Public bathrooms are actually one of the few things that US cities are undeniably better at than European cities. You almost always have to pay in Europe and even paid ones can be hard to come by.
Readit Newsxputer commented on Public restrooms are hard to find in America washingtonpost.com/wellne... · Posted by u/linusg789
Car dealers really have no leverage. You can walk out at any time up until signing the paperwork, and just go to another dealer.
Yes but their job is literally to manipulate you into buying a car then and there. They play all sorts of dirty tricks to get there.
I have absolutely 0 desire to live in a city though...
Too noisy, cramped, expensive, more dangerous, etc.
I want space, a yard, isolation, privacy, etc. Living more out in the countryside is much more ideal to me.
Nobody is arguing against car usage in the country side. People are arguing against car dependency in cities and suburbs.
xputer commented on You don't need Scrum, you just need to do Kanban right (2022) lucasfcosta.com/2022/10/0... · Posted by u/thunderbong
Yes, you need the protection. You shouldn't be protecting yourself because it takes time from your work.
Or do you enjoy explaining how project priorities work at length for the fifth time in two weeks? Do you enjoy sales just "quickly popping by" your desk to request "a small tiny feature I promised the client we'll have done by end of week".
This is why in Agile we have the Scrum Master who fields all requests like that and tells Marketdrone A to fight Marketdrone B on whose task is more important, because team only has enough time to complete either task on the next sprint. Every time someone tries to interfere with the team's work they firmly direct the person to the SM. In a few actual cases the team's SM has physically removed the over-eager middle manager out of the team's space with their "few quick requests and improvements".
I'd really want to know what kind of tasks can't be completed in two weeks in your opinion.
The tasks in a sprint aren't "build a house from scratch" -level, you split them until they're in manageable chunks of time. In a single sprint you might have the task of clearing the plot from any trees and laying down the markers for the house's base.
Then the client comes in and approves the direction or asks you to make the bathroom a bit bigger or move the house 5 meters to the east - which is still easy because the "house" is just stakes in the ground with string connecting them.
And again you pick 2 weeks of work you know your team can finish and the client checks that everything looks good. etc etc.
It really isn't complicated. I think the majority of HN has only been subjected to cargo-cult Agile or some kind of Agile-ish system where you just use the terms, but none of the actual processes.
+1 in my experience most people that criticize scrum simply have a bad experience with a half baked implementation of scrum.
If it's implemented well it's fantastic. You get to focus on the important stuff during the sprint. Issues tend to get caught early on because experienced team members chime in during planning poker. The whole team takes responsibility for the sprint together. This leads to lots of knowledge sharing and collaboration within the team.
Once the team velocity is predictable it also becomes much easier to ask for x amount of time per week for refactoring work as the impact to project timelines can be easily quantified.
xputer commented on Millions snap up new Germany-wide public transit ticket apnews.com/article/german... · Posted by u/thm
Something I really appreciate in Taiwan is a single card works for all transit. What I found cool in Sydney was metro turnstiles would read contactless credit cards. And I'm shocked and thrilled that the Bay Area consolidated on one system.
The US is pretty split up and doesn't use trains outside the NE corridor, so it's not as useful, but it'd be nice if congress would start work on unifying transit payments across the country over the next decade. Also unifying car toll payments. These balkanized systems are just silly.
Doesn't Kaohsiung have it's own card system?
xputer commented on Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself? · Posted by u/l2silver
xputer commented on The electric vehicles we need now are e-bikes (2022) bloomberg.com/news/articl... · Posted by u/jseliger
Interesting. What do you do when it's 50C hot outside or freezing winter with a snow?
Find your answer here: https://youtu.be/Uhx-26GfCBU
xputer commented on Liberating the MacBook Air 2013 with Linux boilingsteam.com/liberati... · Posted by u/ekianjo
On my mid-2010 Macbook Pro, with Linux Mint (Xfce), the trackpad works just fine...
Edit: Here's a video showing mouse movement and 2-finger scrolling - https://imgur.com/a/f6zImz6
Have you ever used said MacBook intensively with OSX? I guarantee you the difference in trackpad performance will be mind boggling and frustrating. Literally the only thing keeping me away from using Linux.
xputer commented on Farmers' protest party win shock Dutch vote victory bbc.com/news/world-europe... · Posted by u/version_five
Most comments seem to miss the point that The Netherlands is the second largest exporter of food in the world. That the agricultural sector needs to be downsized particularly in NL seems rather obvious. Sadly this goes against populist interests and a handful of very rich private interests in the country.
In terms of dollar value, not in terms of volume. Still very impressive though for such a small country.
xputer commented on Zero energy ready homes are coming energy.gov/eere/articles/... · Posted by u/ricardou
> This is all very expensive to build and maintain, and the cities and municipalities are left to foot the bill.
Look, I hate Single Family Housing as much as anyone - but roads are BY FAR the most expensive part of infrastructure you mentioned - and those are financed by gasoline taxes.
If the people in the sticks are buying a lot of gas, they're paying a lot more taxes for the roads, too.
It'd be nice if property taxes were slightly higher in suburban areas to make up for the higher costs - but it really wouldn't need to be that much higher. Houses usually cost more than condos - so you're paying more property tax already by having a more expensive home...
Sure, there's exceptions like condos in Manhattan and near the beach and ski resorts, etc...
Roads are absolutely not financed by gasoline taxes. They are massively subsidized by the federal government. Watch some videos about Strong Towns to learn about the problems that is causing in regions that are not experiencing constant growth.
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJp5q-R0lZ0_FCUbeVWK6OGLN...