skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Even if scrum works perfectly, it does not empower developers. In fact, from what I can see, the whole purpose of scrum is to disempower developers while giving them the illusion they are empowered.

As the author reveals, under scrum, it is not the developers who decide what new features to add to the software. It is the product owners.

Who decides the priority of the new features under scrum? Not the developers but the product owners.

At least under waterfall, developers could get their teeth into a good chunk of interesting work. They could come up with some fancy architecture or something. But under scrum, all work is broken up into bite-sized chunks of work that are rarely challenging and often highly repetitive.

Under scrum, the developer's time and ingenuity are not valued. If a product owner out of the blue decides to ditch a new feature or radically change one, wasting the work a developer has done creating it, he does so without a moment's concern about the developer's wasted time and effort.

In short all that scrum offers developers is a small amount of control over their workload. Compare that with developers of the past, who would conceive software and build it themselves the way they wanted, and you can see that, far from empowering developers, scrum has reduced them to little more than assembly line robots, at the beck and call of their masters.

I am not saying that we should go back to the past when developers were in charge or everything but to say that scrum empowers developers when it clearly does not needs to be challenged.
Why free software really isn't (and shouldn't be) free
> learn the subject before commenting

I graduated about two decades ago, but I am quite sure of what I said.

Wanna bet?
No, because the NM_ messages are for standard controls only. There are more messages in the WM_ family that aren't really 'command' messages, but more 'notification' messages, like WM_CREATE. It's not like one can create a window by allocating memory, casting to an HWND and sending WM_CREATE to it.

I guess the conclusion is that one cannot blindly take WM_xxx message and think 'oh I can use ::SendMessage() and friends to make windows do certain things'. Only the documented behavior are valid use cases.

I guess one could say that the WM_xxx message should've been split up into more subclasses, but where to draw the line? I'm quite fine with using WM_xxx for all the fundamental window manager messages, as long as one minds their documented behavior there is no problem. (I realize that this last sentence can spark a whole discussion by itself on how far self-documenting a 'sane' API should be, but that's rather subjective imo).
I don't take notes and tweet them, but I do search for books in the online store via whispernet. I have no idea how that's going to work on this device, probably something like registering your name on Zelda, which will be a pain and probably not worth the real estate.
I am kinda waiting for the DX to drop in price. I really want that bigger e-ink screen, but it's not worth $379 to me.
>How much do you charge for a mobile app?

Why are web designers (as opposed to software developers) being asked about mobile applications?
I don't see why Google wouldn't index hidden it. As long as there is static text on the page, Googlebot will see it and index it.

Has anyone seen any scenarios where there was static content on the page and Google didn't index it?
FeeFighters use and like Expensify:
http://expensify.com
Does anyone have a link to the discussion about Amazon doing more tech-related disruption than Google?
This seems rather intuitive. Does the google bot even parse css? Is there any evidence that it ignores non-displayed text present in HTML?
I'm really looking forward to something like a cheaper variant of DX to come along.
Technical books don't render well on 6 inch screen and I can't get myself to shell out a notebook's price for current DX.
Real World Haskell is a pretty solid Haskell book too.
Kindle comparison
There is no Instapaper for Android at present. Read It Later is available in the Amazon Appstore, so it is likely to work on the Kindle tablet.
Agreed. Maybe the Silk team should read my book. :-P
I disagree. Every time Amazon gets a sentence printed that says the Amazon table is $300 cheaper than the iPad, they win. They want to have them be mentioned in the same comparison, because that encourages the consumer to think "do I really need $300 more of tablet?"
7 Create Enjoyment Sensational Sex Position
Amazon Silk cloud-accelerated web browser (video)
Really, really cool. I hope they extend Silk to all their products.
I quite agree, and think that anyone who participates on Hacker News would probably get a lot out of reading Schelling's book The Strategy of Conflict.
The technology looks interesting, but it looks like Amazon gets to track all web surfing that you do on the Kindle Fire?
Money does not disappear... It just hides in some peoples pockets :)
I can vouch for the effectiveness of Toastmasters in addressing the problems the article describes in the first paragraph of "this is Paul Graham". http://www.toastmasters.org/

The rest of the paragraphs in that section are off. I didn't see the presentation, but just reading the writer's complaints about unanswered questions tells me that pg's speech was effective. The goal was to get the audience to want the answers to those questions.
2. API ties windows to threads

What UI APIs are there that don't have a concept of UI thread(s)? Coming from Windows, I'm used to UI work needing to be done on a UI thread.

I randomly googled these comments:

"Never, ever, touch the UI from outside your UI thread, in any version of Qt."

"Android UI toolkit is not thread-safe and must always be manipulated on the UI thread."

google "iOS 'non-UI thread'": 60 million results.

javascript: everything UI-related runs on one thread.

Do you do much UI coding?
Reminds me of the TV series Lie To Me (03x13) called "Killer App" where the Zuckerberg character's social network uses cell phone camera technology to point one's phone at anyone's face in order to get their profile info.

Also reminded me a bit of the iris scanners in Leon, Mexico
http://singularityhub.com/2010/09/26/iris-scanning-set-to-se...
Some people say that this should never happen – once the Sprint is planned, it’s sacred, and that any changes to it need full team buy-in – any significant number of changes need a complete replan of the Sprint. I’ve not seen this so far in practice, but it sounds intriguing.

Some people being, in this case, the people who defined Scrum. If you allow a product owner to walk in and add stories to a sprint, and the team does not have the choice to "reset the sprint", then You Are Not Doing Scrum.

The Organizers are rarely empowered to change any of those thing, so they change the one thing they can, but shouldn’t: the build quality.

Again, if the Organizers are not empowered to change scope, deadline, etc, then They Are Not Doing Scrum.

So Agile Scrum doesn't deliver broken software. Fairy tale fantasists who believe they can ignore the central tenets of any process and get the results deliver broken software. Essentially: "People unable to implement a simple algorithm deliver broken software".
"Computing Power in the Cloud

EC2 servers have massive computational power. On EC2, available CPU, storage, and available memory can be orders of magnitudes larger than on mobile devices. Silk uses the power and speed of the EC2 server fleet to retrieve all of the components of a website simultaneously, and delivers them to Kindle Fire in a single, fast stream. Transferring computing-intensive tasks to EC2 helps to conserve your Kindle Fire battery life."

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0051VVOB2#silk

What does this mean? "Transferring computing-intensive tasks to EC2 helps to conserve your Kindle Fire battery life". Are we offloading javascripting processing to the cloud and returning the results?

If so it will be different than Opera Mini.
From my own experience, where Scrum has broken down is the promise of, after the sprint, you have something you can "release".

Of course, the term "release" can mean many things to many people. If you're building something substantial, an initial sprint or two may be dedicated to simply getting some overall framework in place. It just depends on what you call "release".

In the cases where I've seen failure, "release" could mean only one thing -- a shipping product outside the organization to customers. In spite of declarations from the dev team that no product going to customers would be delivered. And, at the end of a sprint, with no product prepared to go to customers, product management decided scrum was a failure. I'm not making this up.
Why do you think internal problems are not dominant in Amazon and Oracle?
Amazon unveils 79, 99, 149 e-ink kindles
This Silk browser could be the "killer feature" of the Kindle Fire... something that allows it to really compete in the tablet space. It'll be interesting to really see how well it works in the real world and what the form factor of the Fire feels like.
People in Europe are getting screwed again.

- Small Kindle: $79

- Power Adapter: $10

- Cost in USA: $89 (free shipping)

Okay, so I see a banner that they ship to Europe. Excellent, I click it. Then I get a new banner, saying that my country qualifies for free shipping (pending some conditions). I go through the checkout process and I'm faced with the following list:

- Kindle + Adapter: $119

- Shipping: $27 (what happened to the free shipping banner you advertised with on the Kindle page AFTER I selected my country!?)

- Tax: 0

- Import duties: $28

--------------

- Grand total: $174

That's twice the amount you have to pay in the US. Really, Amazon? Can't you just tell me it's going to cost that much BEFORE I go through the entire checkout process?
I have an iPad 2 which I love, but I can't resist not getting one of the new Kindles now. Doing almost all book reading on the Kindle app, $79 or $99 to comfortably read outside is hard to pass up.
"2. API ties windows to threads"

OK, so what's the alternative? Automatic locking at OS-level? How can the performance penalty in those many cases where it is not needed be justified? Same goes for your arguments 3, 4 and 5 btw. Why should such low-level functionality impose important design decisions on those who follow the documentation, just to protect the beginners who don't? I much prefer my raw control, thanks - and I'll happily take the few times I shoot myself in the foot with it, err, with it.

Despite its warts and its legacy cruft, the win32 is quite flexible, and easy to understand - at a very basic level, not much studying of under-the-hood stuff required. For an OS-level API, it packs a lot of power into a small set of concepts.
I've liked Outright, as a simple, easy to use, "won't need Quickbooks for a while" solution. http://outright.com/
How does SSL work with this? Wouldn't a lot of certificates get broken?
I bet you put a lot of effort to program this, eh?
I think we can say that this is an argument in favor of intelligent design.
The only bit that was surprising to me was the history of computers that you've logged in from, and the history of other users that have logged in on that computer. While I can see the value of identifying public computer, it is rather unnerving to think of the "Eye of Facebook" following me wherever I log in. Although it would be neat to be able to access this data and create a timeline heatmap of where you logged in most over the years.
I guess yes.
Barnes & Noble is only america right? I have never seen a Barnes & Noble store anywhere in europ, were as amazon is very commen in europe. Thats not a small market.
I had one of those days where I read the publisher's name, not the author's. Sorry, Mr Dominus!
The iPod Touch is a considerably worse iPod than its predecessors. This doesn't seem to have hurt its sales much, nor the iPod brand.
I concur with this. I've had a lot of history of serious depression, and when people say "just don't commit suicide, duh" it shows a misunderstanding of the motives. There's always something going wrong in one's life, but I would say it's only the tip of the iceberg when someone commits suicide.
We go through this process each time we want to automate something.

1. Systemize it
2. Automate it
3. Optimize it
Spotify pays more per listen than radio does.

Exactly. According to this article[1] (in Swedish) about Lady Gaga making $340 from a million Spotify listens to a single song, the same number of listeners on the radio would have made her $15.

[1] http://www.expressen.se/noje/1.1787187/lady-gaga-tjanar-1150...
You'd think they'd mention which version of Android it uses.
Using User Agent Switcher on Firefox, I set my UA to iPad and went to Google. The link for the "Classic" version was:
http://www.google.com/?hl=en&tbo=d&output=search&...

However, when I set my UA back to Default (Firefox), this link did not appear to do anything. YMMV.
> He must trust the manufacturers of those props

Or be completely oblivious to the risks he is incurring.
Amazon Kindle Fire vs. iPad 2 vs. Nook Color: by the numbers
To be fair, I suspect that the cache link was used by 0.1% of all users. Even I almost never use it, and I am likely to be a power user.
Actually, the announcement is now at the Amazon's home page.

Next step: make e-books cheaper!

http://www.amazon.com/Kindle-version-expensive-paperback-ver...
Job Posting Hints at Amazon Silk using SPDY
Litoranea Passagens
Para viajar com os amigos ou a família em segurança e sem gastar uma fortuna, consulte o site da Litorânea passagens, confira a dica e aproveite mais da sua viagem.
That must be why the Qatari royal family is so good at it.
Semantics...would you argue the iPod nano diluted the iPod brand?
"Our back end has some of the fattest pipes you'll find" - Amazon
I thought Friedman argued they were intertwined, and that capitalism created freedom in many cases, but I haven't actually read his book.
I often use cache links instead of going to the actual site since it was faster and your search terms were highlighted in the document. Now it takes a bit of work to get to the cache link.
What is the rendering engine for this? Is it Webkit or something else?
> and me having just bought a Kindle like 2-3 months ago, grrr

I wouldn't be annoyed, the Kindle you have has a battery that lasts twice as long as the new Kindle, and it has a proper keyboard. The only plus for the new Kindle is it's a bit lighter.
"Unsettling" might be a overstating it a bit. The first slideshow[1] explains (on slide 38, Limitations) that face recognition techniques still have a long way to go. More clearly stated on slide 39:

"Face recognition of everyone/everywhere/all the time is not yet feasible.
However: Current technological trends suggest that most current limitations will keep fading over time"

[1] http://www.heinz.cmu.edu/~acquisti/face-recognition-study-FA...
And ... throwing away the least fit every time can lead you to climb the hill to a local maxima. In this case, the only way to leave a local maxima is to get lucky with a mutation, but if you cull the population randomly with a log probability that more fit parents will be kept, you could reach the goal in fewer generations.

You could even eliminate mutations altogether if you have the proper character in each position in at least one member of the starting population.
As far as I know you never could compile OCaml with F#, it lacks nearly all advanced features of OCaml. You can do the same as workflows in OCaml with delimited continuations [1], except it is even more fluid. That said, for most software the availability of the .NET library is more important than all of this. F# also has some very cool and compelling features like type providers and extensible pattern matching.

[1] http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/icons/pdf.gif;jsessionid=FF06FC4...
Would you prefer a system where stupid decisions and bad risks are instead rewarded?

Free markets are about giving feedback like that. They aren't magical ways of making people never make bad decisions. And neither is your preferred $ECONOMIC_SYSTEM, whatever it may. If it's claiming to be one, it's lying.
Flip To converting travelers into your strongest advocates
[emacs starter kit] in which version two turns the inside out
Twitter's "Information Network" Strategy Under Pressure From Facebook & Google+
you hear that spotify? you're doomed
A year after the fork: LibreOffice is growing and going strong
This is the exact opposite of what SCRUM hopes to achieve. If a product owner decides to bin a feature, it's because it has been weighed against the options available and decided that this feature is no longer valuable to the company.

'Wasting' the developer time as you have stated it is a misnomer, as I would say developing a product you know wont be used by a customer is wasting time.

Within SCRUM, a developer should have full control of how software is developed, if a product owner is trying to dictate the way in which a product is developed, they are stepping too far and the ScrumMaster needs to get them to back off.

The way for a product owner to determine how a product is developed is to have a clear set of requirements in place that are testable and achieveable.
Amazon Launches Cloud-Accelerated Web Browser
Codecademy (S11) is hiring engineer #1
Defmacro revisited
Is anyone else more interested in Silk than the Kindle Fire?
What popped out at me was the battery life for the fire:

8 hours continuous reading or 7.5 hours video playback

8 hours doesn't seem like very much. Clearly its an LCD panel with back lighting and all that, but 8 hours seems a bit short.
I started mountain biking this April, and watched my entrepreneurial performance grow. Before that I was miserable in the suburban Michigan, can't get anything done. Now I'm vibrant and energetic.

I've just got my co-founder to buy a mountain bike so he can exercise enough as well. We'll see how big an effect it has on him.
RailsCamp Hamburg 2011
I agree with this. Imo, this is a good step for web browsers.
Ocsigen (http://ocsigen.org/) is based on cooperative threads, AKA coroutines.

There's also an OCaml-to-Javascript compiler.
You're spot on. Scrum (and indeed agile development in general) is good a getting a group of average developers to create an average product.

It is also good at getting a group of great developers to create an average product.
Beasley & Henley Wins Sand Dollar Award
Midtown Row making it easy for you to buy
http://www.blogcdn.com/www.engadget.com/media/2011/09/amazon...

Now, the picture could be incorrect or stretching the truth, but there was some indication.
Walled Garden 2.0
Did Amazon, with the release of Kindle Fire, just raise the stakes for the requirements of a walled garden that Apple, Google and Facebook will try to match?
"Machine Learning. Finally, Silk leverages the collaborative filtering techniques and machine learning algorithms Amazon has built over the last 15 years to power features such as “customers who bought this also bought…” As Silk serves up millions of page views every day, it learns more about the individual sites it renders and where users go next. By observing the aggregate traffic patterns on various web sites, it refines its heuristics, allowing for accurate predictions of the next page request. For example, Silk might observe that 85 percent of visitors to a leading news site next click on that site’s top headline. With that knowledge, EC2 and Silk together make intelligent decisions about pre-pushing content to the Kindle Fire. As a result, the next page a Kindle Fire customer is likely to visit will already be available locally in the device cache, enabling instant rendering to the screen."
That data is also skewed. Notice they say "album - $10, song on amazon - $.99" thats wrong. An album may actually be say 10 songs. So 10 songs at $9.99 == 10 songs on amazon at $0.99 -- OPSE miscalculation there.

Furthermore there is the complication of "likelihood of sale". If I self-promote a CD, I may not sell my needed quota of 143 albums per month. In fact for an unknown the best chance to earn cash is playing at a bar. Streaming provides a longer-term ROI AND simultaneously possibility of having "pirates" actually buy your work, which equals profit.

Furthermore new free model for spotify = less chance that an artist will get many plays as you can't listen to that song over and over.
I have an older Kindle DX which can do technical PDFs. Aside from the cost (nowadays triple the smaller Kindle), it's still not entirely satisfactory for three reasons:

- It's cumbersome to do anything other than reading sequentially.

- The screen is still not big enough for letter/A4 pages - it does perform decent scaling, but you know how scrunched many technical papers are. Can go landscape and read half a page, which is a pain in two column layouts ...

- It's a tad heavy, almost like a hardcover textbook that needs to be held in both hands.
DuckDuckGo! I'd say the search results are better/less cluttered about 60% of the time, and google or bing are only a !bang away...
In the product page http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0051VVOB2 the word Android appeared once only. Interesting.
Also, it seems that the Kindle Touch is not available in Europe!?
the SSL would have to stop in the EC2 instance where the bulk of the 'browser' is. Its then up to the Silk infrastructure to ensure the transmissions from the Fire to EC2 would be secure as well.
Not my call, brought in at end. Even then, I wouldn't have suggested it either. Managing servers is not a cheap or fun job; if their site was successful it would have made future sense and migrating was easy.

Regardless, setting PHP4 as the default in 2009 is idiotic.
Don't do your banking on it!
Why would Amazon be on wordpress.com? That's not for real is it?
Http://thebestzazzle.blogspot.com/2011/09/27092011-best-at-zazzle.html
Opera Turbo is a similar service to this, but it doesn't intercept https connections. Hopefully Amazon's service will behave the same way. If not, there will be a privacy shit storm.
I'm guessing it's intentional that they don't mention it. Given how much time and effort Amazon spent customizing Android to their needs, what would the advantage be of saying it's based off of 2.1? Most people would not care, and a minority would complain that it's not 2.2 or 2.3 or something else.

Just like Apple, Amazon is trying to sell a complete experience, not a version number.
Another Train Wreck Wrecks China Markets
Choosing A Car? Go With Your Gut
I have personally found the most benefit by basing my workouts around one of the main powerlifting exercises - squat, bench press, or deadlift.

Cardiovascular exercise is best performed after a weightlifting session and provides additional benefits.
If it's anything but Webkit, I won't be testing my sites in it unless they manage to get decent penetration.

Until it outranks IE6 in my stats, I won't even be giving it a look in.
> 8GB internal. That's enough for 80 apps, plus either 10 movies or 800 songs or 6,000 books.

Anyone know how 8 gigs enough for 10 movies? The quality can't be great. Can these things plug into a tv?
*affected
From the FAQ [1]:

What about handling secure (https) connections?
We will establish a secure connection from the cloud to the site owner on your behalf for page requests of sites using SSL (e.g. https://siteaddress.com).

Amazon Silk will facilitate a direct connection between your device and that site. Any security provided by these particular sites to their users would still exist.

[1]: http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html//ref=amb...
Right next to the Amazon store ;-)
This is a temporary move, when 4G becomes widely available in a couple of years or even six months from now, in some countries web optimization via cloud computing will become a trivial.
Nor is the Kindle Fire.