skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I work for a web dev firm in the infrastructure team.

They are trying to apply scrum and agile to us. It is not working.

I've been told ot to work on anything without a ticket. Outages have gone up.

It's a disaster.
But plastic bags use minuscule amounts of plastic, and are not single-use by a long shot - I use them for waste-paper bins bags, planters, dividers inside larger bags, etc, etc.

The most egregious plastic polluters are the cosmetics and detergent companies. Those would really make sense in bags; no worries about plastic in your diet, etc, and eg those shampoo bottles, especially the ones with pump dispensers, are an outrageous orgy of waste.
This idea of the "desktop" still persists. I have often read description of the BSD projects as "server" oriented. Thus some may conclude, NetBSD is for servers.

However when I look at the personal computers I run today, there is no "desktop" because I prefer textmode and I am running many tiny servers. These serve only me not the internet at-large.

The dream I had at the time of NetBSD 5.1 was a framebuffer where I could launch GUI applications from the command line in VESA textmode, without any context switch (Ctrl-Alt-F1, etc.) back to X11.

If I have the choice between "desktop" and "server" in 2023, I choose server. The "server" is a more useful metaphor for for me than the "desktop" ever was. Eye candy GUIs can be seductive, but IME servers operated with text commands and text configuration files are more powerful and ultimately more useful. As it happens, the server metaphor is quite common. For example, it's used to run the web.

NetBSD 5.1 was great. Arguably one of the best releases in the project's history.
The bigger scandal is that Mr. Joe BigCo Developer rewriting a bonafide open source app in BigCo language Swiftgolanghacksharp makes that new thing also open source, but for some reason, everyone gets away with declaring it proprietary.
I knew that U. S. Grant was also at West Point, but I looked it up and he was there in 1839. A good many of the generals on opposite sides of the Civil War served together in prior conflicts.

I wonder if there’s a book out there that traces their lives from West Point to Appomattox. I found a book recently that did a similar thing with Wellington (following him through his India campaigns) and Napoleon (starting in Egypt.) Although I don’t think they ever met before Waterloo. (Or even if they personally met at all, actually.)
> People had other things to worry about during the Revolutionary War

Actually there are plenty of examples of countries adopting metric after a revolution or gaining independence, so perhaps the US didn’t adopt metric in spite of the revolution rather than because of it.
See also: "Show HN: Going into freshman year, figured I should build an interpreter"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37274882 (74 points | 16 hours ago | 28 comments)
Kanban is one alernative[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanban_(development)
Thanks for the perspective. It's a refreshing difference from the HN refrain of "everything is an interface, and we can bend it to our will". The natural world will come for us all sooner or later.
Use something that can mount backups and poke around inside.

And when you're setting up that test, get the password and any other details to access the backups via a back up method too.
Why not?

WASM with optimisations will mostly run faster than binaries without optimisations, which is the current strategy. Plus you won't need the compile step that's necessary at the moment.

Distributing arbitrary binaries right now is bad because it's not clear what those binaries contain, but the WASM environment is completely sandboxed, so it wouldn't be possible for them to read files they weren't meant to or phone home with telemetry.

The Cargo project already does some amount of automatic building e.g. of docs pages - this could be extended to proc macro crates to ensure that the uploaded binaries must be built from the uploaded source files. Alternatively, making sure that reproducible binaries are standard would help a lot from a trust perspective.

This isn't suitable for every situation, but as a tool to reduce the compile times of some of the bigger and slower macro crates, it sounds like a great option to have.
That is pretty cool! I have a similar setup started around 2011 as well. It's an Atom netbook and has run OpenBSD almost continuously since then, only going down for upgrades and patches. The SSD shows something like 8 years of (non-continuous) uptime, before that it had a spinning disk.
Scientific consensus is built up around a body work. It is only really in modern times that laymen have started reading scientific articles, and usually only one here or one there.

There is no perfect scientific study, if you critique all of them to the point you critique this one, you will dismiss more-or-less all science.

Scientists who study the effects of various forever chemicals on health have read hundres of studies on the matter. And from those scientists I've talked to the overall consensus is definitely leaning towards these so-called forever chemicals having associations strong enough towards negative health outcomes that it's worthwhile to keep looking.
I've been a crunchy granola conspiracy nerd for over 20 years now, eating organic foods and avoiding plastic anything, including clothing polymers and food containers for a long while, having taken a lot of heat for being a tin-foil hat wearing nutjob over the years. My sperm is on fire though - my wife and I have to be extremely careful to avoid pregnancy, having multiple kids and making a couple other unplanned mistakes already. I have many friends around me that have difficulty conceiving, and perhaps not coincidentally some of them are ones who criticized me for my "paranoid beliefs".
Stopping obesity with ozempic might extend lifespan but it won’t fully correct loss of health span due to poor nutrition and lack of exercise. I don’t know if any drugs can correct for a poor lifestyle. They can correct for some major issues caused by poor lifestyle, but cardiovascular disease is only one slice of that miserable pie.
That’s one of the reasons I started tracking the filezise of the archive, and monitoring that over time. Datadog will trigger an alert if our backups are suddenly X% smaller.
I'm not sure if a process can be a cancer. Instead, an institution that uses processes, Scrum included, to hide their ineffectiveness and inefficiency is.
Ada’s take on memory safety is pretty limited. Heap allocation is explicit; there’s a procedure literally named Unchecked_Deallocation to free a pointer. It does have thread-scoped locals and arenas, but nothing like declared lifetimes or borrowing. The spec allows for GC but I believe it’s rarely offered.

It’s safer than C, but I’m not quite sure where recent specs line up against C++.
That was never a backup volume then, it was a mirrored volume. (Ask me how I learned the distinction.)
> I’d argue that you’re way better off hiring 6 devs that can go from business problem -> technical solution in their head, without all the ceremony, instead of 40 devs who can’t and 6 PMs to wrangle them.

The problem is that finding those 6 experienced devs is _HARD_. And they're usually very expensive and know their value.

You can easily find 40 mid to low level coders and a half-dozen people who know how to run a scrum team. Maybe even some of the coders know how to do that for extra savings.

Also in the latter way you can easily have a turnover in the team without any major hassles, you can always find mid-tier coders.

But if one of the 6 highly experienced ones leaves, good luck finding a new one quickly.

A shitty car analogy: You can get a more efficient and faster car if it's 100% custom made. But if something breaks you need to manufacture the parts. Or you could make do with a less efficient and slower car, built out of highly standardised off the shelf parts.
A little over 5.5 years, impressive.
Removing the OP energy of "enrage to engage", I think there's a room for a more nuanced position.

It's a pity that we do not have more people doing systematic research related with Scrum/Agile practices and it's advantages, Regarding on outcomes, in comparison with RUP, empirically we know that it worked better based on economic results + adoption/spread + people empathetic to use it in a corporate environment.

However, after 22 years of Agile/Scrum we do not know in a systematic and in a scientific researched way the second order (side effects) of Scrum as a management tool, and which kinds of incentives it creates. We know empirically based in a small amount samples.
To read without logging in to Xitter:
https://nitter.net/svpino/status/1695806027256475777
Absolutely do not put SLAP through the Barrett. The sabots give the muzzle brake bad indigestion.
If it is a public blog, make sure the url is in the wayback machine as an extra external backup
Running is different from existing.
Spoken like a true scrum master.

You don't have to produce an alternative to critique something. In fact making such a requirement makes problems linger.
Amusingly, Alex Gerko offered the hams some cash to fund their lawsuit. He's the founder and CEO of XTX Markets and supposedly has a net worth of $11b.

https://twitter.com/AlexanderGerko/status/168782830155593318...
I went a few times to a really great internet cafe in NY, Chinatown. Full bar, coffee, 50+ very capable PCs and a bunch of different consoles. Place was packed, especially when there was a Smash Bro's event going on. Reasonably affordable price of admission if you were looking to kill a few hours.
It’s not a huge part of the spectrum. It’s certainly the only part which any adult can access for the small cost of an exam, license, and shack. The top level amateur licenses go up to 10W!

Open radio spectrum is a natural resource like any other. It is indeed about as commercially useful as a field, a tree, or a patch of blue sky.
That explains why the K8S defaults are bad, but why use K8S at all here?

Personally it seems like a lot of shade-tree server admins are way too eager to bust out much more tooling than is actually necessary for many tasks, just because it's the way that $BIGNAME company does it.

Realistically, most people running a personal or small community's IT system aren't going to need the sort of crazy scalability that container orchestration systems are designed to provide. And if you're not running them at significant scale, the containerization and orchestration-system overhead are often quite significant fractions of the overall resource footprint. Plus there's the unnecessary complexity due to all the levels of abstraction that just don't need to be there.

E.g. for a Mastodon instance, I wouldn't touch Kubernetes or complex orchestration unless I was out of other, more traditional options for scaling. The server side is already broken into a number of components (RoR app, PosgreSQL, Redis, Sidekiq, node.js) which you can separate out onto their own servers, and from there each component has preferred ways of scaling based on need. And while nothing is safe from failure, backing up a bog-standard PostgreSQL VPS is a lot more straightforward than K8S.

If you're doing deployments dozens of times a day, of course automation is desirable. But if you're doing it once, I suspect most people would be hard-pressed to make back the investment of time and additional testing required (well, should be required) of working through a complex container-management architecture.
A Watchmaker's Lathe Made from Scratch
Nautical miles are used in sailing because they correspond (nearly) directly to an arcminute of latitude which simplifies chart navigation.
The author seems to have a particular IDE/text editor and programming environment in mind. But they don’t ever reveal what those are and makes an argument much more general than that.

Ie: This one IDE is worse than this one text editor for this one programming environment. So every IDE is worse than every text editor for everyone.

I am sorry, but there is zero truth in a sweeping generalization like that.

What is an IDE anyway these days? VSCode with plugins is more IDE than some IDEs. The lines are all blurry. Is syntax highlighting considered to be an IDE? Clearly it’s doing more than text editing. It’s understanding the language.

Believe it or not, those days of pure text editors are long gone. Almost every modern iteration of a text editor does a lot of what would have been squarely in the realm of IDEs some years ago.

These are all just tools. Some are better than others in specific situations. Without the specifics, this kind of argument is noise.
Yes you are, because (presumably) you live in an area that has cheaper/larger housing, and perhaps better natural environment, then accept the trade-off of a longer commute.

Those trade-offs are best made by the employee, not the employer. Everyone's preferences and family situations are different.
But what if I just tried to write C in Lisp? What could go wrong?

Author here: please don't look at this as a way to organize a lisp project.
Declarative SQL version control has the same challenge. Best practice now seems to be moving towards explicit SQL migration scripts.
> We use #Velero to capture backups of our cluster every 6 hours. From what I had seen our backups had been running successfully. I discovered once the incident started that backups had captured everything but the Persistent Volume Claim data

This is why for non hobby stuff I advocate for RDS, or its counterpart on your favorite provider. Running a production db on Kubernetes is looking for trouble unless you really, really know what you are doing.
Please read my previous comment again.
I was thinking the same thing.

I guess they give the American shit to the interns.. "Here, you gotta do the ones for the gaijin, make it as boring, ugly and 90s as you can."
I've not tried to run this repo in "a long time" :tm: even back then, it had some fun and exciting sharp edges that I never got around to fixing. Apologies.
Anecdote: When Intel's stock kept falling early this year they had to quit SAFE to speed up development... a bird said.
> Their most aggressively marketed prescription was scrum.

I don't think Agile has prescribed this though. Scrum, in my view, is an intermediary 'solution' so non-technical 'bosses' can overlook and micromanage dev teams. I guess it all stems from 'unproductivity' really, those cases you mention, where you end up with sub-par devs trying to deliver complex software products.
I would fully agree with your point if I weren't regularly in daily were nobody listen to what being said : e.g. discovering by themselves what was said the previous day/week as it was a new piece of important information to share.
I like the idea of a textmode computing life. What is your preferred way to browse the web?
Too much honey, most likely.

The big problem with baklava is that it turns into a blob of solid glop unless you pay strict attention.

Everything has to be kept very "light". But, when you do, everything is on the verge of falling apart. It will not transport very far or last very long.
But what to do when instead of 6 competent and efficient devs you get 40 people with random mix of skills, no domain knowledge and at moderate programming talent? I dont know Scrum to comment on it, but many management methods converge to 'appear that work is done all the time even if it's just meaningless bureaucracy, make everything slow and inefficient, but manage the expectations - so customer is moderately disappointed all the time but there are no catastrophic failures. And make sure there are no red lights on the dashboard, ever.'
I'm not sure what changed up break everything. When I can get back to my computer in a week or so, I'll take a look.
A very long time ago The University of York (UK) secured the contract from the UK Science and Engineering Council (SERC) to write a unix Ada compiler.

It was a multi pass, 5-10 stage process (or more. I want to say 13 but time plays tricks) Very costly language to compile, in those days. (Vax 11/780 running Unix 32V, a precursor to BSD and Ultrix by some years)

The story was it emitted an error/warning code along the lines of "Congratulations you have used the most abstruse feature of the ADA language" -which the approval people made them take out before it got certified.

Wirth had a sabbatical residency in York around the time of the Ada language selection process, his choices didn't make it through the strawman/steelman process, I think they resurfaced in Modula-II. It was a pascal teaching department like many others in the UK of the time, so it made sense for him to spend time there. Modula-II is said to be a systems programming language too.

Ada was very hard to teach. The ideas of asynchronous, and exception handling didn't sit very well on young minds. Maybe now they're well enough understood to teach in Rust. At the time, the absence of a rationale around "why" was very strong. York had a miniature 2-lift engine model which it used as a proving ground for Ada programs and undergraduate projects. Lift sequencing is a bit of a black art in itself but if you put that optimality of "which lift, which direction, which floor" to one side, the mixture of real-time controls and sensors were probably a good fit. (lift == elevator for the other side of the Atlantic)

I remember some concern in the department the only logical endpoint for Ada was to code military flight control/weapons/radar systems, and people felt uncomfortable about the implicit participation in the UK War economy. This was during the time of the Greenham common protests against US nuclear forces on UK soil.

During the Alvey 5th Generation funding debacle ("Catch up with Japan at all costs") there was another round of this using GEC400 computers, again very directly related to Uk MOD needs for weapons control systems and what I think became the Nimrod airborne radar. Probably signals processing is a very good fit for Ada. (I didn't work on that project, or the compiler)

People said that the consistency of mapping data structures to devices, chip signal lines, real things, and the abstractions around that in types worked well in Ada. I found it horrendously complicated to understand. People might say C is a hack but the literal directness of C structs on a PDP11 or Vax to the underlying architecture worked pretty well to me. I guess the problem is that C was always too close to Assembler for some people. Bliss/32 was the systems programming language of choice in Digital, and I think continued to be used to write VMS, although I read now it was almost entirely written in DEC Macro assembler.
There wasn't a lot to say. The guy had a bad breakup, and needed to vent. Oh, also, he used the gym as an escape, which is a better choice than many.
I think even a tier-1 team could make it work for them, but the key is they would make it work for them (make it their own process).

Once you hire a scrum master to tell you how to do your work, you've sort of lost. They are rarely useful other than as sort of "priest" of the process, who ends up becoming another sort of management, but without management powers (usually).

The meetings etc. can be downright useful, in certain cases, but don't really make sense to follow religiously. I.e. if the devs themselves are running the meetings, for themselves, its a useful form of self-management, and you don't need much management skill to run it (any seasoned dev with any sort of communication capability can do it).

But if its imposed upon you, its just a cookie-cutter sort of management, which, doesn't fit all teams or scenarios.
This sounds like a really interesting topic. I'd love to read your book when it's released. Would it be possible for me to sign up to some kind of newsletter or something so that I can be notified when it comes out?
It's sad that posts like these get so many points.

A sad take that's based on a sad experience with a great framework.
> The rise and fall of the Nile.

The ancients noticed patterns, but had almost no causative understanding of what was happening.

> The influence of the moon and the sun on weather and tides.

Even Newton didn't correctly understand how tides actually work (there is no oceanic "tidal bulge"). It took until Laplace for dynamic theory to be developed. The ancients were unable to predict tides except by repeated observation of a specific location.

> Where baby animals come from.

There was zero understanding of biological reproduction before the modern era. Claiming that people 2000 years ago understood this phenomenon "almost as well as we do" is absurd. They didn't even know about sperm cells, nevermind chromosomes or DNA.

> How to make beer and bread.

Alchemy, with no insight into what was really going on.

The ancients understood none of the things you mention even remotely as well as we do today. In fact, I'd argue that they essentially didn't understand them at all.
Anecdotes #6 and #7 in their list is a real indicator of something bad, wholly unrelated to Scrum.

> #6 We measured how much it cost to deliver one story point and then wrote contracts where clients paid for a package of "500 story points."

> #7 Management lost it when they found that 500 story points in one project weren't the same as 500 story points on another project. We had many meetings to fix this.
> […] hire top talent […] easy

Have you _tried_ hiring good people?
This is the correct answer.

Different teams get by with different amounts of Scrum Processes.

Less experienced ones need the full-on shit with backlog grooming, planning poker, dailies and retrospectives.

When the team gets better (and there isn't much turnover), you can relax the Processes.

I'm pretty sure I might be the only one on HN who has Scrum actually work in real life. (I've had my share of shitty-Scrum too, like 45 minute "dailies"... =)
Is this meant as a joke, too English-heavy?
>Five people were shot in a police-related incident

is a passive voice. The people receive the action.

>A policeman shot five people today

is active voice. The policeman shoots people.

I use this particular example because it's a prime example of voice for the deflection of responsibility, see https://www.nber.org/papers/w30209
China Evergrande loses $2.4B in value as trade resumes after 17 months
Unfortunately actions and words is what matters. If you are deeply "moral" but support the gov in what you do, say by continuing to live in a violent dictatorship and work for/pay tax to the czar, you are acting immorally.

Therefore between two equally moral people (self assessed) whoever actually acts moral is more moral (effective).

So even if we pretend that knowledge is irrelevant to morality and only assume that smarter people are generally richer and richer people can afford to act moral then the fact is richer people are more moral IRL.

And yes, this means circumstances beyond your control can make you unable to act moral even if you are moral. It's called "tragedy" and dictatorships are known for causing this
Top programming talent may still need to be managed (and in fact may need to be managed more than lower quality talent). The sweet spot is to hire top programming talent who is also good at intra-team communication and can organize themselves with little direction from management except to be informed about outside factors like client priorities.

Even better is top talent who can also interface directly with the client when necessary (not necessarily all the time) and doesn't need everything first filtered through a manager.

I've worked with teams like this in the past and it was always a pleasure. Most of them were fairly experienced devs and knew the value of email, phone calls, and water cooler talk (serendipitous discussions which led to valuable information being exchanged). Despite the lack of "modern" productivity tools like text messages, chat apps, and Slack, we were able to get stuff done efficiently.

We had weekly meetings which were productive and useful, and actually helped identify if anything was falling through the cracks. Nobody got bored because the meetings were actually helpful.