skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What’s the best feedback you got when you DIDN’T get the job?
Every one of us has been there: You applied for a job that you really wanted. You thought you did well in the interview, answering questions confidently and creating a rapport with the interviewer. Maybe you even got to the third or fourth interview. But eventually, you get that oh-so-polite email: “While your background is impressive… blah blah blah… not a good fit for the organization.”

It’s bad enough that you didn’t get the job. But you’re left wondering, “What did I do wrong?”

Every so often, fate is kind, and you get useful feedback. If you are lucky, someone is direct enough to say, “We decided we needed someone with more manufacturing experience,” or “When push came to shove, we concluded that the telecommuting was a deal breaker,” or, “The new CMO came in and decided to bring in the team from her old company.” In the best of circumstances, the knowledge gives you a way to improve.

So I’m writing an article (for a publication you know) collecting the best feedback that people received, as well as providing advice for the uncomfortable manager who has to say, “You’re not the one.” I don’t need to attribute anyone by name, though a context helps (“John applied for a programming job” is credible enough). But if you’d like to be on the record, that’s good too.

•	As a job applicant who didn’t get the gig, what feedback or advice was useful or reassuring? Why?

•	As a hiring manager, what have you found most effective for saying why the applicant didn’t get the job? Why do you feel that worked? How did you handle it when the truth is uncomfortable (“You offended someone by arguing with his expertise”)?

For gosh sakes, tell me stories. Maybe we can save someone else from experiencing that frustrating sense of mystery and self-flagellation.
It was an order of magnitude higher at one point. These days it's not that bad under most workloads.
Yup. I remember reading about a smoothie like product that had some additive, a known inflammatory, that did nothing but keep it from settling out. It's only purpose was to save the consumer from shaking it before opening the bottle and had some obvious downsides (it also made it look prettier on the shelf). After a/b testing it the consensus was to leave it in.
Nice idea. How do you pick them?
Apparently, the pilots' contract says that flight time scheduled on an emergency basis is supposed to be repaid with compensatory time off.

Clearly, from the sheer amount of emergency scheduling, the company simply does not employ enough pilots to honor all of its contract obligations. ABX needs to immediately expand its permanent pilot workforce by about 15%, and still hire additional temporary contractors to get through the end-year holiday season.
Didn't Tinder start off by seeding your experience with friends of friends on facebook?
Looks like the diagrams on the Rational Rose Process.
The tags turn into a tag cloud at the bottom if your screen/window is small enough (I had to zoom out to get them to move to the right on my dinky x60). Smaller still, and everything (including the social share buttons) turns into one column.
No, we didn't had anything like ICPC in the 90's on my home country, at least it wasn't known to us.

But we had "... similar competitions", one of them was national logic programming competitions.
Price discrimination at its finest!
I feel like I'd be a lot more convinced by this if the author made a genuine attempt to understand the conference instead of interpreting his ignorance as proof of tech's "rot".

"brings the next generation of B2C, B2B, B2E platforms to a high qualified partners network supported by a great business model,” you can make the vague assumption that all this gibberish might actually mean something to someone somewhere."

Sure, we have jargon, just like any other industry. For anyone who cares to take 2 seconds, it's really not difficult to understand that B2B is a business selling to other businesses.

"This isn’t meaning, in any of its usual senses, something that exists to be understood, but the zombie signifier, words building and feeding on each other to form a system terrifyingly self-sustaining and utterly opaque."

Again, that's basically how all language works. Language is a self-sustaining thing. I agree that it's opaque, but not uniquely so.

As much as I dislike this article though, I do agree with the basic premise that tech really is filled with claims like “data is the new performance” and an overuse of "innovation", I just don't believe that glorifying your alienation is useful for anyone.

Aside from using Google to understand specific pieces of jargon, we can actually take a step back and understand why it develops in the first place. In a world where companies rely on VC backing, and startup valuations obey a power law[0], entrepreneurs effectively have no choice other than grandiose claims if they want any hope of securing funding. Due to massive uncertainty, it's literally not worth it for VCs to invest in a company that doesn't have the potential to become hugely successful[1].

None of this is to say that the jargon is justified or good, just that there are actually ways to understand this stuff that can be useful for people who want to help shape the world instead of leaving us with

"The end of humanity had already arrived; it was everywhere around us."

[0] http://reactionwheel.net/2015/06/power-laws-in-venture.html

[1] https://blog.ycombinator.com/why-vcs-sometimes-push-companie...
I believe Tinder did a lot of going to campuses and throwing parties, that sort of thing.
The account would be by far the hardest thing for me to walk away from. Email is federated and I can export the mail out of Gmail without too much hassle. I don't because I like the interface they provide (for now). Calendar, same deal. I'm there for the convenience, not because another calendar application wouldn't work for me.

Accounts would be the hard part because that's my phone login, and there's no standard account service I could migrate to that would give me a functional replacement.

The real thing keeping me on the Google platform is the convenience of having these things tied together. But that's not exactly a strong lock for me. I can and do hop services while sacrificing convenience. This might be a stronger hold on others but it's still not Microsoft's you-can't-do-work-in-any-organization level of hold between Office, Windows, Exchange, etc..
I feel like I got those things from K-12 education. I took French in high school. I took USA and World History. I had an economics class. When I first moved out, I still had to have room mates regardless of school. We had to do presentations in front of the class all throughout school. And I was in public school.

I'm not saying college is bad. It can be a good experience despite it having some cons(like price and time). I'm just saying you can learn to code (and well) in less time if that is the only thing you are focusing on....and there's nothing wrong with that. Education is not just limited to school, and some people have that attitude about it.
I so misinterpreted that headline - for a moment I though military aircraft had attacked a cargo ship!
Will this work for letters from the US?
Uhh, if I bought a bottle of Aloe and was smearing it all over myself, and then I was told "That's not actually aloe", I'd want to know what I was applying to my skin before I applied any more. Sure, it works, but maybe it's carcinogenic, or has a side effect that I don't want to risk, or I have an allergy to whatever mock-aloe-substitute they used.
"So GNU's gesture is almost purely symbolic"

Yeah... and pedantic. And childish. I support free software, I commit to open source projects, I love just about any form of Linux and I prefer OSS when its as good as proprietary (sometimes it is... like blender... and sometimes its crap in a bucket... like GIMP ...)

I think my aversion and disappointment comes from the fact that, like PETA, this group and the RMS brigade are very much the public face of a movement, but a movement that doesn't need a single face... but regardless, they are the what outsiders see, and when you turn every piece of software into a political statement, you end up hurting the cause.

There are people out there who will, through some sick twisting of the mind, treat animals poorly or not care about actual animal abuse because PETA has been the face of the animal cruelty movement (or GreenPeace, another great example of this effect, I'm sure it has a name) ... even though the cause is good, and there are good organizations (ASPCA)... the annoying, loud, politically charged reactionary groups like PETA, GreenPeace, GNU, RMS/FSF ... those groups turn people away from free software...

Maybe I'm ranting more about the politicalization of software... maybe its all tied together and one and the same... I just know that I've heard plenty of people say they don't use Linux because it doesn't have X application, or X drivers... when it really does, but the common distros don't include them because they aren't in-line with their political view of the situation...
I love this site. Change Management is a super important one that often gets missed. Enterprise customers will have strict workflows around migrating changes from Dev, to Test, and then into Prod. They'll need warning about upcoming changes so they can plan and train users as well, which is often overlooked.

A good example is a government client I recently worked for. For major application upgrades and changes (which they needed to apply to keep their SLAs in place with the vendor), they needed at least 12-18 months notice, because if they needed to re-train 15,000 users, that takes time and lots of money. And if they needed lots of money, they needed to submit a business case to the government and get funding in the next financial year.
Key Facebook Engineer Departs to Start Deep Learning Hardware Company
For me it was a case of thinking I know better. As in, "no way I'm giving you my passwords" and "who knows how tight their opsec is" ... never even tried anything like LastPass or 1Password until six months ago.

Now I cannot imagine going back. My LastPass subscription is among the most vital services I pay for and the sheer freedom of having to remember one diceware-style master password instead of maintaining my own local database is just too nice.

I'm using banking software with a HBCI card and have set reasonable limits on all things like PayPal. So if you cracked my LastPass vault - good luck with that, 2FA considered - you'd be well able to ruin my digital life. But you would not get much out of it.

The attack surface I offer in total has shrunk a lot, too. Unique, maximum allowed length passwords for every unimportant little account and no need to memorise a single one.

It's to Web logins what pubkey auth is to ssh for me personally. Just such a freaking blessing.
Show HN: Branchr – Continuous deployment of feature branches in development
I've actually had a problem with Magsafe. When I'm using my laptop on my lap, my leg pushes up on the adapter, which causes it to disconnect very easily. But I can lift my 13" 2015 rMBP right off the table by pulling straight out on the adapter. Seriously, if you're careful enough the Magsafe charger can support the entire weight of the laptop. Which means it's a great feature if I step on the cable (which pulls it downward) but if I trip on it and pull it straight out, it will always, every single time, always pull my laptop right off the table.

Which makes it worse than worthless, remembering that when I use it on my lap it will constantly disconnect itself. I'm happy to see Magsafe go, I'm just not thrilled that it's not being replaced with something better.
U.K. Parliament Approves Unprecedented New Hacking and Surveillance Powers
Ask HN: How many followed startup owner's manual (lean startup)?
What were your results?
North American hunting laws generally frown on snaring or trapping unless you specifically are licensed for that. Too much opportunity for cruelty, even if inadvertent.
JIRA would be my example of it. Of course, it seems old and clunky now, but when it first came out, it was a revelation in a world that had been stuck with the likes of Remedy.

Salesforce is another example. Again, it seems dated now, but when it first hit the scene, it was seismic.

It's actually pretty straightforward to make a loveable product for the enterprise, if only because the pain can be so great. The problem is wading through the sales process.
Get Angular 1 Features in Angular 2
I don't think any vector imaging format could ever replace a raster one (regardless of whether it's animated). Each has their own pros and cons.

Keyframes competes with animated SVGs, but not GIF/APNG/WebP.
Foursquare solved the issue with gamification (badges).

For your dating app example, you could add a non-geographically bounded ranking feature, similar to "hot or not."

Basically, creating any sense of accomplishment within the platform will make it more difficult for people to abandon, giving you time to reach a scale where the core product value can be realized.
Yes I agree, sorry I thought people were just talking about a light pack. By that measurement, the Ikea bag is in a similar situation. It doesn't look much larger, maybe 22L?
You should look into improving your Single User Utility.

Here are some links to get started:

http://avc.com/2012/12/single-user-utility-in-a-social-syste...

http://andrewchen.co/social-products-win-with-utility-not-in...

http://platformed.info/seeding-platform-standalone-square-op...

There are also countless examples of successful two-sided marketplaces who started out by "nurturing" (aka faking) one side of the market until they reached their critical mass.
This is a project I created a few months back for a dev need we had on my team. It could use a little work, but I figured it would be worth sharing in case people found the idea valuable.
>It's almost too bad there isn't some way of manufacturing all 18 varieties of hemagglutinin, and wrapping them all into a single vaccine.

it seems that having just 2 varieties representing those 2 hemagglutinin groups can already provide pretty good protection.
But I need an adapter to plug my Apple branded hockey puck mouse to my Apple branded laptop, too... we're talking two different hardware generations.

Likely the reason they discontinued the Apple monitors is because they wouldn't work with the new MacBook.
I'm not saying there's no lock-in, just that it's not as rigid or strong. Better search results (for you) is exactly the kind of reason you want to be using one search engine over another. If another search engine started providing better results, you'd be able to swap, and the only effect would be the psychological disorientation from the change interface (I struggle to use DuckDuckGo because my eyes scan the wrong part of the screen while trying to take in the results).
I was less than 10 years old in the sea house we rented in August here in Sicily, 1986 or alike. ZX Spectrum connected to the TV, and me working to make a point moving with the arrows on the screen, a problem that was for me unsolvable. Then, suddenly, I realized that I could updated a var in terms of itself: X = X + 1. A whole new world opened in front of my eyes.
Why's Poignant Guide to Ruby

I don't consider it a bible of CS, but it's one of the most playful, imaginative and, essentially, fun, introductory programming books that I've read.

The analogy of the truthiness of a value as an energy or life force that flows through your program, or Ruby's ranges depicted as accordions, are just some examples of the book's approach to visualising some of the aspects of programming that seem so rote after you've used them for a while.

How useful it is to someone learning to program is questionable, as the book's style might get in the way of teaching fundamentals, but it's certainly fun to read as an experienced programmer (imho, of course).
Elon Musk vs. the Trolls
Im currently building a UI for an app that asks the user to input a ridiculous amount of info in exchange for an accurate trade in price on a vehicle. I mentioned to the client that this is a classic linear regression problem and that they could pribably get more accurate estimates with far fewer input variables. Also, their backend datastore is in a real mess and is going to be a constant source of problems going forward.

But they simply weren't interested in even considering it. They just do not believe that machine learning can out perform their current process.
Electron (ie Chromium) dependency?
This is effectively lying and fraud... That would still be illegal under libertarian ideals. The current system isn't the libertarian ideal and still isn't working... And while civil actions may be limited, that doesn't exclude the Govt coming in with more teeth when it comes to systemic fraud.

Also, with more clear marketing and without unfair advantages, competing products and companies should be able to enter the market.
Actually back before that FDA that was true because people were generally poor and could not buy quality. Evidence quite clearly shows that with growing wealth you also get improved quality. Product quality was rising steadily in the US way before the FDA, and when the FDA came along it did not radically improve, it continued on much the same path as before. Correlation is not Causation.

> That is why we have regulatory agencies: we cannot rely on the market forces for absolutely everything.

We have regulatory agencies because somebody thought regulatory agencies were a good idea. That something exits, is not prove that it works. Its not like these agencies get closed when they are doing a bad job.

Generally these bureaucracies just keep growing and attempting to ever increase the amount of detailed regulation in order to justify higher budget.

This is basic, well documented and tested political economy.

> This is why hardline libertarianism needs to revisit history and check with reality. Hundreds, thousands or millions of people shouldn't be injured or die before someone with enough money / evidence can sue or a class action lawsuit is brought before a court.

I have argued in other posts that the legal system is what is most important. In the case of the US the class action lawsuit has lots of problems, legal scholars and legal historians have designed and found much better ways of doing it.

Also, lets not ignore the millions of people who did because of the FDA. They have (actually had) a long history of waiting a long time to let dying people have medicine. In some cases they band useful medicine.

There is a hole history of such things that is often ignored.
10 Startups to Work at in 2017 – Based on Data
this is strange -- why is there a little bit of Python in the middle of an R implementation/prototyping?
I think you're doing this in jest and that's fine. But the only value of a fork would be one who's license is less restrictive. But the Keyframes license would prevent this, so it's fruitless.
Kind of off topic, but this reminds me of my internship this summer. What sucks about Spring is the horrible error messages. If there is something wrong in the XML configuration, or dependency configuration, it doesn't actually tell you that. Instead, it shows a deep stack trace with some strange exception that doesn't relate to the problem at all.
Outlook mail down for ios users
20 years ago I worked for a major gasoline refiner in Canada, who supplied the gasoline for all of the gas stations in Toronto. Esso, Shell, BP, Petro-Canada, Sunoco - all bought their gas from the same refinery. The whole WORLD is branding.
Yes, we do not want the flu. If you want to train your immune system, get the flu shot.

I got the flu 10 months ago as a healthy male in his late 20s, the first major illness I've had since I was 11. 102+ fever for over 5 days and then developed a pneumonia coinfection which knocked me out for another week. It was not just an inconvenience, it scared me being that sick.

The hospital I went to in Philadelphia to get treatment for the pneumonia said they had several young adult patients who were otherwise generally healthy in intensive care due to the bout of flu going around and related complications/coinfections. The flu kills people -- between 3,000 and 50,000 per year in the US [1]. Count yourself lucky that your experience with the flu has been as you described, if it was even the flu at all.

[1]: http://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/disease/us_flu-related_deaths.h...
Sorry, this sounds like a nitpicking. It's akin to saying that Peter Sagan is a loser, because unlike Chris Froome he will never win Tour de France GC. Not to mention Mark Cavendish or Marcel Kittel, who are complete losers.

People have various talents and their mental capacity is used best accordingly; if you start forcing them to do work that "hurts them", their best parts disappear, you won't get any results and their lives will be miserable. All because you decided how it must be while ignoring nature.

Just out of curiosity, are you a German? I see similar thinking around here a lot.
Brand value isn't just a "name", it's built up by a reputation of durability or usefulness.

Apple products generally have a high resale value like BMWs.
How does libertarianism deal with shell companies and dumping?

It only takes five minutes to setup a shell company under a false name, sell your toxic waste to it for $1 (or some amount that "looks real") and just dump it all under the new company's name.

You can't really sue to recover damages in such a situation and you can't assume that a paper trail will be accurate or even kept.

You could hold the people at the tail end of the pipeline responsible but they may have been deceived as well. Also, what do you do when it's all robots?
"Rotate the pod, please, Hal. ... Hal, rotate the pod. ... I don't think he can hear us."
What part? :)
but how does that work out for a SaaS app? (especially a startup that's always adding in new features?)

I mean, one idea is to create sub domains - each running a different version of your app...but at that point, you kind of loose control and companies would love to stick to an older version (and you'd have to support an older version).
I prefer video tutorials, but only when the instructor is aware of and takes advantage of the visual medium. It's just that the visual component of over 90% of coding videos is little more than watching someone type text into an IDE, editor, etc. Casters just often completely neglect the visual component by relegating it into static, monochromatic diagrams and flowcharts or at best a digital whiteboard. I don't need to see an instructor actually type out the code or make some barely legible scribbles. I already have the code!

Videos that effectively engage you visually are very powerful learning tools. For example, back when I was learning sorting algorithms, I was having trouble understanding merge-sort. I read about it in numerous texts, and I could implement it, but only because I had memorized the coding pattern. Then, I came across this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INHF_5RIxTE

and in an instant it all made sense. Doing it well takes time, preparation, creativity, and often times a bit of resources. The youtube series Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell does an excellent job of engaging you visually and I wish more online coding tutorials would adapt some of their techniques.

But, it's rare to find that so I when learning a new topic, I'll generally inhale a book or two on the topic.
>" You can say "go somewhere else" but selecting a different store isn't even a realistic option for many people in the US - there are no alternatives."

In New York City there is basically Duane Reade(on every other block) and CVS. As the diversity in stores and brand selection decrease the unit prices seem to increase. I think this largely explains $5.00 for a single roll of dental floss.