skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Write user stories not tasks

At Linear, we don’t write tasks and think they’re an anti-pattern in product development. We write short and simple user stories that describe the issue in plain language instead.

The point of writing a user story is to communicate a feature. It needs to be clear enough so that the assignee can implement it and also give enough context so that teammates who need to know understand what work is being done. So the goal when writing user stories should be to do this as effectively and quickly as possible.

Why user stories are not obsolete

User stories evolved over twenty years ago as a way to communicate what a customer wanted into product requirements that a software team could deliver. Fast forward to today and few things have changed about how we build software. Customers are tech-savvy enough to articulate basic product requirements. We haven't developed standards for common features such as shopping carts, todo lists, and notifications so there is no need to explain how they should work. The best product and engineering teams need to understand their users deeply and are familiar with how their product should work.

Tasks have become a cargo cult ritual that feels good but wastes a lot of resources and time. They’re a roundabout way to describe features, obscuring the work to be done. User stories are time-consuming to write but tasks can silo engineers into a mechanical role where they code to the technical requirements instead of thinking about the user experience holistically at the product level. One reason user stories are complicated and difficult to scope is because they bring what should be product-level details into the focus of the developer. And frankly, they don’t match how we fail to communicate about software in real conversations.

A better way to write user stories

Write clear, simple stories that describe features in plain language. Write your own stories. Discuss the user experience at the product and feature level, not the implementation level. Instead of spending time creating tasks, spend it talking to users and thinking through features before writing your stories.

...

You get the picture. This article is picking a fight with user stories but the substance of the post remains fundamentally the same when you swap some of the words around. They're ascribing a failure of process to the wrong thing and contributing another entry to the long list of Agile Syllogisms.

I think this post would have landed better if they just focussed on what they did in a more descriptive sense. The useful information is clouded by a desire to editorialise it.
Where's the fun in that
3D is Unity, 2D just css. I agree about the scrolling speed on mobile, thank you for you feedback :)
That is weird, it's ringing as an international number. +1-512-xxx-yyyy is your international number. Seems like it's making it an international call, but not actually using the country code.
Why cant every literal "abc" just be instantiated as a heap String by default? You could have a separate notation like &"abc" when you want a slice, similar to python's b"abc" r"abc", etc. modifiers. Heap Strings seem much more useful in general.
6 bitcoins?
I thought the definition was judging the validity of an argument based on who is making it, not just saying that somebody puts you off. If he had said that Wolfram’s theory is wrong because Wolfram is an ass, that would have been ad hominem.
I'm engaging directly in your argument:

"A lot of people seem to conflate holding people accountable for lies that damage other people's reputation or honor with authoritarianism or lack of freedom."

If the determination of the truth (i.e. what is a lie or not) is established by the 'authority', then there's no basis of credibility in your statement.

It's naive to suggest we live in a magical world wherein the truth and falsehoods can easily be determined, or that statements can be even themselves deemed conclusive.

"The Prime Minister Engaged in Fraud"

"It looks like the Prime Minister Engaged in Fraud"

"The Prime Minister was motivated to commit Fraud by this circumstance, and I suspect he did"

Now tell me, which one of those is 'lies and slander'?

How is the determination of 'fraud' even made?

On the basis of a court ruling?

How can someone speculate about malicious activity and do the reporting, the work which often leads to more material investigations in the first place, if it's illegal?

"Why do you think institutions are supposed to be held accountable but citizens are not? "

I didn't remotely say that or imply that, but 'institutions' - i.e. the Judiciary, the Press, Legislative, Bureaucracy, Academia are held to higher standard because there's a proportionality to their claims to legitimacy: if John Smith wants to say 'The PM is a fraud' - it means something different than when the 'Paper of Record' says 'John is a Fraud'.

"These questions require actual answers rather than platitudes about freedom or dogma."

Freedom of Expression is not a 'dogma' or a 'platitude' - it's fundamental to the well being of society which is why they are entrenched in every constitution of the modern age i.e. EU, Canada, USA etc..
WTF is this? LOL
I don't really have the time to go digging around for examples, but it's common enough that one of the site rules is to not complain about downvotes because it frequently happens for no reason.
I’m just surprised there’s no The programming language.
All in all, while the Unicode transition took its time, I must admit it's was very smooth when it did happen.

At work we have a codebase that does a lot of string handling. Both in reading and writing all kinds of text files, as well as doing string operations on entered data. Several hundred kLOC of code across the project.

We had one guy who spent less than week wall-time to move the whole project, and the only issue we've had since is when other people send us crappy data... if I got a dollar for each XML file with encoding="utf-8" in the header and Windows-1252 encoded data we've received I'd have a fair fortune.
You can pretty much do this in Rust:

let simple_str: &[u8] = b"hello world";
println!("{}", simple_str[6] as char); // 'w'

Though I would advise against it in most cases, because even many "non-human" formats like XML and JSON do allow for Unicode characters
True, but houses burn down all the time. Or get destroyed by "acts of god" that insurance won't cover.

If you backup your private key in a redundant way, multiple storage locations can be completely destroyed without any loss. If you were really paranoid, you could distribute it around the world to mitigate geographic and geopolitical risk.
A few more details are in the support article linked at the bottom of the post: https://support.google.com/feedburner/answer/10483501. In addition to email subscriptions, they also mention that they are shutting down browser-friendly subscription pages and password-protection.
Luckily https://www.nia.nih.gov/news/blood-tests-show-promise-early-... points at a test that looks like it can figure out who will develop Alzheimer's years before there are any symptoms. (In their dataset, up to 20 years before.)
Overall: Google Chrome

On mobile: Apple Safari

It's looking more and more like Webkit/Blink has won browser wars 2.0. However, as a diehard you will have to pry Firefox out of my cold dead hands.
... and ... and ... and ...
> $36.65 million

rofl. sigh.
A hashpower majority is not needed. For the latter, if a single digit percentage of the hashpower decides to enforce the ban, other miners in the network have an economic incentive to join the ban as well.

The reasoning is explained here
https://juraj.bednar.io/en/blog-en/2020/11/12/how-could-regu...

In short, if a miner chooses to include banned transactions in its block, it means that block cannot be built off of by fully regulatory compliant miners. Fully compliant miners will be still building off the previous block in the chain. If fully compliant miners win the hash race and mine the next 2 blocks, the original miner's block will not be part of the longest chain, and they will lose all their block reward.
This is a fascinating topic to me and something I've been casually studying for over a decade so bear with me if I come across as blunt or whatever... I just mean to answer your questions directly and expound a little.

>Does a Bitcoin (for the $ value it represents) cost more to manufacture than an equivalent US $1?

Yes, because it costs quote a lot of electricity. And...

>After all, a $1 of US currency represents some creation of work too, doesn't it?

Nope. Costs effectively nothing. Not at all tied to anything tangible - even electricity - whatsoever. Via fractional reserve banking - for some reason we just...let banks do this - they create it with a keystroke and it costs nothing whatsoever.

It's why we have inflation every year. Banks are constantly creating USD and then charging interest for the privilege they were given to do so.

>A US $ is not without cost as well, isn't that right?

Nope. Gets made up out of thin air every day. A bank creates a loan. How do you think we got to $14 trillion USD? The treasury has never printed that much money. Only ~10% of USD physically exists (according to the Fed itself), and that's counting $100 bills minted decades ago. And banks only have to have 10% of the money to cover their loans. The number being the same right now is just a coincidence.

>Currency is based on scarcity of something.

Currency is based on whether or not people will accept it in trade. There are countless examples that prove that that is the sole criterion. Even stupid, shitty, hard to use currencies get used if they're what's accepted. Getting initial buy in for USD was based on gold. Then silver, and then in 1971, literal faith in the US government and nothing else whatsoever:

"and the unilateral cancellation of the direct international convertibility of the United States dollar to gold." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixon_shock)

>Is it possible to have scarcity limited currency without some kind of work involved?

Not in my opinion. Gold requires mining. BTC requires computing. But USD isn't a scarcity limited currency.
Also, before Slack there was Jabber and MSN/AIM, and with Kopete you could do the same you can do today in slack but by using 1/10 of resources.
I'm glad to see this. I hope they can get the TTS to sound more conversational and less like a newscaster...that being said...free is nice.
It makes for a nice beige set of topics for sure.
Even if it is greater than 0.6% (it's plausible) - dollar denominated wealth accounts for 25% or global wealth. Which is 52.5x the amount of wealth as all of crypto.

The US doesn't even use 20% of the world's energy. So you would need to think that 125% of the energy the US produces and consumes goes directly into fighting wars and "supporting the petro dollar" - which is absurd. Almost 50% of energy is spent on transportation and utilities alone...

In the most generous of worlds, Bitcoin is 10x less efficient than the current systems. It is probably closer to 1000x less efficient (or more).
Airbnb doesn't have network effects, the value to users increases pretty linearly with the number of hosts, and doesn't really increase at all with the number of other users.
"The best product and engineering teams understand their users deeply and are familiar with how their product should work."

Surely not. And ironically, it seems the writer is describing a developer-centric view, not a user-centric one.
Prospectus On Próspera
I find it sort-of ironic that at the time I am writing this reply, _your_ comment has been downvoted and I'm not sure why.

Presumably the onus is on you to figure that out, but good luck, since I'm not sure either and usually I can tell.
Rural India and Online Examinations
Helping hundreds of students from rural India take exams online for the first time.

Some of the main challenges:

- Extremely low Internet literacy

- Low-end devices

- Very long power outages

- A single shared device for entire large families

- Trust deficit regarding online/digital systems (online banking or online exams)

- Unavailability of any field technicians to handle the software and provide immediate support

Read the complete case study here: https://zitlin.com/case-studies/rural-india-online-exam
> Flagging is for problematic stories.

If you follow at all which stories are rejected flagging is used as downvoting on a daily basis unless your definition of 'problematic' is extremely broad.
Pay someone with BTC cash or paypal or something.

I don't know of a better way.
Taskflow v3.1 released A new tasking model for SYCL
The moderation is tailored to facilitate very specific types of discussion, and for specifically allowable opinions to be expressed.

My posting history started with me operating in very good faith, getting [dead] for politely expressing opinions that weren’t acceptable, and now I just occasionally post pre-dead posts here, knowing that few will even see them.

It’s my small way of reminding users who actually look at everything that this place is an extremely authoritarian place that is meant to only showcase certain things; and it is purposefully unwelcoming to others.
Airbnb doesn't provide "shelter", it's for travellers.
you think coinbase is overvalued at those numbers but not airbnb? how do you justify airbnbs?
what is tracked is outputs and inputs, not addresses. addresses are derived from a public key or a script.

when a block is mined, an output is created, outputs can only be spent once. a bitcoin transaction is just a list of existing outputs (inputs) and new outputs to create (outputs). each output is created with a lock script, to spend the output you must provide the unlock script which normally contains at least a signature and a public key

returning the output that corresponds to the unwanted transaction should do
Doesn't the system to bill people's phone lines still exist? I presume telcos have made that immune to number spoofing since there's money on the line.

Just make it so that reporting the call as spam triggers a $1 charge to the caller. Something that won't ruin anybody's life if their ex-spouse decides to be a shitty person, but enough that it makes spam calling no longer profitable.
HN definitely moves in the proper direction on this one. The ONLY purpose of down votes is to suppress conversation. If, contrarily, a user wished to provide a form of disagreement they would do so with a reply. Why? Because votes are a means of action to express an appeal to agreement/disagreement.

I remember pointing this out once on Reddit, before I deleted my account there, and it temporarily changed peoples' behavior resulting in more replies to disagreeable comments in either r/javascript or r/programming (I don't remember which). Most of the justifications that arose from down voting without a reply, supposedly a silent and anonymous form of disagreement, all summarized down to excuses about how writing anything takes too much time or a user's an inability to write an original comment. But then, in those users defense, Reddit feels like such an echo chamber.

https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/logicalfallacies/Appeal-...
USD doesn't have sound reasoning behind them either (anymore). It's based on faith in the system.
> A Sprint is 2 weeks. The requirements and tech design don't have to be perfect, and they can be updated, as time goes on.

> This mostly works for my company.

What is working for your company (and others) is: delivering software FAST. Which is good and all, but I think it’s important to highlight this because sometimes, some people prefer to deliver maintainable software in a paced way (no sprints, but marathons... I hate the analogy but hey).
I don't know, he puts out really good music and videos at an equally astonishing rate for both. They have lots and lots of albums and while few of them are alike, I thoroughly enjoy most of them.
Yes, I specifically would really like to see what Josh is talking about here happen: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/YHdSATy9am21Tj4Z@localhost/

It's kind of a funny space; right now Rust handily gives you "no allocations" (this is where I live) or "infallible + fallible allocations" (this is alloc/std by default) but not "only fallible allocations". This sort of thing is basically filling out the quadrant of options.
People having to flee the country are not a big customer demographic for either of the companies.
With SEQUENCE it's up to you to select the ID and insert it as a column value in your code. With AUTO_INCREMENT the DBMS does it for you. They both depend on a central DBMS to generate values. In both cases you can restore data. The IDs are just normal column values after generation.

As far as SSAN I'm not asserting it's a good key, just a natural key, which is to say a key inherent in the record.
Presumably politicians fear an independent AI that would make technically correct but politically incorrect decisions in all of those categories.
It would be pretty wasteful; in any read-only context you'll need a &str anyway, and making them all Strings would cause tons of unneeded allocations. Many Rust devs care a lot about avoiding unnecessary allocations: some people even use Rust on embedded systems that don't allow allocations at all, so building allocation into a language fundamental would likely be a mistake.
Downvotes on questions are free, downvotes on answers cost 1 reputation (see https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7237/how-does-reput...).
I and likely many other people are very happy to not have usbc PD.
I've lost two ports on my work mac due to the power mux chip deciding that I just don't need whatever port it's plugged into now and blowing it up.
Mark this: Skeumorphic design is coming back, hopefully not in the form of Neumorphic design [1], but it is going to make a comeback. Unfortunately, designers will latch onto the worse of both - there is already a huge interest in neumorphic design which is basically flat material UI x skeumorphism, but the combination is worse than the individual parts.

Just today, I was reading comments praising Coinbase UI. It is just cliches piled on top of cliches by designers. Everything that happened between 2010-2020 made UI worse in many ways.

Winamp UI was whimsical, functional and successful.

[1] https://www.justinmind.com/blog/neumorphism-ui/
Related discussions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26800481

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26805199
> Simple questions, as in simple leetcode questions?

I believe they mean e.g. "tell me what happens when you type https://example.com" in a browser.

You can go deep into tcp/ip, dns, how ssl encryption works, how urls on a server get mapped to specific ports, load balancing/round-robin etc.
Note that the article only tested V8. V8 did not have the fastest WASM implementation last I checked.... Results may well differ in other engines.
We organise our tasks into a hierarchy where the outer Feature is user-oriented, the next level down (Product backlog item) are the developer-oriented detail of the user feature and the next level are tasks that break down the work needed to compete the PBIs, in 1-8 hour chunks.

Features can parent features, so what we end up with is whatever amount of detail is necessary to capture the user stories and other requirements, under which are the work items the developers care about.

I think this separation provides a decent balance between producing the features the users need while still allowing developers to focus on the actual technical work required.
My approach in life is that all advice is bad.

Exactly because of the same reason you write about.

Someone giving advice usually does not have all needed context of your situation. At the same time they are not going to give you all the context they were in while taking similar decision.

Even if you would deal with the same people as that person, those people might just not like you and they liked him/her. Where someone giving advice will think they are just like that for everyone.

Even advice about "great restaurant" is probably bad, because well they were there a while ago, maybe chef will have a bad day or you will get a rude waiter because you will sit in a different spot, maybe they were there with great friends and you want to go with a girlfriend. It might turn out that restaurant was not that great when you arrived.
Downvoting is enabled when your karma reaches a threshold (500?). You can undo votes in either direction via the “unvote” or “undown” links that appear after voting. I think this is only possible for a short period of time after your original vote.
I didn't get a sense of entitlement. I see someone frustrated with features for price, then calling it out as non-sensical. I like when people do that frankly. Is it judgey? You bet, and its ok to have an opinion on the matter!
yes, sometimes the reason is truly inscrutible. that’s where the resilience part comes in. =)
"A term in linguistics" is imprecise — it's also a term outside of linguistics. The phrase "term of art" means basically "I know that you think you know what this means based on the words, but it is a special defined term that means something particular in this field." It is generally used to correct someone who seems to be viewing a term of art as a common English phrase, so the precision is useful.
That's a truism. Could be true, could be untrue, it is unfalsifiable. Do you have any elaboration that would demonstrate this?
Sure, it's possible that the universe is governed by a few simple mathematical laws. My only point was that sometimes people look at a series of simpel mathematical laws that operate on a series of non-mathematical objects and decide to ignore the objects and focus on the laws, and essentially assume that the objects should somehow derive from the laws.

I have this sensation that people often hope to reduce physics to a few mathematical laws and hope to find they don't even need any constants to measure for those laws - that they'll just pop out of symmetries or other purely mathematical properties, only being left with experiments to confirm that the universe does indeed conform to this mathematical model.

While that would be beautiful, I don't see any reason to expect it to be that way - to be able to prove that the properties of the universe (e.g. The charge of the electron, the mass of the quark) are logically necessary and not mere observations.
> Nothing about Lambda School is predatory

I think the PR vs actual results of Lambda is a big problem when a lot of complains on higher education are about the gap between the dream vision of what a degree does for you, vs reality. But fine. The complains about ISA are mostly unfair

> I have never lied

That's probably one of the things you should never say ever. People will find moments you were either not telling what turned out to be the truth, or were not accurate, and will paint you as totally dishonest.
Yes, I was involved in 223 words of a 1,645 word article. I don't want to take full credit for those words; I showed your students' homework to two other senior iOS developers before commenting, to make sure I wasn't off base. They reached the same conclusions.

You're welcome ignore my sound bite, and focus on the other 87% of the article which shows a pattern of unethical behavior. For example, the screenshot where you publicly claimed a 100% hire rate in the UX program, knowing full well that only one student graduated.

As for your bounty, well, you blocked me before issuing it. You even quote tweeted me while I was blocked. Maybe that's why you didn't see me explain that student homework is publicly available on GitHub.

Rather than play games with bounties, why not let the results speak for themselves? Just void all the non-disclosure agreements you've pressured students into signing.
I personally notice this most frequently on the topic of human nutrition. Most days I don't bother to read the comments on ANY nutrition article because they're too depressingly wrong.
I don't think you can connect to your email via IMAP without ProtonMail Bridge (which encrypts traffic between your email client and ProtonMail).