skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> It's interesting to speculate on why, if Scrum is so bad, everyone uses it?

Scrum is bad (as implemented by bigcorp), but waterfall is worse (as implemented by bigcorp).

A simple example from my past. My team was scrum based in a bigcorp that mostly did waterfall, so of course we did scrum badly too. That said, our scrum team shipped a major integration feature in two sprints (4 weeks) that the partner integrating team inserted into a 14 month long waterfall release train. It took ~16 months to ship a feature to customers that took 4 weeks to build and internally validate.

If there had been less bigcorp bullshit said feature might have taken 3 days, but at least 4 weeks is better than 14 months, although in this case customers got the worst of both.
If you aren't jamming your head between your teammates' thighs, you are doing scrum wrong!
You’re making an argument of false equivalency. Anyone who has used Siri can tell you that its listening capabilities are vastly overstated. There is a reason they make smart speakers and don’t just leverage your phone, despite the fact that almost everyone with a smart speaker has both.
Will you maintain the perspective in the midst of eternal incremental price increases and eventual ad placement?
Developer-only "agile" never works, no point in ranting about the details. Either your company is able and willing to develop a product incrementally, or they’re not.

Agile is not going to help you better track a project that the rest of the company treats as waterfall, fixed date, fixed scope shit.

99% of the ranting about Scrum or whatever is about typical shit project management, that they've bolted agilish lingo to.
An LCG with better parameters would be just as fast.
Robots Are Looking Better to Detroit as Labor Costs Rise
I recently dealt with the same thing. We had an experienced CTO come in and implement a “big company” style of Agile. In all fairness, there was a lack of process that needed to be addressed, but the pendulum swung very much too far in the other direction. He left the company and I stepped up to fill the gap. First thing I did was quantify the amount of time the team was spending in meetings and it was over 25%. Those meetings weren’t even efficiently grouped, so with context switching it was even worse.

Luckily I was in a position to change things and consolidated a lot of the ceremonies. I kept more of the process in place for our offshore partner team because the communication burden was higher.

So I guess my two take aways are that time in meetings needs to be evaluated with how meetings are grouped to avoid too much context switching and allow for folks to get into a flow. The other is that how strictly you adhere to “textbook” scrum really depends on the composition of the team. More junior teams or teams that are insolated from the larger business context benefit more from more process imho.
The Air is designed to satisfy the target market for the Air, which it does, and is why they sell in large numbers. It runs Safari, MS Word, and TurboTax just fine.

For comparison, a base Surface Pro has even lower specs than a basic MacBook Air. (8GB/128GB)

But both of these devices are absolutely useable for general tasks.
> Under the Amended Compact, the RMI and the United States agreed that the United States has full authority and responsibility for defense and security matters in and relating to the RMI

https://www.state.gov/u-s-relations-with-marshall-islands/

There's an argument that flagged vessels might not qualify here in some circumstances, but RMI isn't just some random country.
Creators also get paid by ads and by Premium subscriptions. A whole lot more than any other platform pays, and without gatekeeping to boot. As far as I know there are no other significant platforms except YouTube and Spotify that allows _anyone_ to try to make an income from their work without having to be vetted. I'd be happy to know of any other platforms.
Topics like this will inevitably devolve into predictable flame wars around "capitalism", various Marxisms, climate doom, the validity of private property, Mr. Monopoly top hat caricatures and the virtues of central planning.
Time spent with the team ebbs and flows depending on complexity of projects, where in the roadmap you are, seniority of the dev team, and more.

The agile manifesto was too abstract in it's original state, and folks who needed a rigid framework created capital A agile in order to adapt it to their cog in the machine role.

For my team of 6 in a ~20-25 person (remote) startup, we have a 30 minute dev meeting in the morning, and a 15 minute full team meeting where the agenda rotates daily around departments. I quite like it honestly, remote can be lonely and isolating otherwise.

Generally I think it's important to structure team responsibility around who ultimately needs to make the decision (although they need to consult others and get team buy-in). And hire people you trust to make the decisions. Then the meetings become about problem solving and getting through the work, rather than performance art and politics.
most of the discussions on SCRUM come from people running scrum or commenting on scrum as employees.

scrum exists because companies are paying salaries for engineers and dont want them sort of milling about doing random sh*t all day in an aimless fashion.

my experience is most engineers are incredibly passive and just want a paycheck and are barely productive.

except management is often completely clueless / non-technical / not interested in technical topics / view technical stuff as being "beneath them" sort of like taking out the garbage or cleaning the windows.

solution is to create a pseudo-science pretend self-governed democracy.

let the engineers manage themselves! genius!

It is a zero-interest rate management cop-out for badly led highly mediocre companies with a lot of dead weight.

make the over-hired engineers engage in a lot of activity so they seem to be making progress.

scrum needs to be looked at in context of past economic conditions and the structure of the market. lots and lots and lots of engineers work in these environments of non-technical management who just want to see "activity that looks like progress" and dont have any intention of getting more engaged or involved than that.

compare to startups where the ceo is often an engineer and doing the work themselves

I think scrum is going to die a horribl death in a high interest rate environment with AI.

the mediocre overpaid middle in tech is going to get a very hard re-evaluation

so is mediocre middle management

all of that needs to go away

mediocre middle management and scrum and over-hired, bloated organizations are all phenomenon of low-interest rates.

in a tight environment, I hope that talent is what matters and all that gets the chop.

I think scrum will be categorized with "sitting in cubicles" as a productivity method in the near future.
Seeking Guidance: How to Build a Passion-Driven Waitlist for My SaaS
Hi Hacker News Community,

I'm Karan, the heart and soul behind Poper.ai, an AI-driven popup builder. After dedicating days and nights to this project, it has become more than just a tool; it's a piece of my dream. I am here to seek your collective wisdom on how to attract and engage users for our waitlist.

Your experiences and insights are invaluable to me. How have you captivated and maintained interest in your projects? What strategies have you found effective in building a passionate and committed user base?

Any guidance or stories you share will be a guiding light on this journey. I am all ears and ready to learn from this incredible community.

Thank you for being a part of my story,
Karan
A talking rat character in a fantasy book I'm reading points out the illogic of a boat taking on a cat to catch a single rat. The cat is likely to eat more food than the rat. I wonder if rat terriers would be more efficient?
Multi-layer caches are also complex, but the benefits are worth it.

We already see NPUs spanning 3 orders of magnitude in TOPs in consumer devices. In the next few years that will probably be eight or ten orders of magnitude. I don’t think a LCD approach is going to work.

I would say that everything gets pushed to the cloud, but the economics are brutal. All of those companies spending billions a year on GPUs have very strong incentives to push as much inference to the edge as possible.
This is what we've done of late. Massive improvement. Much lower time commitment and we get a good (enough...not perfect) view of the metrics we really need to focus on.
I have pro and it conveniently “forgets” my update settings and will still do it whenever if feels like. Microsoft doesn’t understand that no means no.
oic. I missed that nuance. Thanks for the clarification.

Again, neat formula, happy to see your comments :)
If too many get laid off there will be less money in the housing market, it won't be able to soak up as much excess surplus value anymore.

If AI kills the rat race, we're supposed to be sad about it?
I wonder what is the more general solution to fixing the wealth distribution problem? This is not a unique problem and it is playing out in most western countries to varying degrees.
Cost of housing has skyrocketed, social mobility is down, a large portion of the population is bifurcated into “haves” and “have nots” which due to more limited social mobility is perpetuated across generations.

One thing that I notice in my country is that there are very strong social programs to ensure that home owners do not lose their house. For example there was a moratorium on mortgage payments during covid, the government runs a mortgage insurance corporation to bail out defaulted mortgages, home owners get many tax breaks. What this does is it syphons money from public funds to protect home owners - which makes up the majority of people’s net worth — further ossifying the social classes. If you can scrounge enough money or have rich parents you can make that jump to property ownership and then the government will do everything in it’s power to stop you from losing that asset even if you are way over-leveraged, or the economy fails, or the house is a lemon.

I think this is part of what makes the USA so wealthy is that they are willing to accept more pain during economic busts which efficiently allocates resources to where they are more efficiently used for the next boom.
I'm using the chatgpt sometimes 2-3 hours a day. That could easily go 10x
"Yea this small VPS provider with 1% of the features is just as good as AWS to us" yea that's because you aren't using features as basic as AWS Nitro Enclaves and you are years behind even basic cloud security.

Hetzner is for running homelabs and basic compute, not businesses. That's why EU companies constantly ignore EU rulings on US-EU privacy shield because there's just no alternative to American cloud providers yet.
I don't even use autocomplete. I know that autocomplete is, like, table stakes for the developer experience these days, but I just can't stand videogame shit happening in my field of vision whilst I'm coding, and I've learned to relish the extra effort of typing the whole name in every time, it's like a vocabulary word I can wield with power and precision, rather than relying on the machine to finish my thoughts for me.
> Big red flag is there is a daily all hands (yes, I've seen this in a 16 person startup)

It was even worse than this: The Scrum operators wanted an engineer from every team they interacted with to also join their meetings.

So if a project made an API request to another project, they'd insist on pulling an engineer from that team into their weekly or daily meetings.

I had daily meetings with 10 people, half of whom might be engineers from other teams who didn't need to be there.

Meetings became so useless that everyone stopped listening until their name was called so they could work through meetings. Then every time someone's name was called, we had to spend 5 minutes recovering the last 5 minutes of the meeting to bring them up to speed.

The inefficiency was out of control, but the worst part was that some people thrived on this level of inefficiency: Lack of progress meant the empire builders could argue for more headcount, too many meetings meant the Program Management department could hire more program managers. It was like a case study in adverse incentives.
We did a planning exercise every sprint at work to see how much time people had to work on features once you removed meetings and other ceremonies, RTO, holidays, oncall, etc.

We were tracking that per employee.

Everything was fine for a few months and then I added a "total" column next to each row and it became apparent that we were spending close to 60% of our sprint on non-development related tasks. On 45 work-days per sprint we had something like 19 days for features.

Needless to say it shocked my manager. He's not against change thankfully but we're still evaluating what could be better alternatives.
> Whatever people or person has the authority to prevent individuals from acquiring great power over the masses.....has great power over the masses.

I'm talking about the masses. The masses of people should prevent individuals from acquiring great power over them.

> Why are we judging the wealthy by their utility to the poor anyway?

That didn't come from me but from the person I was originally replying to: "If one person's ideas and actions brings up the standard of living for everyone else, I'm fine with that person having more wealth."

I guess it was supposed to be some kind of justification for massive inequality. That's not my criterion though.
Never in my life have I encountered anyone from the engineering side who spoke positively about scrum. It's always the consultants and scrum masters and their ilk who push the agenda.

Never have I ever heard about any story about agile making things better.
This is definitely part of it, as anyone who’s run Linux and Windows on the same machine can probably attest Windows is constantly doing… something? It is quite odd as it doesn’t seem to offer much in exchange for all these wasted cycles.
What’s the opposite of the “room-temperature” insult? Maybe “Death Valley temperature” would be at least one standard deviation above average.
The value of UBI is it means your ability to survive isn't tied to having a job, giving you a much stronger negotiating position. It's the same as socialized health care, housing, subsidized or socialized food...if you have to risk your life to find a better offer, it's harder to walk away from the table.

In theory, base on supply and demand, jobs should be priced at

difficulty * value * unpleasantness

Instead, a lot of the hardest, most important, and most unpleasant jobs pay some of the lowest wages, because they default land on the people with the least negotiating power (undocumented immigrants, prisoners, or those so stuck in crushing poverty they have to take the first option they get), and the employer gets to get away with paying well under the "market" value of the labor. So many jobs wouldn't exist at their current price point (if at all), if there was a basic minimum amount of "You can just about get by" money that everyone had.
The average German, while nominally poorer than people from other countries, is often richer. Living in the UK and knowing people in Germany, I realized that the average Briton is significantly poorer than the German.

For example renting in Germany is comparable to buying a leasehold flat in the UK, but doesn't count as personal/household wealth and doesn't require high capital in order to be acquired. Similarly, free education and functional healthcare are indeed assets, but aren't counted as household wealth. Even their pensions are significantly higher, their unemployment benefits are enough to pay the rent and the bills of a 4 people-household (compare to the 82£ a week you'd get in the UK).

Over their lifetimes, Germans receive benefits worth tens of thousands of euros every year, that, while not being counted as personal wealth, make them factually richer than the Brit. I am sure this applies to many other countries.
Us who have zero influence on German government policy? Why does it matter what language we discuss it in? What matters is persuading the people that can influence German government policy, and one does not influence them in English.
> everything could be instantly stripped away by world governments

Your comment suggests that the driver of your (and your peers) anhedonia is some lingering threat of some future lockdown by governments? Is that what you're saying? And, is that actually the case or is it just the easiest cause to put your finger on?

I understand that period was really rough for so many reasons. But a lot of the angst I see among friends/family/coworkers today isn't from the lockdowns per se, but it's more from having to slow down and consider some heavy, almost-existential questions surrounding their relationships, life, fulfillment, social supports, and purpose. And, at least for me, struggling with how many of the things I thought I knew about myself turned out to not really be true. Lockdowns may have forced me to see and acknowledge these issues, but they were always there.
Our local Walmart has given up weighing items post scan. It helps a lot.

In the UK many of the small grocery stores limit shopping to what fits on the scale at one time. While highly annoying, it mostly fits the shopping habits. That would not work at all in the US.
This essay holds a special place in my heart, since I first read it as a teenager when I was just starting to learn to code.

Re-reading it now, I was surprised to see references to Malcom Gladwell, since I didn’t remember Outliers becoming a thing until much later. Then when I saw the reference to Ratatouille, I realized the article had been updated since its posting in 1998. The original is still available on archive and is significantly shorter: https://web.archive.org/web/19980206223800/https://norvig.co...
Respect to Peter Norvig for continuing to edit his posts over the years.
confirmed as typo

https://www.techpowerup.com/317796/nvidia-corrects-l2-cache-...
We heard this tale many times already. Funny thing: if they started showing ads even to YouTube premium subscribers, they wouldn't even be first. Ridiculous.
I feel like an entire generation of devs have been weirdly brainwashed by cloud to believe that a ton of things need to be very complex and expensive.

Of course it’s also a zero interest rate phenomenon. We are exiting a >10 year era when the name of the game was simply to grow and anything in your way could be dealt with by just throwing money at it. Nobody cared about cost as long as growth numbers went up.
>catch a single rat.

There's rarely a single rat
Using ChatCPT to help you after you have been stuck and struggled would be equivalent to asking a senior. A senior might hallucinate an answer too, but either way you will get pointed in a generally useful direction. That’s usually all it takes

But as a senior, I can’t imagine using an LLM at this stage for solving anything meaningfully complex.
Yeah, I realised I'm not really learning by having such a cheatcode. Was doing a Vulkan renderer and the moment I stopped using ChatGPT, I started making way more reasonable decisions on how to structure my code via abstractions and such.

You shouldn't take the easy route when learning lads
I set my kids up with Faraday.dev on their M2 Airs and it does just fine. They will have chatbots up for hours to help them with schoolwork or when playing Minecraft to give them ideas.

The big thing is just don’t lock the models into memory on lower RAM systems. That gets you into trouble when some of the unified RAM is needed for something else and you can soft lock the system. The heat is not an issue though in my experience.
To clarify, I really don’t see this one as a big deal at all.

Not even on the radar for me.
Ha! At my old employer they used "Scaled Agile Framework" (SAFe).

About a dozen teams of developers and operations people got together once a QUARTER to determine what big epics/objectives to complete, and then develop stories and estimates (points) for those stories and roughly which sprint they would fall into within the "iteration", as the quarter was called.

Every team on the same sprint schedule. Fibbonaci story rankings across the org. Product owner and scrum master would be shared between several teams, IIRC.

And of course, middle management observing the aggregate amount of work estimated vs. completed every "iteration".
> There's no way to write good security software for an operating system that's written without security software in mind.

That's the job of the OS vendor: to design software such that third-party security theatre isn't necessary.
Aren't story points (estimates) usually part of scrum?
Bad idea re. Texas. UT Austin is extremely difficult to get into nowadays.
You make a good point! But scrum as we know it today is not Agile:

"Individuals and interactions over processes and tools."

Processes and tools (i.e. Jira, sprint planning, retrospectives, etc.) dominate all implementations of Scrum I've seen.
What's Gone Wrong at Boeing
I retired two years ago, but finally made peace with SCRUM in my final years by eliminating standing team meetings for retrospective / review / backlog.

Backlog - groom during long/medium term planning. Not everyone needs to be in the room for this, just leads. Use 1:1s to triangulate on issues that we're ignoring or under-resourcing.

Retro - on an infrastructure team, retros are already built into the incident management process.

Sprint review - start sprint planning by asking how'd the last sprint go. Did anything gunk up the works? Are there any promises we didn't keep? The rotating on-call and triage (secondary on-call) would fill us in on any active fires, or less us know if we can/should hand ownership of an issue to another team.
No, a thousand times no.

Inflation wipes out the notional value of debts and therefore favors the 80-90% of people whose finances are dominated by a debt term. At the low end of being lucky that debt term is unsecured dollar-valued debt like a credit card. At the high end misguided boomers acting against their own interest owe that debt as a 30 fixed secured by a home.

The subset of boomers (or wannabe YC insiders) who suffer at the hands of inflation are fucking vocal but statistically irrelevant. The ratio of actual financialization of actual asset classes to people who whinge about “inflation” is maybe the stupidest thing said stupidly constantly.
Fridays for future is a pretty massive protest wave in europe, this is simply a play on that.
> Did the need for labor decrease after the lightbulb, electricity, or the telegraph? Or did Quality of life go up while projects expanded in scope and we accomplished greater things with more efficiency?

It absolutely did...and you literally said it yourself. What is "more efficiency" except a reduced need for labour for a fixed unit of "productivity"?
Summed up: war is complicated and people will think up every possible advantage they can get to avoid getting killed. Also; logistics matter (laymen talk tactics, experts talk logistics and all that)

I wonder what myths people will say about our current or recent times?
- That soldiers would just shoot like there’s no tomorrow (bullets are heavy and reloading matters)
- That fortifications didn’t matter (look at the success of T walls and hesco barriers)
- that small units could be found just driving around the desert like Hurt Locker would lead you to believe (only the most specialized units would go without local and quick support forces, and they almost always had aerial support instead)

I could go on a long time about this stuff - look up videos posted by TRADOC or MCoE to see how complicated seemingly simple things can get: https://youtu.be/ZZ-sCT_maAQ?si=CFeSzzhobzzYIeDg
My issue with premium is they bundle Music and force me to buy it when I don’t need or want it.
> After 2500 people own a company's stock

Which is why many large private companies have special purpose entities for employee ownership and the like.