skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Intriguingly you've not mentioned 2/3rds of the people in a Scrum team - the Product Owner and the Scrum Master - both of whom are supposed to be the ones who handle many of the problems you list. Build servers being on fire feels like a perfect example of an impediment. People who aren't actually developing anything feel like the perfect example of people who shouldn't be at standups, and certainly shouldn't be speaking at them.

Again Scrum relies on empowerment, with the Product Owner being the "single wringable neck" whose career is tied to the project and who has the buyin from management to get stuff done. The point being that it is in their interest to have a happy and productive development team doing what they say.

Finally there's also a really good point about internal and external metrics. I've always been a fan of management getting the stats they ask for, not being provided with access to the team's internal metrics which should really be short term to address perceived issues. If we count defects for a few sprints to reduce our defect count that is good, providing them for evermore to management is bad. Separating the two out lets your Scrum Master / line managers have a good conversation about what management are concerned about and how to effectively measure it.

As you said - bad managers won't do any of this, but then flagging up that you have bad managers is A Good Thing (TM) overall.
Batterie voll oder leer?
There's a difference between post-release piracy and pre-release bootlegging. I would be surprised if this leak doesn't noticeably dampen their view count for the first four eps. Although that's hard to measure.
It's pretty much invalid everywhere except the US.
I really like this site. How much do I like this site? Well, before clicking on it, I said to myself, "I wonder where Davida ranks?" (query the list of most valuable). So, yeah, I've thought about this subject a lot, and I really appreciate this beautiful website which presents all this data in an easily readable way.

In the spirit of constructive criticism, I would suggest the following changes which might make the site more useful for people like me who run calculations on asteroid mining for fun:

1) Make the formulas for value and cost explicit somewhere easily found on the site. Maybe it's there somewhere, but I can't find it.

2) Make it possible to alter the variables to allow exploring different scenarios. For example, the cost in $/(km/s) of delta-v depends upon the technology used. Maybe have different selections (chemical rockets, nuclear rockets, solar sail, cool unknown technology, magic fairy asteroid whales) which have different costs associated with them. This would change the rankings of which asteroids would be more profitable, since high metal asteroids with a high delta V cost are more profitable if more accessible. The opposite effect occurs if there is a technology which lowers mining and processing costs (such as directed solar heating and in-situ smelting). It would be nice to tweak that cost too. Being able to change technology scenarios makes this site much more fun.

3) Show some estimate of ore concentration. Yeah, I know the data isn't exactly definitive. Spectra don't give you good information on internals. But an estimate is being used in there somewhere, it would be interesting to show it, especially if it could be compared with earthling ores.
Blog spam. The article if you're interested: http://www.wired.com/2015/04/canons-new-4k-camcorder/
Depends on the bug, sure.

It's my job [or used to be :-)] to give estimates of bug fix times to management.

It usually broke down to:

- trivial (about an hour)

- nearly trivial (maybe half a day or a day)

- "I have no earthly idea". The last one of these that I fixed involved about twenty people, deep dives into our hypervisor and interprocessor communication mechanisms, research into some hardware details and three 100+ hour weeks about four weeks before we shipped. And we started out not having any idea where in the system the problem was (that took two of those weeks).
Author here. That's my goal, but I don't have their email address so I simply wrote it down there.
"Ads were everywhere: on hotel-room key cards, on X-ray trays at airport security, on the handrails on escalators."

One of the great things about living in a foreign country and not speaking the language especially well, many of the subtleties of advertising are lost on me.

Conversely when I was in the US for a few hours flying back from Mexico, wow, everything is being blasted at you on all fronts. I have read a fair bit about NLP and it just feels like pure brainwashing there. The lounge "serving them who serve us" and the likes. I was glad to get away.
This.

The minimum difference in scene length allowable would be a single frame.
Shouldn't be too surprised about the lack of open source. They also didn't open source Bittorrent Sync which was another exciting application of bittorrent.
Our CEO hired a VP of e-commerce last year, before there was just an over-worked director handing me down directives from on high. As the sole back-end engineer inheriting an ancient codebase, I've been able to keep things reasonable and clean and not build new crap on top of old crap. But it's taken the careful exercise and maintenance of leverage.

Now we're gaining traction and pushing back on the on-high directives and coming up with a solid long-term plan.

I shudder to think what it would have looked like if there were a whole team of engineers with nobody to add their voice to the leadership.

Engineers don't help this problem when they treat management like idiot work.
How to Overwhelm a Beginner Front-End Dev
I've seen 3 companies that tried to disrupt email and bring alternatives to email and they all failed, they had great developers, great ideas but they still failed.

My question to your team would be, why do you think people want this. Are you seeing people claiming that they wish email was better? It is hard to change people's behaviors and this is the reason why these companies failed. I agree that there are better ways to communicate now, slack, hichpchat, facebook, but why try to reinvent the wheel.

People are not going to drop something reliable as email for a new fad. what would make your product different that would make me want to use it?

Cheers
If you ask someone, "How long is it going to take you to finish designing and implementing that gozzlewog?" they won't have the foggiest idea.

That's technically true but not useful. There are much better questions to ask, namely:

- Will gozzlewog or foofaraw take longer to implement?
- Is the difference minor or is it an order of magnitude?
- Will shipping gozzlewog or foofaraw make a bigger impact on the business?
- Is that difference small or large?

All of theses are easier to estimate and are more useful, too.
I always forget which Ubuntu name I'm using, even though I remember the number :-/
> If Airtel's experiment succeeds I think that this could be replicated across the world and destroy the very character of the internet.

No - that is unlikely in the extreme. The UK has had zero-rated data and text messages for over 5 years and it has had no impact at all.
Piracy is actually in their interest up to a point. It generates free advertising through free samples, and might lure new subscribers who are on the fence about buying. The endgame is they really want people to sign up for the whole package.
Does anyone know how Facebook 0 worked? That sounds like it was pretty much the same thing:

https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook/fast-and-free-facebo...
This.

As someone who started the first travel site on the web (GetThere) and built it to 600 employees, an IPO and later sale to Sabre, and who debated this with my co-founders and myself, there is a most definitely a happy medium (we started with 18 months of vesting on a 48 month plan).

If founders start 100% vested then the pre-money will simply be a different calculation, and founders will earn additional shares to continue to provide incentive post-funding. Don't delude yourself that somehow your equity will provide sufficient incentive for you to continue to perform. This might be somewhat true in startups with one founder, but it's considerably less true when there are 2 or 3. And it's also protection for you as a founder. Why let one of your co-founders be able to cut out early on and get the same deal you did when you still have to put in the time in order for the opportunity to truly prove its potential. It's important for the founders to continue to vest-- and also, when things take longer than 4 years, as they did for us, more shares are appropriate for founders that remain essential to the business.
Skintone Emoji Portraits
So, what are you saying, then? That Agile isn't suitable for the majority of workplaces?
That's good advice. Thanks for the tip. I'm only about a year into this, so my social life hasn't really degraded too much yet, but I'll keep it in mind going forward.
Anyone else here think HBO's missing out on a business opportunity? I wonder why they don't charge rabid fans (a _lot_) extra for early access to episodes. There appears to be a lot of demand for this.
“We own a color”: Marissa Mayer on Yahoo's 20-year love affair with purple
Same here. I was really surprised. That's why I thought that my very simple idea warranted writing a post.
Russia is getting what it wants because, to be frank, everyone in Western Europe and the United States does not really care about Ukraine enough to make the sacrifices that would be necessary to stop them (not economically and certainly not in terms of loss of life).
No, incentivizing small tasks that look good in standups over larger, less-sexy tasks kills productivity.
The instructions are right there. Perfect demonstration of what happens when you don't create a linear expectation for the customer. :)
exactly this. I've been working from home for 7 years, and by the time Friday evening comes a long I'm desperate to go out and do things for the weekends. There are only so many conversations you can have with postal workers :)
Agreed. I'd like to see some solid experiences that counter the author's claims being used in the wild that fit where he says it doesn't work well (anything other than small, short projects). Nearly everyone is taking the "it's not us, it's you!" approach.

A lot of things work well in theory. That doesn't really make them good ideas if they can almost-never be implemented properly.
Positive Paradigms- Everyone is doing the best they can
Of course you should use toupper(). toupper is great and handles all sorts of corner cases. The person who would use a hack like this and case already used toupper here.

But toupper is slower AND that slowness is unnecessary in some cases. These are the kind of optimizations you use after you have revisited your algorithms, after you have profiled your code, and when you know you have a code path that is heavily used, where saving a few cycles really does have big gains. If I were writing the parser front end for GMAIL's SMTP server, for example, a micro optimization like this could pay off.

Or (more likely in my case) when I have an embedded device with only 4K of program memory that nevertheless needs to talk to a syslog or time server and still perform its normal function.

This is not a "party trick" optimization a la HAKMEM.

And that's not an "archaic characteristic of ASCII" it shows thoughtful design from an age of specific resource constraints. We don't have those constraints now, but we have others and this is a good example of how they can manifest themselves, and be designed for.

And for that matter it shows why, for all that I hate it, ASCII itself is not archaic.
IF teams are using Agile like that there doing it
wrong. It's meant to be recipe for collaborative,
relaxed, friendly environment.

I'm at a place where (IMHO) scrum works reasonably well. But some of the scrum language I hear people using kind of invites misunderstandings.

For example, "sprint" evokes runners running 100m at a pace they can't sustain for minutes, let alone weeks or months. And "committing to stories for this sprint" implies it's some sort of failure or emergency if the target is missed - when in truth nobody should be skimping on testing or staying late to get things done.
Realistic Strategies for Funding Product Development
I've found that there are two things that let me use the Kindle Paperwhite left-handed -- one is that the "back" area of the screen is small, so pressing close to the center with my left thumb, once I've gotten used to the "sweet spot", is very reliable. The other is that it recognizes swiping gestures, so a small swipe with the thumb will also turn the page if my hand is in an awkward position.

That said, I would love to have the physical buttons back -- when the touch screen works, it is okay, but when it decides for some reason that I want to change my font size instead of turning the page, or just decides that I didn't press it, or turns the page twice when I think it didn't register my first touch, I get unaccountably mad.
Since this is a hacker crowd where data should count for something, consider that the entire Arab-Israeli conflict since 1948 so far caused less than half as many deaths as the current Syrian civil war, let alone the Iran-Iraq War or the Iraq invasion.

So, claiming this nation of 7 million that is smaller in size than Lake Michigan to be "posing a threat to world peace" is pathetic, and frankly says much more about Grass than Israel.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab%E2%80%93Israeli_conflict

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syrian_Civil_War

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93Iraq_War
Zero rating is a thing in richer countries, too; in the US, for example, Sprint has made deals to zero-rate selected social media services; T-Mobile has made deals to zero-rate certain streaming audio services.

And, as in India, the advocates of the interests of the wealthy and corporations in the US like to promote zero rating as a thing that is good for the poor, with AEI promoting it as a tool to "narrow the digital divide". [0]

[0] http://www.techpolicydaily.com/internet/zero-rating-narrowin...
I've been in standups that lasted an hour a day. That'll destroy your morale pretty damned quick.
"A few milliseconds" won't work - you must do it in units of frames.
I've been reading books on my iPad and it's fantastic. I recently switched to buying books from apple rather than from amazon and reading using iBooks. Again, fantastic. Great typesetting, great UI. Also I can share books with my family with Family iCloud sharing. I know there's a kindle version of this sort of thing but it seems like a hassle.
If ever a project was crying out for Gill Sans it's this one.
What not to do when starting a business
Not reliant on petroleum for energy, only transport. Gas (in the European sense, not the American one) is a large amount. Renewable is 15% at present.
Like Eric my parents bought our family a computer when I was little that came with a copy of GW-Basic. They used their tax return for that year because we were basically dirt poor and that was the only way they could manage it. They saw the onrushing future though and decided that their kids should be prepared.

It was a Tandy 1000-HX. At first I just played a lot of Gorillas with my brother. Then eventually I figured out I could change the code in the game and cheat. And that was the start of my lifelong love of code. Just like Eric it was an investment from my parents that paid off in a big way.
Any steganography solution on the market today that is worth its salt would actually be robust against this. The amount of different sources you would have to combine to protect against this is higher than you'd realistically be able to find.

Disclaimer: I used to work at one of the leading companies in this field.
They won't
Palindromic sequences in Clojure
Improve Website Page Load Performance with Critical CSS – Tech  Namshi.com
I think this is the real underlying issue. SA is looking at all this oil inventory, and if their oil ends up going unsold, they lose money in the long run. This may end up being a clearance sale. My guess is that they'll try to seek a maximum price without reigniting the US shale insustry over the next year. That price might be $60/$70.
Still, we are talking about one-shot solutions for big events, like this Game of Thrones release.

Obviously I can come up with anything and you would be able to present a strategy how to beat it. But that's not the point.

If this kind of various copyright protections become norm, people might actually be afraid to leak stuff, because you will never know how safe it is and what kind of protection you might run into. Even after analyzing spectrogram and generally watching the media multiple times, trying to find anything weird.

Well, obviously when you grab infinite number of watermarked copies, you might be able see where the irregularities are. But that's not how leaks happen.
>Everyone seems to agree that we're doing Agile wrong

The fact that we've all heard this line (yet never heard a solution) should make it pretty clear that it's more of a management religion than an engineering practice. "You're doing it wrong" is the perfect built-in, pre-packaged defense to the Agile system that agile managers/consultants/etc can rattle off with zero effort and an air of superiority. Had a bad experience? Well, you were doing it wrong. It's not an issue with the system.

I recently worked at a place that was the text book example of agile/scrum development methodologies -- Which I don't mean figuratively, I mean in the literal sense, their big claim to fame was that they were the subject of a case study on the success of Agile methodologies. So, having worked in a place that was studied for "getting it right," it's extremely annoying to see all critiques of agile had waved away under the flag of "you did it wrong"

Just about every complaint in the article existed at this place as well. For me, at the tip top of the list was meetings. Planning would take hours. Sometimes it would be split up over two days. That is two days out of the 10 you have available for development eaten up by talking about what you're going to develop. Then there's a meeting to show what we did in those 10 days. Then another meeting to talk about what we think we did in those 10 days and how it could be better (which was of course done through stupid time wasting games ("I wish I could have ___" "I was happy when ___", "I should start doing ___"))

Then layer on top of all that a whole hierarchy of people whose whole job description is to be "agile" -- which not a single developer was able to explain to me the meaning since the day I started.

I'm ranting too much, but the whole agile thing just gets under my skin. It's such a massive waste of time. Leaving that company was a happy happy day. I now work at a place where 'planning' takes 15 minutes in front of a white board. Engineering discussions take as long as they need with the relevant parties whenever needed. Other than that, you're left alone to fucking do your job.
If you're doing SCRUM, hopefully, when planning, you're building in slack for the devs already. Your sprint commitments should always be conservative. If something ends up taking more time than you planned, then, it'll just take up some of that slack.

With that slack, then, when things go right, you have time for dev priority tasks. You hit your sprint commitments two days before the sprint ends? Great! Time to work on some of those long term investments.

You can also scope stories based on dev priorities. You want to add a feature to part of the code that is in need of refactoring? Scope the story to include that refactoring.

Etc.

If using Kanban or something, it's a bit harder; you can easily take time for dev tasks (since you're not making commitments), but finding the right balance of taking them on but still getting feature work done is harder.
Are these the best release notes of all time?
This client is essentially bullying you into indentured servitude and using mind games to motivate you into continuing to work for them indefinitely. Unless you've heard from this supposed lawyer they've hired in your country, I'd take a solid guess they haven't actually taken any action in that area and have no clue how to go about it.

As others mentioned, cut off all communication with your client. Find legal support or at least have someone ready to defend you if needed. As soon as they mention legal action all communication goes through legal channels, on both sides. If they haven't taken that step yet, they are bluffing.

What I would do is send a short very clearly worded email, with no emotional or personal language (this is important). The email would 1) state exactly what was delivered to date in terms of hours spent, equivalent hourly value based on my rate 2) assurance that the client has access to all assets and source files as a showing of good faith and 3) a short, very specific statement that the contract is now terminated with no further work delivered, payments made or communications outside of legal channels.

Then walk away and look for other clients. File every communication the client sends you, save somewhere in PDFs and make hard copies. Any response you send should say simply "This information has been retained for my attorney." Respond that way to the client for everything. Say nothing else (very important). Eventually they'll either get the message and walk away or take some sort of action. If they take action then you will need an attorney ready, but I'm guessing they're bluffing and you'll never hear from them again.
Waking Up 17 Years Younger
So instead of Agile we should use, what?

Fully understand that process is a technology.

If Agile is so bad, what's better?
How Introverts Can Network Without Changing Their Personalities
The idea is still around; it comes and goes.

Emacs supports them for example. You can buy hardware chorded keyboards like the Bat.

I think the problem is they come with a large learning curve for prose--just imagine learning to touch type again--but then multiply that by a few factors to do programming with all the symbols to be efficient. Ye olde 101 key keyboard is about the fastest thing there is right now, balancing keyboard size and key-to-semantic entropy.

http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/KeyChord

http://www.infogrip.com/bat-keyboard.html
"Here's the secret: software development isn't really about making computers work, it's about organizing knowledge. If your process focuses more on making the computers work than your institutional knowledge you're making a critical mistake."

That's a fantastic quote, thanks.
Another Set of Kelly Brook’s Nude Pictures Leaked Online
Agile done wrong destroys more than Agile done right can fix.

If you feel too good, or too senior for a programming methodology like Agile, then you are bound to not like it. Is that a fault with Agile, or a fault with your attitude?

A cowboy coder is not micro-managed, does not seem to need atomized tasks, does not need a direct line with the customer and decides on the complexity of the problem and the solution all on his own. They are also terrible to manage and hit-and-miss when it comes to actually shipping something with business value.

Bluntly spoken, Agile is there for the project managers, not the project developers. Agile should be implemented for as long as productivity increases, customer feedback loops create desirable features, and iteration cycles become tighter and shorter. If you know a way to increase those stats without Agile, then write your own methodology (http://programming-motherfucker.com/ is taken) and join management. If you don't care about those stats, and feel too good/senior for Agile, then start your own company and proof it to yourself. You don't start to measure a project's success by first counting the number of developer complaints. You could probably keep the complaints at zero, and never ship anything of impact.
Peripherals Behind the Iron Curtain