skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One-liner: Dropbox for developers?
¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Still experimenting with how to pitch it. Dropbox for devs makes sense, knowing the details, but would be super vague for anyone who doesn't already know anything about booste.

Other pitches that fall into that "short but vague" pitch.

Filesync + SSH

Docker + Heroku

*Cloud IDE without the IDE

(edit: list formatting)
Ask HN: What is your strongest argument against remote work?
please, I need to know!
Yeah people have short memories of the pre-agile role demarcation and wasted handover time between them.

It was utterly frustrating to be powerless to improve specification quality and find out you built exactly what was asked but you were asked for the wrong thing.

The silos were horrible. Devs were often as bad as BAs, dev’s just were just crapping on the testers instead. Spare a thought for the production ops person at the very end of the chain. Here comes 3 months of developer work in one weekend and no it doesnt work but we’re still going live because the entire tech org is invested in this release. Now you have smaller squads, you can postpone a release without it looking bad on the top person and thus affecting your career prospects.

In agile models you have the power to fix crap processes that don’t work. You can call out any BS on the retrospective and make it super visible when things are being swept under the rug.
By "ceremonies", are you referring to daily standups? And/or something else?
One thing that's for sure is that Agile completely shifted the culture of software engineering, and generally in a good way. I am very thankful for that, and I think that this is where Agile has done its job.

Then, the problem with frameworks like Agile is that smart people will use them wisely, and less smart people will try to apply the concepts without really grasping the ideas and not really gain anything out of it.

But you can't really prevent people from reading the book, and do stand-up scrum meetings and sprints and shit...

Unless someone comes up with something else (which most likely will be equally twisted) Agile is here to stay. I just wouldn't mind watching conversations about Agile die.
I was exposed when it was still eXtreme Programming (back when "extreme" was the most nineties adjective you could have) and didn't much care for it then.

I keep hearing it touted as this kind of universal cure-all but I just do not think it is applicable everywhere. On a personal level, the more any given thing is touted to me as the solution for any and all problems, the more suspicious I grow. The more fervor, the more I draw away. The more cultish it seems (convert, adhere, rituals, special names, and then finally the narcissism of small differences in practice as exemplified by that old Emo Williams routine), the less I want to participate.

The more I have seen it shoehorned into places where it seemed ill-suited, the more this was revealed to me, yet the evangelism continues. Nothing like watching the tape backup guy, suffering from a flare of gout, hobble over to a room to perform his "stand-up" routine to hammer that home. Of course, we "probably weren't doing it right," but the more I have seen the slavish adherence to the strictures of Agile the more it seemed like this was an exercise in polishing a boss' resume so that he could say he had done The Things when he went elsewhere.

Reader, he did.

Perhaps the Agile that can be critiqued is not the eternal Agile.
The “Star Wars” Collection
We've played a couple of games in both TTS and Tabletopia. Neither became a favourite.

Superficially they are indeed very similar, you're getting a 3D simulated world with the board game in it, and then a clumsy way to interact with that world.

We did not find (not sure if any exist) rules enforcement implementations for Tabeltopia. Every game we tried we had to understand and enforce any rules, and the physics engine is arguably an obstacle rather than assistance as it neatly allows you to drop cards where they can't go, flip cards you shouldn't see, resize counters or accidentally stack them when that's not useful....

Big upside to Tabletopia: It runs in browser. If a person in your group has a company laptop that's locked down to do Office and so on, chances are it can't run Steam (and so TTS isn't possible) but it can run Chrome and thus Tabletopia works.

Definitely the biggest contrast is to BGA. BGA is the place to go if you want rules enforcement and aren't happy to stick with one game you all enjoy. But you won't get any of the mechanical joy if that's important to you. If you actually enjoy making change with monopoly money, BGA discards that because their rules enforcement just turns the amount of money (cows, glory, mana, whatever) into a number instead. Little wooden cubes become small red squares on the screen that appear exactly where the designer put them, you can't balance them or line them up how you want, because that isn't part of the game rules.

Personally I am now spending several hours every single week on a variety of games at BGA and maybe one session of TTS Gloomhaven if we can face it.

To me video conferencing isn't essential. We usually run a Hangout for live games, but in practice you care mostly about the voices. It's satisfying to hear another player say "Aw, I wanted that" when you take away an option you suspected they wanted, and it's easy to say "Sorry, Jenny is screaming, back in five" and put the headset down compared to having to type all that with a child screaming.
Japan already has formal stigmatizing of groups: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burakumin ... this is how caste systems develop.

Burakumin: "They were originally members of outcast communities in the Japanese feudal era, composed of those with occupations considered impure or tainted by death (such as executioners, undertakers, workers in slaughterhouses, butchers, or tanners), which have severe social stigmas of kegare (穢れ or "defilement") attached to them."

Add to this now "medical professionals".
Since businesses are the ones who employ software developers, 'Agile' is the only Agile that matters because that's the definition the people who pay money use.

We can talk all day about principle philosophical differences and what is/isn't 'agile,' but there has been a consensus from businesses in industry that 'agile' is 'Agile.'

Agile has become an excuse for terrible planning and offloading more and more work with ever increasing responsibilities to developers. At some point, enough professionals will reject following these terrible frameworks through different mechanisms. We're definitely not there yet, unfortunately.
> To all the people jeering for Agile's demise, please provide a superior alternative.

The goal of Agile is to let smart people work incrementally towards a somewhat nebulous goal. The ceremony that's arisen around that tends to be put in place by people who feel the need to manage, but don't know how to help their developers achieve that goal.

The alternative, as far as I've seen, is to hire smart, curious people, let them work closely with the end user, and pay them a lot of money. In this situation, the engineers will typically self-organize effectively.
Ask HN: Alternatives to YouTube?
YouTube has started heavily censoring coronavirus related content [1].

What less censorious alternatives are available?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22954765
For integers, x86 has had mul and div all the way back to at least the 8086. If you are looking for a cpu with no mul or div then look at the classic 6502/6510 as known from c64, nes, and many more contemporary machines.
Apparently it's some sort of dogwhistle, but I don't have my dogwhistle lexicon handy.
If same sex attraction exists biologically, not as a social construct than it's possible those genes are select as side effect of smth else that comes with it. For example, my gay friend is godlike attractive and one girl literally begged him to marry him in really sick ways and he's ended up marrying her to make his life easier and also because she was completely attached and attracted to us just because of how he looked. Few months ago, they had a kid. Has there been any studies which can shed some light on this, if gay people are more attractive on average or more intelligent?
Really tempted by the System76 machines but my worry is the screen res. My MBP (2014) has 2880x1800 and I really don't want to go down to something less crisp than retina.
In his "L.T. on git" talk at google Torvalds said he used SHA1 not for security, that that would be elsewhere but he called sha1 the best (I think even most secure) hash out there. The serious most well know sha1 flaw was not discovered at that time AFAIK so not sure what you mean by already known as weak. And the fact that 3 years later git has not been broken proves its security does not rely on sha1 alone. I did not even know they are working on a change but good and makes sense of course.
Sure!

Andrew Gelman (Stats at Columbia) had a commonly shared piece: https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/04/19/fatal-flaw...

Also a good dive into the issues: https://medium.com/@balajis/peer-review-of-covid-19-antibody...

Mercury News also had a good article covering a lot of this: https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/04/20/feud-over-stanford-co...

And yes, lots of twitter discussions from folks in the field, e.g. Natalie Dean of University of Florida https://twitter.com/nataliexdean/status/1251309217215942656
and Trevor Bedford (Fred Hutchinson) https://twitter.com/trvrb/status/1251332447691628545 and others.
> I'm not dying to hear what the person who invented Agile thinks we should do next

Agile has plenty of good ideas.

The problem is the almost religious following and, as you mention, the whole industry that has sprung up around it.

Even the initiators said that it was supposed to be a rough framework, to be adapted to your individual circumstances and teams. It was also a (much needed) counterpoint to the then prevalent waterfall model.

Now we have consultants, people strictly following something they read in a book or learned in a course, adhering to strict structure of meetings/processes, and even a big association with a single software product, Jira. ("You are doing it wrong!")

When you step back, a lot of the ideas make sense, and many teams will even implement similar workflows without having ever heard about "Agile".

Common sense has to prevail though.
Your "servicing" and "note" on a mortgage are two different things. The servicing right is who gets to interact with you and charge you money, but the owner of the note actually gets the money in the end (minus servicing costs). Those can be transferred independently, so you may keep sending checks to one place, but the actual owner may change over time.

One reason to sell a mortgage is to get the money back. Instead of making money slowly over 30 years, you get some fraction of that as a lump sum plus your principal is returned. Some investors want the steady payout for more, others want fast turnover for less.
There is a very clear heritage of the ideas of those Ancient Greek thinkers which have moved and influence world history. So I'm befuddled how you don't see sufficient evidence, nor what constitutes such sufficiency for genius?

I highly recommend you read Arthur Schopenhauer's essay On Philosophy at the Universities: https://archive.org/stream/23341891SchopenhauerParergaAndPar...

It is a persuasive essay that, no matter the resources, genuine philosophers or geniuses pursue the truth for its very sake. I concur that historically this has been the art of the aristocracy, but so what? Hypothetical or "unrewarded genius" doesn't amount to much in world history. Results do. And such fruit is actually the result of a cohesive organization of a society, ie genius is the goal of civilization proper. Plato and Descartes both had to have their trash picked up by somebody in order for them to impact us today.
Sure: Make games, not engines.

To break it down a little more: come up with a game you want to make. Start making it. You'll figure out how to make an engine as you start making your game.

To break it down even more: I wanted to impress an old girlfriend by making a clone of Galaga, cause she loved it as a kid. I decided to make Galaga in HTML5. I wanted to start by rendering the ship to the screen, so I went down that path until I could do it. How do I draw something to the screen on the web? Use Canvas - figure out how to reliably render a canvas element on the page and fill it a color. How do I draw an image? Draw sprites on the canvas - get a sprite of the ship then figure out how to draw it. How do I move the ship? Create a backing representation of the state of the game, then render the world based off that. I now have a simple game engine and an emerging game.

https://github.com/hoorayimhelping/Galaga5
Historically shocking, contextually maybe not so much.
Managers just want you to deliver on a predictable schedule.

Here's how you can solve your problem: Make as many tickets as you can think of, it doesn't really matter if they contain the essence of the problem or not, it just matters that there are many tickets associated with the task. Once you have your tickets, estimate them with as much padding as possible. If the manager complains that you're padding a ticket too much, make two tickets and split the estimate.

Once you have a big pile of tickets and estimates, you've bought yourself enough time to do the work. Go do the work, then mark all the tickets as complete. You'll figure out the edge cases as you go, as long as you've made enough tickets and time to do the job at a reasonable pace.

If you have extra time left over, get started on the next thing, improve your tooling, or try to help someone else with their tasks. If you don't have extra time left over, make more tickets next time.
I got to say I have given up worrying about why people are downvoting what I say, I do have a suspicion that I have a couple people who when they see my name automatically downvote - oh it's that guy again - although I don't think they search me out to downvote either.

on edit: at any rate I upvoted it as you're right, seems an encouraging nice message.
I don't get why people don't just buy their own beer and go sit in nature. You can even bring some friends. It is large masses of unknown people that we should avoid.
System76 does exist and they're laptops are good (I'm using one as my personal/development machine). I used there tech support for a desktop and they're quite responsive.

They're at little pricey (they're oem laptops with linux) but I would buy another, because I know the OS will work with the hardware with no fiddling. (They sell ubuntu but I'm using their POP-OS. ubuntu variant).

One of the Reasons I got it was because it wouldn't have games, but Black Mesa runs well on this notebook as it has a nvidia graphics.
I would say that there is "little evidence" that he was talking about Healight because his sentences are barely coherent but it does appear to be that he is referring to "injecting" UV light to "disinfect" the lungs which is what Healight is doing when you get past the exact words that I quoted.

Yes, I believe it is the media's responsibility to be more intelligent than the President in this case, which honestly shouldn't be very hard. Time and time again they are lowering themselves to Trump's level presumably to soak up that sweet sweet ad revenue
PostgreSQL Joins, Using on versus Where Clauses to Combine and Filter Data
NYC sidewalk map shows how most are too narrow for social distancing
> but the top comment of this thread for Lubuntu 20.04 LTS:

The one I replied to said Ubuntu not Lubuntu. Big difference.
Another huge aspect of "bad luck" is just meeting unusual numbers of bad people. By that I mean people who have an intention to harm you in some way or another instead just being the typical look out for oneself or even the more empathetic caring kind of person. You dont really choose the people you run into but there are absolutely skills you can learn in order to deal with them in healthy ways.

A significant portion part of someone's career is based on politics and surprisingly little on skill.
All of your statements make perfect sense. I was more addressing the comments that were acting like Windows was some kind of toxic sludge they had to swim through to get to a linux install.
Great story. Thanks for sharing!
Just want to say I love your project, and shout loudly about it to whoever will listen. :P It's very exciting! Thank you for your work.
What do you mean by slower? Is it the new TGS solver you’re talking about (which is optional and really doesn’t need to be on for games)?

You’re right that it seems like Unreal and Unity are ditching PhysX for something else (Unreal for the new Chaos engine, Unity for their new DOTS engine in collaboration with Havok). I’m just surprised that PhysX‘s performance problems had something to do with the move.
XP, and several other processes, identify the problem as a mismatch between the goals of the developer and the actual customer (not necessarily the end user). Management doesn’t figure prominently in the solution which is probably one reason why a different form of Agile is usually chosen. I also don’t know why businesses are so reluctant to have their customers involved in software development. But you’re definitely right, when all the incentives align on the axis of management and their needs, you get garbage.

This is not to say that management isn’t useful or necessary, but they are a facilitator of work, not the patron.
I’m confused, can you clarify you are referring to?

Edit: In what way was Trump “selected” and not elected by the rules laid out in the constitution?

Edit2: So not selected, and yes entirely by the rules we’ve always used.
Why do you need automatic fallback? You simply define in the config file, for each peer, which protocol version to use. Then it's up to the config file distribution process - whatever it is that you do - to make the appropriate version settings, at the exact same time as they set up the public keys. The essential thing is that each peer has a fixed expectation of the security to use, rather than trying to negotiate it on the wire, which leads to downgrade attacks.

[Disclosure, I'm a Tailscale co-founder] ...and if you use Tailscale, it takes responsibility for the key exchange part. So we can tie protocol version settings to long-term state (eg. ratcheting up versions for each old node; not letting new nodes use old versions at all).
Why doesn't your team have a process (integration tests, etc) that makes it impossible to check in something like `input_array[0]` without breaking a build? Why is it allowed to directly push to master?

How does the old saying go? The road to where is paved with good intentions? You could engage in moralizing against "carelessness" and "neglect" and presuming that a teammate somehow cares more about watching Netflix than doing their job (which they presumably outperformed other candidates to even get), and maybe that will make you feel better. You are the good, careful, model employee, and that other one -- they're careless, slovenly, apathetic and lazy. But if that's the case, how did they get past the door in the interview process? If the whole company is like that, why do you work there as opposed to a company where the bar is higher? Something does not add up. In all likelihood, your explanation is a rationalization and not the most obvious answer, which is that your process could be improved but it hasn't been because such investments are not viewed by your companies executives as improving the long term bottom line to be worth the short term investment cost.

Take a look at history and figure out how companies in the industry have solved this problem before by building more bulletproof runbooks, processes and tools. These companies, as they approach enormous scale, necessarily have to determine how to deal with employee reversion to mean. It turns out, surprisingly, that process eats good intentions and care for breakfast. You'd be surprised at how quickly those good intentions become useless if your company is successful and you hit hypergrowth and scale. It's ironic that for a profession where it is so tractable to automate away mundane or repetitive tasks, where we study spacetime complexity in data structures and algorithms, that we have so many practitioners that default to witch hunting and moralizing and seem unable to apply spacetime complexity or procedural analysis to their own software development lifecycle. I expect to see this trend change as our still young industry continues to mature.
“but I really don't understand the hate people have for Windows 10”

The constant dialling home to Microsoft? I’ve not used Windows since Vista but my partner uses W10. She’s working from home on it and my PiHole is working overtime. W10 is not just dialling home to Microsoft but also to all the preinstalled software such as Netflix which she never ever uses.

It’s her work machine so I can’t cleanse it of the various crap on it but I’m intrigued to know if the telemetry/updates/nags can be blocked on the machine rather than via a PiHole (and by blocked I don’t mean any Microsoft supplied privacy options via a UI toggle switch or two).
The point isn't to build categories for their own sake, the point is that categories allow us to group and exclude concepts based on whether they have similar "rules" or "feels". If you're designing a new thing or analyzing an old thing, it's useful to be able to sort through which heuristics and rules will likely apply to the thing you're examining.

In other words, if we have generally good advice about how to make a game fun, and you know that advice is predicated on a certain definition of "game", it is easier to figure out whether or not that advice applies to the thing you're building.

Rosewater's categorization of Minecraft as a toy rather than a game is a really good example:

If you're a game designer, and you think of Minecraft as a game, there are a lot of game rules that Minecraft breaks. Its progression system is wack. It has a lot of design elements that don't really feed into its core loop well. And part of understanding why those "flaws" don't matter is understanding that Minecraft is working under a completely different set of design rules than a game like Doom.

So one of the things we do as designers is we add distinctions between different types of experiences that allow us to make rules that are more consistent and predictable. If you're able to split computer experiences into different categories and say, "Minecraft and Doom are fundamentally different", then it's easier to come up with rules around flow, and progression systems, and difficulty curves, and unity of theme.

As to why we need those rules in the first place? Because we want to make good games. Without narrowing a design space or coming up with heuristics to filter out good and bad ideas, designing games is just too stinking hard. There are always going to be exceptions to those rules, and that's fine. But the goal is still to give us mechanisms that in most cases allow us to talk about why an idea does or doesn't work.

This is the same reason why games build player archetypes. Basically no one fits into a single player archetype, and there's heavy overlap between them, and there are players that defy all of the archetypes we come up with. That does not mean that player archetypes aren't extremely useful as design tools. People think about classification systems like they're some kind of moral or philosophical separation between objects. They're not, classification systems are entirely pragmatic, practical tools.

All categorizations are wrong. No maps are completely accurate. But game design is an extremely fuzzy field, and it's hard to figure out what makes "good" design when your subject is so broad that literally every rule you come up with has exceptions. As a designer, I have multiple classification systems that I use for games and players, and some of them outright contradict each other. But all of them are useful lenses that I look through when I need to think about design decisions.