skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Your experience is definitely unfortunate - stories/features being fully tested before being considered done, and therefore potentially shippable, is a key part of a successful Agile process. Without it, you are missing out on a lot of the possible benefits of the process, and I have seen first-hand the difference having QA engineers, even not particularly strong ones, integrated into the sprint can make to product quality.

A good first step to take would be to get your team together and work to define a Definition of Done, which should include both unit and integration/E2E testing (manual and/or automated) being complete - any stories not meeting these criteria cannot be considered as "done" and you can't count the points for them in the sprint.

Of course, initially this will probably cause lots of failed sprints and will decrease your velocity, but you have to see this as a positive, in that this raises visibility of the problems, and once you can identify the specific issues you're having and take the steps you need to resolve them (whether that's a lack of QA resource, or poor testing culture among developers, or whatever), you'll know when you say something is "done", it actually is done, rather than hiding a load of extra testing work that isn't complete.

On the requirements front, again defining a Definition of Ready can help - these are the criteria stories need to meet before you will estimate or start working on them. This should include things like requirements being clear, designs/UX being complete (if appropriate) and the story being testable and of a suitably small size for you to estimate with a reasonable degree of confidence.

Once you start pushing back on estimating stories because they don't meet these requirements and educating your product owners what they can do to improve the situation (for example, breaking stories down into smaller chunks, or defining requirements more clearly), you'll hopefully find the situation improves.

Of course, none of this is a substitute for conversations and working with the product team to help them understand what does and doesn't work for you, but I've personally helped make big differences to a team's quality and productivity by taking small steps such as these, in addition to educating the team and business on what "agile" is (without all the BS that some people will try and sell you!) and why this is important to us as developers and therefore to the wider organisation.
Why is it so hard for people to explain what their product is on the product's web page? Two sentences explaining why this keyboard is interesting and why I should put my e-mail into your box would be welcome.

Yeah, I see that there's a video. No, I'm not going to watch it.
The Imitation Game: inventing a new slander to insult Alan Turing
Anyone have a hint for using G-Maps (or making a homescreen shortcut) to navigate home address that won't send me to the wrong place, or make me wait, in case of slow internet?

This seems fairly basic functionality so I may be missing something. I've even been sent toward a place 30 miles east of home, repeatedly, trying to select the autocompletion of 'home'.
Because the keyboard has a dictionary and can choose the most likely word you meant from your swipe waypoints
Our intuition does a very poor job of answering questions like this (well, almost any questions, really) and we can spend a lot of time fooling ourselves that the way the universe actually is "makes sense" in some intuitive way. It doesn't. If it did, we'd have had correct physics in 1687 BCE instead of 1687 CE.

One way to test this is to ask yourself what your intuition tells you before you know the answer. You'll mostly get it wrong, unless you have formal training in the field. Intuitive "explanations" are only good after the fact, and even after the fact can be misleading and problematic, as the one you bring up here is.

The universe as a whole (very probably) has zero angular momentum. There are consequences on the large scale if this is not the case that we'd probably have detected by now. So early star formation, including quasar formation, happened in a hot zero-momentum gas cloud that filled the expanding universe. That is the structure that birthed the quasars. That means that while there may well have been local eddies, there was not any overall rotation to the gas. So why would quasars that formed in distant parts of that gas have their axes aligned in the same direction?

Short version: your mental model of the early universe is not accurate, so your intuitive explanation doesn't actually explain the phenomenon under study. Simply because it "makes sense" of the data does not make it useful. In particular, you've assumed a counter-factual.

The reason why cosmologists are surprised by these results is because they have a better understanding of the early universe, and know that there is no known mechanism to align the rotational axes of these objects. They are now wondering what that mechanism might be. Global angular momentum is one possibility, but it is far, far down on the list because it is contradicted by a lot of other data.
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The moon is effectively at infinity in terms of focus. The problem is not that it can't focus, but just that the stuff is too small. Hubble has taken pictures of the moon.
I don't know... what you're talking about is something like how Netflix used their data to motivate shows like House of Cards and Orange is the New Black, which they "knew" in some sense would have mass appeal. The masses are easy to please because you can just average over their individual tastes and capture huge swaths of the general population (see also: political parties, popular music, "middle-brow" chain restaurants), but it's much more difficult to get an accurate prediction for a single person. If you zoom in close enough, everyone becomes an outlier.

Also, creating art is not as simple as entering the infinite realm of possible songs (or paintings, or meals or...) and just choosing a set of parameters. Again, a broad set of parameters, sure. I'm going to write a rock song. I'm going to cook a boeuf bourguignon. But how to capture the weird unsystematic idiosyncrasies of any given individual, and do so in a way that doesn't feel soulless and artificial?
My boss in previous company forced analysts to write bug reports and feature requests in the form:

"how it works now, how it should work".

This took at most a month and made life for everybody a lot better.
We (mostly my cofounder at Leanpub, Peter, but I've done it once or twice) do the same thing when talking about "the rise of serial fiction via fanfiction" to a publishing audience.

We show them the "books" page of fanfiction.net[1] and then note that the numbers there are the number of stories written in each book's universe, not the number of readers or views or anything like that. Go look if you haven't seen it, it's amazing.

[1]: https://www.fanfiction.net/book/
Why do they call them "Stories" in this article? Is it because of Agile?

They are called "Change Requests". Put on your big boy pants and replace "Stories" with "Changes" and it makes much more sense.
> This Mr Programmer is confused by elements flying around in front of them.

Try it out for yourself and see if you find it confusing. In many places it's designed to enhance ease of use and does a fairly good job of it.
>why don't we get tough with laws and sentencing?

The utter inevitability of misuse and overuse of it. England has set a great example for why I never want that kind of speech enforcement here.
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> - Unclear requirements

> - Changing requirements

> - Context switching

That's Agile Programming!
Seems to be perpetually stuck on "loading...". Hug of death?
An NSL can be used only to compel release of connection or transaction metadata, and cannot be used to compel disclosure of message contents. It's basically a fast-track for getting things like call records, and it most emphatically cannot be used to compel turning over a certificate or allowing a man-in-the-middle.

To my knowledge the exact details of the Lavabit case were never released, but from what has been released it's quite clear that the issue was regarding a warrant and a gag order, because the ensuing litigation wouldn't have been remotely applicable to an NSL (otherwise Lavabit's attorney would have won on a walk).

None of this is to say that I think NSLs should exist. In fact, I think they're a terrible idea. But the vast majority of discussions around them and similar topics is so grossly uninformed that it's impossible to take most people seriously on these subjects.
It also decreases your user satisfaction from my experience. Writing a full native app, versus an cordova based app is still a world of difference.

So for business apps, data input apps etc, cordova is fine, but dont try writing your next killer app with it..

But opinions might differ, i know.
There's probably a subreddit full of people just like you that you just haven't stumbled across yet.

Or maybe you have.
> But if you're doing agile properly, you shouldn't consider a user story a 'spec' - a user story should be a placeholder for a conversation.

Yep. It almost sounded like this article was saying "you're not waterfalling hard enough". Processes are not a substitute for human interaction, they are supposed to enable human interaction.
Yes, "nerd logic" includes applying normal standards of human decency to marketing instead of giving it a free pass to act however it wants as some people seem to think is appropriate. That should not really surprise you.
Okay, so I grabbed my phone and tested it out. It...actually works. It's a bizarre method of text entry, but interesting nonetheless.
The harsh words here are unnecessary and don't do anything for your argument.

There were actually plenty of people using the channel when advertisers still had the ability to reach their entire fanbase. There was a long period of time when this was simply the way it worked. Thus, I think it is reasonable for companies to be forgiven for thinking that they would continue to be able to reach this audience in the same manner once they invested in acquiring them.

Now, I have always thought email had more value just because of what you can do with it, but if you tell me to invest in your ad platform to drive people to signup for me to contact them on a page on your platform, and let me reach them for free after the initial investment, I think it is perfectly reasonable to feel extremely cheated when you change the terms of the deal to suddenly double-dip. There is a reason a large part of the ad industry has erupted at FB over this and why anyone spending serious money on social these days is driving all that traffic offsite to places they control, and/or using their own audience data through a DSP with FB simply serving as a "dumb" placement.
You can zoom with one hand by double tapping and then sliding down or up on your second tap.
Wow! But I thought t-mobile was 1700MHz / 2100MHz! I don't want to believe that you're lying to me, but... You've gotten my hopes up that I can use this on WIND in Canada.
Hm, that's not a simple question to answer.

It's not actually the matter of importance but rather of which e-mails can wait. There is a client, a global corp. interested in becoming partners with us who's willing to add our software to their products, big bucks involved, and no matter what I'm doing at the moment I will answer their e-mails right away when they come in.

On the other hand I have a small client who's not in a rush and I know I can wait with him till Monday.

The bad habit is using the inbox as your to-do list, but that's what has actually become. Certainly I should answer all the e-mails promptly, as waiting for answer is really frustrating from the client's point of view.

Internal communication is most often the least important like what's for lunch or who's going to play the ball after work, and most of this stuff should be completely separated from e-mails sent by clients.

I think there also should be a text field for notes next to the e-mail's title so that I could write short notes on how to process the e-mail once I have time.

When I know I won't have time to answer a particular e-mail later I try to answer it instantly, but later I might forget to follow up. If I don't have time it's also good to know to whom I could forward the e-mail and know that the person will 100% answer it on the very same day. Nothing is worse than telling a Client someone else will fix the problem and then a week later you learn that your colleague actually didn't get in touch with them.
I don't know anybody seriously using either of these. Mahout has bad implementations and Weka is showing it's age.
Site is stuck at `loading...`
Game UIs feature transitions extensively.
We all have an opinion. I find his spot on.
This practice is very common. I'm not saying I agree with it but you should expect that every service you signup with to do this. As the company retargeting you do not know anything extra about your customers. The retargeting audience is a black box. It's Facebook you have to worry about. My suggestion is to have a different email for Facebook than everything else.
I think you're generally right about the fact that pop music popularizes more grown-up genres.

But I think you could have picked something different than delta blues as an example. Delta blues was extremely simple when it started out, before the end of the thirties there wasn't even a proper turnaround [1]. If you compare originals from before WW2 to covers by British bands you'll find out that in most cases the British version is more complex.

On the other hand take Frank Zappa's Freak Out and compare it to Sgt. Pepper's…

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turnaround_(music)
FYI - This is the privacy policy for it: https://www.facebook.com/ads/manage/customaudiences/tos.php

"Facebook’s custom audience feature enables you to create an audience using your data such as email addresses and phone numbers. When using Facebook’s custom audience feature, your data is locally hashed on your system before you upload and pass such data to Facebook to be used to create your custom audience (the “Hashed Data”)."
remove the PM.
Thats indeed a good point. The question remains. How often should you redesign your app? Sometimes an innovation (such as touch screens) forces you to rethink the uix.
Try their github repository (MIT lic) https://github.com/driftyco/ionic

or goto

http://ionicframework.com/
The email in this case is somewhat trivial. It serves as a userID. If you are super concerned with giving away an email, there are services like LiveRamp that can translate that into an anonymous audience ID for use with your DMP and/or DSP so you target the ID without handing over the email.
Thanks! We use multiple cloud providers (Digital Ocean and AWS being our primary), Play Framework, AKKA , Ansible for deployment, Shippable for our CI and a good amount of custom clever code by our back end team.
Fail. All of this shows the same problem that "Agile" in general has: it's an attempt to patch closed-allocation, business-driven software engineering. It does not work. Maybe it turns the 0.5x developers into 0.75x players, but it alienates the shit out of the top talent. Fuck user stories. Fuck letting the passengers fly the plane. Fuck "sprints" or "iterations" or whatever nonsense you're calling these artificial time periods. Just let the people who can build great things, and who want to do so, go at it.

I agree with some of what's being said here, but not the direction it's heading. Business-driven engineering is a dead end and it can't be patched by hiring consultants to tell people how to play planning poker. If you want to build great technology in-house, you can only do it as an engineer-driven firm.

The real lesson from all this is that you should never let people work on more than one thing at once. Make sure they know what it is.

Neat idea. Fails horribly in practice. Why? The problem with "one thing only" management is that the matter of who chooses each person's "one thing" gets horribly political, and fast. "One thing only" works only if the workers get to choose their one thing, which brings us to open allocation, which leaves me questioning whether we need all of this process that the engineers wouldn't impose on themselves...

Also, "one thing only" tends to create dead time and throughput issues, (a) due to communication issues and blockages, and (b) because people who'd rather have a different "one thing" will often do other stuff anyway. It also tends to lead to a high burnout rate when people can't voluntarily switch between at least two tasks.
OP here, i'm spawning more machines, hang in there
Can I get the list of APIs via an API?
Yeah, this isn't even mopping up water. This is exerting effort to lie only to yourself. The emperor has no clothes and the emperor is you.
That's what the absence of a CLA would achieve. Adding a CLA explicitly gives the company the option.
After a bit of thought, Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 (and 2, honestly) would also be interesting to look at. 2 is essentially a booked game, I don't think anybody feels like new stuff is going to be discovered there, but it was actively played for years and years, so examining changing tier lists would be pretty interesting. 3 is still played and the metagame has gone through some pretty significant shifts (from phoenix teams to morridoom to zero may cry), but I can basically guarantee that it's not going to be patched any time soon because of the way rights to the characters are tangled up, so any metagame shifts that happen are entirely due to the players discovering new tech. And there's definitely still a lot of new tech to be discovered in MvC3.
Coding is more like music than math. Multiple parts work together cohesively to create something bigger. Just like music, a program or library always has a beginning, a middle, and an end.

Music and programming are creative tasks that require you to think of new ways to solve problems or express yourself. Math is a system of calculation.
I've had Lollipop for over a week and I generally don't find lack of affordance in the UI. It's very clear what is clickable and what isn't. (there are a couple of very minor exceptions I can think of)
Elasticsearch – It’s {ON}: Announcing Our First User Conference – Elastic{ON}15
I'm going to guess that it looks like that because you only read the headline and not the article?
just a function of our simple demo, it returns confidence intervals for what it thinks it is of digits between 0-9 and we pick the top one. Not perfect by any means but shows how easily we can compare the libraries against each other.
it was the feature that kept me on vim for years until moving to sublime. I wish someone would implement it for sublime as well!
Nobody asked that the service to be limited to women. That's something you're adding to the conversation. So it seems to me that you're politicizing it even more.
This "design trend" is basically touch-based navigation, which calls for large link boxes instead of the text-only navigation for mice.
Yeah that's a fair point. The real downside of using Cordova in my experience is performance, but I do believe that is, and will continue to change. Mobile devices are getting faster and if you compare a typical Cordova app on a two year old phone vs. a new phone it's a world of difference.
What 1,000 rejections have taught me
Ugh... comparing random algorithms without showings error bounds on the accuracies.
If this technology is as powerful as it claims to be, I could easily see Magic Leap eclipsing Apple as the most valuable company in the world as long as they hold those patents.

I suspect their strategy for finding investors is like this:
1. Potential investor is incredulous about the company's value
2. Investor gets a demo of their technology, and it's mind-blowingly amazing.
3. Investor asks them to name any price and gets out their checkbook, knowing that this has the potential to be the biggest invention of the century.
Hey I'm one of the guys behind Next Keyboard.

Not sure what you're referring to. We started working on Next in the summer before Blackberry Passport was released.
You can access it using our API http://apis.io/apiDoc
This is really cool. The one feature request I have is that descriptions be added. The tags alone aren't enough to determine what an api is offering.
Awesome I've been accepted into koding's global virtual #hackathon
It's unfortunate that more and more services started blacklisting mailinator.
How we tried to fix the app ecosystem by building links that actually work
Ask HN: What would you do with a bank API?
What would you do if all banks had open APIs? What problems would you solve and for whom?

(I've worked for banks and am aware of how hypothetical this is. Just humor me.)
When I started go, i also thought it was nuts. And it indeed clutters your code a lot. But in the end, i like it.

Golang is a really simple language, but all the simple concepts, and the lack of OOP, forces you to think more about your code. Also you are forced to think about error conditions.

I'm still playing around with it. So i dont have a final opinion on go.
>"Facebook and Twitter have users. The only customers in the equation are the advertisers. They have no idea how much their users are willing to pay and they have no idea how much their users are worth. They price ads based on what must amount to voodoo projections of their operation costs and a blind balancing act of signal-to-noise."

Are you referring to advertisers or the social networks with your comment about "voodoo projections"? For many advertisers, yes, it is very hard to pin down a proper value for acquisition through any digital channel except in certain direct response cases. With advanced attribution technology though, it is increasingly possible to dial in the proper mix of channels needed to maximize certain targets (conversion volume, revenue, efficiency, profit, etc.).
Nice start, OP (especially with unclear specs, my personal pet peeve), but you've only hit upon the tip of the iceberg.

Just a few other things I call "work prevention" that make good developers appear to be slow:

- unclear specs
- context switching
- peer review (both giving & receiving)
- code review
- status meetings
- waiting for others to show up at meetings
- others not prepared for meetings (no agenda, etc.)
- unnecessary but enforced standards (stupid, pointless)
- programs locked by other devs (get in line)
- pre-existing technical debt (must be fixed before amended)
- framework can't handle it
- works but won't scale
- can't recreate bug
- platform issue (server, DBMS, etc.)
- environmental issues (test server out of date)
- waiting for server resources (testing)
- waiting for regression tester
- waiting for user acceptance testing
- specs changing during user acceptance testing
- uncontrolled deployment "freezes" (month-end, release schedule)
- noisy office
- meetings when emails would have sufficed
- phone calls when emails would have sufficed
- text messages when emails would have sufficed
- continually changing priorities
- delays in offshore communications
- lack of training (technology)
- lack of training (business subject matter)
- too much training (HR bullshit)
- not enough donuts
I understand it does, yes. The infamous Porton Down apparently has (or at the very least had) a large collection of nasty agricultural pests and knows how to weaponise them (and presumably how to defend against them). This kind of thing has indeed been explored in the context of warfare.

http://cns.miis.edu/cbw/agchron.htm chronicles some cases (and several hoaxes).
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