skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Scrum is a great idea and I use elements of it to manage how I organise my work. If I've blocked out a month to work on one piece of software then I will sit down with the relevant team and we'll agree together a "prioritised product backlog" consisting of a combination of new functionality and bugfixes.

However, what Scrum doesn't seem to address is how to deal with the bureacracy in a large organisation, especially where you don't have all the resources you need to meet demand from different teams who want you to do work for them.

It's been a fairly exceptional month, but I've been forced to switch projects 3 times recently owing to differences in opinion (at board level) about which piece of work is more important. This has obviously been less than ideal from an engineering perspective and has left me with just a couple of weeks to develop a fairly important web application.

I'm currently thinking about how I could extend the Scrum model to account for multiple projects but I'd appreciate any insights people here on HN have to offer...
Cool trick. Completely fails at discoverability though.
This is a nice enumeration of the details, but should we really be surprised at all that they're doing it? Compliance with CALEA requires that some of this information be retained in addition to the ability to tap communications.
This is a great podcast about exercise and the brain. Most interesting to me is how exercise directly increases brain plasticity :

http://brainsciencpodcast.wordpress.com/2008/03/21/brain-sci...
I'm not sure why I got downvoted. Maybe I wasn't clear enough about what I said? Here's a link to a blogpost I made 5 mins ago that explains what I meant properly -> http://blog.arunbalan.in/2011/09/28/hey-facebook-ive-got-a-q...
Sending a window a WM_DESTROY is like prank calling pretending to be the police
That's a pretty good sign that it's not really legal.
An HTML5 app is an app written using HTML5. A GTK app is an app written using GTK. A GTK3 app rendered on an <canvas> is still a GTK app.
Comparing Social Technology Adoption Rates Across The Web
The science and the chemistry of startups
I didn't do a literature search, but you are almost certainly correct.
FWIW here's a story about the scene, by a native Japanese.

It was more than 10 years ago when I joined Fujitsu's 3G cellular network project as a subcontractor. It was a huge complex project and I believe was one of the first 3G networks deployed in the world. So I expected I would work with teams of descent engineers.

Except most of them were not.

The subproject had dozens of 'engineers', but many of them had just finished vocational schools that didn't teach them even programming in C. To make it worse, the existing code base was the exemplar of bad code, e.g. each function had more than 3000 lines, function names were a letter and some digits and we had to consult some other documents to find out what they were expected to do, etc as well as more architectural design problems. In fact there I was able to find every horror story about software development.

Why did such a mess happen? One of the reasons was that the contractor company (who then outsourced some senior positions to subcontractors like me) were paid by the headcount of engineers it offered to the project. No kidding. So, in order to maximize the profit, the contractor made up a legion of those incapables who were paid less. Expectedly that made things worse, and Fujitsu thought it needed more engineers to solve the problems. Vicious circle.

I had tried to make the situation better, but the root cause was not in the technical side and I had no clue. The only nice thing for me was that during the personal research to improve the project I got to know Erlang, which was of course never ever used in the project because of the similar reasons mentioned in the article.
Show HN: Thinng - Instapaper for Products
Hey guys, I was really inspired when I saw the reception to HackerThings yesterday. We built an app over the course of a few weekends that we've been using personally but not had the time to promote, we're growing organically just via word of mouth & referrals currently.

Thinng is a place to create visual lists of all the products you might want to buy, or want people to buy for you. So technically you can use it to create your own list of HackerThings or whatever you are into.

Install our bookmarklet, use it when you're on a page with the product & save the image with a description/title into whichever list you want. You can update it with a custom image if you're like me & prefer higher quality images of products, but it's up to you!

Some of our users are using us as an inspirational source so technically we're not just limited to products.

All lists are currently public, but we are considering allowing private ones & the ability to follow individual lists if we get enough people using the app.

Happy to take any criticism or suggestions from the community. It would be good to get some feedback on what we can do better to drive users to add products (i.e. making the bookmarklet more prominent in the signup process).

Some example lists:

User page: http://thinng.com/thegyppo
Gadgets - http://thinng.com/list/6-gadgets
Things I wish I had at home - http://thinng.com/list/43-wish-i-had-this-at-home
I Love Tea - http://thinng.com/list/41-i-love-tea

We also built a custom landing page, this is for when we pitch to blogs/partners but it'll allow you guys to bypass Facebook only login that active to the public for now.
My personal list of verified and legit online jobs and leads
Ummmmmmm, this is a terrible article. They failed to point out that Porsche went heavily in debt in order to finance this "hack", and ended up getting bailed out and bought by VW.

It's ridiculous to say that Porsche "hacked the financial system and made a killing" when they essentially bankrupted themselves by doing so.
Have you tried MeeGo ever? I don't think so.
You're right to say that fast and functional is preferable to pretty, but both are examples of 'design' in the truest sense.

Good design really isn't about making things pretty, it's about enablind the user or customer. Usability is goal number one.
Are you using the HTTPS Everywhere plugin? Sometimes, the link is HTTP but your browser will go to HTTPS instead, so the original never gets marked as visited.
Microsoft signs “its most important Android patent license to date” with Samsung
How do you know that they think that scroogle is not a net minus to them?
Get to teh 1st page of GOOGLE - FAST & AFFORDABLE
For pages that are rendered using javascript, the text won't be in the cache. Sometimes clicking the "text-only" link at the top of the cached page helps.
Hey guys, I was really inspired when I saw the reception to HackerThings yesterday. We built an app over the course of a few weekends that we've been using personally but not had the time to promote, we're growing organically just via word of mouth & referrals currently.

Thinng is a place to create visual lists of all the products you might want to buy, or want people to buy for you. So technically you can use it to create your own list of HackerThings or whatever you are into.

Install our bookmarklet, use it when you're on a page with the product & save the image with a description/title into whichever list you want. You can update it with a custom image if you're like me & prefer higher quality images of products, but it's up to you!

Some of our users are using us as an inspirational source so technically we're not just limited to products.

All lists are currently public, but we are considering allowing private ones & the ability to follow individual lists if we get enough people using the app.

Happy to take any criticism or suggestions from the community. It would be good to get some feedback on what we can do better to drive users to add products (i.e. making the bookmarklet more prominent in the signup process).

Some example lists:

User page: http://thinng.com/thegyppo
Gadgets - http://thinng.com/list/6-gadgets
Things I wish I had at home - http://thinng.com/list/43-wish-i-had-this-at-home
I Love Tea - http://thinng.com/list/41-i-love-tea

We also built a custom landing page, this is for when we pitch to blogs/partners but it'll allow you guys to bypass Facebook only login that active to the public for now.
"used to"? Mind sharing what changed? Did you achieve what the OP tries to, did it happen by itself?
Not to mention the annoying +1 button after each link. I don't want to +1 unless I visited it, and I don't mind taking the extra step of sharing if I found a webpage interesting!
Why are you using a "hosting" company? Get a $20 VPS or spend more, or any of your inhouse boxen or whatever.

Sheesh.
Oh god, love it. The ultimate cure for disposable income.

One suggestion, which may be unpopular: As many cool "let's build stuff" ideas as I get when browsing sites like this, a tag or filter for stuff that is complete, ready-to-use products would be helpful, as I already have too many PCBs scattered around and most times should only be buying complete products that can actually improve my life directly.
Shouldn't all jocks be Einsteins?

All jokes aside, exercise reduces stress. Which can really affect your mental performance. I found that when I was working out consistently my academic scores were higher.

My number one tip to people going into university is to find time to workout 3 times a week to balance out the stress.
I can summarise this presentation as:

* Postgre 8.3 on AWS not good enough
-> lets try Mongo
* Mongo performance not good enough
-> lets try and fix this
* Oh shit we don't know what we're doing lets go back to Postgre
* There's a new version 9.0 this might sort us out
* No sadly Postgres 9.0 is no better
* Oh wait maybe Amazon performance is to blame
* Lets try it on real hardware
* Oh yes that's better
How much of that is due to Spotify, and how much can be attributed to IPRED[1]? (Either by people actually not downloading stuff or people not being counted due to services like Ipredator[2])

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPRED

[2]: https://www.ipredator.se/
Should you quit your job?
I would agree. With a population size of only 20 the algorithm is closer to being hill-climbing with random restart. Crossover can't do much if there isn't a lot of diversity in the population, and a small population can't be very diverse.

But it still worked.
I am underwhelmed with this post that shows that, metaphorically, when using a hammer vs. a screwdriver to insert a nail into wood, the hammer tends to perform better. Perhaps I missed some big discussion on how great MySQL performs on graphs, because it would seem the wrong tool for graph traversal.

And a stacked bar graph was probably not the best way to display these findings.

However, other posts on the blog (markorodriguez.com) are more interesting, such as the application of a graph traversal approach to a collaborative filtering recommendation algo.
"If every shop clerk, Starbucks barista, bus driver, electrician or other professional realized that there must be a better way of working, what would happen?"

That point comes up often, and personally, I think it works itself out. There will always be people that seek the stars and there will always be people that are content with a different lifestyle, including those you mentioned.
The Infrastructure Turk: Lessons in Services
Avoid This Mistake While Building Your XB Fit Business - *Make Or Break Info*
Is cache:xxx method still working?
Ask HN: investor-backed startup vs. bootstrapped app development
I'm currently involved in a startup (tech co-founder). We received some investment and are getting ready to launch a product. But recently my motivation took a steep dive & this is starting to show up in the quality of my work.

I guess deep down I'm not 100% convinced in the long-term viability of our product & the alternatives start to sound alluring. Not a single day goes by without me coming up with an idea for a simple app that I could push out & start making money NOW vs. accepting investor money & have a big potential payoff in the distant future.

It all boils down to: do I want to shoot for the stars (startup) or do I want to explore more mundane app development. I guess I'm not the only one in this situation. Suggetions?
There are tons of great DER SPIEGEL articles about this

http://www.spiegel.de/international/business/0,1518,637542,0...

http://www.spiegel.de/international/business/0,1518,637243,0...

http://www.spiegel.de/international/business/0,1518,623423,0...
Study: Birds learn nest building
The iPad "Tablet" Google results experience has removed them completely, no instant preview, no "hidden" swipe-to-expose (that I could find). You have to go to the "classic" version, via a link on the bottom of the page, to get them back.

The classic version? It's the one we used to have: no instant preview, Cache link present on almost every listing.

So, at least on some platforms, the info-dense but useful version is sill around...
Microsoft signs Mega-Patent deal with Samsung
Latest Video of Boston Dynamics' Dynamically Balancing Bipedal Robot, Petman
How blind people see with technology
Hacking Your Education
I think a robot/automation revolution would allow us one day to not have to work, but I think that hope faces more political and socioeconomic obstacles than practical ones.

Or in other words, someone will try to profit from such a revolution, and probably to the detriment of the rest of society. In some ways, this is already happening.
Would that kill existing apps for iPhone and force them to be redesigned? That's the reason I don't think that they will change the screen shape.
Because the public transit companies are not fully rider supported, they receive heavy subsidies from the various municipalities they service. Thus, they are in many ways constrained from operating optimally; in addition, they are riddled with politics and empire-building -- why do you think that I can't buy the equivalent of an Oyster or a Carte Orange stored value card that will let me take e.g. the Alameda ferry to MUNI to Caltrain to VTA?

Let me also remind you that the distances and population densities are very, very different, even in a relatively dense area of the US like the Peninsula.
2011 Beach Sweep
Small wrapper that "fixes" pbcopy in tmux on OS X
'Ubuntu Friendly' Hardware Certification Program Maturing
Amazon Unveils $199 Kindle Fire Tablet
My experience with Scrum is that it has a tendency, especially if implemented "textbook" with absolutely no flexibility, to completely de-emphasize any kind of architecture, forward thought, elegance, or big-picture thinking about the code.

The result tends to be a giant snotball of hacks. In my personal experience the biggest casualty is efficiency, followed by maintainability and scalability.

The fact is that good programmers write good code, and bad programmers write bad code. There is no management "methodology" that can make bad programmers write good code. There are, however, methodologies that make good programmers write bad code. Scrum at least can be one of these.
Oh, it's happened to me too. And sometimes it replaces one term with another word with similar spelling but not related at all, the typed term is still in the textbox, but the terms bolded in the summary are different. It started a little after the anti-content-farms changes where applied, so I thought it was some temporary glitch. I haven't seen it recently, but maybe it's because I'm not making complex queries since.
Work 100% on one thing at a time and decrease your cycle time (length of sprint) to allow for rapid shifts.

If you have to go to a 3-day cycle time -- as long as you are 100% dedicated -- do that.

This, of course, assumes you've understood the agile/scrum concepts enough that you can scale them down to a few minutes each. If you're still having 30-minute standups and 4-hour sprint planning sessions, my advice is not going to work.

Here's the thing: no matter how stressed out and context-switching the work environment is, you can only work on one thing. So can you predict what you are going to deliver and then deliver it? If you can't -- if you can't even predict day-to-day what you are going to do -- then you're well and truly hosed. Scrum or agile isn't going to fix that. (BTW, there's another answer if you are truly in an environment without any structure at all. In that case, I'd look seriously at some lightweight kanban)
"SMC" breaks energy storage records
Coming very soon.
But most european countries have a privacy/data protection law.
Only around 30 and feeling this mundane? Although I loved the technology I was working on, my last job became five work-days filled with meetings too. I can tell you that it turned what could have been my hobby (the technology) into a similarly mundane existence.

A day full of meetings poses three problems:

1) Poorly run meetings consume too much time without accomplishing anything.

2) Having a full day of meetings almost eliminates the possibility of getting real work done while you're fresh.

3) The meetings are often so dull (probably the small ratio of useful content to blather), that you'll be tired sooner.

I became quite a contrarian ... refusing meetings when there wasn't a clear-cut agenda and goals and in general trying to take back some of the time for actual work. It didn't work, but it did earn me some black marks with my managers.

Finally, I started a venture with two other guys and the three of us have clear-cut roles. Since we trust that the others are capable and willing to do their parts, we have only three calls a week, each scheduled to be 15 minutes (but generally they're closer to 30). Now we're starting to demo to customers and those meetings are exciting ... validation of some of our ideas, new ideas and occasional criticism that keeps us on the right track can be invigorating.

I hope you're able to find that kind of excitement soon ... I've rediscovered the adventure in my life!
Looks like Bloomberg got early access and published before the actual press conference by accident.

The most relevant details:

The Kindle Fire will have a 7-inch display and sell for $199, compared with $499 for Apple’s cheapest iPad, Amazon executives said. The device, a souped-up version of the Kindle electronic-book reader, will run on Google Inc.’s Android software, the Seattle-based company said.

The Kindle Fire doesn’t have an embedded camera or a microphone. The device offers Wi-Fi connectivity, though not 3G access, and comes with a 30-day free trial of Amazon Prime, the company’s $79-a-year membership service that includes streaming video and free two-day shipping.
MongoDB Monitoring Service (MMS) released to the public
Getting your hands dirty : installing and using Gentoo
Yes, let's blame the people that are trying to solve illegal file-sharing issues. Spotify is competing with free and they offer such a great service that people are willing to pay 10 euros a month for a subscription. Most of my friends use more money on music streaming services now than they ever did back when they where buying cd's, and these are people who have been "pirates" for the last 10 years or so.
I see your point; I interpreted the post to be more targeted at folks that weren't aware of Neo4j or graph-specific data stores and might be trying to hammer their nails in with screwdrivers (only know MySQL and nothing else) and the post was enlightening them to what is waiting at the end of the rainbow... or some analogy like that :)
What on earth does that have to do with Scrum? Pressure to make compromises on code quality is about as universal an issue as you will ever find one.
The key might be variety. I'd hate "spending the rest of my life programming in front of a screen" as much as "spending the rest of my life making coffee" or "spending the rest of my life on a potato field". But trying your hands at various jobs for a few months or years? Sounds much more refreshing, doesn't it!
I agree that this problem exists, but I also feel that there is a better solution than whats listed. Stories should be given points for their complexity and not for the time it takes. Additionally stories should only be business oriented, so things like automated testing don't get their own stories.

Since automated testing does take time your team velocity is what's affected, and no one has control over team velocity once a sprint has started. Quality issues that recur affect the calculated velocity and one off quality things (like setting up continuous integration) should add a buffer to the velocity. This should be discussed in sprint planning so transparency is maintained.
Baby insurance... lol
Whether this is a toddler require a life insurance policy is a widely asserted debate. In the event you look at the following information plus sense you're in a position that might benefit coming from life insurance being put on your toddler, then this would be the most effective decision for yourself. Some consumers are not in times that would be helped by simply their child having a life insurance policy.
Amazon Announces The $199 Kindle Fire
Very simple. Porsche financed their stock buying with loans, but then credit essentially disappeared for everybody in 2009 and so they couldn't keep it up. 0x12 posted some good links earlier.

Same sort of reason why Ford did better than GM or Chrysler in America - Ford had secured lines of credit back in 2006 in either a fit of brilliance or luck, so when credit dried up in 2009 they could still borrow. The others couldn't get loans and had to take drastic action.
Interesting.

From the commands currently supported, it looks like it's an update tool to update the core and to update plugins.

Here are some commands I think may be helpful and a few notes:

* upgrading the core could check the installed pup and mysql versions for changing WordPress dependencies. i.e.: latest wp versions had php requirements changes. You wouldn't want to be able to update unless your system is up to date
* secure: command to secure the wordpress installation based on best practices
* language: download/install language packs
* backup: tool to backup wp-content and the database (optionally to another server)
* restore: restore from a backup
* migrate: copy to another database, optionally change DB/WP prefix, migrate/merge user IDs, etc. Could be complex, but the use case would be to help moving to a multi-site single DB installation.

I'll probably thing of other stuff.

I like that plugins can be developed for this tool.
Did you honestly only buy TextMate based on that promise of a free upgrade? Was that a legally acknowledged part of the contract of the sale?

I can’t help feeling that, if you weren’t satisfied with TM1 to some reasonable amount, you wouldn’t have been prepared to pay the original $60 for it. So you must have be relatively satisfied. Or have you been using TM1 under sufferance all these years or not using it at all but effectively just made an early purchase of TM2. Neither of those seem particularly likely to me.
Who would want a life without some work? I think it's more that we don't get to work on the things that are meaningful to us. Work can be one of life's adventures too!

BTW: I've met Baristas that are exactly where they want to be ... you can tell from their great smiles, and their propensity to call you by name and remember your regular order after only a couple visits.
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