skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not sure where the poster comes from.

(The poster seems to confuse Agile in "Agile is a Sham" and the Agile "industry". I can't talk about the Agile "industry" as I'm no part of it or have no contact to it, so I will concentrate on the "Agile is a Sham" part)

After introducing Agile/Scrum in 3 companies over the last 10 years, not as a consultant but as a permanent employee, I'd think it has been a success three times. Measuring success with two metrics: Predictable, ongoing results and developer happiness.

Developer happiness in agile usually comes from calming down the fury of requirements and wished for features. Sprints do enable developers to focus for 2-3 weeks on one topic instead of being pushed to the most urgent topic of the day by management. Happiness also comes from communicating and working and feeling as a team.

I assume the poster has - if he has - a different agile experience. Perhaps he's not a team person or uncomfortable with coordinating and working with others. 10% of the developers I've worked with just don't feel right with agile, it's not their thing. They should not try to adapt to agile from my experience, as it does not work. Better to find a non agile environment that does work for them.

From asking developers after agile introductions we had >90% approval rates on the question "Would you like to go back before agile?" and "Would you like to have a different development model?"

Scrum in particular is different from, e.g. XP. It focuses on process and - deliberately - says nothing about engineering practices or craftmanship. Coders are free to chose those for themselves. Some struggle on this or think they don't need to have them just because Scrum doesn't prescribe those. Some think Scrum is sh* as it does not talk about engineering practices or developer quality. But this is intentional.

Scrum will not make development "work" with bad developers. But it will make good developers work smoother together and make them - if they are team people - more happy from my experience.

One final note: Some people here agree that Agile is a Sham and does not work, then citing examples of managers/scrum masters that deliberately did not follow Scrum. Following Aristotelian logic at least this does not make sense.

A final final note: I got a very fine and tasty chocolate cake from my current team for birthday, so I might not be doing things that wrong ;-)
A beginner friendly Express.js Tutorial
This is tangential to the discussion, but as an obtuse non-American I'm glad to have the phrase in question explained to me (you wouldn't believe I have actually spent some time in the US).
The UK equivalant is "as the actress said to the bishop", which combines a Cromwellian suspicion of the immorality of the theatre with the implication of the hypocrisy of the clergy. Is it any better, though? I'm sure the bot could be adjusted to come back with quotes from actresses.
I am used to seeing wind markings on aviation maps (e.g. http://www.aviationweather.gov/adds/winds/) but it's pretty cool how much clearer this map is. It makes me wish I could see a much larger portion of the world so I could get a better understanding of the currents that are entering/exiting the US.
been wanting to do this myself for like forever. it looks like they are using high level summary data from the NWS ... they also have this amazing thing called MADIS which focuses on micro climate research (and more) ... so in theory you could get a high resolution version of this for san francisco or nyc, and that'd be really great and possibly rather useful too. I think the Weather Underground is a subscriber of MADIS, and their "rapid update" feature has some of this, and also I should mention some of this is collected by ham radio people in their spare time too.
It can't be that hard; I once bitbanged a 30 pin SIMM on a PIC with an interrupt to trigger the refresh.

The 30 pin SIMM is 16MB and easy to wire (0.1" pitch). 16 MB of SRAM is probably going to be TSOP or worse, and probably in multiple packages. The multiplexed DRAM bus would also help with the pin count, but it's not clear to me that was a concern.
Only *One* Kohana & Codeigniter Developer Will Be Selected...
RSS feeds from their search functions, or in 37signals case pulling in all RSS items and then filtering for just those that match what I'm looking for. Then a little post-processing work to extract the data into something more structured.
Linus Torvalds Helped Invalidate a Microsoft Patent
You're no fun... Not one of the people that sends little messages like "draw me a dinosaur" on their delivery tips, huh?
It's also insane the amount of gore and violence allowed on TV and in movies, but show a little skin and you get fined.

The reason Family Guy has so many fight scenes is to prove how stupid the FCC's regulations on violence are compared to nudity.
L0pht testified before Congress claiming that they could shut down the Internet globally in 30 minutes back in 1998. If I recall correctly, it was through attacks against BGP/BGMP. I can't find a non-broken source link, though.
51% of US Households Own An Apple Product
Tidal heating is likely the largest contributor.

Tidal friction explains why Io is the most volanic body in the solar system and its deformation.
That's amazing. It's so inspiring to see someone can have such a simple idea, execute, and create something not only incredibly intuitive and useful, but beautiful too.

It makes you wonder what other things are out there waiting to be done, and what you can do.
This should probably have a license added to it somewhere. Especially with those 21 forks hanging around.
Or it's an opposing group using its name to discredit it.
Flexible and easy to customize css tags
Really a stunning presentation of this data. A huge "whoa." moment when it loaded.
They should add Canada, Mexico and the ocean if possible to see where these in and out flows are coming from.
How much redundancy is built into the GMail nameservers? That worries me more than http requests.

Also, should I host my own nameservers and assume I'll fly under the radar of attacks?
Google's self driving cars can navigate drive-through restaurants.
We wanted to share one of our favorite moments from some special research we conducted. Watch this video of Steve, who joined us for a drive on a carefully programmed route to experience being behind the wheel in a whole new way. We organized this test as a technical experiment outside of our core research efforts, but we think it’s also a promising look at what this kind of technology may one day deliver for society if rigorous technical and safety standards can be met.
This reminds me of the proof that there is always a point on the earth where there is no wind. This is a property of spherical surfaces: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hairy_ball_theorem
Support for Startups?
Support for Startups.

A friend and I were walking around the Stanford last Friday, and we were both doing some thinking about our lives, and where we want to go with them. After a while, the topic turned to maybe starting our own startup, the problem of course, is neither of us are software developers, nor are we particularly enamored with the idea of yet another photo sharing/social networking/whatever site we both feel all of those markets are very saturated.

We then looked at what both of us know well. Support. Both of us are top tier support folks - I have a background in field work, telecom support, and System Administration, with a large side of Customer/Technical Support as well as some Sales Engineer/Project Management stuff, he has a background in Technical/Customer Support, with a strong side of Technical Documentation as well as a side of Finance/Business Management.

So we got to thinking, what is missing in this market?

What about a company to provide Customer Support aimed at startups, empirically, there does seem to be a market - having your developers directly support customers is both inefficient and frustrating for everyone involved, beyond that, if your product is paid, you do really need real support, preferably being able to reach someone by phone. Even if your product has no direct customer payment, if your product is complex enough, or used by enough people, you at least should have an email que, staffed by real people to get answers to the questions that cannot be covered by your FAQ.

Both of us also have a large number of friends (read former co-workers) who could staff out such an enterprise, and I have enough telecom experience to get the basics of a contact center going. I've been looking at how to structure pricing, if for example you don’t want dedicated agents, we could just charge a per call amount to you, or for those who do want dedicated agents, a fixed monthly charge, plus a much smaller per call charge. Beyond this, I have some ideas to give companies the benefits of traditional internal contact center folks, while still being able to have it managed at arms length.

So I suppose the question for HN are there startups looking for this service?
This visualization is incredible but it made my browser freeze for almost a minute :(
Code Red http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_Red_(computer_worm) did a lot of damage, but I believe it was an attack on IIS, therefor TCP based.
Great article. I've built a number of systems very similar to this and have found Redis to be a fantastic platform, both in terms of reliability and flexibiliy. I'll share a few tips that I think complement your approach.

- When you want to compute metrics for multiple intervals (hour / day / month / etc) Redis' MULTI / EXEC constructs make transactional updates to multiple keys a snap. Additionally batching (which is supported by most Redis clients) can dramatically improve performance.

- You can use Redis sets for computing uniques in realtime. You can also use set operations like SUNION to compute uniques across multiple time periods relatively quickly. For example, SUNION 24 hour intervals to get the total uniques for the day. You just have to be careful that large numbers of uniques eat up your available memory very quickly. EXPIREAT helps ensure things get cleaned up automatically.

- Using a Redis list as an event queue is a great way to further ensure atomicity. Use RPOPLPUSH to move events to a 'uncommitted' queue while processing a batch of events. If you have to rollback, just pop them back on to the original list.
Bluestreak Android emulator for windows finally in beta
As far as I know there's no way for anything written in ActionScript to use ApplicationDomain.domainMemory, so this really does only apply to C/C++/Unity games targeting the Flash runtime (something that's not even possible yet). It wouldn't affect any game currently on Kongregate as far as I know.

Still not a good sign though. If you've got great developer tools, then charge for the tools!
Which is a ridiculous goal, because, in general, most documents found in the wild are portable if transported together with the author's computer system. Chances of successfully producing typeset output from a .tex file (+ a bunch of external files) that you get from someone else are slim to none.

I'm glad there is a movement to do something. I used to use TeX but stopped a long time ago, because it was simply too much pain for too little gain. I still have to deal with it sometimes when helping my wife who publishes scientific papers. Whenever she mentions that she needs "a small modification in the BibTeX style", I get nightmares.
This is beautiful and a brilliant, intuitive "100,000 feet up" picture of wind movements.

But it's not horribly useful if you are interested in wind conditions at a particular place. Trying to figure out if a spot is experiencing 15mph wind vs 10mph is hard, for instance.

Compare it to these maps: http://passageweather.com/ which are not pretty nor are they intuitive but they are useful for someone trying to use the map to get detailed, localized wind condition information.

It seems like there should be some kind of middle ground between this wind map and maps like passageweater.com, maps that are intuitive and pretty but also provide detailed, useful information.
I thought about this earlier today, and I think it is less sexist, because we no longer have the same stereotypes of actresses--it's not an invitation to lazy thinking.
some previous visual inspiration possibly for project:
(based on lidar data) http://www.datatelling.com/2011/07/29/wind-flow/

http://www.shiffman.net/itp/classes/nature/week06_s09/flowfi...

as well as the big nasa ocean viz from the past few days
My god. Go is _so_ much fun to program. Apart from it's technical pedigree this is its most remarkable feature.
What Red Hat Has Done is Worth So Much More Than a Billion
I want this as a screen saver!
It seems natural that very little attention is being placed on mans issues.

I think just selectively pointing out gender issues will not prove that the specific gender has it worse. I think instead of always assuming that woman has it worse we should also look at mens issues along with womans issues. This is difficult because humans have a tendency of protecting woman and not worrying much about men. Here is a video about this http://youtu.be/TBzx-SMSwGE and a paper (which I haven't got a chance to read completely) http://adamjones.freeservers.com/globe.htm

I can't find a good list of mans issues but here is a OK list.
http://goodmenproject.com/ethics-values/the-top-10-issues-of...

This list does not contain issues like the rape of man by woman and other man, incarceration issues, man having a much higher death rate in the work place (more man at dangerous jobs), higher suicide rate of man, less men graduating college then woman, crazy rape laws like drink + sex = rape of woman but not man, tricky asking for consent = coercion = rape (at some colleges), draft only applies to man, millions of mostly male veterans committing suicide, male sexual mutilation & forced circumcision, domestic violence against man, legal paternal surrender/financial abortion, man are more likely to be assaulted and mugged then woman (even criminals tend to protect woman, see what happens to rapist in prison), in average man live less time then woman etc...

Note. Criticism of feminism is not necessarily anti-woman or anti-womans rights. I support womans rights like rights to chose.
Is it snowing organic compounds? Probably. Is it snowing complex organic compounds? Let's go see. Is it snowing microbes? At this point, we're leaving the realm of scientific evidence and throwing out sensational headlines. I'm not saying that it's a particularly poor speculation, but I personally think the article name could have been more accurate.
You have to periodically refresh DRAM. That's what the dynamic means in DRAM. If you don't, the memory will "forget" what it's holding. This is because the memory cell is essentially a capacitor.

SRAM would be easier because it's set and forget. It needs a more complex internal circuit, and therefore more expensive.
Rails 3.2.3.rc1 has been released
“I pointed out that it’s trivially easy to have the bot not say anything: don’t say TWSS”

That's the best part right there. Perfect tit-for-tat.
The Birdy - Track your expenses thru a daily email
Version 11.61, Build 1250, Platform Linux
or tie it in with the ocean viz from nasa from the other day! unfortunately most of the data i could find for canada was only in the south, and the mexico data was similarly in only the more densely populated areas.
How did they tell the car to stop in front of the speaker (in the drive thru)? And how did they signal to the car that they were done ordering and to go to the pick-up window? The video conveniently skips those sequences.
I love these apps that nag you through email (like iDoneThis). This is a cool idea.
> It implies that just by being a men one is in a more powerful and advantageous position.

All other things being equal, yes, a man is in a more powerful and advantageous position.

Obviously there are lots of individual women who are more powerful than individual men, and there are classes of women who are more powerful than other classes of men, but in general there are many advantages that men have that women do not. These advantages are a direct result of broad societal structures and cultural norms.

Yes, there are advantages that, in general, women have and men do not, but when you look at them they are almost always the result of sexist, patriarchal norms - e.g. the ideas that men are strong so they should never show weakness, strength is best displayed through through dominance, women are fragile and need men to take care of them, women are naturally better with children, etc. These problems are all tied up with each other.
Probably not, but to whom is the good faith obligation to? Twitter or the USPTO?

I don't think that makes a difference to the inventor, except that the USPTO is less motivated to come after him.

Is the "defensive" use of patents explicitly codified somehow, or is there a body of precedent explicitly cited, supporting this notion? If current practice is based on precedent, then this is unfortunate. What we have basically carries the weight of law, but was hacked together by fractionally clueful bureaucrats on a substrate that predates a widespread understanding of many of the concepts involved. (Or any understanding at all, in some cases.)
Ladies and Gentlemen, Welcome to SlashdotTV (Video)
There are two problems with TeX (in general):

1. It is a local maximum. It produces great output and works now. Changing it requires a huge effort which will result in a system that is inferior, for many years to come. Only then another maximum could be achieved. This means there is resistance to change — it's easier to adapt to TeX's flaws than it is to write something completely new. Many systems suffer from similar fate (think Emacs).

2. It is a black hole, a programmer sink. People start using TeX and curse it, then they learn it, and by the time they know its limitations and are ready to take on a job of writing something better, they are proficient enough in TeX to stay within it. Many systems suffer from similar fate (think Emacs).

I wonder if something will eventually happen to budge the TeX community from where it is now.
This rings true, but the OP's decision to burn his bridges is unfortunate. This is just how Indian bureaucracy is. It's a combination of 19th-century British Civil Service, crossed with 20th-century village socialism, implemented by 21st-century people who are just as confused as you are by the system they've inherited.

I've done and still do a lot of work in/for India -- mostly for the government and various quasi-governmental agencies. A couple of rules for having a successful outcome:

1.) Cash in advance: 10% to 25% the project fee, depending on my familiarity with the client. Expect to negotiate for 3-6 months before this is agreed to.

2.) Additional milestone-based payments, with a contract stipulating that no milestone will be delivered until the prior milestone payment has been received. Make sure that ALL project expenses are covered by these intermediate milestones.

3.) A final payment of 10%-25%, which is basically all margin. Expect to receive this 6-12 months late, and adjust your project costs accordingly.

This might sound unbelievably aggravating, but if you go in with these expectations then it's really not so bad. The bureaucracy just kind of washes over you eventually. (Oh, and tip #4: if you can at all afford to, pay somebody else to deal with the bureaucracy....). In truth, most Indians are tremendously honest people -- despite the impression that their bureaucracy gives -- and although I've endured screw-ups and delays that have been significantly worse that what the article describes, I've never not been paid. And in the end, India is a fantastic country with fantastic opportunities (and fantastic people and fantastic food), and it would be a shame to miss out on all that.

So I hope that this article (and others like it) doesn't scare anybody off India. Just calibrate your negotiations accordingly, and enjoy it!
It would be great if you could write that post! Wonderful project!
It wasn't code Red. It was latter and attacked a database discovery service for MSSQL.
Gamification: Why gaining points is so appealing
I think you got the cooling problems backwards. In vacuum it's a lot harder to get rid of excess heat than it is inside an atmosphere. Latency might be a bit of a bummer.
Maybe using colors instead of shades of gray would be clearer?
> Just calibrate your negotiations accordingly, and enjoy it!

Or just go do business with people living in countries where the insanity is more toned down, and enjoy it more.
I can zoom really far in by double-clicking, but I cant zoom back out.

I have to refresh to zoom out.

This is BEAUTIFUL.

It would be cool to see the different speed ranges reflected by [color of my choice] as well!
I think this kind of weird misinterpretation of the buzzwords happens because most people don't actually read anything about agile. They just hear other people say they need to be doing "daily stand-up meetings", and they interpret what they think that means, instead of bothering to find out.

I had a wonderful example of this behavioral pattern last week. I was called into my project's first "sprint planning meeting" where I was asked to write down for the next 8 sprints which features would be delivered when. Of course, since we were now "doing agile" I was allowed to be off by one or two features every sprint. But it still had to all fit into 8 sprints, because the project's deadline was by the end of the 8th sprint, and we needed to be sure we would deliver the full scope by then. As pepe le pew so aptly described: "le sigh".
Men's issues are feminist issues, and are best advanced by working with and as feminists.
Really? I don't disagree with patents, especially in the software area, being broken. I'm trying to think what else they might be meant to act as. If I was to patent a novel Widget, it would be to protect/defend it against others copying the Widget without my permission. No?
There's an UNZOOM button on the left.
Unfortunately I don't have a budget for this yet, and our MVP isnt launched yet, but I am going to wish I had a budget for this when we go live in june with our customer loyalty management app. located at www.lifebadges.com
next version will be named Go Laprofonda
Here is a link to the book (http://www.amazon.com/Miles-Nowhere-Americas-Contemporary-Fr...), an initial google search turns up unrelated things.
Science Fiction or Fact: ET Will Look Like Us
Brilliant.

On a side node: Anyone else reminded of Deluxe Paint palette cycling animations by this?
Beautiful! Is anyone else slightly annoyed by the front-loaded easing when you click the arrows? (I have no idea if that is the right term, but I mean to say the fact that it starts slowly, then speeds up. I'd prefer the other way around).
+1. Some of the linear disruptions in wind flow suggest the topography, it'd definitely be interesting to correlate changes in elevation w/ the wind patterns.
I laughed, but I would definitely change the name of the product to something that you could mention in public/polite company.
Happiness is a warm SCM
actually, if you click on the map, you can zoom in, and you can see whether a particular spot is experiencing fierce winds or not. I haven't figured out how to zoom out yet though.
I think there's one important distinction to make here. Dustin Curtis wasn't the one who submitted the link to hacker news. So, he wasn't really saying how awesome his product is, ans then saying that we can't have it, as many people said on both the Svbtle post, and the Obtvse post (at least not to Hacker News).

I was still annoyed by the wording by the post, but I think the fact it wasn't meant to be posted to Hacker News should be taken into consideration.