I have two thoughts about this submission. First, this is a funny and well written blog entry about someone trying Soylent. Second, Hacker News is not the right place for this.
This is humor and viewpoint. HN wants, or at least pretends to want, analysis and figures. Maybe if they stripped all the CSS from the site and made the blog look like it was made by a dysfunctional highschooler in the 90's it would get a bit more respect.
Oh I'm getting nearly as much amusement out of reading the comments that solely focus on soylent as a product as I got out of reading the (excellent, imho, but not very objective) post.
Interesting. So he's started a new company to focus on products that have "play well with others" as a design concept.
I like the idea he's promoting with the phone where all the accessories either magnetically connect or a wireless connection. I hate having to purchase the same things over and over again.
What bothers me more is that when people say "we're destroying the planet" or "the planet is dying" they are not sitting there thinking that the literal physical solid rock of the planet is somehow going to go to pieces and disappear.
What they are saying is that ecosystem which is on the planet is going to hell including the ability for said ecosystem to support life. Either all life, or more specifically the ability to support human life.
No one, no one, is thinking the literal planet is going to go boom.
The aha moment for my team which changed us from a mindset of dealing with scrum to enjoying it was when we moved from aiming towards a number of story points to complete towards committing to the stories that we could individually complete in a sprint, without a concern for the associated story points.
All of a sudden story points disassociated with time. They just became a number. a combination of complexity and understanding.
A lesser, but still important shift, came with our changes to backlog grooming. When part of that grooming included poker planning to estimate points. This Spread that chore out, and our Sprint planning is now approximately half an hour as the team goes down the prioritized list and commits to stories.
Is each developer just working on as many stories as he can in a sprint, picking from a prioritized list?
Because otherwise, how do you estimate what you can complete in a sprint? Don't you commit beforehand to deliver a certain amount of stories? And doesn't that translate to a certain number of story points?
We get the prioritized list, we review our other commitments in the upcoming Sprint, and starting from the top of the list we go down and developers pick which ones that they will work on. Since we've groomed these stories, we have an idea of complexity and one or more developer may have already taken the time to identify exactly what needs to be done.
We don't commit before hand to deliver a specific number of stories, or a specific number of story points. That would never work. Rather we focus on what individuals believe they can achieve. Our velocity has become pretty consistent and our delivery of story points is close to 100%
Well yes, if you're only option is to send them to a sub-par public school then the government is going to force you to send them to that school. If you don't have the means to move to a better neighborhood, if you don't have the means to pay for private school you have to deal with what you get.
One of the biggest complaints I have for websites that host software projects is a tendency to assume you know what the project is about. A couple of clicks to look at the main page, documentation, and getting started, and there is not a single paragraph that tells me what mesos is for. So my eyes glaze over and I move on.
I agree. This is a sub-page talking about a particular release though, so it's not a landing page or "front page".
Clicking the logo works and gets you to the project's actual front page (http://mesos.apache.org/), which has a decent description:
Apache Mesos abstracts CPU, memory, storage, and other compute resources away from machines (physical or virtual), enabling fault-tolerant and elastic distributed systems to easily be built and run effectively.
That's still pretty abstract of course, but at least it's attempting to answer "what is Mesos?" first thing on the page.
Fair critique, but this is a release notes page and not really the front page. Here is likely the bat article on what mesos really is from a high level:
Besides some of the other advice offered. You're probably looking in the wrong place.
Anecdotal story: I found myself working at a warranty company and a friend of mine worked at a specialized software company. We got together one day for drinks and lamented the fact that we had problems finding the right people. His problem was that everyone who applied was fresh out of college and had no true hands on experience, where he wanted senior programmers. My problem was that everyone who applied had a Masters or Doctorate degree and was applying for mid level/entry position.
If you're finding yourself unemployable in a particular area, you're probably right. More than likely though, you could find an excellent job at a company that isn't directly a traditional tech company. Every company in the world now needs to have an IT strategy of some sort. With an IT department of some sort. And I can guarantee that there are enough out there who are just looking for experience that they would hire you on the spot. The problem though is reaching out and finding them.
I think it's important to differentiate that it depends on the company and the field. For lack of a better phrase there are sexy companies and not so sexy companies in the IT world. They get different people applying to them and they have different wants. If you are looking at doing R&D at a startup software company, the competition is going to be far different than working at a medium sized independent insurance company
Yes, but the 50% ratio is for those that aren't doing R&D or the like. They are literally asking for stuff that has been done 912834902384902380492349023 times before from an IT perspective like a standard OS db cluster backing a web app which is behind a CDN+Load Balancer combination.
