skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> if you have a skilled set of programmers on your team you probably don't need Agile

This. Craft and passion beat any process. These people will organize themselves into the most efficient process eventually.
True, as stated by the quip "Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes", which is mis-attributed to Dijsktra (http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Computer_science) but still very much true I think.

The blame is not all on the student, though. It's on CS departments that present a vague picture of what they are doing. Some of these focus on mathematical aspects, some on AI, etc.
And the point of this being ...?
Obviously PlainJS author isn't going to do the debugging for you when a client calls you at 2am to ask you why some widget is broken on an old version of webkit on his android.

Because that's why serious front-end developers use jQuery. Because the jQuery team actually tests the code against a wide range of browsers. All these libs hacked in an afternoon are lucky if they have at least some tests...

And again, the DOM=/=Javascript. Jquery is as vanilla JS as all these libs. But some people still can't tell the difference. An API isn't the language. There is no "document.createElement" in the Javascript spec.
Is Chat Solving the E-mail Problem?
I still remain totally unconvinced that 'Agile' is broken, or has failed. I have worked in places that do FakeAgile, and places that do GoodAgile, and there are two conclusions:

1. Bad companies and practices will not be magically fixed by applying 'Agile' or whatever other methodology you want.
2. When companies do agile development well, it is effective at solving some of the worst problems that software development faces.

Apparently I'm in the minority for thinking that Scrum in particular is a pretty effective development methodology. I'll tell you what our process is.

- Spend a couple of hours planning a sprint of work. Two weeks, in our case. During that planning meeting, look at the backlog of features and tickets that the product manager has built up. Identify tasks we can reasonably accomplish in that time frame, ensure we have enough information to start, and discuss each one so we have a clear idea of what it involves.

- Make sure that those tasks are customer-visible features wherever possible. It's not always the case that this can be done, but it helps to provide feedback.

- 10-minute daily stand-up to discuss any issues and communicate who's working on what. Also time for the product manager to feed back any information from outside the team.

- Work on some tickets. Review the code. Pass them through QA. Deploy them. Let the product owner receive feedback from customers.

- Review the sprint when it's done – take an hour, discuss what went well, what didn't go well, and anything we can improve.

That's the core of Scrum, and I don't see what's wrong with it. The problem arises when it's abused; story points as burndown charts, or productivity monitored in terms of 'number of tickets finished', or whole-company stand-ups, or whatever.

Agile development works well if you're agile. It's not a set of rules that must be followed – it's a set of guidelines that can help to improve the development process. If you are performing useless, time-consuming overhead tasks, then you are not doing Agile – end of story.
The probably falls in the general category of a Good Thing™ for employees and people developing B2B applications since internal systems are more easily accessible but, this will be a gut check/squeaky bum time for traditional on-premises B2B vendors like PeopleSoft/SAP/IBM and the like. The corporate firewall has always been a bastion of security they have been able to hide their applications behind. As the concept of a corporate firewall begins to fade their security risk increases and previously non-worrisome attack vectors become serious problems for them.
"Can I do the same with a business? A multinational corporation? Freeze up all the assets of a bank and deny access to funds for any reason including payroll while we investigate?"

Yes, actually. It's a standard tactic that was used in, eg, the prosecution of Michael Milken.

It's also nice if you can get some kind of tax angle going so you can threaten the target's wife as well.
The thing is we aren't talking about morals and ethics. We haven't been.

We are doing a deductive (and therefore flawed) analysis of benefits and costs.

Case in point: societies also (feel they) benefit from genocide. This doesn't make it right. But we're not talking about right. We're talking about gain and advantage.

We could have a really interesting conversation about right and wrong. But that's not what we're talking about in this tree of the conversation. So nothing you are saying, as interesting as it is, addresses the conversation points.
>> Patent trolls have no political clout. Zero chance of police arresting someone on their behalf (let alone them calling police to request this).

But they have rich guys behind them. What if they decide to make "an example" of me, to scare everyone in the US and abroad and convince them to give in and just pay extortion money to them? Right know every non-US company just ignores them and that's huge potential money to be made. It cannot be done through European courts for instance but they could use another intimidation tactic like making the IT community know that everyone who doesn't pay to the trolls will be arrested if he ever crosses the US border. That would be a very profitable venture.
Yep, this is awesome. Go Postgres!
It's a little weird because in '67, the court redefined the 4th around the idea of expectation of privacy (Katz), and Miller and Smith followed from that redefinition. So you might have happened across something relevant under the previous scheme, like Boyd in 1886.
This. Craft and passion beat any process. These people will organize themselves into the most efficient process eventually.

My direct experience of working with programmers over the years is that this will generally descend rapidly into an inefficient mess. Yes – maybe it works, sometimes. I'd argue that's the exception, rather than the rule.
‘Game of Thrones’ Management Quiz: Why Tyrion, Jaime and Jon Snow Dominate
Is a "new Agile" really what will solve this problem? I think really this just isn't a priority for many employers. Maybe we just need something new so us employees can see who's paying attention and flock there?
Again, Battle Fantasia was a learning project for Arc System Works. It was never meant to be an advanced artform. Which is why it is deeply ironic that almost all modern 2D fighting games using 3d art are based on Battle Fantasia camera mechanics.

Compare the super-attack animations between SF4 and Battle Fantasia. And note the following similarities:

1. The 'Super Zoom' that changes the camera angle, to focus on the character performing the super-attack.
2. The 'freeze frame' mechanics: which "pause" all other 3D animations while the super-attack user remains fully animated.
3. The way the background melts into a new environment, and then melts back into the stage as the super-attack either hits the opponent... or misses.

True, SF4 has better character models, better backgrounds, and better animations. But the camera mechanics were all invented and pioneered by Battle Fantasia.
"[O]ne can be compiled to an independent binary that can load and run on a variety of machines. The other requires a large application infrastructure to run at all."

That seems more a matter of current tooling, not anything about the languages themselves. Did Java only become a programming language when someone wrote a compiler to machine code? Is perl more in the same category as C or as HTML? Quite a few languages dynamically link a runtime, and most are dependent on OS facilities that could be extended to handle HTML.
That's an incredibly privileged point of view. It is not frequently the case that students with the apitutude for college have the support they need from family and relevant experts at school to engage in the kind of thoughtful deliberation you suggest.
Math and Money: How Facebook Enticed Publishers to Its Platform
Facebook has bowled over the world’s biggest publishers with math and money. It is a classic ploy, long utilized by savvy young technology companies to make stodgy old industries commit to a Faustian bargain.
I came across a neat implementation at UTA's ARRI. There was a gizmo there called the Texas Microfactory, and it actually could assemble things on the microscale this way. I'm not sure how hard it is to get a tour of the cleanroom, and I wasn't able to find many good pictures of it easily.

Really, it was enormously impressive. That it worked, that is: turns out the magic of the system was the controls engineering. Placing manipulators on manipulators makes for a heckuva unstable system (every minor error upstream compounds, and timing starts to be everything). And if you go for stability, it becomes too slow to be useful.

But it could stack blocks in a clever way, and any microrobots that do anything at all is pretty dang impressive.
I think this is true to some extent (corruption of this sort has always existed), but it is getting worse. More inequality, more corrupt legislatures, more transparent moves to aid the powerful.

Reagan raised taxes when he had to. His scions stoutly refuse in his name. Nixon created the EPA. It is definitely worse now. The right is more right; the left is more right.
I'd explain, but it'd be exponentially long and boring. Or maybe not. I can never be sure.
How We Acquired 26,447 Users and $207,152 in Sales on Product Hunt
Under some legal systems I can execute a homosexual for merely being a homosexual. But don't you dare call that murder.

Under some legal systems you can own a sex slave, but don't you dare call it rape.

Under some legal systems the government can take what they want because the law allows them, but don't you dare call it theft.
Can not overemphasize the value of the secondary market. That is a huge cost savings for clothes and also large toys. Garage sales, etc. Why pay $100-200 for a fisher price car when you get a used one for $10?

The only exception I've found are good kiddie pools. Those things hold a surprising amount of value. There are a couple of products out there that are popular for dog baths, so kind of a funny market dynamic.
When I last checked, IBM sold these x86 servers (I can't recall what the model line was called) that you could stack and made to behave as a single NUMA box. These compared very favorably to POWER servers in the same price range (32 cores on x86 vs. 6 cores on POWER7).

I don't remember the maximum scalability of these, but I doubt they would reach the biggest POWER machines. Problem is: if you need the biggest POWER machines, you're probably running something that isn't even portable to x86, so the comparison becomes academic.
I do agree that it is a sensible way to learn, just that they shouldn't take credit for it. I totally don't mind poking into stuff, it just means the original work is awesome and there're stuff to learn from it. However, there's always been the problem of taking credit away from the original creators, acting like its all yours to begin with.
The end of JavaScript?
Takes a really long time to just reply with an error when trying to register. How is a non-developer supposed to deal with that now? ;]
> It seems a bit of a broad generalisation to say "Haskellers have a hard time translating an algorithm" based on who happened to be on the IRC channel at the time and decided to answer a challenge from a random C++ programmer who turned up.

I'm not a "C++ programmer". I'm just a programmer. I happened to have the algorithm written in C++, but I could quite easily have written it in pseudocode.

I got about 6 responses in 20 minutes. Four of those were O(m^n). Yes, I think this is quite indicative that Haskellers have a hard time writing performant code.
the thing that often gets lost in these discussions is that a software development process is mainly a method of communicating state to management. management does need to know, despite developer complaints, because company resources need to be allocated and tracked.

if developers can't figure how to let management get the information they need, then management will impose whatever they think is best, even if they have no particular way of figuring that out.

the failure of agile is mainly a breakdown in this communication. the process itself works if it is followed, just as lighter and heavier processes can work. are they optimal? probably not, but communication amongst teams is a fairly difficult problem to optimize and it's likely to not have any one solution.
tl;dr > Students ages 5-19 years old are invited to become the creators and innovators of tomorrow by using 3-D modeling software to submit their designs for containers that could be used by astronauts on future space missions [...] The challenge closes on August 2, 2015 with winners announced on October 7, 2015.

For more information -> http://www.futureengineers.org/
That may be because Drexler work came decades later.

I don't know if Drexler ever mentioned Feynman's work. But nanotechnology was basically born at that talk.

For other areas that Feynman created out of having nothing better to say in a talk, look at quantum and reversible computing.
Apologies for being off topic..

> squeaky bum time

Never heard this expression before. Quick search defines it as "An exciting part of a sporting event, particularly the final minutes of a close game or season". Unfortunately, I still don't really get the reference. Could someone spell this out for me?
Yeah, exactly, forcing things upon others. Or, as people usually call this, a conversation :D You are being a hypocrite right now. You may disagree, but you may not accuse me of forcing anything just because I said something you disagree with.
Dodiss.com – Get feedback and advice on your projects
My wife spent a stupid amount of time researching everything and then finding the absolute best price (which is like saying you are a savvy lamborghini consumer). So as new parents, I doubt we'd consider it (tho my wife did do a trial of some curated eco-toys... we did not sign up and we did not find it useful).

So I would say no. We actually dread parties and holidays as it brings a huge influx in new toys that our daughter will likely never use or clothes she will outgrow in a few weeks and/or never wear.
>it's "like having someone shout your name every 30 seconds, looking up and then having them reply 75 percent of the time with “nevermind.”

The best metaphor for the flood of notifications I've ever seen.
I'll add that teams should be cross-functional. If every team has product related person, designer, developers and qa — they will do OK.
Are you involved in Nuimo? "Show HN" is generally reserved for things you created yourself, and the projects are expected to be in a usable state that people can try out.

That said, I backed on IndieGoGo when this was "Flow," and I'm excited about the improvements.

My main use-case is wanting a secondary input device to use with a Surface Pro (alongside the pen) for things like brush adjustments that are typically done by keyboard or the touch ring on an Intuos. The new development looks less focused on computer input and more on being an Internet of Things controller, but the new LED array still looks like a helpful feature for folks like me.

I'll likely end up setting up multiple modes, like brush size, brush softness, brush flow, opacity, and current layer. So having the LED array allows for visual feedback for which mode is active.

I'm also a bit less hesitant on this than most manufacturing projects, since it's all being produced in Germany. One would hope that will run smoother than trying to do all of the production in China like many projects do. And perhaps the broader target audience for IoT stuff and a second round of crowdfunding will boost production volumes and give them more leverage to have manufacturing partners prioritize them over other customers? Small production runs have definitely been a cause of manufacturing delays in other Kickstarter projects.
SpaceX First Stage Landing Video
Location: Ontario, Canada
Remote: Yes
Willing to relocate: Within Canada or USA
Technologies: C/C++, Python, Scikit-Learn, Pandas, Lua, Git, Perforce, PhysX, Fortran90
Résumé/CV: https://ca.linkedin.com/in/alexvyskocil
Email: alex.vyskocil@gmail.com

I am a Master's graduate in theoretical physics. Worked remotely as a gaming engine core developer. Also worked in a start-up environment (in Hong Kong) using machine learning. Looking for interesting software work using any technology/language.
I wonder why isn't there a "text messaging mobile app" out there which just uses openPGP signed and encrypted email as the backend. Email is not that far from text messaging anyway.
Turn your standard e-commerce retail concept into an MRR business suitable for venture capital with this one simple trick!
Or no[1].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines
Why do I keep reconnecting to another room each 5 minutes ??
It's annoying as hell.
No, because the 5 year old phone is broken.
As a few people below have pointed out in various ways, this is a pretty absurd perspective. Quality of life is highly influenced by stability, and being priced out of an area where you're trying to raise a family is the opposite of stability.

Is the point of a city to relentlessly grow and attract money, or to provide a good place to live for its residents?
Floating train at 2000 km/h set to store 10% of Dutch electricity
This exchange in the comments between another CS student at Temple and the subject of the article supports your observation: http://technical.ly/philly/2015/05/12/computer-science-dropo...
"There is no "document.createElement" in the Javascript spec." Uh...
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Document/cr...
Music players on Linux: choice or confusion?
What will happen to all the junk we're leaving on the Internet
How about 'taxation may be theft'? Depending upon how it is done and how much of a tax there is compared to the benefits.

For example, a one time tax of 30% of all bank accounts would be considered theft. Paying a gas tax to care for the road you use would not.

Also, some of the corrupt dealings of Congress would be theft from the government, and since that raises taxes on the individuals, I think it would be reasonable to consider it theft.
Because his beliefs are backward and actively harmful.

Because it's not his beliefs that people are upset at him for, it's his actions.

Because this goes well beyond Mozilla.
I don't have a CS degree, but even in entry level positions, it crops up when you least expect it. My company gathers data off of truck engines, with a data sample every .3 seconds. The data samples contain things like instantaneous "fuel rate," "vehicle speed" and other "rate" values. If the manager says to me "erroneousfunk, I want the cumulative fuel usage values over time, in a graph" I need to know that they're looking for the second derivative of the fuel rate, and how to model and summarize that data in the database appropriately for a fast processing and lookups across any combination of companies/drivers/trucks/date ranges they can think of.

Voila! Calculus, algorithms, and data modeling!

Or perhaps I need a job title upgrade :-p
Hello, NotRealTwitter.

Could you explain yourself?

Thanks, Erik
Show HN: DHCP as a file system – an experiment with Go and FUSE
>You agree to pay taxes by continuing to live here.

Does one agree to civil forfeiture by continuing to live where it is legal?
I don't trust a product which is closed source and closed protocol. It's ok to be closed source and closed protocol for a product which isn't focused on privacy, but for the product which is it's a showstopper.

Also, bittorrent did bait and switch with btsync, and had supplied utorrent with spyware. I just don't trust the company.
Show HN: Analyzed 30k images from 300 art blogs to find the most popular art
Other articles mention virtualbox is affected:
http://www.zdnet.com/article/venom-security-flaw-millions-of...

Oracle, which develops VirtualBox, said in an emailed statement that the company was "aware" of the problem, and fixed the code, adding that it will release a maintenance update soon.

"We will release a VirtualBox 4.3 maintenance release very soon. Apart from this, only a limited amount of users should be affected as the floppy device emulation is disabled for most of the standard virtual machine configurations," said software lead Frank Mehnert.
Agile as practiced by the industry is nothing more than a way for dysfunctional businesses to punish their developers.
I have just bought a "Learning GROWS" book from the Pragmatic Programmer online store, and have hired a consultant to educate (inculcate?) the team on the new methodology.

We even are using one of the new open source libraries that tests and enforces the process, it is called 'poison ivy' - it hurts, like all good software engineering processes do!

Edit: do the downvoters disagree? We don't think there will be books, courses, tools for this new methodology?
I still feel groggy after a 90 minute sleep; it's not as bad as waking up in the middle of the cycle, but I still feel groggy. If I nap for 3-15 minutes, I wake up feeling as awake as I am during exercise.
Kish was featured in a TAL episode this year, dubbed "Batman": http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/544/b...

They go into more length about his abilities and his views on the culture, which (in his opinion) holds back the blind from being more independent individuals.
"Raise property taxes if you don't want property to be left unoccupied."

Yes, that's what everyone is saying.
What's happened to our country is the equivalent of "death by a thousand cuts". I place blame on having devolved into a system where we have professional politicians and voters who are either apathetic, under-informed or both.
Show HN: Cross-Platform Libraries. Objective-C/Swift + Java IRL
You clearly haven't worked with people who like the sound of their own voices quite so much as I have.

>> What went well during the sprint cycle?
>> What went wrong during the sprint cycle?
>> What could we do differently to improve?

I have had Agile Evangelists, who are supposed to be good at making this stuff streamlined, turn around and say "Everyone needs to come up with five things in each category, then we'll go through and discuss them all, deciding on the most important things to change at the end"

In a team that was already too large (15ish people) I watched that eat an entire afternoon and produce no useful output on more than one occasion. In the team I was on (four, five?) it still seemed to take hours.

I know, I know, they were probably doing it all wrong, this is just my experience of one workplace.

I'm not saying it can't be done right, just that it doesn't seem to be a magic bullet and can devolve into navel-gazing.
It is under citizenship, not country of birth.
> The DEA isn't a company.

That's exactly my point. Not being a company, the notion of what is "lucrative" for the DEA is quite different.
The other great product placement scene was when Bruce Banner was listening to classical music on his Beats headphones.

Beats headphones are overpriced, over-bassed crap with a gross form factor and uncomfortable cups to boot. This is said by anyone with any kind of taste for finer audio.
It really, apparently, isn't a joke: https://twitter.com/growsmethod/status/596404929679458304