drspacemonkey

No, I would not. ICE has already detained Canadians, and I'm not looking to try my luck. I've already cancelled a work trip to a convention in Vegas.

It's called a "swing bar". It's easy to open from tho2e outside with some duct tape and a rubber band, unfortunately. Plenty of easy instructions on YouTube.

First, the more difficult a task is, the more inherent difficulty there will be in "accurately" estimating the difficulty of the task. Fibonacci is used to represent the inherent lack of accuracy in more difficult tasks, since the numbers get _very_ far from each other as they go up the scale.

Second, the numbers _are_ arbitrary. Completely, 100% arbitrary. It's a _relative_ difficulty scale. Say you've got 3 tasks - A, B, and C. A and B are approximately as hard as each other, they're 1 story point. C is more difficult than either one - it gets 2 points. That's it. Story points are not, and should not be used as, a unit of measurement. The biggest utility is to identify big, scary tasks with lots of unknown factors.

The fact that they are _numbers_ is what tricks so many teams/PMs/management/etc into thinking that story points are more meaningful than they were ever supposed to be. Incidentally, this is also why some planning poker teams use t-shirt sizing (S,M,L,XL,XXL, etc). No numbers means people are less tempted to punch them into a spreadsheet while deluding themselves into believing that showing numbers going down is the same thing as "showing progress".

That would be TurboLinks. It's going strong, and has seen significant improvements over time. Especially when paired with something like Stimulus and/or Reflex and/or Hotwire, you can make some _very_ snappy feeling server-side rendered HTML. At this point, I won't even consider making SPAs for anything unless the product owner has an incredibly compelling reason.

If you're curious what the modern state of server-side HTML Rails can be from the user's perspective, head over to hey.com and sign up for their free trial.

For one or two standards? There's just the headache of getting approval to spend the money.

But when it gets to dozens/hundreds, plus requiring vendors to have their own copies, it quickly multiplies into a massive burden. And that's not even getting into the open source issues.

Not to mention the fact that you might not know if you NEED the ISO until after you've already bought it.

I'm convinced of the same thing. I once had a rather enlightening conversation with an Agile consultant who had never read the manifesto. When I showed him, he said "I'm not sure I agree with this".

Equifax isn't just "still around". Their stock price is up nearly 50% from the day before their data breach crash.

There was a Netflix documentary series on pandemic planning (in the works before COVID, but the timing was fortuitous). In it, there was a CDC/WHO expert who traveled around to various health authorities/districts/regions and trained them on how to deal with the public regarding a pandemic.

This expert did the professional version of a facepalm when she recounted the times when these health experts failed in their drills. She made it clear that the public will look to them as experts, so be clear, be informative, tell the truth, give actionable steps, etc. Because if these experts _don't_ do these things, the public will look elsewhere. And that "elsewhere" will likely be random yahoos on the internet. Doctors saying "wear a mask" will have greater overall benefits, even if people follow that advice BADLY.

work to elect officials that make the political change you want

Not sure how that is supposed to apply to people like the Canadian employee referenced in the article. Canadians don't exactly have much say in American elections.

I've had the exact same experience. Throw in a large dose of "no repeat customers" due to us prioritizing Feature A for Potential Customer B over fixing existing gaps that affected actual customers, and it was a never-ending parade of haphazardly created, bug-riddled new features that never got improved.

Made every single day a death march and a company that survives purely on the sunk cost fallacy on the part of the investors. They've already dropped $MILLIONS into building this thing, and the CEO swears that this next big deal will be what finally pushes the company into the stratosphere. As miserable as it was to work there, I'm honestly impressed they're able to keep that zombie moving.

<sarcasm>Well, then that would be the first and only time that jackass did something skeezy and illegal</sarcasm>

Seriously though, that man's sense of ethics were... well, when he first found out about the GDPR, his first and only question was "how do we circumvent this?" There's a bunch of reasons why he's a FORMER boss.

I wouldn't be so quick to jump to the conclusion that they were _actually_ union. They may very well have been. But companies have a long, proud history of playing VERY dirty tricks in response to unionization.

A former boss of mine once bragged about how he killed a union effort at a previous job. He worked a corporate job for a chain of restaurants that was threatening to unionize. He was given the task of showing up pretending to be a union-affiliated, bafflingly incompetent asshole. He went to individual employees to discuss the "benefits" of joining the union, because in a group he was more likely to be called out by somebody actually union-affiliated.

The "uniform" thing is very true. I'm a software developer in the Pacific Northwest who loves to wear suits (they look damn good on me). I was told long ago that jeans and a hoodie are the de-facto uniform of my profession, and I needed to dress the part.

That got really hammered home when I showed up to a job interview in a button-down shirt and slacks and I was _far_ more dressed-up than the CEO. Getting bounced for not being a "culture fit" cleared up any lingering ambiguity.

On top of that, a lot of people won't want to go back to the office, not because they enjoy working from home, but because they will still be afraid of getting the virus. Being at the office probably won't feel normal anyway due to continued social distancing and the use of masks

That's where I'm at. My workplace put out a survey to see how people felt about going back to the office next month, and I don't think anyone was willing to risk it. We'd be wearing masks, taking public transit to/from the office, and sanitizing our hands every 15 minutes.

Having spoken to some management people, this survey is mostly being done just to confirm that we should discuss getting rid of the office entirely. Which would be a huge cost saving for us.

Aside from the incident in the linked story, fictional characters (like The Count from Sesame Street) have the blue checkmark. So it doesn't seem to me that it's there to verify "who is the owner of this account".

My guess is that the whole AngularJS/Angular2 fiasco really soured a lot of people on going anywhere near anything named Angular for a long time.

The IOC wants to punish Russia and not the atletes, Why don't they allow for or facilitate independent doping testing then.

That's exactly what they're doing. The third sentence in the article:

    Russian athletes will be allowed to compete in major
    events only if they are not implicated in positive doping
    tests or if their data was not manipulated, according to 
    the WADA ruling.

I had a similar experience. I joined a company about a month before Google launched a competing advertising product (you know, the kind of product Google never kills). The CEO got stuck in some sort of pivot loop where we'd drastically change our product offering every 6 months.

The CEO insisted it wasn't pivoting, it was "refinement", but he also had a really annoying tendency to redefine X to mean "what we do", so he could tell clients and investors "we do X".

I've been using a Vagrant VM and VSC remote via SSH for the last two months, and it works really, really well.

That's almost exactly what Vancouver does. Biggest difference is that instead of image processing on the video feed, there's sensors on the tracks at every platform.

Yet for some reason people still insist that estimating non-trivial software is not only possible, but trivial.

It's always maddening to get into debates about this stuff with project managers who believe this nonsense. I know the Fibonacci point scale is supposed to address this by giving PMs something, but I've only ever seen it turn into time-estimates-by-proxy.

These days, I only ever give estimates in terms of time scale. A task will take "hours", "days", "weeks", or "months". As long as it's within my power, my team will only ever estimate on that scale.

Considering the posters of /r/wallstreetbets have a leader board going to see who can glitch the most leverage, it's well within the realm of possibility

https://old.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/drt5tr/guh_...

Spent 2 years there as one of the tech expats you spoke of, and you are 100% right. The country runs on expats paid with oil money.

In my opinion, the best yardstick for a health care system is how long you have to wait to be treated for cancer. By that yardstick, countries like Canada and England stack up quite poorly when compared to the USA

I don't know who told you that about Canadian healthcare, but it's simply not true.

When my mom was diagnosed, she underwent surgery within days, and was getting chemo/radiation as soon as was medically safe.

* Accounts may have different password, lockout, and expiration policies.

I've had to do that with Devise. It was easy enough to fork the `devise-security` plugin and modify the configuration settings to handle lambdas. The lambdas were then set to pull the config values from the user's account configuration.

* There's a generic "login" button on the marketing site that 50%+ of our users use. This generic login page must implement all account specific constraints (probably via a 2-step login form)

That's super easy.

* Some customers have SSO. For some customers, using SSO is optional. For others, it is required.

I'm in the process of adding exactly this to my project's Devise configuration right now. It's a little tricky, but only because our previous attempt at SSO was very strangely done (and I now understand why so many users complained about not being able to log in).

* Owners of accounts have a limited impersonation feature that allows them to see only certain parts of information in eyes of one of their account members

User permissions are outside the scope of Devise, since it just handles authentication. But the Pretender plugin makes user impersonation dead simple.

I don't like Devise either

I've got my complaints about Devise, but I'll take those pains any day of the week over the alternative nightmare of "built in-house" authentication.

At this point, if somebody doesn't want to use Devise in a project I'm working on, they better have a _really_ good explanation. To me, it's like suggesting setting the building on fire.

Having been down this road before, I'd recommend Flutter over ReactNative.

ReactNative feels like developing the same app 2.5 times. Once in RN proper, and then covering the same ground for large swaths of the app again for each iOS and Andriod.

Flutter has some pain associated with it (I would highlight the lack of 3rd party and community support compared with RN), but overall I'd say it delivers more on the "write once, run everywhere" promise of RN.

I went with an XPS13 a couple years ago. Display is great (I'd say on-par with Apple), keyboard is far superior to the new MacBooks, touchpad is about 90% compared to MacBooks, and I'm pretty sure it's thinner. For sure the smaller bezel gives it a smaller footprint.

Battery life was pretty decent after autotuning power settings through powertop, too. Better than I'm getting on my current work-issued MacBook, at least.

Only real annoyance for me was the wifi, which would vanish off the face of the earth after resuming from suspend. But I was able to replace it with a $15 Intel, a tiny screwdriver, and some patience.

Thanks, I look forward to reading it!

The author kinda lost me halfway through. Was mobile or other non-web API interaction ever addressed in any meaningful way? Specifically, how much it sucks to to allow 3rd parties (or even 1st-party non-web-browser clients) access to your API if authentication is done via session cookies? Cuz that's a pretty significant thing to just gloss over.