skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> With Scrum, there is an explicit commitment ... on what stories are going to be delivered within the sprint,

No, there isn't. You adhere to your burn-down, not to your feature set. Scrum is time driven, not task driven. The whole idea is to become better at estimation so that Scrum appears task driven, when really it's just because your team is that good at estimating.

> Iteration planning meetings are seriously expensive.

Then you're doing it wrong (god, I feel awful for saying that). If you're spending that much time in pre-sprint planning, people aren't bringing enough to the table and you're not defining your problems well enough before trying to solve them.

> I hate the term “scrum-but”.

Ironic that that sounds like exactly what the environment you were working in sounds like.

> This might be a bit controversial, but the big difference between Scrum and things like Lean Software Development for me were the difference of focusing on process versus delivery.

I think this is a "forest for the trees" issue. Scrum is about abstracting the process into a rigid and lightweight framework so you only have to think about it, at most, fifteen minutes a day (unless you have the misfortune of being the Scrum master/cat wrangler)

> It can’t, and it’s not a problem with your organization if it doesn’t. It’s a problem with Scrum.

That's a non-sequitur. It's a problem with neither. If my company can't implement a waterfall methodology because our clients require faster iteration, that doesn't mean there's a problem with either - it's just not a good fit.

But if your company tries to implement Scrum and throws it out six weeks or six months later because it's "too hard" or "bad," my assumption is that real Scrum probably wasn't happening.

Will Scrum work for everyone? Fuck no. Scrum is hard. It requires the kind of buy in that, if you've got it, you probably don't need Scrum anyway.

Can Scrum work for everyone? Probably. Scrum is only hard when you've got conflicting goals. If you have a smart enough team, you can tweak your sprint lengths from as little as a few days to as long as six to eight weeks, and after you've been on Scrum for a few sprints your planning meetings should take an hour or two, tops.
The #1 point mentioned in the article was my experience as well. For a tight deadline project if we decided to do everything based on the complexity points and team velocity it would take 6 sprints and a total of 3 months. But we just decided to ditch it and sit around a table and finished the whole thing in 2 weeks straight.
So my experience is that if you are working with a dedicated team it is better to finish the work based on the best of your ability rather than time boxing into some artificial time limits.
I wouldn't say that Zynga is using virus tactics, I would say that viruses have been using marketing tactics that everyone knows works for short term gain.

But there's plenty of blame to go around for this stuff being out there. Zynga for doing it, Facebook for allowing it, and the user for not reading about what they're clicking.
Dancing Penguins – A Case of Organized Android Pay Per Install | ESET ThreatBlog
I worked at a place once where we were forced to work 12 hour days for about 5 months straight. As exempt employees, we were not paid more, and our pay was already below industry standard.

In exchange, we got free soda, nerf guns, and they would buy you dinner. They also had a beach party once... on a saturday. Also raffles for free swag.

Despite the fairly pleasant social atmosphere and talented co-workers who were in the same boat as you, I left after 7 months. It didn't matter as much as having time to spend with non-work friends and loved ones and a better paycheck. Apparently most agreed - the turnover rate was over 200%.
Oh interesting. That would be quite nice, actually...

Have you found Play to be significantly faster than Rails/worth the context switching?
The Find Films tab is awesome. Well done, guys; will be spreading this around to my friends :)
Made a game to play while reading Apple announcement tweets
Apple is a special case. They spend more on advertising than the GDP of most countries. The media won't--can't--call Apple on its deceptive advertising because Apple, even post-Jobs, is notoriously vindicative with these sorts of matters. For too many media companies, Apple's ad buys are what keep them in the black (or at least, out of bankruptcy).
Injustice means one thing for me and another for someone living in China. I have no idea what the standard of living is over there for a typical factory worker. Is it better or worse than the alternatives? I don't know. Foxconn could be a pioneer of beter living and working conditions for the country and I'd never know it. I'm biased towards a first world view on these matters. Everything must be considered when doing these types of comparisons, but there is no comparison here, just an editorial on how deplorable working conditions are. Again, at Foxconn in China. I assume Foxconn factories aren't this way in other countries with better labor laws.

My stance is that this is an issue the government needs to resolve. It's unreasonable to expect Apple or Foxconn to do anything about this on their own accord. I doubt they are behaving any differently than any other company with manufacturing operations over there. There's no need to crucify Apple or Foxconn over this.
I think your last point is key. You can't use process to turn a bad programmer into a mediocre one - any process that does will also turn a great programmer into just a mediocre one.
That Stripe CTF was deceptively excellent. If you (the reader of this comment) got through it and had fun, I promise, we'd be both interested to talk to you and an interesting company for you to talk to. www.matasano.com/careers.
Another story on same issue already on front page:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4510742
The author nails it in their last bullet point: "Facebook, STEP UP and stop your big partners from hurting your product, users and whole ecosystem once in a while!"

If Facebook doesn't police a major partner from abusing its API like this, they are effectively condoing this behavior and inviting their other app partners to do the same.

I can't believe that Facebook has become another MySpace. Its product/market fit was so strong just a few years ago that they seemed unbeatable: a true anti-MySpace. Since then, it seems like in their pursuit for growth they've basically completely gutted their product/market fit and worked to destroy the trust they'd built up with their users.
Best Practices for SMBs Advertising on Facebook
17 year old Africans build a platform to connect your website to the world
It's a little more complicated than that. Using /usr/bin/env in your shebang is effectively a way to say "I don't care which executable you run this with". If the executable doesn't actually matter, that's fine - bash scripts probably don't care whether bash is /bin/bash or /usr/bin/bash, so it makes sense to just use whichever is in the path.

Once you start getting into Python/Ruby/Perl/etc scripts, the executable actually does matter and relying on env can make your script fragile with respect to path changes. Different executables have access to to different collections of installed libraries, and it's important to make sure that your scripts are run using the executable that has their dependencies installed. If you use env shebangs, there's no way to do that - you're limited to either using the first executable on the path or manually specifying the executable on the command line to bypass the shebang.

I'm not saying that you shouldn't use env shebags, because they really are fine for a lot of scripts. However, you should always be mindful of what they mean and how that could break your script in the future.
No, you didn't. It was thoughtful and even-keeled perspective, conveyed in a tone that should be embraced here even if there is disagreement about the actual points made.
Market Ready Internet of Things | ioBridge
> "I thought my post would be downvoted" ... "I really didn't want such a huge discussion"

Let's call this what it is: trolling. Please don't do that.

"Please avoid introducing classic flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say about them." - http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
An Unusual VC Scours Military Labs for Ideas
I did and I didn't see anything that provided comparison with conditions in other Chinese factories. I have no way to know what's typical and what's not.
My perspective is that we know how to design protocols which are provably secure.

Your perspective is... I'm not quite sure, actually. Maybe you just don't believe in mathematical proofs?

As you say, agree to disagree -- but I'm not going to stop pointing and laughing every time a new SSL/TLS vulnerability comes out. :-)
Part of me says "why is this news?", and part of me says this is uncharacteristically sloppy for Apple.
Chocolat, on the mac, switches to comic sans when the trial runs out. Using it for a couple weeks before jumping to the full version, I can vouch for that it's actually surprisingly good for writing code. Much better than most proportional fonts.
It's not about looking for an easy way out, you really have to be prepared to embrace not just new tools but a whole new way of thinking. As a former python diehard it took me a long, long time to understand why anyone would choose to use java - but it does have its advantages, and wicket is the best demonstration I've found of what it makes possible.
> They must make their mobile app flawless and reliable, because if only a couple of users out of hundreds of millions publicly criticize their app, this hurts their reputation badly.

Vehemently disagree. I know very few apps that are flawless and reliable, including Apple's native apps. A couple of users have already publicly criticized the app for YEARS now and it hasn't hurt their reputation to the point where they are losing users. Facebook has power because of the network effect. People are willing to deal with a flawed experience as long as the network effect is left in tact. Facebook will need to worry about a flawless app experience when the network effect diminishes.
You remember how I've been telling people they need to learn to code? If you can then you can look at their code and see that they actually don't have much there, and what they do have is kind of crap:

https://code.google.com/p/course-builder/source/browse/#git%...

There's really not much there, and a lot of the code is kind of junk code meant to get people stuck on GAE. Here's my criticism of it so far:

* Most of the controller code looks slapped together and kind of hacked on rather than designed with any thought. https://code.google.com/p/course-builder/source/browse/cours...

* There's hardly any other services other than a model for Lesson/Unit/Student and controllers that are hardcoded for their own course. For example, their entire Assessment system in lessons.py isn't backed by any model and is just dumped into the Student model, which means students can't be assessed more than once or on multiple courses or lessons? Hopefully I'm reading that wrong.

* The model isn't even really right. There's no Course or Instructor model and all the other things that should be models are just tossed into lessons.py controllers and dumped into memcache.

* Very tied to GAE it seems, and to set this up you'd better be damn good at that and python. There's no way in hell this'd ever be useable by anybody but a programmer.

* The assessment stuff is either going to be useless or a major time sink for them. Instructors are notorious for having batshit crazy assessment systems making it impossible to create a universal one they'll all use. I'd ditch that stuff or hook it into google docs spreadsheet instead.

* Seems to have almost zero Student->Instructor communication, and only a placeholder for the Forums. If they plan on doing the classic Google Supportless Tech Support then they better fix that, or hook it into G+ better. Problem with G+ is they'll need to make it so students can't monopolize instructor time in private.

* They'll very definitely be tying this to all their services, which means it'll only be slightly useful outside of the google ecosystem. If they plan on getting into the K-12 hosting then that'll be a problem for them since many school systems can't host student data on outside computers because of student privacy laws.

It's easy to rip apart code like this, and most likely when I release the code to my stuff people will do the same (and should). But, if they post a breathless press release touting it, then I expect it to be much more capable than this. This to me looks like classic corporate FLOSS white elephant code where they hope some poor suckers will jump in and make it great for them so they don't have to work on it anymore.
isn't profit a motive anymore in this form? this is just a method to make profit, well thought out and executed. Good word play.
Why is fundamentalism bad, and why is it ok for you to be fundamentalist in your anti-fundamentalism?
And it's fantastic when you're on a tight schedule! Instead of running fast all the time, you just sprint, then sprint, then sprint, etc! Works like magic. No one burns out at all.
> For copyright to even exist at all the work must be fixed in a tangible medium.

Examples of a "tangible medium" would include, of course, graphite markings, magnetic dust, or the strength of nodes in a neural network.
You also need the client and server to both support TLS compression. But there aren't any major sites (that I know of) which do support TLS compression.
I've seen those 'OK'/'Yes' button-only modals in a few social games now and they're goddamn disgusting. It will probably catch on since I have no doubt that it's effective, but it's the worst kind of manipulation and a great way to ensure that customers never trust you.
I think there is an editor out there that actually is free to use but only lets you use Comic Sans as punishment until you pay.
They are displayed in two cases:

1) When you turn your Kindle off, there will be a full-screen ad.

2) When browsing books at the main menu, a small horizontal bar across the bottom of the screen will display an ad. You only come to this screen by choice, though -- if you were in the middle of a book when turning off your Kindle, when you turn it back on it will go straight to where you were in the book without showing this menu.

Since they never interfere with reading, they are extremely non-intrusive. I think they are personalized but not positive.
>> Yes, we do hold Israel to a higher standard than its neighbours

When I compare the volume of criticism from the left, I have to ask: How many thousands times more criticism is reasonable? For much, much less?

Compare with e.g. Sudan, which literally can be argued to be at least thousands of time worse -- and not only is it criticised less, the muslim world's shameful support isn't criticised.

What shocks me is that the left support (as in -- not calling out) state nazi propaganda. Public news media, children(!) tv. And so on.

Is it a new Ribentropp-Molotov nazi/left alliance!?

There are many more possible examples (some more in previous comments). I just can't see how you reasonably can argue your position here.

>>My instinct is to lay that at the feet of religion. Two violently opposed religions claiming the same areas as important holy sites makes peace hard.

You really don't think the permanency of the refugees' situation (and dictators' need for external enemies) have the large influence?

(Also, up to now, the Jewish side haven't been that religious.)

I'll take the rest later or tomorrow. (I am in Europe, the prisons and criminal subcultures are (still) very different here. At least in Sweden, no one needs to be a criminal to not starve. There are, simplified, two motivations for criminals: Drugs or a big car to impress stupid women with breast implants.)
It seems to be a very early release just like the article says. Additionally it is Apache Licensed. So even if Google is unable to deliver a brilliant and easy-to-use tool, others can probably create a layer on it. It's a win either way.
I use Ubuntu Mono. Consolas is a little weird to me and Deja Vu Sans Mono just lacks character. I like Droid Sans Mono a lot too.
I've never done formal scrum, but I've worked on a lot of teams, and I just don't see how there is a single bare minimum you need to be effective. In my experience, even with excellent teams, this depends on the project and the talents of the contributors.
Right, and Vivtek's point was that it doesn't matter if Foxconn has better working conditions than other factories in China. Lesser of two evils is still an evil.

deelowe seems to have the "if someone's gonna do it, it might as well be us" mentality; as if it was morally ok to exploit labour in China just because China does that to itself.

What we should be looking at is the Purchasing Power Parity. If the Chinese factory workers can afford much less than American factory workers, we should try to make it more fair.
Nice summary. Slightly off topic, I first learned about the basics of integer compression with some good context in "Data Intensive Text Processing with MapReduce", which I recommend not necessarily for that section, but otherwise as a great book. http://lintool.github.com/MapReduceAlgorithms/
You can, however, strip it down even further and still be effective. Scrum encourages bundling stories into sets and delivering them all at once. I've been moving away from that, and continuously delivering discrete stories/features/changes/fixes/whatever as they are ready.

Decoupling incrementalism from iterations has been a huge change for me.
No, it's like looking at a steel mill in the 1900's and pointing the finger at our government to do something about it. Which we did and it got fixed. Resolution didn't come from journalists going around bashing all the companies that purchased US steel. Resolution came from the government enacting better labor laws.

Also, it wasn't just steel. It was steel, oil, coal and many other industries. Which, I'd argue is the same issue in China.
I can't believe this biased and unintelligent rant is being upvoted. HTML5 does not suck because of JavaScript, or because of using greedy algorithms, or because people allocate too much memory. It sucks because browser support isn't there and Apple/Google/MS does not give a damn about HTML5. And if you think about it, it makes sense, it's much better for Apple/Google/MS that developers develop exclusively for their platforms and not for HTML5 (a platform that could be run on any OS).

What we need is an independent browser vendor (Opera, Mozilla) to do an amazing HTML5 experience.
RAM really is a harmful kludge. Neither Turing machines nor lambda calculus call for some of an algorithm's state to suddenly be obliterated. The only reason we put up with it is that disk and SSD are so much slower.
How can they leak something they already leaked/implied themselves on purpose in their media event invitation with a giant "5" showing as the shadow?
I think he means we can't even Right click -> Copy Image URL, at least not in Chrome

So there's no way to access the raw image without searching in source code (unless I'm missing something).

In any case that's what I don't really like about it.
Thanks for this link, and also all the commenters adding other useful links - I'm looking forward to watching these.
What's the issue with that ? Isn't it possible to design a compression algorithm that is efficient and less predictable at the same time ? Or is it more of a general concept that I don't know of ?
36 comments and nobody figures out that you could do this with the phone you already have?
Ditto. I left feedback on the site saying the same. I think there's potential here, but whether this service does what I wish it would is entirely unclear.

Also, have someone comb through the site for grammer - I got a sign-in prompt at one point that asked 'Already got an account?' This should be present-tense, as in 'Already have an account?' rather than past tense (e.g. I got an account yesterday).
TL;DR: remarkably lightweight article, mostly a puff piece about one particular entrepreneur.

General good advice found within: "there are as many opportunities in a down market as in an up market", "setting up a business you essentially have do five years of work in one year", and "don't bet the family home".
These sorts of incidents make me wonder why we even care about "democratizing" these countries. It's clear that they're stuck in the Middle Ages, and I don't think any amount of intervention is going to change that. You can't forcibly change an entire culture by throwing money and soldiers at it.

Seems to me the right thing to do is to make it as easy and seamless as possible for those who share our views to leave their countries and come to America. It's not like we have any shortage of space in this country, and as long as the people we bring are contributing to the economy and have a modern value system, it can only be a good thing for us too.
That protocols without security proofs can survive in the real world, and protocols with security proofs still fall to implementation bugs, and that if you were going to bet on incidence of protocol design flaws vs. implementation flaws, the safe bet is on implementation flaws.
"You want to state that psychiatric medicine is mostly placebo, but don't have any good criticisms to levy against double blind studies of antidepressants with placebos."

Because maybe he assumes you aren't too stupid to do a simple Google search. Both Emperor's New Drugs and Anatomy of an Epidemic are extraordinarily well written, it's well worth reading both, and there are all sorts of other good books on mental illness as well.

This is exactly why HN has become like idiocracy, where anyone who takes the time to become well educated about something before speaking is basically called a faggot for reading books.
The reality is we spend most of our waking lives at work.

Bloody hell, that sounds so depressing when you put it like that...
For general population, Linux became the name of the whole stack of related technologies rather than the kernel name, so not using it (by Ubuntu at least) is a disservice to everyone involved. I'm OK with Android not using it, since they are too far apart from the rest of the Linux world anyway and aren't benefiting global Linux community much. Just my 2 cents.
I don't know if you meant that in a sarcastic way, but this does touch on a pet peeve of mine with Scrum, the word "sprint" is, by definition, not a sustainable pace.
Netflix Canada definitely has a Not Interested button.
An excellent defense of the Java language Mr. exabrial, but any recommendations for Java web frameworks? :D
and what is/was wrong with slavery, after all every one was doing it and probably slaves on plantations had better living conditions than the people they came from living in the bush...

Don't blame the poor plantation owners, they are just doing the same thing as all the others....

Sheesh, until now I never realized it was possible to have your head so far up your ass it ended up buried in the sand...
"Please don't spread unsubstantiated rumors on this topic."

You're the one spreading misinformation. How about you actually read some books on the topic before attacking others.
If you're encrypting and storing files, the answer is (A). The question is, in light of this result, frustratingly imprecise.
How did you get it to work? I've been wracking my brain over this but can't configure it correctly http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12358173/correct-s3-cloud...