skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
IMO Agile has become regulatory capture. It's a means by which non-engineers can extract value from a booming market which doesn't directly benefit from their skills.

That being said. I think there is a lot of wisdom in the original agile manifesto. The core principles are solid, but the methodology has clearly been co-opted by consultants and supported by management looking to increase the headcount under themselves.

I've often struggled to understand why my team is made up of only 20% engineers with the other 80% pretending to create value by holding meetings to tell engineers what to build next when I feel like it's your clients that should be doing that.

Ultimately it's engineering that becomes the constrained resource which leads to technical debt in favor of pushing out product's features.

I would venture a guess that most engineers have used (critically) more software in their lives than any non-technical person driving the development of the product. Why then are engineers not the most consulted people on the efficacy and value of new features? I think there is a big myth out there that engineers are incapable of directly handling client feedback.
Right, but my statement was that the domain would be low level or performance intensive code -- do you disagree that in that domain they are equally simple?
I've heard another theory on Spain: huge Mar 8 international women's day demonstration in Madrid. No wind, 70% humidity, 13C/55F.
Just install Debian instead of disabling all the stupid stuff from Canonical.
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/04/dont-wear...
> Freedom is the premise of responsability.

Is it? Maybe it's the opposite? Citation needed.
Sigh. ok then let me explain that last comment.

It's called a network externality. Microsoft achieved this with piracy based market penetration of dos and it worked great for them and they've built on it ever since.

Shuttleworth understood the importance of getting established as being popular when he launched and would press install disks, as many as you asked for, and ship them to you at his own cost. As one example of nakedly going after market share and spending resource to do so.

Bug #1 in the ubu bug tracker is literally "windows is the most popular os."

Separate to the marketing, which is worth discussing on this site because some of us actually care about what works and why so wish to discuss it, let's talk engineering decisions.

Between 2 choices that are technically about equal. Choose the one that is more popular. Many feet trample more bugs. Better support. More likely to be around after $time_period. If it needs to work with something else, the managers of the something else project will likely suppor the more popular first etc. Obviously popularity is not the only concern but it really does count for something, ignore it as a dimension in your decision process at your peril. I use linux, and ubuntu as it happens on this laptop. I'm aware windows and osx are more popular and that popularity makes certain things easier. For /my/ purposes and to /my/ taste linux and ubuntu are worth paying that cost to have installed here and I'm very comfortable with that decision.

Just quietly, perhaps people who don't care for business decisions and engineering decisions are on the wrong website? There's plenty of places "boosters" can go to do that.
This is also how iOS has worked since forever. I think it's helpful, but not that helpful.

In practice, apps that want access to my contacts usually keep asking for access every time I try to do anything, until I eventually either relent to make the prompts go away or click allow by accident.

And that's me as a computer-enthusiast. I would bet money most normal people just hit allow always. Because it's easier.
It makes since that the Parent does not view WD actions as bad since they also did not view Apple's actions as bad.

Of course both companies are on my never buy list now, but some people have lower standards.
On Deck Fellowship #4. Thoughts?
The AUR is so transparent. If I want to see how the AUR package is getting built, ez, read the PKGBUILD linked right from the packages page. I was immediately turned off to using Snap because I couldn't find how the Snap was built and really who built it. No Thanks, that's not how I install software on my personal computer anymore, it's one of the main reasons I exited windows as soon as I started to learn about infosec and trust.
This painfully reminds me of the fact that @SeinfeldToday [0] is no longer updated. So many episode ideas!

> Jerry gets paranoid about his girlfriend’s past when her iPhone automatically connects to the wi-fi at Newman’s apartment.

[0] https://twitter.com/seinfeldtoday
> I often don't know what the shape of the problem is until I've built something.

This is the majority of estimation failures as far as I've seen. You can only "estimate" so far and then leave significant padding for all the other minutia that will likely creep in.
>The problem is that's a ridiculously uncharitable interpretation. I mean, is that what you actually believe the president was thinking?

Yes. If not outright recommending it, bringing it up as a somewhat viable possibility. Poison control hotlines have been fielding hundreds of calls asking if it is safe to ingest or inject disinfectant.

>The (hydroxy)chloroquine is example is also a non-issue. Trump correctly pointed out that this was a low-cost, long circulated drug with well understood risks, and that even if we don't yet know for sure if it works, if patients are dying from the virus, it makes sense for doctors to try it. I'm glad he shone a spotlight on it.

Those well understood risks include heart failure and blindness. Trump asked "What have you got to lose?" when saying "I think you should take it", and the answer is my sight and my life. There was no solid medical evidence at that time that chloroquine had any impact on coronavirus in vivo, and what we're finding now is that the null hypothesis is still the best supported in that regard, and that it causes an increase in all cause mortality, to the point where several studies have had to stop because the people they were giving hydroxychloroquine people were dying from heart failure, and the best completed study we have showed a nearly 3x increase in all cause mortality among those taking hydroxychloroquine vs. the control.

It was reckless and irresponsible, exactly like this.

>(motive unclear)

The motive is extremely clear. Trump is worried about a wrecked economy ruining his re-election chances. He wants to open the economy back up to improve his chances, so getting people to believe that we have a plethora of solutions to novel coronavirus helps him achieve that goal.
Now imagine going out shopping, you’re stopped at the door, and you test positive. What happens then? The government puts you in a car and sends you... back to your apartment? Sounds like a dystopian nightmare, to be honest.
It's interesting how underrepresented KDE is in the "big distros". While it makes sense that Fedora and Ubuntu ship GNOME, and there are "spins" of each that include different desktops out of the box, it still surprises me.
I'm not like on my knees begging for forgiveness, but I feel regret that an unfortunate thing happened.

To me it's a similar situation to if I, say, accidentally spilled your drink; something of that nature.

(I guess different people could attach different amounts of significance to the word. To me it simply means, "I feel sympathy that this unfortunate thing happened, and I wish it had not.")
They did not, Seagate did not disclose some of the their Desktop Channel drives were SMR,

the NAS, aka IronWolf, drives are all CMR, have always been CMR, and according to seagate will always be CMR

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/04/seaga...
Actually, I think its dumb.

A better saying would be, you should only use your target as a measure.

If your target is working software, measure how well the software works.
PB, can you elaborate on which other possible answers you've found for fast, easy, and abundant tests?

I'm working with a team that has a test that detects proteins associated with covid. It works like a pregnancy test and does not need a special scanner. Would love to discuss further.
WD got press because they shipped SMR drive for a use case that SMR can not work in and peoples drives failed to work properly
Debian did not send free CDs by mail
They only used SMR without disclosing for general purpose drives... while bad, not as bad... their IronWolf and IronWolf Pro (NAS) drives are not SMR.

As I mentioned in another comment, equally pissed WD did this on (albiet smallest size) a Black label drive. WTF would they do this on their "high performance" segment is beyond me, and completely unreasonable.
Condorcet Paradox
I'm well aware of browser fingerprinting, I take my privacy seriously and do my best to protect it.

Both on desktop and mobile I use an array of browser extensions to limit online tracking and fingerprinting. On Android I use Webapps Sandboxed Browser [1] to log in to webapps without leaking the logged in status to other websites.

I feel that with the web I get a fighting chance, while native apps are designed for tracking you.

[1] https://f-droid.org/app/com.tobykurien.webapps
Exactly. More testing is good, but actually stopping pandemic will require orders of magnitude more testing, which in turn requires a different approach to testing because the current way we do testing can't scale.
To your point, many businesses and facilities implement safety measures because they fear civil liability for preventable damages. I don’t think that’s likely in this case but if you can get most businesses and facilities to be mostly compliant most of the time, that might be enough.
strictly speaking, speed in and of itself isn’t the primary problem, it’s distracted driving in its many forms. speed only makes the severity of those accidents greater.
Hear hear. I imagine for dogfooding, LXD is only packaged in snap, so we can't use apt as the source anymore. After migrating, an upstream push to a 'stable' LXD snap channel introduced a regression that borked our environments, and there was no way to:

1. prevent machines in the fleet from pulling the broken LXD update

2. rollback broken machines to the previously working LXD version on the same channel, since it no longer existed in the Snap Store™.

What a joke! Now we're burnt on snap _and_ LXD.
Yep, it's a massive smell. When I looked at installing a snap I wanted to audit the build script but I couldn't find that anywhere. That's a big NO from me.
Weird. I'm on a ThinkPad x230 Ivy Bridge and Gnome (3.36) is butter smooth for me (Ubuntu 20.04, fresh install). I did the minimal installation though.
Very much agreed on both points -- which is why I think studying that is important. The tide is definitely against you, but you have a greater chance of fighting it if you know how it works.
The store does not permit you to enter and you are asked to go home and self-quarantine.
That "stupid comparison" shows their phone booting in 13s. I just timed my Pixel 3 and it boots in the same time. That's really impressive any way you slice it.
This seems like something that would detect symptomatic patients only, I haven't heard of any research showing that patients would see lowered oxygen saturation in the early stages of infection.

So for people who are going to get sick it would trigger too late, letting them spread the infection for days until this test catches it; and all the many infected people who will never develop any symptoms (perhaps up to a half of infected according to the Iceland tests?) would never 'fail' this test, but still go on infecting other people.
For this to work I think you would need a much stricter compliance than what is enforced in restaurant cleanliness.
Do note that stem is not one field. It contains medicine and biology but also IT and physics.
Likewise IT is not one field. UI/UX design is very different from infrastructure or backend work.
Many stats and research lump things together.
If humans were so extremely risk averse that a single case is unacceptable, wouldn't we have naturally isolated ourselves without requiring lockdown orders?
> it's a way to evaluate engineers, not create a good product.

Gonna play devils advocate here...would those two be mutually exclusive?

I feel there's a fundamental flaw in the garden of agile eden you initially described and that's trust...if you don't have it or lose it then gl trying to convince someone to essentially write a blank cheque for something they don't understand

If trust can erode a whole methodology then it's something to consider imo
> > The constant dialling home to Microsoft?

> My opinion on the matter: so what?

I understand that everyone has different opinions on this topic, but to me it's indefensible to allow this kind of surveillance without opt-in (or at the very least opt-out). I think it's a grotesque violation of privacy and does not consider the risks it poses to all the people who actually need or want privacy.
I don't think it's from a specific package. It's just the Daemon. I didn't really dig into why or what, don't have the time, and don't have the energy. I just get the message on the console when shutting down my laptop. Maybe it's updating something? Who knows.
Let's take a look at the arguments presented here.

> Code that mutates (changes) a variable is harder to reason about, and so easier to get wrong.

This is true when the mutation is "off the page" - in some other scope - but there is no mutation going on in this example that is hard to understand.

> An explicit 'for' loop is another common source of bugs.

The C-style 'for', where one manipulates a control variable which nominally denotes those elements of a set which one is concerned with, is very prone to error because of this indirection, but both versions of this code do this!

> The original snippet is longer because it’s doing boring, low-level work. More, boring, code is another source of bugs.

Maybe, but it is not demonstrated here. 'Boring' is an odd adjective here: how often have you seen the source code for a complete application, let alone anything larger, that you just can't put down? real-world code is about as exciting as a balance sheet, and for good reason.

> Long code with low-level operations like for loops and pushing values onto arrays is not expressive.

Expressiveness might be a feature of a language, but it is not something programs inherit merely by being written in a particular language. Programs are not poetry, and what we want from them is clarity. Expressiveness may help with that, but this example does not demonstrate it (maybe the author should have given us an example in APL?)

> The shorter, functional version has no variables, no mutation, and no explicit looping. It’s much shorter and easy to understand, once you’ve seen this style.

More of the same, with a touch of the Emperor's New Clothes thrown in to suggest that if we do not get it, we are just not sophisticated enough to understand.

Don't get me wrong: mutation is the cause of a lot of problems, and I would prefer for procedural languages to have variables const/immutable by default, but this sort of article just does not make the case. There must be several thousand articles like this written every year, all pretty much the same, with the author never asking whether their example actually makes the case they are claiming (I would guess because they are so convinced that they are right, they don't ask the question, and the existence of so many prior articles of the same sort (which they are effectively plagiarising) makes it seem obvious.)

To be fair, a decade ago I was in complete agreement with the precursors to this article.
I think the main point is that he's pointing toward a specific test being developed that is intended to facilitate greatly increased degrees of testing. It is of course generally understood that if we could test everyone daily (or even a large section of people regularly), it could allow the virus to be contained without such widespread distancing and shutdown measures.

> This test gives results in ten minutes using a small amount of saliva which is taken into a disposable tube and then run through a scanner.

> We’re planning to start operating the first scanner within a month. If all goes well, there will be millions of scanners deployed by this fall, ensuring that every school and essential business can reopen while remaining safe and virus-free.
Not only is it completely unrealistic at scale, the specific approach in the blog post is wildly impossible at all.

It requires screeners to directly manipulate saliva samples; this is dangerous in a pandemic. The assays referred to (lazily) in a Google Scholar search are almost overwhelmingly antibody assays; this does not allow the screener to differentiate between "has COVID-19" and "had COVID-19". Also, there is no evidence that the described test actually exists.

Finally, maybe irrelevantly, there is no way in hell you're going to get people at large to stand around for two hours a week waiting for test results. Ten minutes for a screening whenever you try to enter a public building; that's ten minutes to get into work, and we'll say ten minutes to get into another place each day. "But wait," I hear you say, "you only need to be screened once per day, and the first place can share that data with the next place." This plan was constructed by someone who is unfamiliar with medical records laws.

This is no "third solution." It's an engaging thought experiment, but it's just too far away from reality to get here from there.
You are handed a free mask that serves as warning people to give you space, and you are simultaneously logged as being infected with the CDC.
It depends on your definition of objective, which is part of the point. What it means to be "human" will color everybody's preferences. How many outliers does it take for a preference to become subjective rather than objective? The nature of the question, more than the question itself, will determine whether something is "subjective" or "objective".

Are there objective moralities? Yes, if you qualify what objective means--e.g., approximately universally manifest preferences among humans. The particular morals, or at least the simplest aspects[1], will then tend to fall naturally from that.

But if our benchmark of objectivity is something completely abstract, then objectivity is unlikely to exist. Pure math allows us to create infinite universes with consistent rules, yet only one of those universes can exist in any physical sense. As long as you can pick from those non-existent realities (which is pretty much what philosophers do), then you can always rebut any claim of universality, objectivity, etc; or even, conversely, assert objectivity of a finely detailed morality by simply predicating a claim on your universe of choice (see, e.g., Social Darwinism).

[1] We don't have a good track record of fully comprehending biological determinants, especially as applied to human behavior. The interplay of culture and biology is extremely complex, and we suck at even identifying which is which, let alone inferring anything complex from the distinction.
> I have not found any mainstream sources that advocate screening everyone every day

That's because we currently aren't capable of testing everyone who is obviously sick just once. If we got there, we wouldn't even be close to being capable of testing key personnel (like health care workers). If we got there we wouldn't even be close to being able to test everyone once. If we got there we wouldn't even be close to being able to test everyone every day.

You haven't heard any advocating for OR against it because it is so far from achievable that it isn't worth considering.
The USA could pay 6B/day for over a year of the current stimulus package. And that would be paying for the whole world. For the Netherlands it’s a similar amount (for a year) as what we just put in one airline. So it’s peanuts. Employers could Easily pay this for staff, people could pay it for events, etc.
I totally agree with your sentiment, but I wouldn't consider it a counter point.

I said luck isn't as _random_ as some people think it is. You're saying it plays a much bigger role than most people think it does.

These are not mutually exclusive.

It might even emphasize the point -- because it plays a bigger role than most suppose, it is important to understand how to best take advantage of poor (or superior) circumstances.
You're just offering your own special definition of "agile", that of course doesn't fit anyone else's definition, and especially any agile consultant's.

Of course, even more ironically, it doesn't fit the original agile manifesto:

Welcome changing requirements, even late in
development. Agile processes harness change for
the customer's competitive advantage.

https://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html
If we assume (key) that the probability of becoming infected is directly proportional to the number of people you interact with, and consider that the probability of spreading infection given that you are infected is obviously directly proportional to the number of people you interact with, the product gives a quadratic function:

[probability of becoming infected and spreading] = [probability of becoming infected] * [probability of spreading] ~ [people you meet]^2
It’s like the animation from all LucasArts games. If you haven’t played the others, you’re in for a humongous treat!

My favourites, in no particular order: monkey island 1 and 2, Indiana Jones, the dig, Sam & max, day of the tentacle.

There’s a project called ScummVM that allows you to play the games on Linux, windows and Mac.
FWIW, I always thank people for their bug reports on my open source projects, simply because they took their time and helped to improve the software. Also, it encourages to do bug reports in the future. As a solo maintainer, I rely on other people testing my code. I only apologize for a bug if it caused the user a great deal of inconvenience. Generally, my experience as an open source maintainer is rather pleasant because all of my users are very grateful that the software exists in the first place :-)
I was also wondering, and my initial guess was per year. Otherwise I can buy myself a 2TB HDD for the cost of 1-2 months of cheapest equvalent storage at AWS.

Sounds like a gold mine for Amazon at any rate.
When asking about the value that a certain occupation provides, I think it's fair to compare them to the rest of society and ask about the balance. I'm not bringing up the plight of other employees randomly to dismiss one argument, I'm asking for a defense of the stark difference in economic status.
There is almost a Feudal Lord timbre to the way some people talk about their employees. Must. Control. Everything. Especially. Minutiae. I've no idea how prevalent it actually is, especially since some practitioners are exceedingly loud about it. I really hope it's just confirmation bias.

At its worst I occasionally have to resist the urge to blurt out, "You know we live in a Democracy, not an Aristocracy, right?"
Eternal Return
If your oven is clean (and it will be after running it at 800 a few times) the smoke will stop
This test takes 10 minutes. That is probably still too long to implement at the doors for most places. It will end up creating a bottleneck of people waiting to enter the building and another avenue to spread the virus. Making the inside of the mall safe from the virus isn't going to matter if everyone is exposed to the virus while waiting in the 30 minute line to get into the mall.
Just like with Upstart (which existed well before systemd did), Snap existed before Flatpak, and in fact existed in another form (Click) for two years before that.

So it's wrong to say Canonical is guilty of NIH-syndrome with these two items, when their versions were out first.

Whether the tech is any good is another matter.