skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Please critique my cover letter and settle a debate
My girlfriend and I recently had a debate over the relative merits of something like this vs. the standard business-center cover letter. I'm of the opinion that this would stick out more to potential employers - what do you think?

Dear -

I love to program. It is what I honestly believe I was born to do - I started off doing it with QBasic in 8th grade and I haven’t looked back.
Do you remember your first CS class? How there were a few people who just couldn’t handle the obscure bugs and the hours upon hours of staring at the screen and they ended up dropping out? I can honestly say that I’ve never had a moment of doubt about my career. To me there is nothing more gratifying than fixing that last little bug, or better yet, having a piece of code work perfectly the very first time I run it.
I’m a realist and I understand that most programming is not quite the exciting world of cutting-edge algorithms that Google and Facebook make it out to be.
Honestly, I don’t care.
Give me a problem to solve and I won’t give up unitl it kneels before me.
I love Linux, Unix and the keyboard and hate touching the mouse.
I program for profit in whatever language you want (Java, JSP, HTML, CSS) and for fun in whatever language (Google Go, Python, Bash) can solve a problem for me.

If you think you would like to work with someone like me, please contact me at 555-867-5309 or at (something)@gmail.com.

Sincerely,
*
Attending Hacker School as a male without $6000 in savings.
I wish they had sliced and diced the data more. How do these generalizations hold up among:

- Millennials with children

- Millennials living in rural areas vs those in the cities

- Millennials with college educations

- Nonwhite Millennials
I’ve been using Fleksy for about five days now. As a totally blind iPhone user this app has some promise and some major flaws. The first issue is the fact that the app takes at least 30 seconds to load on my iPhone 4 if you haven’t used it in a while. I’ll deal with the crappy typing experience using the iPhone onscreen keyboard instead of waiting 30 seconds if I’m just sending a quick text. The second issue is the inefficiency of entering custom words. If a word isn’t in Fleksy’s dictionary it’s much faster to type the word using the normal keyboard instead of with Fleksy. This makes writing technical emails or messages with lots of nonstandard words quite difficult. Since you can add words to a custom dictionary in Fleksy though I would expect this to get better with time.
First Hacker News Post
Looks more like a new version of Windows logo to me.
> It is good to know what’s new. But don’t forget to learn from the past or from something new.

I have a feeling this post was dashed off rather than thought through.
What the hell is this? Are they trying to take the Gap approach and turn out a turd so terrible that designers storm the campus and flood them with better logos?
Get Your FREE Audio on 5 Critical Mistakes Women Make
Interesting... I've never seen this before: http://i.imgur.com/Ag3fl.jpg

Edit: found better res
I've heard this same result regarding business ebook sales at least half a dozen times. There's a sentiment in tech culture to the effect that we are free thinkers who should be dismissive of obvious sales tactics. But maybe the sales guys use them because they're statistically effective.

"Test everything" includes "test the options you're dismissive of, just in case not everyone thinks like you."
The 1975-1979 logo is neat. I actually really like it. The new one is so boring.
a.k.a. You're not their customer. Ergo, to be successful, you're not your customer.
New Microsoft Logo?
Anybody estimates budget? :p
The logo is O.K. Their homepage http://microsoft.com looks like a mix between a "corporate" website template you'd buy for $50 and a domain squatting page with amazon referral links.

Gosh I want to cheer for microsoft but they make it real hard.
Even further: asking people if they like the page would result in different results compared to testing if they end up paying for the advertised product.
I can attest to that, I live in the UK, public transport in the north is okay but far from optimal.

I wish I could afford my own transport, but my low paying tech job (I'm a 4 year self taught junior developer at a small web development company) can barely pay my rent, let alone afford the ridiculous amounts of money I would have to pay for car insurance (I think I was quoted around £2,100), my driving lessons and a car mean that, for the next few years at least, it won't be possible.

Which is a shame, considering that I have to pay 1/6 of my monthly wages in monthly bus tickets anyway.
I found the analysis of the importance of smartphones over vehicles to be very interesting.

I pay $150 month for my family talk, text, and data plan, plus another $50 for high speed internet into my house. The payment on my car is $207 a month (own, not lease).

I probably spend another $2k-$4k a year on other piece of technology, while doing the bare minimum to keep my car running.

And I live in the suburbs in the midwest. I bet HNers in cities have a much stronger bias towards personal technology than personal transportation.
How do these things work? Do the interviewers get a cut of the profits? Or do they do it for the kudos?
I did vote for that one, but I am listening to 80s metal right now - that may have influenced me.
You mean the one that utterly dominated the computer market and made money by the truckload when other companies could barely survive?

Well, at least that's over now.
DHH: Speaking Again and Making Way to Many Assumptions - Curtis McHale
The author does say that the Parrondo's paradox only works if the games are not independent. It still is paradoxal that "A combination of losing strategies becomes a winning strategy".
I wonder why they didn't choose this logo (colorful tiles) for Windows.
But by far the lowest converting traffic source :-) Thanks!
Sad, that no one is talking about Apple when referencing to abuse of patents, especially.
Here's the intro video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OzkZWvAJUr0
"Money – cold, hard cash – on the other hand. That’s the ultimate form of validation."

This is priceless especially considering how much effort goes into writing a book or creating a SaaS product.
Ubi Always On Voice-Activated Android Home Servant Doubles Kickstarter Funding
Anybody can estimate the budget? :p
I probably sound like a food snob, but when I'm thinking of beef that tastes like cardboard, I'm thinking of a Big Mac, for example. If you take all the condiments and just eat the beef only, it's pretty tasteless, IMO.

A lot of people say there is a taste difference, not just me. It's subtle though, your ordinary person may not notice or care. But I'm passionate about it because I'm big into food and I think the taste of grass fed is much better.
> Sunglasses, unfortunately, are in a stranglehold market.

Most of the sunglass brands that people know, and the stores they buy them from, are owned by a single company:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870451890457536...
Definitely that, but also the skyrocketing costs of a college education. The days of paying your way through school by working summers and weekends are over. Either you are lucky enough to have parents pay for your school, or you are coming out of school with debt the size of some people's mortgages. There goes your ability to buy a house or car...

Then factor in that for many folks, they spent that money on that education and graduated to find out the only place that would/could hire them was the local coffee shop for 20 hours a week, and there is no amount of marketing in the world that is going to convince that person to buy a $30,000 car.
I like personal cover letters more than the cold, cookie-cutter standard ones. However, yours is too emotional. Be more objective and straight to the point.
I am one of those 57 buyers.. I stumbled across the book after having seen the link in another article that was on HN. HN is the right audience for this book indeed :)
SmartThings - Home automation for devs and makers
Some fellow Minneapolis developers have put together a system for home automation that makes it possible for developers and makers to automate pretty much anything. They just launched a kickstarter this morning.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/smartthings/smartthings-make-your-world-smarter
I voted for that one too! Never seen it; spitting image of MegaDeth or Metallica! Haha
I assume it's intentional. Isn't OSX full of apples here and there?
Go ask them ;) http://blogs.technet.com/b/microsoft_blog/archive/2012/08/23...
I don't think the article puts enough emphasis on gas prices driving car sales. When I first started driving in 1999-2000, gas prices were under $2.00 USD. When I fill up at lunch today, it'll be around $3.89.
Great post...it also introduced me to this book, Exceptional Ruby: http://exceptionalruby.com/ Buying it right now.
It's definitely a low converting traffic source, but then it brings an interesting coverage/publicity, tends to generate retweets etc (based on my experience on http://hackerbooks.com/).
But the Android vendors are already using a commodity OS in Linux, but still have to pay Microsoft patent royalties on it.
While I do love my Swype (especially as, similarly to the claims made by this keyboard, I am getting close to being able to "touch type" on it), I really, really like how this keyboard looks. Just letters, no fake key edges or anything like that, I think it's a huge improvement in the usage of the space available.

There are several keyboards available for Android that just plain suck on this front, with more space taken up by their early 00s pseudo-3d button styling than by the letters. I love what Fleksy is doing here and I hope more people follow in their footsteps.
Thanks! Looking forward to your review.
I haven't yet seen any charging for figures, only charging for colour figures (which probably really significantly increase cost). But since I don't know anybody who reads papers on paper it doesn't really mater anymore. And you might make the point that making sure that your figures loose as little information as possible when viewed on greyscale also improves accessibility.
How do you actually contact people to ask for this? Emailing people? Or making a signup page and see who clicks on the (faux) "buy" button?
Of course, the die was cast in the 40s, 50s, and 60s for the automobile. It's impossible to build effective mass transit to serve a low density population. But the argument should not be whether or not to build ineffective mass transit layered on top of low density sprawling metro areas, but instead about what are our nation's transit and residential goals in the long term, like next sixty years -- because you eventually have to fix the mess we've made.
Because the stability of work at present means it's not practical to do so. I could lose my job at any moment - and if I've bought a house, I'm stuck in the same city, looking for a limited amount of work.

I rent at present, it's not ideal, but it means that I'm not tied to a certain geographic region - if I need to move, it's a hassle, but I don't have a house on a 25-year mortgage that I'm stuck trying to sell in a terrible market, I can just say to the landlord - right, I'm offski, here's the keys, bye.
The Deadly Tin Inside Your Smartphone
Why do we need to pay billions of pounds for big projects?
What developers can learn from Anonymous
But Apple isn't full of OSX logos. It seems weird that the windows association needs to stay in their primary mark.
I would add that used cars are increasingly more reliable and easier to vet. There are also more resources available to help identify lemons as well.
The policy is intended to thwart China from undercutting
prices and flooding the U.S. market with cheaper solar panels.

I find this rather disturbing. If solar energy is ever going to replace fossil fuels the price of panels will have to fall quite a lot. Is the Obama administration now actively preventing solar energy from becoming cheaper?
> made money by the truckload when other companies
> could barely survive

The other companies would probably have fared better of Microsoft wasn't dominating the market. This phrasing makes it sound like the market wasn't a zero-sum game.
For my coming SaaS product (https://www.wisecashhq.com), I created a signup page back in september 2011, then tweeted regularly when I worked on it and mentioned it around (shipping end of september 2012).

It gradually got around 200 "pre-signups", and I used the list to contact people as well and verify my assumptions.

I will write a blog post about that soon!
> the share of young people getting their first mortgage between 2009 and 2011 is half what it was just 10 years ago

I would like to explain to the author, very slowly and carefully, that something happened in 2008 which made banks a bit more wary of lending to people they would call "subprime." I tried to get a mortgage this spring and failed, even with a good income and 35% down payment.
I've got the same Cerwin Vega's and Marantz amp that I (ahem my parents... thanks dad) had in the 80's. I've tried a couple different CD players.

The wakeup call came when I converted my vinyl to CD myself with nothing but the built-in ADC on my Mac and it still sounded better than the commercial release.
> If you have a job, why wouldn't you buy as much house as you can afford?

Because interest rates are likely to go and then I wouldn't be able to afford that mortgage any more?

I'm kinda thinking about buying a house, so I filled in an online mortgage calculator to work out what sort of money i'd have to work with. It said i'd qualify for a mortgage that was twice as high as what I think I need to get somewhere really nice, or three times as high as what i'd need for somewhere quite good.

I don't need that much extra debt to worry about.
Myself and many other "millennials" are very reluctant to "buy" such things because they can't.

What we can do is go into massive, enslaving, soul-crushing debt for them, something the smart ones are justifiably reluctant to do.

Real estate hyperinflation is particularly bad. A house is unthinkable to anyone under 40 unless:

a) they've had a liquidity event, inherited money, or have a big trust fund.

b) they are willing to live in bumscrew nowhere or the ghetto.

c) they are willing to go into soul-crushing debt with the very real threat of being rendered underwater and thus permanently shackled to that house without bankruptcy or a short sale.

Screw that. Screw it all. Turn on, tune in, drop out.
I think 443 will be a better example because (I think) it's harder for a middle party to profile https and see that it is indeed https and not something else.
So, for those of us who know nothing about bikes, why are steel frames suboptimal for commuting?
I'm a Nerd But I Might Scare Your Kids
Microsoft should sue the Seattle Times for desecrating their beautiful logo with compression artifacts.

edit: I retract that, Microsoft is doing the very same thing:

http://blogs.technet.com/b/microsoft_blog/archive/2012/08/23...
Asymconf "padcast"
Off-topic, but why do so many sites still use static layouts that break when zoomed in with a mobile browser. The choice of font on this post is too small to read without zooming in, but his little static box forces itself on top and of the actual text content. Perhaps this isn't a problem in other mobile browsers? Using Chrome on Android...
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.exideas.me... this is better
Could you show one?
The thing most of these types of criticisms of Twitter forget is that users don't make apps, developers do.
This is most definitely a more persuasive approach than the standard format. Stick with it.
There's always someone making "truckloads" and someone barely surviving. Every industry, every era.
Minimum wage is a silly thing to look at. In 1980, 10% of men and 22% of women earned min wage. In 2010, this fell to 5% and 7%.

http://www.statista.com/statistics/185536/share-of-workers-p...

Further, a look at hard data (for both the bottom 20% and the middle 20%) shows that people today are more likely to own a car than in 1981, and have more house per person than in 1989 (no data on square footage exists in 1981).

http://www.aei.org/files/2011/10/25/Material-Well-Being-Poor...

So no, it's not the economy.
Interesting that as soon as they dump the old Windows logo, they just start using it as the company logo, minus the swoops.

That said, however, I like it. I'm a big fan of color, and, while not a big fan of Windows, I've always liked its logo. In fact, while I probably won't ever install or use it extensively, I've really been liking the bold, primary color design of Windows 8.
A fun comparison of MessagePack & JSON
I finally got a car since I was able to land an abusrdly cheap loan (2%!), but still won't touch a house. Real estate where I live is absurd, and I do not live in one of the big prestigious cities. (I used to, and real estate there was incomprehensible.)
Chrome on Windows 7 64bit does what I explained above. Chromium on Arch 64bit works fine.

In windows, I made my own keyboard layout in Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator (so that I could switch the symbols to UK but also so I could add some dead keys to AltGr for various unicode symbols). I did "fix" the VK codes for the alphabethic characters, but I guess the symbols are still using whatever the key is assigned by default and I guess JS (at least in Chrome on Windows 7) checks the key code reported by the OS, rather than the value reported by the OS.

On Arch I use the GB colemak layout that came with the distro and I guess it sets all the key codes correctly to where all the symbols are...
Well, my dream bike wouldn't really work as a fixie. But then again, it probably wouldn't work very well for commuting either - I use a longboard for that.

However, I'd love to try riding a fixie some time. It sounds interesting.
Earth to Planet Trust Fund: it is the economy.

http://livingwage.mit.edu

Also look at the ratio of median income to real estate value. We are still in a housing bubble.

My household earns about 40% more than the national average, we do not live extravagantly, we budget well, and we feel barely middle class. This is ridiculous. I'm surprised there aren't riots.
The article starts of by saying that a lot is at stake when a company rolls out a new logo. I'd like to point out the Microsoft has, either intentionally or unintentionally, been piloting this logo-style in their products for the past few years, which is ostensibly a lower-risk proposition. Rolling out their parent brand logo to conform to this arguably successful re-branding that their individual software products have underwent over the past three or so years seems like a reasonably sound decision. Furthermore, if Microsoft has intentionally been piloting this new brand on parts of their business that are subordinate to the brand as a whole, then I'd have to say bravo for likely reducing a huge business risk in the making of a relatively permanent, long-term decision.
I think it's a mistake to overload ctrl+b. That's taken by standard vi functionality. If I'd written this, I'd have been tempted to use ` as a leader. So `n would open a new window. `b would open that buffers view currently bound to ctrl+b.
The one with the antitrust lawsuits, yeah.
Very ubuntish.
22 new business cards – Best of august 2012
I'm 21, live in New York City, and let my driver's licence lapse over a year ago. I don't plan on owning a house, preferring to drive my surplus wealth into assets I understand better and which don't restrict my mobility, and don't care to own a car.

This is not economically motivated - I have comfortable free cash flow and a healthy balance sheet free of personal debt. I pay for a car service and take taxis more than public transportation and pay more than the average U.S. homeowner's mortgage payment in rent. I also spend a great deal more than my parents, who find my behaviour and preferences baffling, on travel and technology.

I won't disagree that a significant fraction of decreasing home and car ownership may be explained by economic factors, but would caution that (a) there is a significant minority that is making these choices as a matter of preference, and, (b) for the rest, these behavioural changes, initially motivated by economic conditions, could become ingrained to where they persist beyond economic weakness. With the second point I'm not saying we will be a "cheap" generation, just cheap traditionally, as we spend in categories we value more than piles of sticks and little steel boxes propelled along asphalt by exploding chemicals.
I'd been developing for the web for almost 6 years and making my living on the web for almost 4 years when IE6 came out (August 27, 2001) and I certainly wasn't a pioneer. It was very primitive compared to now, but standards-based development was important to a lot of us waaaaaaaay before IE6 came out.

Things had been improving at a decent if not exceptional pace back in the late 1990s. IE6 was important but only as the latest of a series of browsers (from several vendors) that added better and better standards-support, it was that Microsoft kept IE6 in stasis for years was the problem not that IE6 wasn't an improvement over IE 5.

Think about it, WaSP (the Web Standards Group) was founded in 1998, back when IE4 was around (and was one of the pioneering browsers support CSS1 with Opera 3 being the other big one I remember). Zeldman started A List Apart in 1998 which was the same year Acid1 was created to test for CSS1 support in browsers.

Eric Meyer covered support for CSS in browsers in a 1999 article:

CSS: If Not Now, When?
http://meyerweb.com/eric/articles/webrev/199906.html

Here's one from him in April 2000 on O'Reilly asking "For literally years now, authors have been faced with a difficult dilemma: should we write pages to conform to the W3C standards, or write them to account for browser bugs?"

http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/network/2000/04/14/doctype/i...

By the time IE6 came out, some web standards supporters pretty much thought the battle was won in terms of convincing browser makers about the importance of the standards-based web. We were looking forward to vastly better browser support every couple of years. And then IE6 froze a huge part of the market for a long long time.

It took Microsoft 5 years to update IE6 to IE 7. 5 years previous to IE6, IE3 was so primitive that it had just added support for HTML tables and barebones CSS1 features.
Pretty cool. I've been thinking of something along these lines for a while now. The fact is, the relative position of each touch very likely determines the word you're trying to type, regardless of what keys were actually hit. It's surprising it took someone this long to release prediction at this level. Looking forward to trying it out.
It was only this morning that my wife said exactly the same thing about it looking like a domain squatting page (while she was trying to find MSE download on their web site).
Software ("app") pretty much depends on dictionary. What about words that aren't in the dictionary?
In most of the U.S. public transportation is virtually unusable. I've heard European exchange students compare the U.S. transit system to the worst of the former Soviet bloc.