HN user
None of these things has anything to do with agile, they are all from scrum. Scrum is not agile as it is the very definition of prioritizing processes and tools over individuals and interactions. If you want to learn about scrum, you have asked the right questions, but if you want to learn about agile development read the agile software manifesto and run away screaming from scrum.
No, because beggars can't be choosers right? And the best thing to do to a person when they are at their absolute worst is to take away their last scrap of autonomy. I'm sorry, in future I will humbly accept the advice of the self righteous with a doff of my cap and a mumbled thank you.
Nope I'm from the UK but we have a system that is closer to the American then the Swiss. There are services out there but they're incredibly poorly funded.
As someone who's been homeless (and didn't have a drink or drug problem thanks) please fuck off. A night in a shelter costs money. Clothes which regularly get stolen cost money. Going to the bathroom costs money. Having a shower costs money. Travel to find jobs costs money. Medication costs money. Toothpaste costs money.
A "halo" market segment for mac books is video and photography professionals who make extremely heavy use of SD cards. Appealing to this group (who are also willing to pay a premium) has always been a feature of macs. Devs, not so much.
Yeah, I find this a huge problem especially with junior devs (by which I mean those within the first five or so years of their career. When you have people calling themselves senior devs after six months the job title has become meaningless). Until you've been around long enough to understand how large code bases (in general, not the one you're working on!) evolve over time and why common trade offs are made you're not going to be able to grok the weaknesses of an existing code base quickly. Start off by being humble and asking why certain things have been implemented in the way they have, there is usually a reason. Sometimes it's even a good one!
The open university in the UK was founded in 1969 and has been offering full distance learning degrees ever since in large numbers of subjects. It uses a mix of professionally produced video content (so usually not just a video of a lecturer standing in front of a blackboard), textbooks, in person or remote small group seminars (you used to phone in, now online video chat), forums, chat groups, personal support by email or post (in case you're in prison or living really remotely) and online libraries / inter library loans and occasional residential weekends / weeks.
Mastery is tested in the usual ways, essays, projects and tests, but also "in class" contributions during seminars, which is a good way of motivating people to actually attend and ask questions.
It works really well but it's taken fifty years of practice, experimentation and investment to get there and it involves a lot of contact between tutors and students and as a student you need to be more motivated than attending a bricks and mortar university (I've done both).
The fact of the matter is that most online learning created over the last year is pretty terrible because it's been created on the hoof by teachers with no experience of delivering learning in this way so they've mostly tried to reproduce the classroom but online, which doesn't work.
Most existing online material out there is intended to be supplemental to traditional bricks and mortar learning or used in a "flipped" classroom like Khan Academy where there is still pupil teacher contact, rather than replace it, or is aimed at professional / personal development rather than teaching academic subjects or the core curriculum.
Honestly if you want to improve your kids learning and can afford one get them a tutor who will work with them one to one or in small groups and can identify what the gaps in their knowledge are and ensure they are keeping pace of where they should be curriculum wise so when they do go back to school they won't be behind their peers. Don't expect a magic tech bullet.
Yeah that was my experience at university in the UK (well you put it in your bag and got a ticket like at a cloakroom) and that was in 2008 so pre smartphones being common amongst students. If university's or schools are allowing kids to have access to phones during exams in 2021 they're idiots or silently encouraging their students to cheat in order to boost their rankings (not unheard of admittedly in the UK)
I know there's lots of research papers out there talking about it but do you know if today's commercial microfluidics "lab on chip" devices use fluidics logic gates or is this still something that is still confined to academia?
Forget older employees, just employees. And I've seen enough poor security practices by 20 somethings at tech firms to have any faith in any user. Favourite example I've seen in several companies including one doing extremely sensitive work - senior devs with root access to the jewels of the kingdom doing pair programming on their own machines with interviewees / interns / new staff and leaving the computer unattended and unlocked to pop to the loo, grab a coffee, or let the junior work something out on their own.
Well China is obviously a bigger threat than the USSR now because the USSR hasn't existed for about 30 years. And while China may threaten western, or rather US hegemony it isn't an existential threat to the USA or EU in that China is unlikely to try to invade and / or nuke Western Europe or USA in the same way the USSR did at various points. I'm not saying that China isn't a threat to the USA's position of hegemonic super power but that's a very different claim.
Because there is little to no benefit to the EU or USA to challenging the CCP, be it because of their treatment of a few billionaires or millions of Uighers. Unlike the Soviet Union China doesn't represent an existential threat to the USA or EU, largely as a matter of geography. The promotion of human rights, liberal democracy, the rule of law etc. has always been fairly low on the priority list of most western states in actuality and has usually played second fiddle to national interests.
Thanks for the response, really interesting to see how this stuff is used.
Genuine question from someone from an entirely different world - why on earth do you have 10 billion log entries? What is in them and do you ever do anything with them that requires you to store so much data rather than just a representative subset?
This change is particularly insane. If you are an overseas business that sells goods that cost £135 or below (per consignment) you have to register for VAT in the UK. If you sell goods that cost more than £135 you don't however because the VAT will be collected as import VAT at the border. Basically this is all about shifting the administrative burden of collecting VAT from HMRC and customs and excise onto exporters. The only bright spot is that online marketplaces rather than sellers will be responsible for collecting VAT, so if you're selling on Etsy, eBay, Amazon etc. you don't have to worry. If you're selling directly though you do. [1]https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/changes-to-vat-tr...
I'm afraid you have it backwards if you think the UK government were "desperate to negotiate everything in one go". "Nothing is agreed until everything is agreed" was a core principle of the EU negotiating guidelines[1] on the withdrawal agreement and was precisely what the UK were trying to avoid. The UK strategy was to try and cherry pick, or in the words of Boris, have our cake and eat it. This tendency was so strong among the British negotiators that "cakeism" is now a genuine term used across the continent to describe the tactics of an unreasonable negotiating partner who doesn't understand the need to make trade offs. I'd say it was amusing watching the Rupert's and their admirers screw up so badly and then pretend they've won a glorious victory except I actually have to live in this country.
[1]https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/press/press-releases/2017...
The negotiators had 11 months not "years". The UK left the UK on 31st January 2020 and negotiations on this agreement didn't start (and couldn't legally begin) until then. The negotiations around the "withdrawal agreement" were a completely different thing and were solely about what the EU / UK relationship would be during the transition period which ends at midnight on 31st December this year. As part of that withdrawal agreement the UK government specifically negotiated a short transition period (off the top of my head the initial EU offer was five years), presumably because they thought that the increased time pressure on the EU would work to their advantage. Whether that has worked out as Boris and co hoped I'll leave as an exercise for the reader.
What seems to be missing from this discussion is that this agreement was negotiated mind bogglingly quickly (9 months as opposed to the multi year / decade long process) and hasn't undergone the usual process of scrubbing which is where such technical and legal issues would normally be fixed. This process would itself normally take longer than the entire period in which this has been negotiated. Of course it's a mess and is full of copy-pasta errors. Luckily however law isn't code, especially not at the international agreement level, and it is implemented by humans, not computers (or software developers). The big problem with the Brexit deal is that it has essentially come straight from the hands of the politicians and civil servants who have negotiated it and is then being approved without proper scrutiny, at least from the UK parliament and the council of Europe. Let us hope that the only problems with it are a few embarrassing technical errors that in reality will be dealt with by secondary legislation and side agreements between the parties. If there are serious issues then they will likely be picked up before it is approved by the European Parliament (and it's not a shoe in that it will actually be approved by MEPs) and these will need to be dealt with, probably through a bunch of secondary legislation and agreements.
Not sure why this is being downvoted. The UK has been intentionally deindustrialising since the 1980s and has essentially lost most of its industrial capability already. What remains is essentially assembly and finishing (i.e. our car manufacturing industry should be more accurately termed as car assembly) This was done first because this was the easiest way for Thatcher to break the unions, and then because it turned out that focussing on services (now 80% of the UK economy and 40-50% of our exports) was more productive anyway for the UK (and locally produced a better environment as we essentially exported our pollution). Of course with Brexit we've reduced our ability to export services to our biggest market and so ironically may actually see a boost to manufacturing as it becomes relatively more profitable, especially since the Tories intend to reduce worker and environmental protections which is why they fought so hard against including none regression clauses in the Brexit deal.
The problem with this is that you then have to drive that 8k, or multiple 8k, monitors which is a problem if you're doing anything visually complex. As someone who straddles the programming / visual arts world (I write plugins for 3D modelling software) I actually spend most of my time having to use "low resolution" (1080p or 1440p) because I'm dealing with complex polygon models with tens of millions of polys and scenes with sometimes thousands of objects in them. You get a similar problem with games or doing video editing. It also doesn't address the problem that there's a limit to people's visual acuity (especially as they get older as I'm rapidly discovering at 40) so you still have to make icons "bolder" and change details as the article addresses as they get smaller to make them more "readable".
One thing that surprised me as a latecomer to software development coming from a visual arts background is how much choice of technology and working practices are purely fashion driven. The thing about fashion is that the way if develops is largely arbitrary. Changes in fashion resemble a drunken walk through possible design space with the drunkard receiving regular shoves from "influencers" who are usually trying to sell you something. Occasionally you have a fashion "revival" where someone takes an idea from the past, gives it a new spin, and then sells it back to newcomers as the next big thing.
This seems especially true in the types of startups and companies many HN readers work at or aspire to join / build - that is ones which are low stake / high reward.
I think when you combine the low stakes nature of the VC driven startup world with its cult of youth and the in group conformity of young people this is what you get.
[1] by low stakes I mean no one will die and you won't be prosecuted if your single page app startup goes tits up. Indeed you're supposed to "fail fast" precisely because the cost of failure is so low. Even if a VC or angel has invested a few million in you, to them that's still low stakes because they exist on an entirely different plane of wealth and you are just one of multiple bets.
[2] We're going to rebel by all dressing the same but not the same as our dad!
That puts you just below the top 10% of earners in the UK, which is not exactly cheap to live in so I would define that as very good salary. You have to remember that a) FAANGS have insane salaries not seen anywhere else but the price you pay as an employee is living in the Bay Area, which is hugely expensive and also, politely, not to everyone's taste. And b) the additional costs paid by an employer for things like pension, employer contributions to health care etc. are generally higher in Europe than in the USA so the total cost of an employee to the the employer and the concomitant benefits the employee gets (paid holiday, paid sick leave, protection from being fired for no reason, a decent pension) are much higher than in the USA. It's a trade off but I'd rather get paid 55,000 Euro and live in most of Europe than 100,000 Euro and live in most of the USA.
The quest 2 is pretty much a revelation. Untethered, light, cheap, high quality display and inside out tracking and connects wirelessly to a gaming PC allowing you to play virtually any title if you pay $15 for vrdesktop. Obviously you have to be comfortable with facebook but it's just a better end to end experience than any other headset I've tried, although it would be better if VR desktop or something similar was included out of the box instead of them trying to flog you the kludgy occulus link cable that doesn't work as well and which tethers you to a pc. It feels like VR done right for the first time in the same way as the iPhone was a smart phone done right for the first time.
Ediscovery software, and I used a bespoke solution in that job, takes a job that can take weeks or months the and makes it possible to do it in days. Or y'know, you could use a filing system and do it in minutes?
Even old draughty homes suffer really badly from damp and mold due to condensation once you get down below a certain temperature for sustained periods. I grew up without central heating (Im 40 and this isn't that unusual for a lot of the UK) and later lived in older unheated houses a couple of times and damp was always a huge issue despite their draughtiness. 13° sounds about right for average indoor temp in unheated parts of the home in winter in the house I grew up in, but it's worth noting that a) you spend most of your time in the bit of your home that you do heat, be that the kitchen or the living room, and b) when you wake up in an unheated bedroom in the middle of winter your walls are damp and if it's got below zero you will have ice on the inside of the windows because the temperature will have dropped a lot lower than 13°. This is, not to put too fine a point on it, miserable and if you want to control the damp you then have to open the windows to air out your room, so it never gets warm. Having said that 18° which is the temperature I keep my house at in winter is perfectly pleasant as long as you wear a jumper and is warm enough that I've never had issues with damp or mold.
It does feel entertaining to read the comments from people who have so obviously never worked for a large (or old) organisation doing an admin related job who think that spotlight or fuzzy search will save them. In a previous job I had to respond to freedom of information requests for a public sector organisation with more than 20,000 employees, which meant deep diving different departments shared drives and shared inboxes. The vast majority had no real structure at all and good luck finding a system that can search dozens of silo'd shared drives for info in .pdf and .doc files with permission systems that have evolved over decades. Discovering that the R&I division (which had several thousand employees on its own) mostly used johnny.decimal on their shared drives and often in their personal spaces was like discovering a tribe of ray gun wielding supermen in the depths of stone age Norfolk. It just makes life easy.
The consensus amongst the three English teachers I asked was that it should be "or else" or "otherwise" and that it's probably ungrammatical, although none of them could explain why. The one who is also an actor said "it works as a line" and she wouldn't think twice about it in a script or as written dialog. Interesting one though!
Hmmm, thinking about my dialect of English (Lancastrian) I can certainly say else without an or and it doesn't sound unnatural to my ears. Something like "if you're hungry now then I can make you a sandwich, else we'll eat when we get to the pub" doesn't sound more awkward than using otherwise. I can't say whether that's just because the Lancastrian dialect preserves quite a few old fashioned usages that have fallen out of use in "standard" (i.e. southern posh) British English and American English, whether it's common usage in other dialects of British English, or if its just because I'm a programmer. Going to go ask some English teachers!