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jVinc

1,324 karma · joined October 25, 2017

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jVinc··on We cancelled standups and let the team build
There are many templates for failure, and the funny part is that often the people who contribute to the failure are the ones complaining. But in all cases a good scrum master should be picking up on this and fixing it.

Most typical one is that a team member wants to go deep into details about a task which isn't important and not the case. And after explaining for 10 mins about how they where brilliant in so many ways, they complain when the rest of the team "wastes" their time spending 5 min in total explaining why that brilliant feature was actually not needed which is why it wasn't on the board and no-one asked for it etc. The solution here is to repeat time and time again what the purpose of the meeting is, and cutting people off mid explanation when they go outside their timebox Note though, don't do individual timeboxes unless you are facing this specific issue, it's not good overall but sometimes you need to correct behavior.

Then there are cases where team members aren't paying attention to others and complain the stand-up is wasteful because they never learn anything new anyways, but when you talk to other team members that person spends the rest of they day asking questions that where already answered at the daily. Obvious here you need to do some coaching for that specific member, but I've found it also helps to let them not do their own points, either skip them completely or do them for them. My experience is that it's often coupled to that person going through what they need to say and forgetting to listen.

And on and on. There are so many cases where teams need to correct bad habits rather than complain about the stand-up being there. But sadly the retrospective is often the first thing to go out the window on teams, and they never get to discussing overall how the process is going, and then the daily stand-up gets changed into a 30 min status meeting, and people start hating it.

jVinc··on We cancelled standups and let the team build
Why do you think the daily stand-up should be the days starting point? That's not a requirement and not at all practical. If you have to skip a stand-up some day because of a dentist appointment or other meeting, do you just not do anything for the rest of the day?
jVinc··on We cancelled standups and let the team build
Have you forgotten to have retrospectives? Yes, the first 2 weeks, the stand-ups is badly place, then the team talks about it and chose a different time. (Remember the team decides the time, not management or Product owner), management only gets to decide that you are doing scrum, which means you need to have the daily stand-up.

If you've goon 15 years without any stand-up being under 15 min, then you are doing something wrong. Is your team absurdly large? Is your scrum-master not fluent in scrum? Does no-one in your company understand how a time-box works? Or do you insist on bringing up lengthy technical discussions that you could perfectly well take with the 1-2 people involved outside of the stand-up? There are tons of ways to do it wrong, and pretty much every single one comes back to people not understanding what the stand-up is and isn't for.

It's popular to shit on scrum, but a lot of the criticism comes out like someone going "Programming in C is rubbish, it always throws segfaults, and it's impossible to create good software in a programming language that isn't pure functional" It's an opinion sure, but it's based off of being bad at coding C and preferring to code in Haskell, where you might ask the person if they had considered actually learning C before shitting on it.

> If you are in the middle of something, a 15 minute meeting clears working memory every bit as much as a 3 hour meeting.

Getting interrupted for a 5 min talk with a colleague is just as interrupting to your flow. Don't pretend to claim that everyday in your 15 years of scrum you have accomplished absolutely nothing on a day if there was both a daily standup, lunch, and a person asked you question.

Yes interruptions are bad and should be minimized.. which is why having 15 min condensed to get everyone aligned is better than having 5 people dropping by randomly to ask "did you commit the feature yet?" "Was it me or you who was supposed to do X" "You do know that I'm waiting for you to finish Y right?" "Are you waiting on me to do Z, cause I prefer doing X first, but no-one needs that yet". And again, if a team has more than 15 min total of those kinds of interactions during a day, you need to reflect and improve. If you have less than 15min, then great, everything is cleared up after the daily scrum.

jVinc··on Epic, Spotify, and Tinder form advocacy group to push for app store changes
> But the smartphone has grown beyond a simple "nice-to-have" utility.

Lets frame the discussion accordingly indeed. Not all gaming machines are consoles and not all smartphones are iPhones. Why should we prevent Sony from providing a console just because the PC is much more than a nice-to-have utility and their console competes with PC's? Apple is not a monopoly, and they are not even the majority of smart phones. Why should they be forced not to deliver a console experience (that many even if not the majority enjoy) simply because the category as a whole is an essential utilty?

Why should we enforce through law what can be perfectly well accomplished by people voting with their feet and just buying the smartphone devices that aren't walled gardens?

I don't particularly like Pepsi, and rather enjoy coka cola, but I'm not going to go out on a mad rager about how "cola products are abundant throughout our society, so we desperately need to force Pepsi to change their recipe to align with coka-colas because otherwise our society is going to suffer from drinking bad cola!"

If you don't like iPhones don't buy them. If you don't like consol don't buy them. But trying to argue that the pc is such a essential utility and that it competes in some subset of functionality and that no-one should therefore be allowed to produce or own consoles is just absurd.

jVinc··on Apple, Epic, and the App Store
Apple doesn't have a monopoly, people are free to chose other platforms. You can't claim harm on end-users due to higher costs when literally every single costumer of Apple chose their product and ecosystem despite it being more expensive.

> Why not the same feelings for Apple who's made this far more extreme and far more anti-competitive.

Because you can't abuse a monopoly when you don't have a monopoly. Apple isn't being anti-competitive. In fact by the very nature of your argument that they are hurting themselves by having high prices and are welcoming competition as consumers could chose cheaper alternatives, which most actually do as Apple only sits on like 14% of the market. Microsoft on the other hand tried to misuse their near 100% position one market to corner a different one in order to kill of competitors and take it for themselves.

jVinc··on My thoughts in response to the lawsuit against the Internet Archive
Why should it seem strange? If you own stock I can lend it and sell it outright, and as long as I buy it back and provide it to you at the exit of the deal everything fine.

If you own a book and I buy it but under a deal that defines you should keep it locked up in a safe. I still own it and have the right to lend it out digitally under CDL, yet it's physically with you. Why is it strange to forgo that madness and just let me provide digital lending services on your behalf? I mean just because it's my lending system doesn't mean I should need to own everything that's being lend out. Amazon doesn't have to own everything they sell.

jVinc··on Remdesivir will cost insurers $520 for a single vial. Production cost: 93 cents
How big are the rebates? Often the insurers not only get the majority of the price back in kick-backs, they also have more intensive to negotiate a higher price rather than a lower price due to the the kickbacks they get on the price. If you're making more than 2/3 of the profit on a product that you're just passing on to patients, then you're happier when it's more expensive.

You can't talk about drug printning in the US without including the entire chain.

jVinc··on Fauci: ‘Bizarre’ White House Behavior Only Hurts the President
This sentiment of "there must be two sides that should be equally weighed" is absolute rubbish. It'd doesn't work for creationism vs. Science and it doesn't work in Trumps Administration vs. Science.
jVinc··on Perl 7 is going to be Perl 5.32, mostly
I'm sorry if this offends. But a complete laypersons* perspective from someone who hasn't been keeping up on the current perl ecosystem is this: perl6 failed to the degree that perl 5 became perl 7, while all the perl programmers switched to ruby or python. Am I wrong?

*ok, not completely layperson, I used perl a lot a decade ago an have spent a week playing with raku at one point, but nothing in my professional life even has a slight smell of perl anymore, which is strange seeing as 90% of our company codebase was perl 15 years ago.

jVinc··on How do I prevent Scrum from turning great developers into average developers?
There is no mention of permission in scrum. There is no event where you discuss if people had permission to do what they did.

You might be using scrum in an organisation that is otherwise overly restrictive or has build it's own processes around how to seek permission prior to implementation but that has nothing to do with scrum.

jVinc··on How do I prevent Scrum from turning great developers into average developers?
Scrum is very clear on this. The PO is in charge of the product backlog. The PO and PO only. If the business has some internal alignment she needs to go through then fine, but the development team doesn't have to care about that, which is great when it works and roles are respected.
jVinc··on Ask HN: Optimal cloud service to run tiny website with back end Python + SQLite?
www.pythonanywhere.com Nice little setup where you get python set up out of the box, and you even have some options of quickly setup database if you need to go beyond sqlite.

It's very flexible, cheap and definitely a time saver for when you want something up and running quickly.

jVinc··on Oil plunges below zero for first time with May contract ending
If I take 10$ to take some asset, and then later sell it for 20$ my return is 30$ and my investment was -10$, so my ROI comes out as -300% which betrays what's going on. So even with ROI, negative numbers throws a wrench in the machinerys typical assumptions.
jVinc··on Jack Ma to donate 500k test kits and 1M masks to the U.S.
And slaps a glove across Trumps face, which I suspect is the root cause for this gesture.
jVinc··on If nearly all Airbnb reviews are positive, does that make them meaningless?
I mean, likely AirBnB did relay the information confidentially... but doesn't take a genius to figure out which guest suddenly provided the confidential feedback which was sent on the day after your stay ending.
jVinc··on Trump administration backs Oracle in Google fight
Politically correct answer: No, they are completely independent just like all other fundraising activities.

Reality: Yes, Oracle is openly bribing the president to get the administration to push their agenda.

jVinc··on Trump administration backs Oracle in Google fight
Bribe the president: Definitely not ok. What sort of backwards ass country would allow that sort of thing?

Host fundraiser inviting a couple of your friends to all donate huge amounts to the president: What on earth is the problem? That's completely fair game and I don't see any issues at all.

It seems the US Democracy is morally bankrupt at this point.

jVinc··on Design systems, agile, and industrialization
Just because you call a person something inhuman like "developer" doesn't mean they stop being humans, or that the company is itself inhumane.
jVinc··on Apple AirPods: iPhone accessory or the next big thing?
OP wasn't saying walkman wasn't cool or have a significant market position, in fact he's saying the exact opposite. That Sony had the position an failed to use it to position new devices. Apple turned the iPod into the iPhone and iPad and now they have AirPods coming off of the same train using each product brand to push the brand of the next.

Sony had the Walkman but missed the mp3-player market, didn't bring out a walkman phone, and now they have a product competing with AirPods that's naturally completely disconnected from the walkman both directly and indirectly because "walkmen are ancient" which is not some universal truth, that's just what they let their previously powerful brand degrade to. They've wisely chosen to brand their Airpod competitor the Sony WF1000XM3, who doesn't want products that sound like version of cruiser missiles, or shipping container dimensions? Ironically I heard a friened describe his pair as his "Sony AirPods", because that's what they are to him, the equivalent of Apple AirPods but cheaper and made by Sony, because even the people who own the product can't remember the name. So naturally friends ask why not get "Real" AirPods? And his answer was price, which makes the product sound like a cheap discount version. But it's in the same price range and same quality and even beat out the AirPods in some reviews. Talk about a branding disaster.

jVinc··on The first chosen-prefix collision for SHA-1
$750,000 is a lot of money, but seeing as some people will act on emails without signature, and that you would effectively have to invest that amount up front in order to attempt this attack on 15 individuals, and then hope that at least one falls for it just to make it even, I can't really see this being a viable attack vector. Maybe if the cost goes down significantly to the $100-$1000 range it might be something you would see in the wild.
jVinc··on The first chosen-prefix collision for SHA-1
So how would someone go about gaining more than 45k USD in profit from a single case of using the chosen-prefix collision? Not being candid here, I am honestly curious here. I'd guess that even in situations where you somehow get a signed e-mail sent off spoofing a CEO saying "Please pay these guys 50k$" the actual payout seems unlikely and that puts the attacker 45k in the red. But maybe there are some obvious avenues of abuse that I'm missing, or is this more a case of "In a decade it will become economical to abuse this for profit"?
jVinc··on Google Will Collapse
Should have put the disclaimer first. This is just a guy betting on Brave trying to write up some imaginary future where Brave causes google to collapse.
jVinc··on Pedestrian fatally crushed between two parked cars after one started remotely
Who's at fault if a bullet that automatically travels forwards after the owner activates it with a button on a gun winds up piercing the body of someone else and killing them? The person who activated the bullet or the manufacturer?

This isn't about AI, it's a simple dumb case "guy presses button that makes metal move. Metal crushes pedestrian". There should be no doubt about who's wrong, and it's not a moral question.

Naturally if the starting was a failure of the remote start system it's the manufacturer, but still not really a moral discussion, just plain old product failure.

jVinc··on Average product lifespan of Google products before it kills them
While some might be seeing 212 potential youtube scale success stories that google killed "for no apparent reason", I'm seeing 212 potential wework scale disasters that google avoided by killing off successful pitfalls and focusing on their core. The truth is somewhere in between, but obviously with google being what it is today, none of these cases chip-ed of anything from their success.
jVinc··on Power Plant Turns Waste into Energy and Doubles as a Ski Slope and Climbing Wall
And for further social context, they are essentially saying what for a Dane is the equivalent of "New York is located in New Jersey".
jVinc··on Bash-lib: Library for bash utility methods and tools
Why is that dangerous? I mean I have seen tons of things in python where I'd say "Why didn't you just do this in bash.

Neither python nor bash exclude the other. Some things are easily solved in one, others are more easily solved in the other. And both have "escape hatches" to the other.

jVinc··on Pharma companies continue to raise drug prices at rates well above inflation
If you where a pharmacy benefits manager, and you where sitting across two different potential drug makers and one says "I'll let you have it at 30$!" and the others says "I'll let you have it at 120$ with a 50% rebate!" which one do you think you'd take?

The forces at play in the pharma/PBM negotiation leads to price increases instead of price competition because the PBM effectively sits on both sides of the table. They want high rebates and they don't care about list-prices as long as they can take back a bit cut of them. This is why you see rebates reaching levels close to 70%. Imagine if you sent a guy to negotiate a car purchase for you, and that guy was looking at taking 70% of the net you pay through rebates from the car dealership. Do you honestly think he would be looking for the cheapest deal?

jVinc··on SEC blocks the Telegram ICO – what this means, and what happens now
You are right that they could conceptually have been operating entirely outside the US, which would shield them from any SEC actions... but of cause they aren't operating entirely outside of the US, and as such are not in any meaningful way shielded from SEC actions.
jVinc··on Airline algorithms may be keeping you from sitting together
unchecked sequential is easier than unchecked random. Checked sequential is easier than checked random. Remember, they aren't just assigning people random seats, they are attempting to assign as many paired individual as far from each other as possible to maximize the inconvenience on the part of the costumers that do not pay extra.
jVinc··on Hacker Who Revealed Soccer Secrets Is Charged with 147 Crimes
Prosecute all the criminals. Whataboutery is not a legal defense.
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