Stop biodiversity loss or we could face our own extinction, warns UN - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/nov/03/stop-biodiversity-loss-or-we-could-face-our-own-extinction-warns-un <comment><USER3> A great place to start would be to seriously limit or eliminate pesticides like Roundup. Don't believe the alarmists in Big Ag who will say the world will starve. We overproduce food now, and organic farming techniques, if widely adopted, wouldn't make it impossible to continue to produce enough. The loss of diversity in insects and "weeds" has had a huge impact up the chain.

<comment><USER4> I once saw a great quote which was, "maybe food is too cheap". This is probably true, we could probably eat better quality, organic food grown in a more diverse way, it would just cost more. On the flip side, it would be more valued so we'd have less waste.

I can't imagine the amount of "non-valued" food, fruit vegetables etc which end up in the bin.

<comment><USER5> Everybody here is ignoring yield per acre. RoundUp, for all its faults, drives the yield number up. More people (and particularly more cattle) are fed per acre when you use pesticides.

If you banned the pesticides, it would do a lot of good, but now consider how many more acres would need to be farmed in order to keep the overall yields the same. How many acres would be cleared that would not otherwise be cleared?

I agree that glyphosate (RoundUp now makes up less than half the market, which is largely Chinese-made and Chinese-consumed now) should probably be far more heavily regulated, but be aware that humans are not going to happily grow less food on the same land when yields drop.

Taste the rainforest.

<comment><USER6> > _More people (and particularly more cattle) are fed per acre when you use > pesticides._

This feels like saying we absolutely _need_ multiple GB of RAM to display a website because how else would Angular work otherwise?

If the increased yield per acre is used primarily to support todays industrial-scale meat production, maybe we should address the latter first. The way meat production works today seems to have almost exclusively downsides: It's a moral bankruptcy considering current state of research in animal consciousness, it's a health hazard for consumers, it's an inefficient way to consume proteins _and_ as you note, it monopolizes vast parts of crop production.

<comment><USER7> We only have a few percent more food production than humanity needs, if I remember correctly. Roundup and other pesticides combined with fertilizer increased yields ... it doubles and triples them, and it prevents famines resulting from sudden insect plagues, which were common (as in every 30 years on average) for most of human history.

If these numbers are even close to accurate, eliminating roundup and modern farming would kill BILLIONS of humans.

I would love to get more accurate numbers, but what do you intend to do about the little "humans need food" issue in general ?

<comment><USER8> As i understand it, there are new intensive organic farming techniques that are practically unknown to big ag and which produce similar yields with higher quality (by not destroying soil and ecosystems every year). I'd counter that the final death toll of Roundup and similar chemicals could be much higher any potential famine caused by abrupt cessation of pesticide treatments. Destruction of ecosystems is an externality which has never been accounted for, and sooner or later someone will pay that bill.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Getting rid of chemical warfare on soil and in farms will become much easier of farming is automated. Automation in farms works longer than any human labourer. And getting rid of weeds in farms and planting hedgerows and letting at least 30-50 percent of land go back to nature with reforestation and installing grasslands will help with habitat restoration. We have urban indoor farms that can deal with the shortage. A lot can be grown indoors..not all our food tho. Just take inside whatever is possible to be grown indoors! Shorten supply chains. Population needs to be reduced not by punitive methods but by incentivizing smaller families. In the 70s, our population was around 3.5 billion ..now it's close to 7.5 billion. This is a problem. We accommodated this explosion by getting rid of animals, birds, insects and turning forests into farmlands. Some of this conversion needs to be reversed.

</comment><comment><USER10> I agree with the big idea of conservation of biodiversity, but it really bothers me when these articles are using what seems like lies and fear tactics to convince me. 2 years? Why is it so urgent? The article doesn't explain. And "By 2050, Africa is expected to lose 50% of its birds and mammals," sounded really implausible to me. I had to do further research to determine that they are probably actually referring to "50% of species" rather than "50% of population", which is a very big difference that seems the opposite of what is implied. In this case, "face our own extinction" seems like a huge overexaggeration. This kind of deception and disregard for actual facts makes me much less sympathetic to the cause.

<comment><USER11> Losing 50% of species _is_ the loss of biodiversity by definition. Just about every species plays a vital role in maintaining a habitat and losing 1 or several has consequences that are hard to predict and could mean a drastic reduction in the ability to grow food and have clean water.

What incentives do scientists have to lie about this? Why is everyone so skeptical about warnings that scientists around the world agree on and have been saying for 20 or 30 years? It's maddening

<comment><USER10> Losing 50% of species sounds bad, but much less bad than losing 50% of all mammal populations. Are we just talking about losing ten thousand obscure rodent species? I actually have no real idea what this value means, which makes me inclined to ignore it. A scientific source would be great, but the article doesn't provide any.

If we're talking about "human extinction" level threats, it would probably be from massive famines, and "half of the animals are now dead" seems much more likely to cause that than "half of animal species are extinct". What is the actual percentage estimate that we would go extinct from this, and when? It matters when comparing it to nuclear war or AI.

The incentive for scientists to lie seems obvious to me. They want people to support and fund their efforts (possibly for noble reasons, possibly because they just want more money). They think that simple facts aren't good enough, so they use fear tactics like "we could face our own extinction" hoping that will convince us instead.

Also, the authors of these articles and the people interviewed are not necessarily the scientists either. Given that sources aren't provided, I have no idea what the scientists are actually saying.

<comment><USER12> Most animal species are insects, so probably that is the majority of animal species that will die out. Insects and grubs, worms etc though can be very important to the local ecology. Loss of some could damage human food production that relies on them in sometimes very indirect ways.

<comment><USER13> There have been a several recent studies showing massive loss of insect populations: [https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2018/10/15/hyperalarm...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2018/10/15/hyperalarming- study-shows-massive-insect-loss/?utm_term=.96d6124d639c)

But insects are also a foundation of natural food webs; we can't lose lots of insects without losing lots of other animals too. And as a couple of us have posted already, a recent study showed that we've reduced the populations of mammals, birds, fish and reptiles by 60% since 1970: [https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/oct/30/humanity...](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/oct/30/humanity- wiped-out-animals-since-1970-major-report-finds)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Permaculture (Applied Ecology) - we can provide food _and CARBON-NEUTRAL fuel_ for ourselves without wrecking Nature.

A "Permie" farm is more productive than any other mode of food production. By setting up ecosystems that consist of a preponderance of human-usable crop species you can grow _multiple times_ the amount of food-per-acre of conventional agriculture (even with GMOs and pesticides, et. al.) After the initial set-up very little labor is required.

Permie farms _foster_ biodiversity.

"Permaculture Behind `Greening the Desert` with Geoff Lawton" [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Q41b05ku9U](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Q41b05ku9U) Salt desert to figs in two years.

Toby Hemenway - "How Permaculture Can Save Humanity and the Earth, but Not Civilization" [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nLKHYHmPbo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nLKHYHmPbo)

"Alcohol Can Be a Gas!" [http://permaculture.com/](http://permaculture.com/) Small-scale alcohol fuel production integrated with a Permaculture farm. You can grow your own energy. The economics are totally different from large-scale industrial ethanol production. You can start this in your backyard and be driving your converted car from your own home-grown carbon-neutral solar energy within a few months. Faster if you scavenge feedstock. Farmer Dave used to have an arrangement with a donut shop to ferment their old leftover/scrap dough.

</comment><comment><USER15> Why would reducing biodiversity cause humans to go extinct? It isn't made clear in the article.

Wouldn't it just cause certain creatures to be more dominant?

<comment><USER16> The environment is a complex web of interdependent relationships between species and ecological processes. You remove enough relationships and it'll just collapse.

<comment><USER15> That's very vague. Collapse how? According to other comments we have already remove 60% of species, why wasn't that enough to cause a collapse. Other species take up the slack left by those removed.

<comment><USER17> Death of insects means no honey and many dead birds.

No pollination means many fallow meadows and dead plants.

This means either weeds spreading or top soil depletion.

This also means many crops we depend on will not survive because various helper species aren't available.

Earthworms dying mean no areation of soil, or the impact of other insects to improve the eco system.

So no those other species aren't taking up the slack as you put it. Wasps aren't interchangeable with moths for example.

But I too want to understand better how far this collapse impacts human beings.

<comment><USER18> This doesn't really explain human extinction. Our food supply doesn't come from a natural ecosystem.

\- Commercial bee populations aren't declining. (There has been an increase in Colony Collapse Disorder, but lost colonies are replaced and total bee population hasn't declined.)

\- The vast majority of the world's food supply does not depend on pollination from insects. To quote from [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_crop_plants_pollinated...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_crop_plants_pollinated_by_bees):

> The most essential staple food crops on the planet, like corn, wheat, rice, > soybeans and sorghum, need no insect help at all; they are wind-pollinated > or self-pollinating. Other staple food crops, like bananas and plantains, > are sterile and propagated from cuttings, requiring no pollination of any > form, ever.

\- None of the crops that require pollination from insects are essential to human survival. It's hard to see how their loss could lead to our extinction.

\- Crops can be pollinated by hand or machine.

\- Crops can be propagated without seeds.

\- Crops can be grown in all kinds of unbelievable conditions. Crops can be grown without soil. They can be grown in space stations, completely isolated from Earth's ecosystems.

\- Extinction is a very strong claim. To support it, it wouldn't be enough, for example, to show that 90% of the population would die off, leaving 750 million people. They need to propose a mechanism by which all humans would die.

<comment><USER19> If you think that the human food supply will not be affected by a planet-wide ecosystem collapse, you might want to think again.

Fertile soil is not just dirt. Talk to a soil expert and you'll find out very quickly how difficult it is to keep soil healthy, especially if you punish it every day with pesticides and herbicides. See you long you can maintain production if you don't have a support system of insects, arachnids, worms, fungi and so on. You'll end up with just dirt. Nothing grows in just dirt. You can try to keep up production by downing it in fertilizer, but in the end you'll just prolong the inevitable; loss of crop and collaps of production.

See how many humans you can feed by growing crops in space stations. See how long you can maintain a closed ecosystem in space.

To your last point; if you lose more than 30% to 30% of the productive workforce, you can kiss human civilization goodbye; our manufacturing is highly de-centralized, but heavily interdependent and without safety buffer.. Our infrastructure is wide-spread and needs tons of maintenance. Lose enough people and it all comes crashing down, leaving the survivors with broken machinery for which they don't have energy, don't have the knowledge to operate let alone repair if (not when) they stop working. They will also have to deal with all the poison and radioactive fallout from all the fission reactors that experience core-meltdown because nobody's around anymore to power them down over the period of ten years.

Don't kid yourself; saving what's left of this earth's ecosystem is the only shot we have. There's not techo-utopia down the road to carry us to eternity and the heat-death of the universe. Its you and me and the rest of us puny humans that will have to do the saving.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> [https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-07183-6](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-07183-6) : this explains about the loss of terrestrial biomass. [..]Numerous studies are revealing that Earth's remaining wilderness areas are increasingly important buffers against the effects of climate change and other human impacts. But, so far, the contribution of intact ecosystems has not been an explicit target in any international policy framework, such as the United Nations' Strategic Plan for Biodiversity or the Paris climate agreement.

This must change if we are to prevent Earth's intact ecosystems from disappearing completely.[..]

</comment><comment><USER20> We can't even stop killing each other because of greed and other stupid reasons, we can't even stop global warming, who's going to stop biodiversity loss and how? It's in the nature of mankind to create but also destroy. Every era of civilization was build on the ashes of the former, and the next will not be different, a lot of people will have to die of violent death for humanity to evolve and come to its senses. we are at the beginning of a climate refugee crisis of proportions never seen before,coming from Southern countries, do people really think it will go smoothly?

<comment><USER21> We kill each other less than we did in the past. Humanity is not a completely static thing.

There are many struggles ahead of us. But not all hope is lost. I wholeheartedly reject any fatalistic notion. There is always something that can be done to improve the situation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Once again the principles of centralization vs decentralization play out in front of us. Decentralization is a strength, centralization is a weakness, in almost everything, from the internet to crops...

</comment><comment><USER23> Humanity will never go extinct as long as the Earth supports photosynthesis generally. If the ecosystem collapses, we might suffer for a little while, but our technology can overcome any environmental problem. Environmental damage, no matter how severe, is not an _existential_ threat, and hyping it up as so does nobody any favors.

That said, environmental damage is expensive, and we should mitigate it. But we should do so with an accurate, not inflated, knowledge of the consequences.

<comment><USER19> Holy cow, Batman, that's some fatal case of hubris if I've ever seen one.

Environmental damage /is/ an /existential/ threat. We're part of an ecosystem, we're not independent of it. We have no way to produce food or oxygen without an ecosystem. In what artificial Biosphere do you live in?

The sheer audacity leaves me (almost) speechless.

<comment><USER23> Agriculture _is_ producing food without the ecosystem.

<comment><USER19> Nope, it isn't. You're still dependent on the fertile soil, on nematodes and fungi, on insects and arthropods. You fool yourself when you think that all these square kilometers of dry and dead dust will yield anything at all when there's no ecosystem around to renew the dehydrated husk of soil we leave when we're done.

Google for 'arable soil loss' and read a bit about it, please.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I like to think each living organism as a gigantic living git repository of successful experiments by evolution. No wonder a huge number of human inventions come out of either isolating naturally occurring compounds or mimicking some natural occurring behavior of some organism: plant/animal.

Each time we lose an organism, we lose an entire repo of commits made over billions of years.

</comment><comment><USER9> There is a lot of skepticism and charges of exaggeration about this threat to the planet. Is it ok to make a book recommendation here? [https://www.amazon.com/Sixth-Extinction-Unnatural- History/dp...](https://www.amazon.com/Sixth-Extinction-Unnatural- History/dp/0805092994) : Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert. And it's not a new book either. Many people have been warning about this and 2020 is a pivotal year for answers about our survival. Media..as usual..is getting hysterical about it too late and all in unison. But that doesn't negate the overwhelming evidence that the threats are real.

</comment><comment><USER25> This has happened many times before in more localized settings. The big difference to our situation is that the pertaining cultures were most likely plain ignorant about the dynamics that lead to their demise.

We are lucky that we do have all the knowledge but instead of taking action we constantly bathe ourselves in dystopian fantasies and social media whining (Q.E.D.) without any _vision_ other than what seems like a global death-wish.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Third_Chimpanzee#Environme...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Third_Chimpanzee#Environmental_impact_and_extinction_\(part_five\))

</comment><comment> village-idiot Honestly, I think it's too late.

It's not too late technically, we could make changes now that would save us. But it's far too late politically because people are stubbornly doubling down on the behaviors that are killing us.

<comment><USER26> There was never any time. We're programmed like bacteria to expand and fill the available resources until either our consumption or our waste products kill us off. The only question was the speed and ugliness of it all. After agriculture, without population control, this whole shit became inevitable. Science? Education? Democracy? Capitalism? All just ingredients into making this global society capable of mass digestion. Chewing up the Earth and shitting it out.

[http://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780199539...](http://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780199539536.001.0001/acref-9780199539536-e-1221)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> What about overpopulation as a factor? The elephant in the room. Every time someone suggest that we are too many, people tend to agree, but when what is suggested is that we should think about how to be less people, everybody halts in horror

</comment><comment><USER28> I some countries is still a challenge to forbid use of plastic bags on supermarkets and plastic straws. We just keep throwing this disposable stuff out like crazy.

</comment><comment><USER19> It's incredible how many participants in this topic don't seem to grasp the delicacy of earth's ecosystem and see it as something that is easily replaced or that humans can exist without.

Let's not kid around; if the ecosystem of goes the way of the way of the dodo, humans will go along for the ride.

You might (or not) have noticed that humans don't exist outside of the ecological system that our plant harbors. We're part of this ecological network, we're fully, totally, non-negotiable dependent on it. Techno-utopian dreams (nightmares, more like it) of being independent of the 'natural' world are not going to save mankind; we're part of 'nature', we exist within nature, there's no existence for humans outside nature. We need an ecosystem that provides us with calories and oxygen. The only ecosystem in existence that is capable of providing that is the very ecosystem we're working tirelessly to dismantle and destroy. So yes; we might die out because of lack of resources. We very probably will. There's only so much damage that an ecosystem can take. And there are tons of signs that signal that our earthly ecosystem is reaching it's breaking point; - we've lost about a third of the arable land in the last forty years. - we've lost about 30% of bio diversity in the last twenty years. - we've lost almost 75% of insect biomass in the last thirty years.

The loss of insects is especially alarming; insects play a major role in all food webs on earth. The disappearance of 75% of insects (biomass, not species) has a catastrophic impact of everything further up the food chain. Yes, including humans.

We're currently working non-stop to destroy our ecosystem's capacity to carry animals in the upper food chain. Guess who's on top of that food chain. Yes, us humans.

Don't kid yourself; we're currently rushing full-speed ahead towards a full- scale ecosystem collapse. And don't fool yourself on our ability to create and maintain a man-made closed ecosystem as a replacement; we're not able to do that and we probably won't for many, many, many decades to come.

The only ecosystem we have to save our collective asses is the one we're currently punishing every day with our overproduction, overconsumption, with our fertilizers, insecticides, pesticides and waste.

It's so past high times that we - humans, as a collective - have a hard talk how much longer we want to exist as a 'civilized' species, with global trade, no struggle for survival, boundless capitalism.

Because if we keep going, we've got a dozen or so decades left. It's back to hunter gathering for the rest of mankind's existence after that.

If we leave enough prey species alive, that is. Otherwise that will be the end of mankind's short stint.

</comment><comment><USER29> Collapse != extinction

<comment><USER19> It is, for humans. We've got a hard dependency on civilization because we've forgotten how to live without it and don't have any natural habitats we could live in (as hunter/gatherers) even if we remembered how.

<comment><USER29> B.S.

<comment><USER19> Even tough you've very eloquently made you point, would you care to elaborate? What of my argument is -- to quote you -- 'B.S.'?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> While it would be sad to see so many species dying, i dont think it will affect the survival of humans.

If really needed bacterias and plants would be enough for humans to survive. Wouldnt be pleasant though, so we should try our best that it doesnt happen.

I just dont see the apocalyptic prophecies coming true.

</comment><comment><USER17> So precisely who is going to pay for all this, and the reduction in growth it's going to entail?

Markets are levered if not overlevered, and maintenance of biodiversity is going to have both spending costs for the govt and resource extraction reductions (arguable), followed by compliance costs for firms.

Sure we save ourselves, but face it, our economic system is a rational system which at the end must put a finite price on a human life. Whether by market price discovery or by fiat, we are going to say, "there's only this much we can spend".

I'm really curious because I pretty much see a dead rock and humans under domes, in the far future.

Is there some other plausible outcome?

———-

Edit: people are correctly targeting the rational part of markets, but here's the counter.

It's very rational for business firms to lobby against externalities being priced in. It's rational for ranchers to cut forests for economic gains. And it's rational for the many many people who are being propelled up out of poverty to want better food, clothing and power.

That guy burning crops in India says "shit, sorry for the bad smoke Delhi. But it costs too much to do anything else. Sucks to be you."

That's why my point on our economy being levered. It's not in anyone's rational interest to halt growth. Every % of global gdp growth is millions of people out of poverty.

Which is why the question. Are people really incentivized to bell the cat - <USER2> actually price in externalities ?

<comment><USER31> A system of economy based on continuous growth and limited resources is simply not viable. That is nothing new, the Club of Rome presented their findings already in 1970s.

Their conclusion was a rapid and uncontrollable decline in population and industrial capacity, and the signs of that would be apparent by 2072.

Given that the "business as usual" scenario has persisted, we are on track to that sudden crash "overshoot" scenario. In addition, now there is the looming climate catastrophy as well. Countries and regions have to become more resilient to all kinds of impacts from climate change, as it does not look like we can avoid or prevent it.

In addition, another economic system than one expecting continuous growth is required.

Therefore the question of "who pays for the reduction in growth" is a rather non-starter, as the reduction in growth is inevitable.

Edit: crash not at 2072, signs visible at 2072.

<comment><USER32> I think his point was that individual actors do not want to hinder their prosperity at the cost of the planet. The looming threat of extinction is not something a business or a 3rd world farmer takes into account when making choices. Out of sight out of mind, unfortunately.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Terraforming Mars, or maybe just create a habitable satellite is easier than saving the earth. Current economical model fosters growing business, and only government regulation to deal with externality. Growing is intuitive to human activity, but restricting human growth is counter-intuitive.

I forget the link, but a lecture video using bacteria growth as a metaphor of human growth creeps me out. Supposed bacteria in a jar growth 2 times for 1 minutes, and the jar will be full in 1 hour. When will the jar be half full? Answer is at 59 minutes. At the time of 58 minutes, only 25% space is used. How many bacteria thinks the jar or the world will be full after 2 minutes?

The situation is similar to human, and we still cannot find a way to protect the environment and have economic growth at the same time. Maybe the end of human history is next 2 years but we still think its pretty okay and didn't notice anything unusual. Then maybe finding a new jar is the second best way to deal with it.

<comment><USER34> Holy guacamole. "easier to terraform mars or create a habitable satellite than saving earth"

this is the most ignorant thing I've ever seen written on the internet. Get back to me once you have 1/10000000th the bio-diversity of earth on your habitable satellite.

1) change our paradigms, economic system, and other social factors. I can assure you that this is far more maleable than Martian soil composition...

our social structures evolved in the context of low population densities and plentiful resources.

our economic system is what needs to give, it doesn't even function for humans, let alone the planet and the rest of life we share it with...

need I remind you that 1) we are only ONE species, and haven't the RIGHT to destroy our shared home, nor the other species. Some of us humans are upset about this, and we WILL take you other humans on over this issue!

2) our planet is STILL the only known place with LIFE in the entire universe. This is likely to change, at some point, but not if you get us all killed first.

3) our social systems are flexible, arbitrary, dare I say "PRETEND"... change em.

<comment><USER35> Indeed, people are dangerously ignorant regarding Earth and Mars.

If we can not rescue Earth, a biological paradise, we have no hope to make it on Mars, a biological hell.</comment></comment></comment>


NASA, Japan Make ASTER Earth Data Available at No Cost - <AUTHOR> http://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/nasa-japan-make-aster-earth-data-available-at-no-cost <comment><USER2> I work with Terra's ground based flight crew. I don't know much about ASTER specifically, but most of the instruments on Terra have a very wide field of cover and gather light in bands beyond of our spectrum of vision. The data primarily of interest to climatologists and scientists. You won't be able to pick out cars parked on our street in these images.

Historical and current data from some of Terra's other instruments is available on Worldview here: [https://worldview.earthdata.nasa.gov/](https://worldview.earthdata.nasa.gov/)

</comment><comment><USER3> How exactly do you download the data? I am looking at the page the article linked to and I do not see any intelligible download link, just some factoids about the craft. Is there a giant tarball I can slurp down. How big is the data set anyway?

<comment><USER4> took a bit to find but here's the link: [https://lpdaac.usgs.gov/data_access/data_pool](https://lpdaac.usgs.gov/data_access/data_pool)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I hadn't heard of this project before, but this sounds pretty awesome. I wonder what the fidelity is and if it could be used to fill in the height tag missing from lots of OSM buildings.

<comment><USER6> Jonathan de Ferranti has a webpage reviewing different digital elevation maps ([http://viewfinderpanoramas.org/reviews.html#aster](http://viewfinderpanoramas.org/reviews.html#aster) ). It sounds like he was not super impressed with the ASTER height data (the review is from 2011):

> Despite the nominal 1" resolution, the true resolution is lower than 3" > (downsampled from 1") SRTM data, and there are very many pits, bumps and > mole runs. So far the tallest spike that I have found is 3,844 metres, at N > 60�43' E 22�02', in south west Finland, and the deepest pit is about 3,000 > metres, in tile N27E088, containing cells below 5,300m close to where > Kangchenjunga's main summit ridge should rise to 8586m. Generally, artifacts > are visible in almost all areas of low relief. Coastlines are not at all > accurate; lakes have not been flattened and are particularly badly affected > by artifacts. Major errors can be found in most areas of very high relief, > But in between, some areas of medium to high relief have been well done and > are almost artifact free. My early impression is that, for areas where > topographic coverage is poor, these data could be separated out for use to > improve DEM data, including both mountain and desert voidfill data, on this > and other sites. At one time I thought it may also be possible to flatten > the low relief artifacts to provide data that will improve coverage of the > plains of North Eurasia, but after further consideration I doubt that this > will be possible.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Reactide a dedicated IDE for React web application development - <AUTHOR> http://reactide.io <comment><USER3> This is great. Going to give it a shot later today.

A side now, I think React (and other one-way, two way data flow frameworks like Vue) with modern ES6, CSS3-flexbox primitives, are setup well to be taken to the IDE -- to an almost Visual Basic level of drag and drop, and event handling.

Somehow HTML5 never got the IDE love -- because of it's extremely flexibility. I'd trade a lot of that for a convention over configuration IDE based framework, that just allowed me to easily handle views, routes and storage.

I hope Reactide (and more other HTML5 IDEs) show up and win perhaps the largest developer community there is.

<comment><USER4> I'm actually working on something very similar to what you've described - <USER2> GUI-driven modern web app designer that exports to React, Node and CSS3. It's turning out to be a really good match. If you want me to let you know when it comes out, drop me an email :)

<comment><USER3> Done.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is great well done. I have been thinking a lot about similar stuff.

I would love to see a new IDE/language emerge that elevates us from "a program is a bunch of directories and files" to "a program is a data structure that can be compiled/interpreted and executed".

I want a "tree viewer" on the side that lets me view the components of my program not just files on a filesystem.

Imagine when your IDE could be 100% aware of all different elements of your program in a reliable way.

You could "attach" comments and tests to your code. Your IDE could show you hints about which components lack documentation and tests. You could navigate your program in powerful ways.

The IDE could give you a UI for changing parameters and configuration. So much potential.

Right now we have some of this stuff but it's done in a hacky way built on top of shaky conventions that are not academically sound or correct (comments as ad-hoc pieces of ignored string sprinkled in a file, test naming conventions , annotations etc).

It would be nice to acknowledge a program for what it really is, a data structure.

</comment><comment><USER6> When will there be a streamlined install and usage flow?

</comment><comment><USER7> download not working for anyone else?

<comment><USER8> This is in alpha or pre-alpha state. If you'd like to test it out, go to the github page and clone the repo.

Once installed, cd to the project and run:

yarn

npm run start-dev</comment></comment>


Does scrum ruin great engineers or are you doing it wrong? - <AUTHOR> https://stackoverflow.blog/2020/06/29/does-scrum-ruin-great-engineers-or-are-you-doing-it-wrong/ <comment><USER2> We use Scrum at work and I have to say, I am pretty annoyed by it. I think it is fundamentally rooted in the idea that ideal software development is just a continuous production of small improvements to the code. And from this come all its micromanagement failure modes (which there are plenty).

I think in reality, SW development done right is nothing like that. It is highly discrete when it comes to output, because it takes time and experimentation to come up with the correct way to approach a problem, but if you do it right, you save yourself an incredible amount of time. It's more like mathematics, where it takes time to discover that things are actually rather easy (this quote comes to mind [https://micromath.wordpress.com/2011/11/06/andrew-wiles- on-d...](https://micromath.wordpress.com/2011/11/06/andrew-wiles-on-doing- mathematics/)).

Of course, if you look at the project from the longer time perspective, it can appear as continuous production of improvements. But it has a kind of quantum nature, if you decrease the scale of time, you will see less continuity and more discrete bursts of code production. There is something like uncertainty principle that on certain scale, it's pointless to try to predict things, because making the correct prediction (which is needed at least to define thing DONE) will take as long as doing the thing in the first place.

I don't consider myself special, but it is possible that Scrum ruins great minds because they seek conceptual clarity (we sometimes humbly call it "lack of technical debt"). I am not sure how to make that work with Scrum. Perhaps if everything was done three times, punctuated by a team discussion, each time with shorter code.

Second thing that I dislike the most about Scrum is that it threw away (or at least "conveniently" renamed) pretty much everything that was ever known about project management. Of that, probably the formal estimation methods (replaced in Scrum by intuition for some reason) are the biggest loss. (I think it comes from the fact they actually realized the quantum nature of development is a problem.) To me, that is a huge red flag that it is, in fact, a snake oil.

P.S. I am tired of the YADIW excuse. Let's have a nice honest discussion about how it can be fixed.

<comment><USER3> > Of that, probably the formal estimation methods (replaced in Scrum by > intuition for some reason)

This has benefits and downsides. One of the one hand, the development team getting to control the estimate helps to control the workload.

On the other, I agree. Why are we pulling estimates of effort out of thin air? Why are we being asked how long it will take to do work in sections of code we have never seen?

Planning could be far more accurate if we just got a proposed task list a day before planning.

<comment><USER2> > One of the one hand, the development team getting to control the estimate > helps to control the workload.

I think that's a kind of waterfall strawman. In every other discipline, you would ask engineers for an estimate. It's insanity to do otherwise.

<comment><USER3> > In every other discipline, you would ask engineers for an estimate. It's > insanity to do otherwise.

I studied engineering in university and profs had plenty of stories about bosses sending business analysts to look at similar projects, generating a time estimate from those projects, and then send that estimate to the engineers as their deadline for completing the project.

It being insane doesn't stop people.

<comment><USER4> That's a pet peeve of mine. A perfect estimate is one without bias. It can't be without variance because there is always uncertainty involved in what needs to be done exactly.

So if you take an estimate and turn it into a deadline, in the _perfect_ case, the deadlines can only be made 50% of the time.

Of course, in practice there is bias, there are things you forgot to include in the estimate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I interviewed a long time ago at a med tech company in Boston where Jeff Sutherland, one of the inventors of scrum, was the CTO (I believe). I had recently been through scrum master training at my current job and was quite keen to see how scrum was applied in the place where the guy who invented it was working. I asked my first interviewer how they used scrum on their team and his answer was that they didn't use scrum. I was pretty shocked. Then he explained that scrum didn't fit well with their team and the way they worked best together, whereas on some other teams they were really happy with scrum. Made me realize that's there's no one size fits all process for software teams. Some of these "pre-baked" processes can help teams depending on their composition and maturity, but teams/companies really need to find the way of working that works for them.

<comment><USER6> If you read his book, you'll see that he repeatedly drives the point home, that Scrum is not a set of pre-baked processes, but a philosophy around measurement, prioritizing, and continuous improvement. The cargo cult meetings and processes are more a product of the "Agile movement" that is championed by mediocre middle managers.

<comment><USER7> That's the problem though: any philosophy that cannot be implemented by a "mediocre middle manager" (i.e. most managers in most companies) is doomed to fail. And if it requires an "amazing" manager to succeed, the question is whether it's down to the philosophy or the manager.

<comment><USER8> But there are no managers in SCRUM. It is doomed to fail once methodology is thrown out and replaced with manager. I've been on SCRUM presentation in 2007. They explicitly stated - we help forming the team and go away.

<comment><USER7> > there are no managers in SCRUM

A philosophy that hinges around some ideal of how the world should be, rather than dealing with the world as it really is, often ends up being implemented as the exact opposite of that ideal. I can think of some historical parallels...

<comment><USER8> Just don't call it SCRUM.

Call it "fraud SCRUM because it sells so well" or "lipstick SCRUM so we look cool" or "didn't read SCRUM but we have meetings and sprints". SCRUM works, maybe not for everyone but this denies us a chance.

<comment><USER7> No True Scrum again...

<comment><USER8> Look, I've had good experience with SCRUM team. Later I've been searching for work, "SCRUM", interesting, interview, what? PM? Another place, PM? Yet another... I have not found. They would not tell that it is not SCRUM before interview. And oh, they failed so miserably, I knew how it works but couldn't do anything. It is regress.

So often it is PM who destroys project. I've seen good PMs. Two. Great guys. Great managers protects project from upper management and helps to resolve teams disputes. Others... They are like third wheel - developers like to build, business knows what to build, managers - exercise control.

<comment><USER7> That's just it though: the fact that Scrum only works given this perfect "no management" ideal. It might work as a lightweight set of guide-rails in a self-motivated, experienced team which has 100% hands-off trust from management, but I'd argue that in that perfect-unicorn case Scrum is not the key to success but rather the fact that you have a good team and good management. In practice - as you are finding - this combination is very rare. Furthermore I'd argue that in the typical company with typical management, Scrum will lead to even greater micromanagement and overhead, and might actually be worse than, say, some version of ad-hoc Kanban-lite.

<comment><USER8> Yes, but not _works_ but _is_. Scrum requires trust and autonomy. Otherwise it is a set of non applicable tools, jumping with parachute under water. I argue Scrum with PM is oxymoron, like round square. I know it is rare, earlier it was easier to find.

Why discussion is about Scrum, not Scrum tools application and awful project management? The language is subverted, why do you help it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> In the one place I saw Scrum work really well it wasn't because of scrum we succeeded it was the amazingly talent team that groked their goals and understand how to build software well. The complete lack of an enforcer manager was a huge win, being connected directly into your customers and letting them drive what they needed and balancing it with the engineering, that worked really well. They executed well despite scrum and ultimately used Kanban with on need for the biweekly meetings since they were releasing many times a week.

Scrum was a small part of a package of process, the important bit that made that possible was the engineering processes not the task management ones. The business needed to work out what matter most to it and the developers certainly helped more as their expertise in the subject matter grew but what made it all slick was the automation and engineering. Engineering is where the time goes on a software project and doing that well is what matters. As an industry we focus so much on something that is a few hours of effort a week on planning and tracking and yet the big time goes into the actual work. If you spend a lot of time doing planning and tracking and not producing software you are doing it wrong regardless of whatever process you say you are using. Scrum is not remotely sufficient, it ignores all the important bits.

<comment><USER10> "being connected directly into your customers and letting them drive what they needed and balancing it with the engineering,"

Lucky you however, letting 'raw' Engineers interface with customers is usually a disaster. Engineers build tech, the company builds products, and they are very, very different things. A lot of pieces in there - support, training, docs, _price_ , risk, leverage, IP, know-how, relationship management, legality, confidentiality.

Experienced Engineers who have a lot of exposure to Product, Sales etc. can do this, there's usually a role there for a highly technical person to support sales.

If it were only a matter of 'the customer saying we need XYZ and Engineers doing that' then great, but it's almost never that.

<comment><USER9> You need the right customers. We were really lucky the lady in charge of the business team learnt enough of how the development worked to sit in that middle ground between her team of experts and ours to guide the direction well. I would say she and our engineering principle were what made things work well. If you are working with generic customers out there in the world then its much harder to utilise customer focussed requirements.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> What i don't like most about scrum is the sprints. Doesn't matter if it's one or two weeks long, we never have a successful sprint, the velocity chart looks like random numbers, and we spend hours on debating what the story points really mean. Sprints are artificial deadlines that don't really make any sense, developers don't care, business people don't care. A project i could complete in a month will take at least three months, because of the processes we have to follow. Instead of refactoring and thinking about overall design i have to worry about getting the task done by the end of the sprint.

<comment><USER12> The amount of hours our team has wasted on estimating, re-estimating, splitting up stories, simply to make our burn down chart look great is amazing. We would often be forced to split up stories the day before a sprint review, just so that the chart would look like things have progressed, while in reality nothing was completed.

Our sprint planning sessions were a FULL DAY, yes, an entire 8 hours of planning. Because our scrum master wanted a detailed plan of what every engineer would be working on, on every day of the week.

I still remember a certain even where we were forced to adjust our story points, so that we could make a detail a month in the future. Yes, our "agile" team, had a hard deadline that we had to try and make work. This was the business decided that we'll launch in a month, so now we'll use our agile methodology to somehow make it magically work. During a full day session to plan for this, I suggested we should drop our scrum board and instead revert to kanban. The scrum master threw me a dirty look and told the business about this, pretty sure that's why I was moved to another team.

<comment><USER13> I have suffered through those sprint sessions of hell.

What has worked for me is the following:

\- let the most sr tech person ("the architect ") refine the stories maybe with the PM. Then, the same person will point the stories. \- The sprint planning is only for presenting the stories to devs and giving some minor adjustments to the points if necessary \- The architect may deep dive with a dev for a certain task while pointing it. \- That way we have a standard complexity measure. We know different devs will perform different amount of points per sprint . We dont lose time in pointless neverending discussions \- it also works well in Mexico where people are not so vocal so the standard poker planning doesn't go well

<comment><USER12> Sadly because of the way our organisation works, the scrum master pretty much takes ownership of the whole process, he also sells agile to the business side. So if you go against what he says, the business will know that you're a trouble maker, even if you had the best intentions.

Trust me, our team has tried, sadly the whole business wants to move to agile, and it's shoved down your throat, wether you like it or not, or even regardless if it's working for the team.

Eventually I gave up, the amount of energy wasted on these discussions is just not worth it. After a while you learn to say the right things, while also making sure you keep your technical freedom. Sometimes that meant not bringing up certain technical tasks, and overestimating others so that you have time for those other technical tasks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The problem with Scrum is that most practitioners have no idea why their tools exist in the first place, under what conditions those tools apply, and what to do when their tools fail.

Nearly every -- but not all! -- "Agile" environment I have worked in was pure cargo cult, with none of the requisite cultural infrastructure required to actually make any of it work, and often with a very strong centralization of control that made local iteration... unpossible[1].

Or they do the opposite, and go full "Lord of the Flies", providing no structure at all.

Both approaches yield poor results. You want to provide structure, but then grant autonomy over that structure to those beholden to its results.

If you want to "be Agile", your organization needs to push a great deal of control _and trust_ fairly far down in the corporate hierarchy. Doing this successfully requires that organizations build the structures required for both appropriate oversight and cultural promulgation, and few companies even recognize the need for this, much less have the tools to do so.

[1] I am hereby defining this as "Possible on paper, but not in reality".

</comment><comment><USER15> _Very productive individuals that don't work as a team_

I refuse to have those people on my team. One person who's twice as productive as everyone else sounds great, but if that person's work doesn't fit well and makes everyone else's work harder it always been a net loss in my experience. I'd prefer my team works well together than have some "brilliant loner" join it.

<comment><USER16> Ja I've seen teams without them (10x, brilliant loner, call them what you want). The times the teams are without that sort of talent(just talking pure problem solving ability here)... was the times the teams, product and company was also just that. mediocre/not-inspiring/meh. And they weren't solving a hard problems !

If we were to take this to the extreme. Where do you slot in someone like Jeff Dean ? Are you going to sit there and make someone like Jeff Dean, play poker- scrum about how long the next "big research jump/product" will take ? Granted not everyone will have a Jeff Dean. But I would never wan't to work in place that is as boring as a place without someone like him.

Yea in my experience, scrum sucks for innovation !

<comment><USER17> What's with all the ellipses? Really makes it hard to understand what you're saying.

Almost all of them should be replaced with simple commas or full stops.

<comment><USER16> agreed... and fixed

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I am in a big project which assembles 45 teams and all of them shall adopt Scrum (for various reasons). My observation is that _all_ those teams which have a sustainable pace with regards to architecture, technology, quality, output, social behavior, etc have done so while adopting and embracing Scrum in a clean way since the beginning of their existence as a team. _All_ teams severely struggling with their content of work, output and collaboration have also severe issues with regards to Scrum-adoption, and show anti-patterns similar to the Stackoverflow thread creator's. However I would say the root causes (which we discussed in maaaany meetings) are certainly neither caused by Scrum nor increased by it, but individual mindset, dysfunctional team dynamics, pressure, weird contracts, etc. and would be there under any other or no process framework.

I am no Scrum fanboy (I think), but this experience and also from former projects make me quite sure to not blame Scrum in the first place when I see struggling teams, but trying to understand the underlying problems and solve those.

<comment><USER18> One more thing: In answer to Scrum advocates claiming its about _doing it right_ I would disagree and replace it with _understanding what is really (really REALLY) the purpose and idea_ behind it. Don't worship the cult and don't fight it because it's the perfect target of rants, but see the motivation behind it and acknowledge that there may be reasons why it makes sense how it is to some degree. This doesn't only apply to Scrum but to any other interaction of humans.

<comment><USER19> Could you explain what you mean by the real purpose and idea behind scrum?

<comment><USER18> Let me try: I think it's about reflection and continuous improvement and providing a framework to enforce those. Scrum-haters in our group are also notorious for an attitude of negativity and resignation in many matters, while Scrum-friends want to improve all the time and find ways to do so, beyond what is obvious.

<comment><USER20> I think that Scrum leads to resignation for many people, because it takes away control out of individual and insists on everything being collective. So your personal options to improve or make decision becomes severely limited.

Some people like it, because it allowed them to push themselves on the rest of the team. But people who dont thrive in such constant dominance conflict end up resentful and helpless.

<comment><USER21> That's an insightful concise description of "agile" experience.

As an anecdote, I have an acquaintance who is a psychologist in silicon valley and he has mentioned he frequently works with patients suffering from mental health issues related to being subject to "agile" at work. I wish someone would do a proper study on this topic.

Personally, agile hasn't driven me to depression but it has made me target roles that avoid it at all cost. Life is too short and precious to suffer through a detailed status report meeting every.single.day.

<comment><USER20> I found that testers in particular find agile off putting and some avoid working at such companies if they can. I am not sure why testers specifically end up disliking that.

I think that agile ignores human psychology. First, in management theory, intrising motivation happen when one has autonomy, mastery and purpose. Imo, plus accountability. Agile removes that from individual, but has some rhetoric that places it on the "team". But team is not person, it is set of people.

Second, it kind of assumes that people are socially perfect and everyone is kinda the same and its answer to any social human problem is "that is team dynamic or bad individual". It does not help to deal with _predictable_ human imperfections, emotions and conflicts.

<comment><USER22> possibly because usually they get a fraction of a sprint to do a whole sprints worth of validation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The thing I personally see that corrupts Scrum the most are external stakeholders. They're usually applying time pressures and defining work items to be worked on. The team then has no ownership and no control, resulting in an unhappy and unmotivated team that's constantly disappointed with itself for not delivering and often isn't really invested in what's being asked of them.

If you want teams to care, they need to own it. When teams care, things happen faster. The catch is that you can't make them care about what you want done. You need to treat the team like the "10x rogue developer" giving them freedom to pursue what they want to pursue, steered by the product owner, shielded from external stakeholders. A product owner that mandates as _part_ of a team "we need to do X by y because Bob from marketing wants it" has a losing battle on their hands.

I really think the best person to be prioritising is the leader of the moment. Sometimes it's the strongest Dev, sometimes it'll be the product owner, sometimes it'll be the scrum master, sometimes it'll be a UX designer. It could be anyone, that everyone believes in. The next week/month/quarter it'll naturally be someone different, or maybe it's still that same person, if everyone is on board then there's no issue, right? That's not to say there's should be bitter infighting either, only that everyone should follow the herd. This way, the majority of people believe they're working on the right thing, and social pressures get others pushing in the same direction too.

</comment><comment><USER24> (The linked article is a piece of content marketing and not the reflections of an individual expert in the field.)

Typically for this type of article the merits of "Scrum" are debated without Scrum first being defined, thereby making any reasonable appraisal impossible, and inviting a "your doing it wrong" conclusion.

At this point I am genuinely unsure whether this is some sort of master-level content-marketing trolling which is expertly crafted to goad engagement from senior engineers, or whether it is just sloppy, misguided, business-school nonsense.

<comment><USER25> It's a decent article.

Defining "scrum" in a debate-club fashion here is meaningless and is actually a valid strategy to discredit any criticism of it.

1\. Scrum being a "philosophy" itself isn't clearly defined.

2\. Different orgs practice Scrum differently, hence the more specifically you define Scrum, the less of the practice falls under that definition.

3\. Best definition in this context is "set of practices most orgs call Scrum", which might as well be omitted.

And all of that has no bearing on the fact, that if team leadership busts out Scrum boards and Jira tickets more often than discussing problems, teaching/promoting knowledge and figuring out the best product design, then it's probably a mediocre shitshow.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> _Complicated tasks get deprioritized_

 _Features over robust code_

An effect is "birth defects are forever". An early design mistake is very difficult to correct in a scrum-like "agile" process. The incremental nature of the process favors patching around it.

This is OK for webcrap, but not OK for systems that have strong internal consistency or time constraints.

<comment><USER13> I disagree with this sentiment, well at least I disagree that it is SCRUM's fault. I think this is a problem that resides higher up.

I have been in teams that to take the time to solve technical debt and even generate technical wealth. The best approach that has worked for me is to divide the development available time per sprint in: 33% new product features, 33% existing product maintenance, 30% Solve Technical debt (or 20% tech debt, 20% product debt with a 30-30-20-20 split).

With this I try to show that the problem of development teams NOT fixing their crap i not an issue of the Agile/SCRUM process (or any other process), it is an issue of management that prefers to ignore the mounting technical debt (until it explodes and you have the Github downtime, or LinkedIn leaks or the fact that changes become slower and slower due to codebase complexity).

<comment><USER27> Hm. That sounds like a process issue. Which is what SCRUM etc are part of. So its not process, but changing process will fix it? SCRUM + technical debt management is the cure? Then SCRUM was missing something.

I put the blame squarely on the process, whether its SCRUM or whatever.

<comment><USER28> _Then SCRUM was missing something._

Scrum is missing a LOT of things, because it's very specifically intended to _not_ be highly prescriptive. The whole idea is to iterate, use empirical feedback, and evolve your process to match your context.

Right near the beginning of the Scrum Guide it reads

 _Scrum is not a process, technique, or definitive method. Rather, it is a framework within which you can employ various processes and techniques. Scrum makes clear the relative efficacy of your product management and work techniques so that you can continuously improve the product, the team, and the working environment._

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> The only right way to do 'great engineering' is by not having any middle management.

The only right way to do great engineering, is by first asking _what_ we ought to be engineering, not re-implementing the same shit over and over again, like we do web frameworks in every new language.

Great engineering is completely unrelated to scrum. It is only in the delusional mind of a middle manager that his existence and thoughts are at all relevant to the success or failure of any project on this planet.

<comment><USER7> While "middle manager" is often nowadays a negative term, having a good manager between yourself and the upper management/customer can be a godsend. They can act as a bullshit filter, they can deal with bureaucratic busywork, they can get you whatever resources you need, fight for more funding/people for your team, help out with HR stuff and so on. You need these people so you can get on with "great engineering".

<comment><USER30> Those people should not be paid nearly as much as the actual value producers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Great article, but it does not mention management attitude. If upper management does not have the right attitude towards Scrum, Scrum will fail. If upper management does not guard the role of the Scrum masters, select capable Scrum master and allow them to function correctly, Scrum will crumble into another tool for micro-management which frustrates developers and destroys productivity. I also have seen that often it are the more ambitions (and less technically talented) developers that opt for role of Scrum master as a stepping stone to a management role. These type of Scrum masters will starting act like top-down managers, who no longer fulfill the role of a Scrum master, namely provide a safe environment for the team to function optimally.

<comment><USER28> _Great article, but it does not mention management attitude. If upper management does not have the right attitude towards Scrum, Scrum will fail. If upper management does not guard the role of the Scrum masters, select capable Scrum master and allow them to function correctly, Scrum will crumble into another tool for micro-management which frustrates developers and destroys productivity._

BINGO. The "problem with scrum" isn't usually scrum itself, but the management and culture of the company. And bad management and toxic culture will, in my experience, lead to the same results no matter what process / methodology you nominally employ.

To me, most criticisms of scrum reduce to a (legitimate) claim that "scrum isn't a magic bullet that will fix the fucked up management and toxic culture at this shitty company."

<comment><USER32> In fact, scrum is something the messed-up management has tried to use as a magic bullet, rather than actually fixing themselves.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Scrum, Kanban, scrumban, tickets with predefined checkins... all can work.

"Formal scrum" only exists to sell books, certs, classes; but more importantly to give justification or a "fix" to failed project managers and leaders.

A process will not fix a team that has bad teamwork, is not productive, and/or has bad communication/leadership/management.

</comment><comment><USER34> I think it's similar to when someone switches jobs frequently and complains about every company they've worked at. At some point, you have to realize it's you not them.

To me it feels scrum is the person switching jobs constantly and saying people don't get it.

<comment><USER35> Yeah, no. Scrum is a tool. You can implement it wrong or be very strict with it which kind of isn't agile, but it's always a people problem.

Scrum tells you 1) to analyze the way your team works, 2) make improvements, 3) talk to each other. If that sounds reasonable, it's probably because it is. The mythology of scrum being evil is misguided, I wonder how much of it is caused by engineers forced to use JIRA configured by somebody who doesn't work with the team.

<comment><USER36> No true scrum.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I work in the public sector of Denmark, and I'm involved with both developing and procuring solutions. We have quite a lot of them, around 300 for our 10.000 employees, and from a buyers perspective things like Scrum and agile rarely makes a lot of sense. It's down to the old triangle of time, features, money, which agile and through it scrum mandates at least one has to be flexible. Only that's now how you buy software. No one is going to give you an unlimited amount of money of time for an uncertain amount of features, and almost nobody has the time to act into your Scrum schedule to prioritise stuff. Because of this, it's not really how you sell software either. As a result Scrum often becomes a wrapped in a business side that's very much unified or waterfall process in companies pretending to be agile. I'm not saying it happens everywhere, but I don't think I've ever been involved with a procurement or development process you could truly call agile.

That doesn't mean you can use scrum, but it does mean that you should be careful about how you do so. If you have a bunch of guys working on different CRUD web-applications, does it really make sense to have them do a stand up every morning? Probably not. But maybe the kanban board still works well. Based on my own experiences you have to be careful and "agile" about how you build your processes to suit your changing needs, but going full strict scrum, is probably never going to work unless you're a major tech company.

<comment><USER38> > We have quite a lot of them, around 300 for our 10.000 employees, and from a > buyers perspective things like Scrum and agile rarely makes a lot of sense

> No one is going to give you an unlimited amount of money of time for an > uncertain amount of features

In a customer project I worked on recently, the consultancy I work at had a contract based on the number of story points - something like, "we will deliver 200 story points in phase 1". Now, because a story point is a relatively nebulous thing, there is of course a lot of room on both sides to fiddle things, but actually the customer was pretty happy with it.

The actual scrum teams were completely miserable, but that's a separate point altogether :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> > Build a team to do scrum, don't expect scrum to build your team.

This is a very important takeaway I think. A development methodology can work to organize the processes of an already (relatively) well working group. Expecting process standardization to fix dysfunctional human interaction is just putting the cart before the horse. Scrum will not build trust between coworkers or between workers and management. It will not allow non-technical management to suddenly develop an understanding an appreciation for technical difficulties.

</comment><comment><USER40> I wish blog posts like this had examples of things they actually did. It would make it a lot more informative to learn from an example.

</comment><comment><USER41> In my company we hired a CSM (certified scrum master) and we definitely did Scrum by the book. But we didn't do it right, in the sense that after 2 years our productivity was worse than when we started.

In my experience, Scrum can easily become a series of little waterfalls, rather than bring a flexible and needs based approach to building complex products. This lead me to see that Scrum is not really Agile, where by "Agile" I mean [0]. Scrum is a process and Agile is a mindset. Some teams are able to hold both ideas in their head at the same time. But in my experience across multiple large customers and projects, teams think that by doing Scrum they are being Agile, and this is not the case at all.

Scrum is no more a solution to the social and political problems of a project than is waterfall or the spiral model (which Scrum mimics IMO) or anything else. A good team will succeed regardless of the project management methodology and a bad team will most likely fail.

Scrum is not the problem nor the solution. It's management's job to ensure that the teams are working well, that people have room to succeed and fail, and that the project management methodology suits the needs of the project. That's certainly where I failed my business for a few years, until I worked it out.

[0] [https://agilemanifesto.org/](https://agilemanifesto.org/)

</comment><comment><USER42> Very few people care to read the official Scrum documentation. It is not a long read. Some posts on HN have more words than the Scrum Book.

As a result of not reading the documentation, not many understand what Scrum is and what they're criticizing. I have been in that situation myself at some point. One day, I found myself so frustrated that I read the Scrum book over and over again until I could complete the certification assessment with passing score, just to understand if Scrum was to blame for the problems I perceived.

What I learned in the process was that scrum does not recognize the role of a project manager and it does not make distinctions between development team members. The development team is defined as self-organizing and empowered to make decisions to a very reasonable extent.

The problems described here often start when some the self-organization and autonomy of the development team is taken away. This can take many forms, like adding roles like project managers or by redefining existing roles, such as making the scrum master role absorb responsibilities from the development team.

Those adjustments are suboptimal and almost inevitably result in an imbalance of power between product and engineering, and that's a really bad idea that will often result in engineering disasters.

Some companies create engineering holidays such as hackathons, where engineers can take the time to work on neglected aspects of projects. But then, in many companies, product people have started to intervene those events as well, perpetuating engineering frustration.

</comment><comment><USER7> While there may be success stories out there (and usual arguments apply for No True Scotsman), a company that proudly states "we're a scrum shop" is at this point most likely shorthand/signal for "we love meetings and micromanagement" and is to be avoided if possible.

</comment><comment><USER43> I work in systems engineering, automation, devops and that kind of stuff.

I've seen colleagues in development at other companies do this daily standups and all this scrum thing.

From the outside it really looks like somebody constantly asking "are you done yet?" And pressuring people into delivering. It really looks like something invented to serve companies and management more than developers.

</comment><comment><USER44> Scrum is a process for large companies to force some group consistency across their 1000's of developers. Think of it as the minimum viable group behaviour. Naturally talented and effective team oriented developers know what to do naturally and don't require the explicit framework.

</comment><comment><USER45> 99% of teams are doing Scrum wrong most likely.

Scrum has been ruined by many different groups (large consultancies, certification bodies, the misinformed, bloggers etc.) and there is a movement called the Scrum Pattens movement trying to fix the damage and to make it more explicit. If you want to do Scrum properly read "A Scrum Book".

Scrum is not a process it's process design framework- you start with Scrum as a framework to then, through inspecting and adapting, add what works for that team (and no other team) and discard/replace what doesn't through experiments and retrospectives.

Does that sound like it's liberating for engineers or something that ruins them?

Note: Kanban is also not a process but a system for continuous improvement. 99% of teams doing that are doing it wrong too most likely.

<comment><USER46> > Scrum is not a process it's process design framework

Scrum as defined in _The Scrums Guide_ is a very specifically defined process with a few degrees of freedom, not a process design framework.

Now, if your approach was actually Agile (unlike the many groups that do Scrum, either as defined in the _Guide_ or some variation they've cobbled together from other sources and still call "Scrum", and think that by doing so they are therefore Agile), any canned process will be at most a starting point and input into what works for your team. But that is very much not Scrum as it has been propounded from the beginning, including by it's creators.

> Kanban is also not a process but a system for continuous improvement

Kanban is a very specific process element related to flow visibility and management.

<comment><USER28> _Scrum as defined in The Scrums Guide is a very specifically defined process with a few degrees of freedom, not a process design framework._

Scrum as defined in the Scrum Guide prescribes very little. It's not much more than "Have a development team, a scrum master, and a product owner, have a product backlog, have developers plan their work, and work in time-boxed increments." Nearly every other aspect of how work gets done is unspecified and can (and should) be evolved by the team based on empirical observation.

My observation is that people have a tendency to adopt a version of scrum that is based on certain "default settings" that everybody sort of assumes are required, when they aren't actually. Two week increments, for example. I've heard so many people complain about scrum mandating two week increments, when it doesn't actually.

Or people complain about "velocity", and "story points" which are likewise not part of scrum at all.

<comment><USER27> They are certainly part of Scrum-master training. They're a widespread practice. At this point, they can be grouped as 'part of Scrum' with fair confidence, in any implementation you can point to.

Resorting to definitions is not helpful, when you work in a dysfunctional organization, and instituting Scrum was the root of the disfunction.

<comment><USER28> _They are certainly part of Scrum-master training._

I am certified as a Professional Scrummaster, and none of those things were taught as part of any training I went through, nor were they mentioned on the certification test.

Referring to definitions _is_ useful, when many people are misunderstanding the definition. If anything, we should be screaming from the hilltops "For the love of FSM, go read the Scrum Guide, and the Agile Manifesto, and show your managers and shitty Scrummasters what they're doing wrong." If we, as developers, are not willing to draw a line in the sand and take a stand sometimes, then what right do we have to complain? And if management won't listen to us on this, they aren't going to listen to us on anything else and we're back to "toxic management is the problem, not scrum."

<comment><USER27> Or, not do Scrum. Do another process, like having an experienced team that respects the other team members to plan their time and prioritize tasks, with good communications between members of the team.

Looking at 'scrum master certification test questions' online I don't see anything about technical debt, variable-length time boxes, re-prioritizing work during a sprint etc.

A real and reasonable criticism of Scrum or Agile is, the structure is not helpful to the actual work. Sure, making a list of tasks is quite useful. But the time-boxing and task atomizing can dissect the work to the point of dysfunction.

If nobody is doing Scrum right, we're right on the edge of a No True Scotsman argument.

<comment><USER28> _Or, not do Scrum. Do another process, like having an experienced team that respects the other team members to plan their time and prioritize tasks, with good communications between members of the team._

That seems orthogonal to the question of how desirable (or not) scrum is. You can have scrum (or not), and/or have "an experienced team that respects the other team members to plan their time and prioritize tasks" and shitty management is still going to wreck things.

 _A real and reasonable criticism of Scrum or Agile is, the structure is not helpful to the actual work._

I 100% agree that there are times when the structure imposed on a team in the name of Scrum (whether it's actually prescribed by Scrum or not) is harmful. Don't mistake what I'm saying here as a massive endorsement of Scrum. It's not actually my preferred methodology. But I do think Scrum can be useful to very many teams in very many situations, and I feel like a lot of the criticisms directed at scrum are somewhat misplaced.

 _If nobody is doing Scrum right, we 're right on the edge of a No True Scotsman argument._

I think I get what you mean by that, and I probably agree to a point. But I don't think it's quite "No True Scotsman", as Scrum has an actual definition, to an extent that "true Scotsman" does not. But I'll buy the suggestion that "if everybody is doing it wrong, then there's something fundamentally wrong with the whole situation".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is something I think a lot about because I'm working for a small startup [0] building an issue tracker and trying to take on the likes of Jira. We discuss a lot about exactly how much scrum we should support "natively" in the tool (sprints, story points, etc.) because we've seen scrum go wrong and turn into a mess of micromanagement and misaligned incentives a number of times. At the moment we've opted to make it very un-scrum and our early adopters aren't complaining. Teams need to work hard to find a process that actually works for them - tools and scrum master trainings can't dictate that for them.

0: [https://kitemaker.co](https://kitemaker.co)

</comment><comment><USER8> Once there was great scrum master, no managers, felt like a team, no missed sprints.

Once there were no managers, team crumbled in internal politics but was bearable.

Once there was micromanagement, all fails to developers, all prizes for management, each sprint failed, that was hell.

</comment><comment><USER47> As a manager you should think hard about what aspects of scrum are important to you and where you can let loose. This will heavily depend on the makeup of your team - how many experienced developers are there who don't need hand holding? How many of them will still deliver without some oversight? How many of them can mentor? How many inexperienced people do you have, how many will be onboarded in the next year? Things like that determine and change your development process.

<comment><USER3> > what aspects of scrum are important to you and where you can let loose.

Scrum explicitly does not permit that. A criticism that didn't make it into that answer.

[https://www.scrumguides.org/docs/scrumguide/v2017/2017-Scrum...](https://www.scrumguides.org/docs/scrumguide/v2017/2017-Scrum- Guide-US.pdf)

<comment><USER28> Two thoughts:

1\. There's a lot of stuff that is often thought of as "part of Scrum" that really isn't. To the extent that the parent post you're replying to is referring to these things, then he/she is spot on. Things like Jira tickets, story points, planning poker, velocity, two week sprints, yadda yadda yadda.

2\. Scrum™ doesn't permit you to do certain things... while truly saying you are doing Scrum™. But nobody has any real authority to mandate that you do Scrum™ to the letter, as opposed to an in-house "little-s scrum" version. And if that is what works better for you, you should do it. The goal is delivering working software, not adherence to the Scrum Guide for its own sake.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> The main problem I've seen with scrum is that everything can get put into the backlog, and the backlog becomes infinite.

Then, development becomes ticket driven instead of engineered.

I have seen scrum used successfully where an engineering process was placed in front of the backlog ala Feature Driven Development.

There is a ticketing system, but it is kept separate from the work planning system.

</comment><comment> Fire-Dragon-DoL Scrum has its flaws, but even though is marked as a "process framework" and the guide states you should evolve the process to fit your company (it is part of the agile movement), it's considered a big red flag diverging from it even a little, which completely invalidates the "people over processes" part of the manifesto.

</comment><comment><USER49> In my experience it has been that people expect scrum to be a magic bullet. Things are not going well... it will be better when we change to the new orgs process. Only the real reason its not going well is because of lack of planning and poorly written stories. The how you fix that is much more complicated.

</comment><comment><USER50> I almost can't believe that it's 2020 and people are still disscussing or even worse "utilizing" Scrum. Pretty much all good and excellent Software engineers I know who had to deal with it at various companies hated it.

</comment><comment><USER51> Easy: Is the output great engineering because of scrum, or despite it?

</comment><comment><USER52> How about letting developers pick or come up with their preferred way of working instead of mandating Scrum?

<comment><USER53> The only potential result of a competently run scrum process is exactly that - a process that was designed by the team.

If you are stuck in some weird cargo cult that doesn't allow the team to iteratively change the process, you should call bullshit.

<comment><USER54> If scrum is any process designed by the team the term is worthless.

Sadly, scrum as I have seen it has been consultants preaching to the commoners how their rigid process is going to make them agile.

Scrum is just flawed from the foundations for anything but very routine work where you can somewhat estimate subtasks duration with any accuracy. But if your job is that easy you hardly need any fancy process anyway.

<comment><USER53> > If scrum is any process designed by the team the term is worthless.

SCRUM is a handful of tactics that a team can start off with to design and implement the "right" process for a given team. For example, I've been on several teams where through the use of retrospectives, daily stand ups were abandoned and replaced with other means to keep the team in sync.

> Sadly, scrum as I have seen it has been consultants preaching to the > commoners how their rigid process is going to make them agile.

That sucks, but sadly this is the most common case. Very few organizations actually _want_ agility, as they are culturally and practically top-down hierarchies that require command-and-control structures to function. These consultants are generally brought in by middle-management who are grasping at straws without any real buy in from the c-suite.

> Scrum is just flawed from the foundations for anything but very routine work > where you can somewhat estimate subtasks duration with any accuracy. But if > your job is that easy you hardly need any fancy process anyway.

I couldn't disagree more. For "routine" work that is predictable, what value does agility provide? It's either done correctly or not. Agility is only useful in dynamic environments when outcomes are hard to predict and there is limited prior art to reference.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> No and Yes

</comment><comment><USER56> As a vendor of thought leadership, it's 100% in my interest to treat as exogenous the likelihood that my framework / best practice / etc will be implemented as I intend it to under ideal circumstances.

As a consumer of thought leadership — a sensible and responsible one, that is — I'm compelled to treat such concerns as endogenous to the framework / best practice / etc, and predict outcomes accordingly.

"You're doing it wrong" doesn't explain anything. At best it's the start of a conversation, at worst it's intentionally used to elide the costs of whatever it is you're selling.

</comment><comment> awinter-py or both</comment>


AWS Dashboard – 500 Service Unavailable Error - <AUTHOR> https://www.amazon.com/ap/signin?openid.assoc_handle=aws&openid.return_to=https%3A%2F%2Fsignin.aws.amazon.com%2Foauth%3Fresponse_type%3Dcode%26client_id%3Darn%253Aaws%253Aiam%253A%253A015428540659%253Auser%252Fhomepage%26redirect_uri%3Dhttps%253A%252F%252Fconsole.aws.amazon.com%252Fconsole%252Fhome%253Fstate%253DhashArgs%252523%2526isauthcode%253Dtrue%26noAuthCookie%3Dtrue&openid.mode=checkid_setup&openid.ns=http%3A%2F%2Fspecs.openid.net%2Fauth%2F2.0&openid.identity=http%3A%2F%2Fspecs.openid.net%2Fauth%2F2.0%2Fidentifier_select&openid.claimed_id=http%3A%2F%2Fspecs.openid.net%2Fauth%2F2.0%2Fidentifier_select&action=&disableCorpSignUp=&clientContext=&marketPlaceId=&poolName=&authCookies=&pageId=aws.ssop&siteState=registered%2Cen_US&accountStatusPolicy=P1&sso=&openid.pape.preferred_auth_policies=MultifactorPhysical&openid.pape.max_auth_age=120&openid.ns.pape=http%3A%2F%2Fspecs.openid.net%2Fextensions%2Fpape%2F1.0&server=%2Fap%2Fsignin%3Fie%3DUTF8&accountPoolAlias=&forceMobileApp=0&language=en_US&forceMobileLayout=0 <comment><USER2> I get this too. Their service status page doesn't indicate anything wrong, and ironically, the only way to contact them about the problem is to ... you guessed it ... sign into the management console :-)

<comment><USER2> at least now [http://status.aws.amazon.com/](http://status.aws.amazon.com/) reports increased error rates (as in 100%?)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> The amazon issues appear to affect amazon video streaming, too.

</comment><comment><USER2> And now the outage is over, at least for me</comment>


What am I doing wrong? - <AUTHOR>

My links usually do great on Reddit but they never do here. Can someone please tell me what I am dong wrong? <comment><USER2> Looking through your submissions and I see three types of link:

1\. Your own startup

2\. A Youtube link

3\. Samsung links

Your startup links need a more compelling reason to click. There's little to no info on the pages, therefore the quality content is low.

Posting youtube links is pointless. I honestly don't think I've ever seen a youtube link hit the front page.

The samsung links were your first few submissions. Your first submissions rarely do well.

HN and reddit are very different in terms of the type of content that hits the front page. Sure there are similarities to /r/programming but the type of content that works well on reddit, doesn't often apply here.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. I will work on putting more info on the pages.

Funny you mrention /r/programming. One link I shared made it to the top of that subreddit. Shared it here and it got nothing. I think it may have been auto-deleted for some reason.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> To add to the similar view shared by many of the responses here, my approach is to write about something I care about and think others may benefit from, then think about which demographics it would be more relevant for. If that happens to be HN, great.

I don't worry at all about ranking and yet I've been 2nd and 4th on the front page. Write about something you care about. I too have a must-win attitude, but not in this respect. What is there to win? Virtual internet ego points? I just want to share my thoughts/experiences and hopefully be able to have a discussion and meet interesting people.

</comment><comment><USER4> Why do you think you're doing something wrong? Are you just in it for the points? Why would you care?

I actually clicked on your McLaren link earlier today, but it wasn't interesting enough for me to want to upvote it.

I only upvote things of interest, I only comment if I have something to add to the discussion.

I don't think people should care about how well their submissions do. That isn't the point of HN, maybe a shift in the way you view HN will change what you submit, but either way, enjoy the content, add to the community, don't try to 'win'.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the comment. "Winning" is in my blood. I have to win or I won't be happy. So that is going to be a difficult one for me. lol...

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It sounds like you are posting things for the wrong reason

<comment><AUTHOR> Perhaps you are right. I will work on it and understand this better. Thanks for the feedback!</comment></comment>


Quick Stats on news.yc clickthroughs - <AUTHOR>

<comment><AUTHOR> One of my blog posts was linked here and had 9 points, putting it on the front page for about 36 hours or so. Now that it's headed down the list, I thought it would be interesting to share the statistics on how many clicks came from:

-main page (news.yc/news): 229

-newest page (news.yc/newest): 24

-google reader (via news.yc feed): 19

-the post's comment page: 5

-my user page: 3

I think wordpress doesn't accurately count up referrers, because that post has had a total of 350 or so views since the add on this site (and only 3-7 people a day looked at it before that). There were a few other referrers w/ only one count each (bloglines, newsgator, etc).

So, this site generates quite a bit of click-throughs, even for posts voted up in the single digits. Thought people might find this interesting. While traffic isn't super high, it is "focused".

<comment><USER2> Looks in keeping with the stats I'd gathered when one of my pages got linked to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Wouldn't it be ironic if this submission got more points than your submitted blog post? It's at 7 right now...

<comment><AUTHOR> done!

<comment><USER4> brilliant</comment></comment></comment>


YouTube Channels Created in 2018, Has Got Million Subscribers in a Year - <AUTHOR> https://brandmaxima.com/blog/87-youtube-channels-with-million-subscribers-who-how-they-got/ <comment><USER2> Interesting post. Do you have a similar analysis for all channels created so far ?

<comment><USER3> Thanks for your appreciation. Yes, we do and are planning to publish a report for all the channels soon</comment></comment>


Payment Processing: How does Apple do payments so well? - <AUTHOR> http://www.quora.com/Payment-Processing/How-does-Apple-do-payments-so-well/answer/Brian-Roemmele

<comment><USER2> I know HN is full of Quora-haters but, for me, answers like this are a real treat to read and will keep me coming back to the site. IMO there is currently no other platform on the internet that could provide this sort of exchange of knowledge.</comment>


Fury at 'Bodega' tech startup that aims to put corner shops out of business - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/sep/13/tech-startup-bodega-corner-stores <comment><USER2> Once the door is open, what stops the "buyer" from just grabbing _everything_ of value? It appears to be like a hotel MiniBar concept but with no way to check inventory after a customer departs, resulting in shrinkage.

Another risk is that even an honest buyer can get blamed/charge for subsequent theft.

</comment><comment><USER3> So what if it puts them out of business? Being afraid of that just means that the corner shops really have nothing extra to offer compared to this except the unnecessary human labour costs.

This is nothing more than normal competition in free market.</comment>


Google Drive is experiencing service disruption - <AUTHOR> http://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en&v=status&ts=1363617140341

<comment><USER2> A couple of report from users (We use Drive for remote sales people) is that it's coming back slowly. Two reports in SoCal that it's back, and one in Austin Tx. Regional colo problem maybe?</comment>


Ask HN: Seriously, how the **** do my competitors do it? - <AUTHOR> So I just soft-launched my MVP/beta very very recently, and I've been sending out some cold emails, cold called, hoping to get my prospects on a call/demo or to sign up for a free trial.
Well... No one bit.
Since my product is public-facing (so are my competitors'), I can basically see which competitor has the greatest market share/adoption. Think live chat widgets -- you can see how widespread adoption is.
And my competitors have good adoption.
I signed up for a couple of my competitors' free trials just to snoop around, and I don't think my product is any way inferior. In some cases, I'd argue my product is better in certain respects.
Yet they're successfully selling to customers, and I'm not.
So what gives? And what's the next step?
PS My product is for the dental space. We offer dental membership software for dentists to cut out the insurance middleman and offer their own in-house dental plans, automating billing, renewal, and marketing for them to scale their in-house plan. <comment><USER2> Given that you haven't been able to get meetings yet, it's your sales approach. How many people have you called? How many have you spoken to? What is your pitch like? If you have a relevant product, a good pitch should be able to get roughly 5 meetings out of 100 calls, and if you're doing in person meetings, which you should be at this stage, you should get higher.</comment>


Auto-antonym - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auto-antonym <comment><USER2> Relevant discussion from 2 days ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9339540](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9339540)

<comment><USER3> This discussion reminds me of a joke:

A linguistics professor was lecturing to his class one day. "In English," he said, "a double negative forms a positive. In some languages though, such as Russian, a double negative is still a negative.

However," he pointed out, "there is no language wherein a double positive can form a negative."

A voice from the back of the room piped up, "Yeah, right."

<comment><USER4> I heard a version of this joke from a syntactician, but it involved a semanticist giving a conference talk on a paper he'd written. I think it's funnier that way, but that's probably the background of academic subdisciplines sniping at each other and the fear of someone pointing out that your research is just a fraud.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> As a recovering language curmudgeon, it literally kills me that "literally" is now an auto-antonym too [1].

[1] [http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/american_eng...](http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/american_english/literally)

<comment><USER6> I actually disagree with the dictionary there. In my experience (and admittedly my sample is limited), no one intends "literally" to weaken or to make it clear that their usage is figurative. I think use of "literally" applied to something obviously not literal is just another example of hyperbole.

<comment><USER7> That doesn't actually disagree with the dictionary text linked in grandparent post [0], though it disagrees with the apparent interpretation of it by the post that linked it.

[0] which provides, as the definition for the non-literal use: "(informal) Used for emphasis or to express strong feeling while not being literally true" and, says of that use in the usage note: "In recent years, an extended use of literally (and also literal) has become very common, where literally (or literal) is used deliberately in nonliteral contexts, for added effect: 'they bought the car and literally ran it into the ground'."

<comment><USER6> On reflection, I agree!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> In french there's also the curious case of "pesanteur" (gravity), which is feminine; so "la pesanteur" (the gravity). But the absence of gravity is "apesanteur" (weightlessness), which is also a feminine word; so "l'apesenteur". So we have two slightly different words that actually sound exactly the same with their articles. It's only a few years ago that people decided to change the prefix and use "impesanteur" instead (which is however a bit less accurate - see the difference between "im-possible" (not possible) and "a-gnostic" (without belief)).

<comment><USER9> Thanks for sharing that! I've been learning French for the past two years and it's really opened my eyes to some things. I am already a native bilingual English/Arabic speaker, and thought Arabic was a very heavily-structured language, but learning French has made me realize that more than anything it is English that isn't. Discovering the French Anglo-Norman influence on the language I speak most often has been a very introspective and eye-opening experience for me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The word "hack" can mean to assemble (e.g., hacking some code), but also to destroy (as in, hacking with an axe).

<comment><USER11> This is a homonym, not an auto-antonym.

<comment><USER3> Well, auto-antonyms are homographs with opposite meanings. Homonyms are a subset of homographs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12>
      English:untie?
      German:untiefe?
      French:jamais?
      Dutch:aftrappen?precies?

</comment><comment><USER13> In Dutch the word for hostage and hostage-taker is the same (gijzelaar).

<comment><USER12> I'm not sure, but I think semantics shifted throughout the years. I think it used to be "gegijzelde(hostage)" versus "gijzelaar(hostage taker)" now it's "gijzelaar(hostage)" versus "gijzelnemer(hostage taker" or, to be absolutely unambiguous: "gegijzelde" versus "gijzelnemer".

<comment><USER13> Gijzelaar was originally just the victim (hostage), but its meaning shifted over the years and now most dictionaries list both meanings as valid. [https://onzetaal.nl/taaladvies/advies/gijzelaar- gegijzelde](https://onzetaal.nl/taaladvies/advies/gijzelaar-gegijzelde)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> would "civil war" count?

<comment><USER12> isn't that an oxymoron? (like "fresh frozen" or"military intelligence" )

<comment> andrey-p "light yet filling"

<comment><USER15> "javascript framework"

<comment><USER16> "Modern Perl"</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>