skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's interesting how polarizing this article is. After zigzagging several times while reading the comments I just think that reality is more nuanced than "never apologize" or "apologize", and it simply depends on the context.

It seems to me that most comments with a strong opinion (including the article) have a specific scenario in mind, involving assumptions about the dev's intentions to write good code, the bug's effect, how easy it would have been to avoid the bug, and who is this person we're considering to apologize to (coworker / manager / customer / QA who found the bug). In some situations apologizing feels right, in others it doesn't, so there's not much sense in generalizing from a single scenario to the general case.

I think ultimately it comes down to matching expectations: almost all people involved in software development expect bugs. The question is how much effort do they expect me to put into reducing the quantity and severeness of those bugs. When I go to a dentist I expect them to make every possible effort to avoid harming me; generally this is not the expectation of software developers going about their day. A feature that takes one hour with reasonable effort at ensuring quality could easily take a day or a week if you make _every possible effort_ to ensure it is bug-free. Different pieces of code (at different times) could have different amounts of impact, so it takes a wider understanding of the code's context to decide how much effort I'm going to put into chasing bugs. When in doubt, I match expectations with the relevant stakeholder(s). Then the situations where apologizing feels right are either those where I didn't meet the expectations, e.g. I was in a hurry to push so I didn't take the time to properly test and I should have known better (not very frequent); or situations where I didn't take the time to properly match expectations (though sometimes that's on the other party, but it takes two to match expectations).

One other thing regarding responsibility - I think that taking responsibility and apologizing are different things. Sure, you can take responsibility by apologizing, but there are other ways too. When something breaks in my apartment and I call my landlord, they (usually) take full responsibility and make sure the problem is fixed, but so far they never apologized, and it would feel funny if they did.
The crushing loneliness
Mobile phones aren’t giving African women more power in their lives after all
The point is that from the perspective of the programmer there is no performance difference between / 2 and >> 1.
This article spends a ton of time explaining very rudimentary things and then completely glosses over what it intends to convey.

C-style casts aren't evil, but they are powerful. They can also be used in places where more than one C++ cast would be required. C developers are very likely to use the C style because it mostly gets the job done the first try.

C developers working on C++ code are not likely to be swayed much by anything that doesn't make a strong case for having 4 different cast operators and this article doesn't manage to do that.
The article says all three fbi.js files were on waybackmachine. I was only able to download urchin and the other ones are not there. Anyone have a mirror? Besides the author? pastebin or mega
> If Agile dies (and SAFe might succeed there) then there would be nothing left except Waterfall and people others would call cowboys.

Saddle my horse.
My issue is the confidence with which the author presupposes that the existence of this code on sites indicates seizure or utilization in an investigation. It is a lazy position that leaves others (i.e. HN readers in this thread) with a little more intellectual horsepower to evaluate the other - and frankly more realistic - alternatives.
@integrii There's a bit of a learning curve, but more than worth it to build real-time apps like traffic.swim.ai and transit.swim.ai

Quickest way to get started it here: https://www.swimos.org/start/
You're not the only one. My team and most teams in my company made the conscious decision to not use subtask.
Honestly, it just doesn't make sense. And my experience, when you sit down with, and I'm going to say extremely conservative people because they are the ones I would put in this category, and explain it to them using facts, they just dig in their heels and ignore you. Humans. What weird things.

Source: I talk politics with family all the time; I'm vilified as the weirdo, brainwashed, college liberal in a family of conservatives.
I recently listened to a lecture about the future of programming, and there was a sentence that really stuck out to me. The speaker said something along the lines of "If you go to an agile conference, there aren't that many devs there and it's mostly management.*

As an ops type usually only on the peripheral of sprints etc I feel I don't fully grasp the nuances of the different methods enough to really comment, but that just really got my attention for some reason.

Found the video, linking at the timestamp that includes the manifesto for agile (which I think has some obvious flaws)

https://youtu.be/ecIWPzGEbFc?t=3678
The author of the article did not say that "people should still wear masks", he said "I’m not claiming that people shouldn’t wear masks".

If you want something more actionable, "behave as if nobody was wearing a mask" which is absolutely not the position the #Masks4All guy is taking; he is promoting people in physical proximity but wearing masks as appropriate.
> This may be the case if a significant number of business decisions are done in side conversations. You probably need some tooling such as a chat app, video conferencing software etc and a process where important business decisions are written down and communicated.

Also, don't forget that there's a lot people naturally discuss in those side-conversations that they really don't want to have "on the record" or "discoverable" in the legal sense. The moment someone tells you that lawyers might scrutinize everything you discuss, you become far more hesitant to have open conversations.

Of course that's why many business types quickly transition from Email to "call me", but that's less likely to happen with tech types and more casual topics.
As another example: I tried to get some R code distributed with MPI using a package that claims to do this. If I remember correctly, the package would generate and execute a shell script to spin up subprocesses. Then it would shuttle code (including huge matrices serialized to ASCII) over a socket, to be eval()'d on the other side. The secret codeword "kreab" would terminate the connection, so this could appear nowhere in the code sent over the socket.

This is clownshoes software quality. And it's used for important scientific research.
I don't see how it's possible to reasonably disagree with that. You obviously lose something. You also obviously gain in other ways. Whether it's worth it is another (important) question.

And I say this as someone who thinks it is worth it - for me personally, at least - having been working remotely for a about a year now.
Ask HN: Project Feedback (ThinkBase – Productive Communication Workflows)
This is one of the larger apps that I've shipped on my own. I'd love to see if anyone would like to beta-test it or chat about related matters (email in profile).

I was inspired to build this because of past frustrations with remote communications (inefficiency, messy organization, etc.). I spent a lot of time thinking about what made some of those communications successful (or not), what elements make for a "productive team", and how I could design an app to encourage successful communication and knowledge sharing:

https://vinnyinverso.github.io/thinkbase/

I've been using it personally for a while now to keep track of my own notes and dev TODO's and I'm curious what other communication-related workflows might be a fit for this app. It was built primarily using NodeJS and MongoDB which I had never used prior but was extremely pleased with, after I wrapped my head around promises and async surprises.

I chose Markdown as the default mode of composition because I've enjoyed using that myself and have seen non-technical people have great success with it as well.

Thanks for reading! Looking forward to hearing any thoughts.
A pizza stone is a definite improvement, but what will make an absolute world of difference is a proper pizza oven (preferably wood-fired, but gas also works).

I instantly went from mediocre home pizza to almost restaurant grade simply by switching from my household oven to an Ooni, despite using the same ingredients and preparation method.
"Pet scam" is a big business [1]

In this example its quite possible FBI put their traps to get better understanding what third parties are involved; who is visiting the site, and probably some admin management page behind it. Sort of like get the contacts of a criminal and go from there.

[1] https://www.ipata.org/current-pet-scams
Also, a lot of people with _other_ issues will die because the hospitals are full of COVID patients.
I know it can potentially be controversial but a lot of outside of work relationships start at the office. Some can be romantic and may even lead to marriage. Others can be friendships that last job changes. It can even be as simple as having a great group of people to chill at a bar with. While I love my wife and kids, I think most others are like me and want to periodically get out and meet new people. Work is often the best place for that.
I'd be interested in hearing more; I haven't been able to find anything that isn't a variant of what I posted earlier.
Developers are your biggest cost, so I never understood why fast and cheap would be opposed to each other. And if you buy off the shelve, most of the time it's both faster and cheaper than building it yourself.

So I always felt that fast and cheap go hand in hand.

I think the triangle is:

- features

- quality

- cost (=both price & time)

Edit: I forgot to mention that you cannot just throw more engineers at a problem to make it go faster. There is such a thing as an optimal team size.

Another edit (sorry it's Friday evening here;)): The faster you can get it done, the cheaper it will be.
But maybe I'm just dumb.

No, not at all.

Decomposing a new feature into digestible pieces is hard work and a skill that is learned over time. It's also a skill to know when something is small-enough, or has enough unknowns that further decomposition is wasteful.

Good product owners and managers know this and are good at it themselves. And the decomposition is typically at a story level - "can we take story X, break it into 2 smaller stories, and still deliver something of value?" The tasks are usually pretty self-evident once you break down the stories a few times.

For a lot of my work, if the story is "As a user, I need to do X" the tasks are simply broken into distinctly testable pieces.* Is there a database change? That's a task. Is there an API change? That's another task. Front-end change? Third task. And if you get half-way through and need to start over, that's life and it happens reasonably often. Yeah, there might be some re-testing. Or, a new story for next sprint.

It's up to me, as the manager, to make sure the stakeholders are informed and on-board. At the end of the day, as long as the team is making progress, I'm happy. And if the team isn't making progress, it's probably my fault (and almost never the fault of an individual contributor).

* In my world, tasks don't exist in isolation. They're all subordinate to a user story. Every task (piece of work) we do is done in the furtherance of a well-defined need of the user. And developers are never defining tasks on their own - it's done as a team.
The issue is lying to Congress about it when asked.
Agile is not a methodology or a process, it is literally[1] a set of values and principles which can be summarized by "stop being stupid and trying to reproduce what they do in construction engineering, and start discussing about the why and collaborate, doing things that matter, and being flexible, since after all, we're doing _soft_ware.

The set of methodologies and processes that ensued, as well as the entire industry of coaches, consultants, evangelists and "practitioners" was probably coming from a good place - trying to propose an implementation for how to put in place those abstract values and principles, or to help with that. The commercialization, envy and corruption that followed is what the problem is. "Agile" has become a synonym for "cargo-cult brainless implementation of sprints and stand-ups to copy something called scrum but effectively doing things in a very much waterfall and old fashion that isn't even remotely close to the original intent".

The problem is of semantics order. What does need to "die" is the "agile" industry, with cargo-cultish coaches whose only value is to repeat Scrum says X, XP says Y, Agile says Z, my other customers do Ω, without trying to convey the reason behind those implements ; "agile" methodos like "safe" which have very little agility backed in and whose "Enterprise Architects" proponents usually don't get any of the intent.

But take a look at the manifesto[1] and tell me that you want it to die, I feel like the arguments will be very complex. Re: the that we should become "engineers" (semantics and cargo-cult again), there's a very good reason why agile applies well to software, but not to mechanical engineers. The economic equations between those two practices are completely different[2][3], the "engineering" phase of mechanical engineering is cheap compared to the production costs and so iterations have effectively an extremely high overhead cost, whereas the "engineering" phase of software engineering represents most of the cost, and so iteration and adaptability have a very low overhead.

But saying "agile needs to die" because of how the "agile industry" corrupted it is similar to saying "email needs to die" because what you see most is spam.

[1]: https://agilemanifesto.org/

[2]: https://www.developerdotstar.com/printable/mag/articles/reev...

[3]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RhdlBHHimeM
Mainstream media even has articles e.g. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/23/coronavirus-an...
Hello, I can relate to that a lot. I don't usually comment on HN, but I'll give it a go on this one.

Also grew up on a high pressure environment, as in: "If you fight at school and lose, you'll get a second beating at home"

- If you can afford, seek professional help. Yeah, a therapist. It will help you to learn how you operate.

- Accountability mirror, from "Can't hurt me" book. Some of stuff in the book is meathead advice, but you're a smart guy, you'll be able to filter it out and adapt. The audiobook is great. Look it up.

- 3sec rule: If you want to do something, don't give yourself time to come up with an excuse not to, because you will convince yourself.

- Commit: Publicly say you'll do it, to the point you'll lose face if you don't. There you go, not doing the thing will hurt more than doing it and then you can trick yourself into not procrastinating.

For instance, I was offered a lead role many times, but refused. Until a day I said: "Fuck it, I'll take it". No time to convince myself otherwise. Now, If I back off or do a poor job, I'll lose face.
And it turns out, once you start doing those apparently big things, you learn they are not really a big deal. Then you start feeling more confident.

Finally, be kind to yourself.

Cheers
Yeah. :-( It bugs me to no end when companies do that, but what can ya do?
Germany's €50B Package for Businesses That Boosts Artists and Galleries
I've made plenty of mistakes in my career, though arguably, I've never been in this for the money. What you describe is probably near-optimal from financial point of view, but I can't imagine my younger self being capable of seriously considering such thought process.
Never thought of it this way! Almost every produce I buy at target has a target brand (knock off?) version like MarketPantry or Good&Gather
Sorry, I missed this earlier. PDF spec turned into an ISO standard with 1.7, and became unavailable without paying since 2.0, but 1.7 at Adobe's site is pretty clear about the signatures (nice, simple section on headers :).

(My phone decided not to let me paste the URL, but it's a quick search away — do not be afraid of the spec, it's quite simple, esp the parts you care about)
Fully remote work does not permit the community that research requires to progress. So fully remote isn’t an option for me. Flexible time, of course, is.

Now Alan Chynoweth mentioned that I used to eat at the physics table. I had been eating with the mathematicians and I found out that I already knew a fair amount of mathematics; in fact, I wasn't learning much. The physics table was, as he said, an exciting place, but I think he exaggerated on how much I contributed. It was very interesting to listen to Shockley, Brattain, Bardeen, J. B. Johnson, Ken McKay and other people, and I was learning a lot. But unfortunately a Nobel Prize came, and a promotion came, and what was left was the dregs. Nobody wanted what was left. Well, there was no use eating with them!

Over on the other side of the dining hall was a chemistry table. I had worked with one of the fellows, Dave McCall; furthermore he was courting our secretary at the time. I went over and said, "Do you mind if I join you?" They can't say no, so I started eating with them for a while. And I started asking, "What are the important problems of your field?" And after a week or so, "What important problems are you working on?" And after some more time I came in one day and said, "If what you are doing is not important, and if you don't think it is going to lead to something important, why are you at Bell Labs working on it?" I wasn't welcomed after that; I had to find somebody else to eat with! That was in the spring.

In the fall, Dave McCall stopped me in the hall and said, "Hamming, that remark of yours got underneath my skin. I thought about it all summer, i.e. what were the important problems in my field. I haven't changed my research," he says, "but I think it was well worthwhile." And I said, "Thank you Dave," and went on. I noticed a couple of months later he was made the head of the department. I noticed the other day he was a Member of the National Academy of Engineering. I noticed he has succeeded. I have never heard the names of any of the other fellows at that table mentioned in science and scientific circles. They were unable to ask themselves, "What are the important problems in my field?"

Hamming, “You and your Research”
Extinction Burst · Covid is giving us a chance to be better for all students
A question for italians: do you use raw tomato puree, or do you fry it? I've always used fried tomato puree (fried at home with olive oil)
It sounds like you're trying to decompose software into developer tasks, which is not what (my interpretation of) agile is about.

Forget the developer for a moment and take the user perspective. What's the first thing the user wants to do? Log in? Ok, that's a story. What's the next thing the user wants to do? See a list of widget prices? Ok, that's a story. What's the next thing the user wants to do? Change a price? Story.

If you can't sit down and think of a dozen narratives like this, then the fundamental problem that you don't really understand how people are supposed to use your software or what your software is supposed to do.
Is she being taught a particular framework in Python, e.g. pandas for doing statistics? When I was teaching programming to non-CS grad students, I chose Python for being more all-purpose and explicit in its syntax/conventions (the latter being not too important for most novices). But I envied the relative ease of setup for R – basically, download R Studio – and how quickly anyone can turn a dataset into nice-looking viz thanks to ggplot2.
The system upgrade download for 30->31 was around 5GB if I remember. Which wasn't too bad. I throttled to 300KB/s. And then the reboot/install took maybe an hour. I don't think that's too bad for such a smooth process.
The first article was an academic publication. This is a news story on a scammer from 4 years ago. It says nothing about the efficacy of the technology from the previous one.
To some extend, you could if you worked on the task and, as you worked, said, "what am I doing now and what do I need to do next?" and then plugged that into something.

It wouldn't be a complete decomposition, of course, a person watching would see your thinking unfold. I think speculative decomposition would be very interesting, especially in retrospective if we could see the rabbit holes we went down.

Decomposing is easy since we naturally have to do that as we work. Heck, those 500 tasks are probably in your shell, browser and commit histories, mixed in with a bunch of other junk.

The problem is tools like Jira make this heavy-weight, doing it up front makes it nigh impossible, and having others review all this stuff and it becoming promises blows up the LOE significantly. And, I don't think I'd want to be under that much of a microscope as I work.

But if it were very lightweight, where I'm just posting my thoughts and can see them as a quick dependency diagram, and maybe attach notes, commits and URLs to them, and other people can see them, that'd be pretty helpful.
> i.e. the conversations between other colleagues that you overhear, as well as the 'waterfountain' chat.

Never underestimate the value of these conversations. Often, this simple ability to "overhear" others is EXACTLY how you avoid being left out of the loop and have some clue as to what's going on.
We've fixed this. Thanks for the bug report!
Gladly... if system76 would offer a damn trackpoint on their laptops. Until then, I’ll take suffering.
Didn't realize links don't get parsed in the description: https://vinnyinverso.github.io/thinkbase/
Capture signups on your website in 2 clicks
You don't need to spend 10k for good espresso. Get a used portafilter machine, a grinder and good beans. I used to drink Nespresso but gave up because of the huge amount of waste. Now I am happy with my Saeco Aroma (old model, bought for 150 euros). Actually I even went back to hand grinding with my Hario grinder some month ago. I'll take the time and also have some workout :)
I tend to do that when I'm going to sleep. It usually finishes well before I wake up.
Two dark sides of the inner self: Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele (2007)
I don't like my private sphere getting invaded by a public sphere.
https://atrebas.github.io/post/2019-03-03-datatable-dplyr/#i...

This is how I learned dt.
It's not just about the labor, it's also about the liability and risk mitigation. Most diagnosis and treatment decisions are made by the doctor because they typically face the consequences if they are wrong.
The other side of this is that managers need to be more mature too. There's a fairly significant difference between communicating asynchronously. If you can figure it out, it'll actually increase the company's overall productivity because it'll reduce interruptions.

A great way to approach this is to build trust incrementally. Small projects where responsibility is given to individuals to own work end to end with reviews and feedback. After a few iterations, everyone will get used to it.
I'm unaware of any term other than globalism for the idea that the world ought to act as a single global community rather than a bunch of nations in competition. So I'm going to have to respectfully reject attempts from alt-right circles to appropriate it for weird conspiracy theories.