to control that company.
I'm still waiting to see if all of this is for naught, and the UK already left the Union.
Don't EU elections usually favor more obscure parties? There were some BNP MEPs not too far back, no?
>"what makes you think you're so much smarter/better than the previous team?"

You hopefully learned from the problems they encountered, which they likely didn't know about when they started.
From all the comments, I see that arguments are there both ways. I also understand that we should follow a process that bets suits the business. I would really like to know how we could set up an Agile process provided that is what is required.

Is there anywhere this would be documented to explain -
a. How an agile process in initiated?
b. How an agile process is maintained?

I have been part of a team with mis-applied agile processes -

1. Requirements change frequently. And not due to users asking for them. More like the Project Managers asking for more configurablity.

2. Requirements are not thought through. Even the simplest cases.

3. Changes don't get vetted by users. Instead, we go through another round of requirements!

4. Every once in a while requirements (and teams) get re-organized, re-planned which puts all the developers off.

I have also been part of a team which focussed on deliveries. This team has been able to write tests and iterate over requirements fast. The satisfaction level of all the developers in the team as well as the project owners were high.

1. Requirements were phased.

2. Whatever was required to be done in each phase was thought through as far as possible. Anything that wasn't clear or was more complex to think out was sent back to the project owners / users for clarity.

3. Code and tests get written. Phase delivered.

Although this process was extremely successful, I don't know if I would call this Agile.
It looks like a really ambitious project, but unfortunately looks like it's not gaining progress?
Then they are probably full of vulnerabilities and exposed to the internet
Two hundred years ago, the federal government was tiny and most decisions were made locally. That changed dramatically in the last two generations.
There are many 20 years and older code bases currently. But if you start a new code base today it might get rewritten many times in the next few years because software users no longer have the power to stay on an old version due to the SaaS paradigm.
Political upheaval didn’t cause any regulation, but this surely will.
I don't know if you noticed, but people in the US have been doing that since 1993. It doesn't feel that long ago to me either, but I have to admit, at a quarter century, you have to stop calling it a recent trend.
Apparently, they can go to Alberta...
I have been both a manager and an executive. As well as a consultant in many companies both small and large. I'm not saying that those people are necessarily incompetent. I'm saying that, per POSIWID, the purpose of most software organizations is not effectiveness in making software (or in serving users via software).

That's not constructive in the sense of providing ways to solve the problem. But that wasn't my goal. My goal was to support and confirm the article's thesis. I have also written plenty of constructive things on software development, but I think it's absurd to suggest that every HN comment must contain that kind of constructive feedback. (And if that were a reasonable standard, you aren't living up to it.)
> I have seen my own parents fall suspect to that stuff now and then, so it does scare me.

I think their generation has been influenced by our generations that really started using the internet and got it into every part of our lives. Sometimes I start falling for the conspiracy theories and have to check myself, and they don't have experience with the insane social media machine that exists now but didn't exist during their time.
In rare situations forcing the answer, even forcing a no, can be helpful.
My mom doesn't know that her gmail and yahoo emails are different. I promise she's not more online security literate than HN readership on average.
Sometimes it can't be cleaned up, or the process of cleaning it up takes too long or is more expensive than the company wants to spend. Sometimes the clean up process is error prone, or leaves you with too little useable data. Sometimes the data really is too noisy and no amount of clean up is really possible. It's definitely true that data clean up is a problem data science can address, but it's not a magic wand.
Start with where you want to end up when you’re 50. Work your way backwards in 5 year increments.
Older male crickets attract more females – but mate less
Absolutely but it’s been a very slow creep. Not a sudden imposition.
> The rationale is that if you minimize latency, throughput has to be maximum too

Exactly. And it's quite wrong even without taking the growth of complexity into account — as every engineer knows, or should know. Getting every task done as quickly as possible requires a lot of context switching, which is murder on throughput. When you add in the effects of complexity growth (aka technical debt, though I think "complexity growth" is clearer) the disadvantages of optimizing for latency become that much more serious. And the worst part is, as the disease progresses and latency deteriorates, managers try to cure it by applying even larger doses of the poison.

This idea that managers optimize for latency, while I optimize for throughput, occurred to me only recently. But as I look back over the disagreements I've had with managers through the years (including disagreements over the usefulness of Scrum processes!), it's quite remarkable how many of them seem to come down to this.
Your response is fair as far as the waste to power output. I really don't have an idea. Thanks for putting it into perspective.

The information came from literally Wikipedia, which bring honest claimed equipment fails in the same area as meltdowns. I want attempting to be facetious in saying I don't know if you can claim a nuclear event to be facetious, I'd have to agree that claiming an equipment failure in the same category as a release of nuclear material into the atmosphere doesn't seem fair.
Both of those videos looks like optical illusions or radar bugs. Too bad there isn’t some sort of standard helmet cam so we can see from their direct perspective and get a better idea of how it might happen.

Someone’s digging through the radar data too and there could be more multi-source correlations.

So far it seems each of these are single source with two people in the plane seeing it? Or two pilots flying in tandem facing the same way and speed.
I also lost access to my first account, but who cares? I also lost my first ICQ account... oh well.
What percentage of Scrum teams do you believe are "properly cross-functional and self-organizing"? And could you point me to examples of people losing their Scrum certifications for not living up to that standard?
Yep. :)

https://www.brightball.com/articles/reality-driven-developme...
Ebay is filled with ultra cheap high capacity sd cards that are either fake or quality control rejects. These are still using the SD card branding though. It would be nice to see a high quality retailer of "SD cards" selling them under some generic name and then with the text "SD compatible"
Counterintuitive as it may seem, basically you want to prevent job growth, because that's where housing demand comes from. Instead of competing with other places to get more good-paying jobs, play to lose. Encourage companies to move away. Cooperate with the many smaller cities that could really use more jobs.

It's load-balancing, basically.
I think it's a bit of a fake idea in the sense that you ALWAYS want to ship the most minimal thing you can, as soon as you can. But what that means will depend on the company, the product, and the market.

The tough part is figuring out what the MVP actually is for your situation. It might be a Shopify site that just sends you an email when someone bought your widget, or it might be a multi-year R&D effort that ends with Falcon 1 being launched.

I also think that the "Lean Startup" concept is often abused by people to justify cutting corners on things they should not. The prime example is paying zero attention to code quality and testing prior to launch, then failing to get traction because the product is so buggy and unusable that the customers don't stick around. Don't over-architect and over-test something that may not sell, but some amount of design and proper engineering is necessary to ensure that you have something worth buying.
Beyond using an asinine parody format, this isn’t instructive as the United States was formed from former sovereign holdings and was arguably forced by two major wars (1812 and 1861) to increase its federal power. The EU was formed by sovereign nations, many with long history, in a prosperous time and not in response to existential threats. Unlike the United States, the EU beyond providing a trade zone does not give its members new tools to solve problems as the members already had unlimited power to enact their own policy.
A "generation" in scientific terms is roughly 25 years, right? In 1969, you couldn't drive a truck full of oranges between cities in two different states without permission from a federal agency, if I understand the history here correctly.
You're confusing "investing in design" with "having a design phase". I agree many Agile teams underinvest in design. But so do many non-Agile teams. The problem isn't the lack of a formal phase. The problem is not taking it seriously.