skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Have you tried asking?

I've done this in the past with jobs for which I was not accepted. Some were happy to, some weren't, but where they did it was useful.

And as an employer now, I'm generally happy to share useful feedback. But I'll usually only bother if the candidate asks me. This is at least partly because - as RiderOfGiraffes alludes to, there are legal issues involved, and I have to think very hard about how I word a reply to make sure it stays within the bounds of relevant laws. And I'm happy to do that if the candidate asked after it - but not if they've expressed no interest.

(fwiw, this is in the UK)
Would you rather they bury the fee in the price?

It's not like they're hiding it in fine print, it is right there plain as day during checkout.

I just booked for the first time and thought the process was great, and will use it again.
This might be a funny quip, but I disagree. Implementing anything is hard, and weird bugs creep in. I've never seen any program without bugs. So it's pretty disingenuous to take one bug in Word and say that it shows there's something wrong with Open XML.
I enjoyed Youtube's coverage of the Indian Premier League twenty20 cricket tournament last year. Though the performance was sometimes a bit poor - a couple of games we were halfway through the match then all of a sudden the coverage jumped back to 1/4 of the way through for a while but I think it was their first streaming event so I'm sure they've ironed the kinks out now.
If I understand you right, the do not own the company (anymore)? So that would make them employees - no? I think it's pretty normal that employees explain what they are doing. Especially if they work in a specialized field that is hard for the management to understand fully. So it doesn't have to be mistrust or a form of repression against the engineers.

Yes I admit - I've always wanted time sheets. And they ARE a mixed blessing. They can have a strong negative influence on the "relationship" to your employees. I also have to learn my lesson(s). But I hold onto them for one reason: Timesheets were my revision history. When times are busy and the work is growing over your head, and you are sitting alone in your office, they can help you to understand what was done when.

They can become a very valuable historic document and planning instrument. Often the only way you can plan the future is understand the actions and errors you and your team made in the past,
I really don't think that the "if you're not happy about a bug, fix it or shut up" mentality in open source projects is very helpful. Obviously solving issues like this is considerably more difficult and time consuming than complaining about them and many people complaining about them don't have the time and/or skills to solve them. However, they are real, existing issues that bother users and not complaining about them will not make them magically go away. This, over time, can lead to the alienation of the users and can seriously hurt the project.
Sadly I believe you'll come to agree that the majority of mis-informed people who read a generalist tech blog like Techcrunch could be considered trolls by the normally informed people who read HN. TC does serve its purpose well - it just saddens me that the blog's purpose and mine as a reader are not aligned.

(disclaimer: I worked with techcrunch for a few years, starting in 05)
Wikipedia's good at this kind of thing:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muammar_al-Gaddafi#Name

(I did try to use the actual Arabic link to the article in arabic, but it escaped it in some way when I tried to cut and paste.

Let's see if this works:

معمر القذافي
Nothing takes the wind out of innovation faster than timesheets. It's a repeatable experiment. There are so many secondary effects that come from time recording that it breaks any organization that's designed to be novel and innovative. In some organizations, I've actually seen employees spend 20% of their time in a quest for charge codes instead of building innovative products.

It's literally like dropping the anchor from a sailboat under full wind.
Is there something she likes to do, like make gift baskets or something, that could become a business? Is there a certain goal in terms of time it takes to take off, and/or amount of money she should make?
You could also tell why the one you hired was successful.
New companies get acquired. Old philosophies stay the same.

"But today it seems like the old is doing the plowing. Let’s stop that. Let’s build great companies that are here to fight, here to win, and here to stay until the next generation after us comes along and kicks all our asses. And again and again and again. That’s how better happens."

http://37signals.com/svn/posts/1927-the-next-generation-bend...

That quote is from nearly two years ago, but it's just as relevant today.
Look at it from the company perspective. Out of 10 people, you'll probably upset 5, or enter a discussion with them asserting they are actually good; maybe 4 actually accept criticism and are thankful, and one sues.

So for the most part, it's doing more damage than good to the company image (and from my personal experience, I guess the ratio of not-taking-criticism people is much higher), and might get you into trouble that is at least annoying (sued).

On the other hand, the company has exactly nothing to win from this. If the candidate really were good and only had to learn X, then they'd probably hire him anyway, and the negative image effects for many people certainly outweigh the positive for a few.
This looks similar to myriads of Chinese websites (not the design, but the selection of hit movies by cover art). Many Chinese sites serve up streaming videos directly in the browser. They are too slow to be usable abroad so I guess they avoid litigation that way.
> Bottomline: I hate your easy way out, giving no
valueable feedback at all/in general.

Yes, laws differ, and there are no doubt countries, and perhaps places within countries, where giving constructive feedback would not result in any problems. Then I fall back on - I simply don't have the time.

Besides, you're arguing with the wrong person. You may hate the situation. I hate the situation. As I said, I'd really like to take some of the unsuccessful candidates for a coffee and tell them how they could improve their chances. I'd even consider running a one-off, one hour "seminar" to show people what they did wrong, and why their existing skills didn't match.

But I can't do that on my company's time, and I sure as hell would feel uncomfortable charging people I've just rejected for an hour of time. They're unemployed! (usually)

So it's not going to happen. The market doesn't allow for it - these days you're often lucky even to get a rejection letter at all. I watched my wife send out over a thousand job applications and get perhaps 10 responses. Companies are, almost by definition, sociopaths. It does them no good at all to spend time or money helping people they've just rejected.

The individuals in the company may, and often do, feel bad about it, but that's simply the way it is.

Bottom line: This is how things are now, and if you don't like it, find some way to change it.
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Sorry. It's a startup term, and has nothing to do with Chinese people. It's not meant as pejorative.

The idea is that you look at some market -- say in this case the people in China -- and say something like "Gosh! If we could only get 1% of that market, we'd all be rich!"

Of course, it's downright impossible to get ten people to buy your product, because it sucks, but because you are multiplying these huge market numbers by tiny percentages and still getting big numbers, you think you have a good idea.

Startups have a tendency to do this with anything, but for a while the favorite example was China: "If we could only get 1% of the Chinese to buy our hotdog painting machine at ten bucks a pop, we'll all be millionaires!" etc, etc.

http://www.businesspundit.com/please-stop-with-your-chinese-...
Sencha is doing really cool stuff lately. I love the ExtJS 4 preview as well, especially the built-in graphing.
my thoughts on this
-first of all it must be renamed
-you need a readable logo
-you need a good site architecture
-you need a shiny webdesign

After all those maybe it will success
It's not really happening at the moment, I'm a freelance developer now. But after having a discussion with a friend going through the same trouble, I had the question.

I probably didn't ask as much as I should/could have, I possibly asked 5-10% of employers, and when I had either no response or a negative 'you didnt suit our needs', I guess I just gave up. I think it's extremely dependent of the company, and surprisingly the person you're dealing with directly inside the company.
No you can't. The rejected candidate can say "But I can do X Y and Z better than they can!" and now you're in an endless death spiral.
Only post and account created: 11 minutes ago

Flagging away.
It's not obvious what you're referring to, but the answer's "yes", Apple should be working with others instead of re-inventing square wheels that happen to fit only their car and come with licence fees and usage restrictions.

I personally decided I was tired of this behaviour when they made a crappy copy of FLAC and even stole the name (they just took out the "Free" and replaced it with "Apple", how appropriate) instead of just using it as-is. There's plenty of other examples.
There are actually courses/books on how to spot the faux job ads (forced by HR policy, worker's council, ...).
Ditto. I have NBA League Pass Broadband as well and I have to use a proxy just to watch freaking Timberwolves games. TIMBERWOLVES GAMES, I mean come on! So I've had to come up with a mish-mash of atdhe, sporttorrent, NBA League Pass, and going to bars. I get the feeling the NBA doesn't want me watching their games..
I really like idea #2. Call it something like WorkTheWorld.com. Work out all the details for folks who just want to live and work someplace else for a while. It's something I think a lot of people want to do but it seems too hard for most. This service could make it easier.

For independents, pre-screen living situations with fast internet, find the best language courses, identify meetups and other groups that they might want to connect with while they're gone, plus all the usual travel stuff.

Maybe for folks working for other folks, provide info on visas/work permits and possible employers.
If you hire somebody to your security team every time your network is compromised, and never fire anybody, your network security team will outnumber the rest of your company.
As a tech employer, I can tell you the top 3 reasons why it's hard to provide the feedback you seek:

1) Many times it's not that you're lacking in any manner, it's just that there's someone that suited the position better. It's like dating - if you reject someone because someone better came into your life, what do you tell the other person? Usually it goes "it's not you, it's me...".

2) Sometimes I don't know what I'm looking for until I look. Then I get responses and realize I'm looking for the wrong thing. Then when I say no, again, it's not because of you, it's because of me. Sounds like dating again.

3) Finally, connections and personal relationships help. If I don't know you from Jack Adam, then it's hard to provide any sort of useful feedback if I don't have that much useful feedback. If we had a relationship, then I could give you some sort of advice on what would be a better fit for you, make a recommendation to someone else.

Instead of asking "what went wrong", maybe you might want to ask "is there anyone you can recommend or do you think that something / someone else might be a better fit"? You never know whomever else we might know in the space that's hiring. And while we might have found for ourselves a great mate, that doesn't mean you're not dating material. Perhaps we have just the right fix-up for you. Or maybe not.

Just one additional perspective.
When I have hired people, I have always offered to explain the reasons for rejection, when I turned people down. The ones that opted in, I have given an answer. This way, I don't have to spend time on telling people why I turned them down if they don't really care.

The thing is - It's quite hard to give that kind of feedback. A great deal of the assertion of candidates ultimately comes down to instinct. That's hard to qualify. Besides, you want to be very careful about your wording, so it usually takes up a lot of time to write even a few paragraphs back to a candidate.
I hope not, I hope this trend stop. It's ridiculous that you can get sued for everything these days.
Most of the reasons you list that mention HR can be traced back to reasons why big companies become stultified.
Miniscule data point: The very small consulting company I worked for got bought by a big-ish dot com company (which is still in business, so not a casualty) and I got a very significant pay increase as part of the deal.
irssi with screen (http://irssi.org/)
I personally email every user who uses my apps. Probably 2% response rate but feedback is feedback
well said on both posts sir.

I doubt running this site costs so many resources that they NEED to be charging right now.

another option would be to leave the charge now link and go out to craigslist, dice, etc and be like hey! want to have your job listed on our site for free?
There's a lot of research results on mindfulness meditation not covered in the WP article, and WP doesn't cover the methodology well.

Baer (2003) is, I think, the most highly cited survey of the theoretical & empirical evidence (not cited by the WP article), and has a good historical overview of research. The conclusion states that effects are comparable for depressive patients to cognitive behavioural therapy, whose effectiveness as a therapy for depression is well-established (and incidentally, much more effective than Prozac). The effectiveness for relief of distress from chronic pain is also attested.

Kabat-Zinn, cited by Baer, is probably the most accessible scientist writing for a popular audience on this.

----------
Reference

Ruth Baer (2003) Mindfulness training as a clinical intervention: A conceptual and empirical review http://www.wisebrain.org/papers/MindfulnessPsyTx.pdf
They are not infringing copyright. They make infringement easy.
There's nothing for employees to GAIN by telling you why you suck. If you want to know, try asking.

(and by the way, that would be a great solution to solve!)
Traackr Obtains Series A Funding, Moves to San Francisco
How To Install Railo 3.2 Under OpenSUSE 11.3 Running Apache2 Tomcat 6
JQuery Fundamentals is free today - enjoy
Clicked, and the video says "Video is currently not available." Anyone else having this problem?

Anyways, here is the YouTube link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSU8ftmmhmw
Mystery Box out of Lego
know any large downloads of instance data?
So .. consider forigners who come to your country ... they face barriers of language, customs, etc. If your mom is multi-lingual (or can work with a translator), she could build a speciality service where she helps people of a specific set of foreign countries visit your country. Basically, help with hotels, local customs, etc. This isn't necessarily just an Internet-based business but can likely be done from home (using a combo of the net and a telephone).
There is No Cloud
Is it me or is he talking way too fast? Poor radio interviewer is trying hard to understand what he's saying and keep up.
For me it is the fact that the system seems to have multiple personality disorder. There is a unix system in there and a Mac system in there, the two are not well integrated. There were a number of times I would do something in bash and not be able to find it in finder. It has been a while since I used it but at the time smp support was quite poor. Running a build that would max out one processor of a dual processor box would cause the system become unusable, as it tried to load balance the one job between the processors. Sadly in my experience so far, Win7 has been more stable than OS X.
It's not too late.

What's the harm in something like: "Hey, remember me? I once applied here and wasn't hired, but I really like your company and I was wondering if you have any advice to make me a stronger applicant for future openings"
What People With Big Fortunes Do Right
Ping times seem to be alright — about 120 ms on average. The 2-4s I was referring to are the resource load times I see for the main HTML in the Safari dev pane.
It's not misogyny because, according to Merriam-Webster's 11th edition, misogyny means "a hatred of women," and the original comment wasn't about that at all.

And it has nothing to do with a segment of society. You're complaining about someone half-jokingly calling us all whiny babies.
But I can't do that on my company's time, and I sure as hell would feel uncomfortable charging people I've just rejected for an hour of time. They're unemployed! (usually)

This actually sounds like a place where the government could do some good by somewhat reducing information asymmetries and helping the market function better. I'm not think of regulations. I don't think those would be necessarily positive. Instead, I think there would be tremendous benefit in funding such seminars, recording them, doing some in-depth journalism, and publishing the results.

Where could I apply for a grant?
OK - quick feedback - this will sound harsh.

I couldn't understand from the opening splash what it really did, so I went to the "tour". 30 seconds in I was bored, still didn't really know what was going on, hated the music, closed it and left.

From what I can gather you create a "billboard," get an obscure URL, send that to your friends, then you all edit the shared space.

Yes?

So two points. Firstly, don't show me the details of how to do stuff - I need to be convinced that it will solve a problem I actually have, and I need to be convinced within 30 seconds (or hooked long enough to keep watching.)

Secondly, most people I know either have trouble editing a shared space and prefer email, or use Facebook to arrange get-togethers. From what I saw in the first few seconds (and I did scan forward to see what else happened) you need to find a way to make it much, much, much simpler. As it stands, tech-savvy people will find a better way, tech-non-savvy people won't cope.

I hope that helps - I've tried to be constructive.
Would you open your roadmap to your customers?
South Korea Slaps Our Fat American Face
Linux Mint 10 KDE released
I used to do it. Incredibly easy too.

Like once, in a sprint that took 5 weeks, the last week was scheduled for bug-fixes / quality assurance. I did nothing for 3 and a half weeks, finished my assignments in 2 days, then for a whole week I just fixed a couple superficial bugs here and there.

Reported time: ~ 170 hours.

EDIT: to expand on this point, the secret is in how you do the initial estimation. Hugely overestimate the small / easy tasks (explain with technical babble if needed) , then underestimate the difficult tasks. So not only will you secure lots of free time, but you'll also be that genius that finishes difficult tasks in 1 hour :-)

Heck, you might even be promoted to management; that's how all the cool kids in management are doing it :)
http://www.ebusiness-unibw.org/wiki/GoodRelations#Examples_i...
Why not get her to set up a niche Deal of the Day website specializing in adventure tourism in your area?

She knows the industry, group buying is hot and it could be easily run by a single person.
> Time Machine (and the time slider in Solaris) allow you to see and restore last week's version of any file without you consciously having to back it up.
Previous versions do it, but with less eye candy
So Microsoft finds itself with a surprise hit on its hands and the marketing machine goes into overdrive.

I guess it's fortunate that our schools are broke. It's the only thing that would prevent them from wasting hundreds of millions of dollars on Kinects. It's obvious they would revolutionize how teachers teach students cursive writing skills.

Just think, gym teachers could insure that every student has a fluid jump shot.
I did some research (but not actual programming) to compare Java to Scala, specifically in the area of generics. If you are hoping for some language to make static typing palatable again, Scala is not it: it's so good at static typing that it can statically type anything, but it takes intricate details and more knowledge of its type system than most would want to care about to get it right. In general, I felt there were too many niggly little details in the syntax to be a nice language to use.

Of course, I'm used to Python, so I may well be spoiled.
It is a simple layer over http://themoviedb.org API with torrents added in.
I don't see this as the game changer the author makes it out to be. Remember that Microsoft is in this for the long haul.

The Xbox was plagued with problems in the early years but MS stuck with it; now it's one of their most profitable divisions.
When You Write Your Essays in Programming Languages
First of all: I'm not sure if my "I hate your .. way" was taken as a personal accusation of some sorts. It wasn't meant to be one.

Were these 10 responses valuable for your wife, or "We're sorry to inform you.." useless types that didn't help at all?

Not providing feedback on company time is an shady argument from my point of view as well. The decisions to hire someone that involved me (granted, maybe roundabout a dozen hires only, I don't claim to be any kind of expert here) meant that we interviewed them and usually talked about the candidates directly afterwards. Most rejects were done right there, while we discussed the very reasons, on company time anyway and by definition.

Writing them down and sending an email if you are in that situation doesn't cost your company a lot of time (Cue the "Did you sent the mail" questions: No. I never had the contact details/access to the resume and was just a code monkey involved in questioning the candidate). That's - sad.
I also like how webpagetest.org includes links to downloadable tcpdump files.
Streetline's Parker iPhone app finds parking spots
So, you have to be able to fix bugs in Android if you want to use it? I somehow doubt that Google wants to sell Android phones only to the 20 million developers in the world who could (theoretically) fix bugs.
Good point but I would say don't bother asking. The answer will be useless to you because you can't trust its authenticity. Only people inside the company will know the real reason and perhaps not even there.
Hmm - I thought I'd seen this before:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1961088 <- no comments

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2023177 <- lots of comments.
You don't know what Scala code is doing unless you're familiar with the specific libraries it invokes; syntax isn't much of a guide.

You don't know what Ruby code is doing unless you're familiar with the specific libraries it invokes; syntax isn't much of a guide.

You don't know what C++ code is doing unless you're familiar with the specific libraries it invokes; syntax isn't much of a guide.

Heck, you don't know what annotated Java code is doing unless you're familiar with the build tooling that processes the annotations, and the libraries it invokes; syntax isn't much of a guide.

There's a pattern here. I'm not sure it has much to do with the language.