skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I discard any employer that requires a cover letter. Cover letters don't tell you anything. If you think they do, you don't know how most people write them, and you probably miss a lot of good candidates.

It's an unreasonable demand. You're not the only place that I am applying. Either I send all fifteen of you a generic cover letter (which is likely no better than not sending one), or I customize it for each of you, which probably takes about another hour per application. It takes you 5 minutes to read.

If you like my application, I have to cut time out of my work day for everyone at your company to call me back, usually at least three times (recruiter initial contact, manager contact, technical phone screen). After that, I take a couple of my paid vacation days off work for on-site interviews. I have to make arrangements for someone else to look after the kids because I'm out of town overnight and the wife does shift work. I have to work a few more weeks to replenish those vacation days if it doesn't work out. All the while, I still have timelines and can't tip my current manager off that I'm looking elsewhere. Again, multiply this by a few companies - maybe three or so get to that point. That's costly, but necessary and understandable. At that point, there is serious consideration for a working relationship, so such demands on a candidate's time are more reasonable. And don't forget, at least one of you likely has some sort of programming assignment or problem set that you use after the phone screen, which I will spend several hours on.

To top it off, I'm going to guess that you don't even have the decency to post salary range in your ads. And, your recruiter is going to try and ask me about my salary history, but fail to mention the budget for the position, and my first indication won't come until there is an offer letter.

So, anyone who does this, thanks for self-selecting!
Infringed on intellectual property rights:

[1] https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2012-09-25-namco....
Absolutely. There's a reason it's called a dismal science...
HireFire: The Heroku Dyno Manager
This post is not a direct reply to thisone but thisone may find the following comment interesting.

Ada Initiative has influenced policies in tech/culture including Pycon (and now Django) as well as science fiction conventions, fan conventions, computer game conferences, and skeptic/atheist conferences.

Ada Initiative is sexist towards women and men. The website portray women as very fragile and men (people) as having harmful uncontrollable sexuality.

The following are some quotes from an Ada Initiative webpage (link at the bottom).

>Discussing sex creates a “sexualized environment” which many people take as a signal to treat women as sexual objects rather than as fellow conference attendees, resulting in a higher incidence of harassment and assault of women. Too many women have been raped at technical conferences; we should do everything we can to prevent future rapes.

>Sex in many societies is strongly tied to the objectification and humiliation of women. Many people are unable to separate “talking about sex” and “saying derogatory things about women,” and take the introduction of one for permission to do the other. While many pro-woman, sex-positive people and communities exist, most technical conferences are not safe spaces for discussion of sex.

>Simply put, even the world’s most pro-woman, sex-positive, pro-consent talk about sex is likely to have negative effects on women at a technical conference.

>At the same time, discussion of sexual topics is vitally important to women’s rights and well-being. We strongly support discussion of sex and related topics when it is on-topic and done in a woman-positive way.

Read the entire text on the following link.
http://adainitiative.org/2013/02/keeping-it-on-topic-the-pro...

In that post, Ada Initiative also ignore male victims of rape http://imgur.com/a/aw0eU direct link to CDC PDF http://www.cdc.gov/ViolencePrevention/pdf/NISVS_Report2010-a... Apparently the % of male victims of rape (including forced to penetrate by women) is much higher then is commonly thought.

What are the statistics on people being raped at technical conferences compared to technical conferences without sexual topics? What are the statistics for non technical conferences and other social/professional activities and how do they compare to technical conferences?

Let's be careful with moralist, puritan and sexist ideas in tech. We don't want to end up in a gender Feminism Orwellian dystopia.
Yes, that is it. Contrary to the popular belief, just holding money under fixed supply monetary regime doesn't make you rich.

A Rip van Winkle with a year savings (say clerks' job) falling asleep for a 100 years will not wake up a Rockefeller.
The Negative Impact Of iOS On Android
Because it's not an act of creativity to decide that a name or address is needed (for example), and there's very little creativity in deciding to ask for the first name first and the last name second.
At a high-level, I love the idea of lowering visa barriers. However, a designated list of approved investors sounds like the stuff of nightmares.
I think it's more about caution when dealing with your body than actually believing some law about having a bad side.
This April's Fool: Today I Napped When I Should've Walked
> But I have no trouble imagining that one person could be 100 times as productive as another.

This is a smokescreen. I believe it too, that one person could be 100 times as productive as one other. But what the salaries are saying is that one CEO is more productive than all those 100 people below him put together. I think 100x productivity is more standard deviations than that seems to represent.

Everyone, just admit that the CEO's are paid for having contacts in the right places. They aren't outperforming 100 engineers all day every day or even most days. The notion that salaries are some measurement of productivity is complete hokum.

Nor do I buy 54, the idea that rich people create more wealth for society from by-products, like Henry Ford gifting us with the automobile. I don't think it's correlated.

Yes we have some by-products that improve our lives, but we also have Wal-Marts lowering the quality of products nationwide and RIAA lowering the quality of free speech nationwide. So it's not as if rich people lead directly to benefits for society and they could just as easily push the other way.

Being wealthy isn't like being some video game paladin, it's just another form of concentrated power.
>taking a dump in a thousand
baskets also leads to no eggs

While the quote is very funny and I give you that, the analogy doesn't fit. A more apt analogy would be - throwing your eggs without care in a thousand baskets, chances are most eggs will break.
Check out App Academy (http://appacademy.io), a 9 week accelerated developer program that I help run. Email's in the profile if you have any questions.
In this case, you end up paying for the tolerance that builds up extremely quickly when you take Modafinil multiple times.
About Solutions Journalism (Video)
https://37signals.com/svn/posts/1748-forget-the-resume-kill-...
//build/2011 – ‘free’ prototype tablets cost $4500 each
That's weird, it redirects to Bitbucket for me too.
>If you have "We get sooooo many applications, we'll only contact those we're interested in" I go "Bullshit!".

Is it too naive to think that people who are interested in building their brand and developing goodwill in this small community would take the time to respond to anyone who would take the time to send along a cover letter/resume?

The other thing that I really don't get is when people are using a platform like Jobvite, Simply Hired, or Resumator to process applicants while still failing to notify applicants of a) the reciept the application, b) an approximate timeline for response or c) the dismissal of applicants at each stage of screening. Shouldn't these platforms make mass notification a simple matter?
Test the Riskiest Areas of Your Business First
Going to Stanford or Harvard certainly doesn't make you a "nerd". Quite the opposite in fact.
Those algorithms that govern our lives
The "free lunches of longer and healthier lives" are due mostly to clean water and covered sewers, with the rest of medical science not mattering to the vast majority of people who don't suffer from life-limiting medical problems.

Along with clean water and covered sewers we have improved working conditions (which medical science has contributed to without making everyone take medication), and a range of other quality-of-life changes that have occurred in society.
And so I think it's valid to say Postgres is open source, so fix it yourself if you don't want to wait for the people who are fixing it for you for free.

This is also rhetoric, not to mention damaging and insulting. You know damn well that nobody can "fix it themselves." It's not known what the problem is, let alone how to fix it. For any amount of money.

It's not even about the wait time. The entire point of the embargo is that no one releases early. I initially thought this was an early release, though given that heroku uses a service model it probably isn't. The postgres team obviously cares deeply about handling this in the right way. A great many people value that, myself included.
Engineers have (rightly) a strong "don't fix what ain't broken" streak.
Never heard of Julia. So I looked it up:

http://julialang.org/

From that page:

"Julia is a high-level, high-performance dynamic programming language for technical computing, with syntax that is familiar to users of other technical computing environments. It provides a sophisticated compiler, distributed parallel execution, numerical accuracy, and an extensive mathematical function library. The library, largely written in Julia itself, also integrates mature, best-of-breed C and Fortran libraries for linear algebra, random number generation, signal processing, and string processing. In addition, the Julia developer community is contributing a number of external packages through Julia’s built-in package manager at a rapid pace. Julia programs are organized around multiple dispatch; by defining functions and overloading them for different combinations of argument types, which can also be user-defined. For a more in-depth discussion of the rationale and advantages of Julia over other systems, see the following highlights or read the introduction in the online manual."
Stop Developing Software: Stop Reinventing the Flat Tire
They could have plenty of servers for compute and still use S3 for storage. I don't know if they do but having a data center with computers doesn't mean they aren't using S3 for their primary block level storage.
The "meritocracy" article on the front page is relevant in context of this one.
Honestly what is the purpose of this post?

Its not a big surprise that start ups dont do the things you say because you're not their target demographic.

If the servers are catching fire and you only have 2-3 people then replying to inane emails may not be important to them.
For instance you say you send people emails to ask if its still open even though the job description has the date on it. You are looking for them to reply to you but they're probably thinking that your comprehension is bad. You're really talking about start ups that have a full time HR person and I would hazard a guess that by that stage (ie 10-20ish employees) that the company isn't really in start up mode anymore.

If you want to get a job in a start up then i would recommend:
- Contact the Founders personally. This is generally really easy to find out in a start up.
- Ask your friends if they know any founders and ask for an intro.
- Find a start up that you may actually be passionate about and apply there.
- Take the job offers you have and found your own start up later down the track.

Start ups are not for everyone, it seems quite glamorous but it takes certain personalities to be involved as a founder and/or staff member. That's not a positive or negative either way but figure out what works for you. I notice quite a bit of tension on HN these days that is internal tension that comes out anti/pro start-ups and venture capital.
The tl;dr at the bottom is elegant. I might start doing that.
>By "people" do you mean the absolute height of the technological elite?

No not at all! Actually, I'd say those that I respect for their technical ability still respect Google the most, but even their attitudes are less positive than they were.

I'm not saying anyone is burning-down-buildings mad, but that they are keeping their eyes open for other things. That's all. Even the non-technical. Especially the non-technical.

> Is it the search for novelty?

I'm not sure. My gut is to say "No." to that because it doesn't seem like people are currently craving novelty, but rather bored with Google for doing the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yet_another way of doing something they already have installed. Be it Google Keep in the Play store or Google Offers copying Groupon years ago.
I'm actually genuinely curious what research and theory you are referring to, and I wouldn't know where to start looking. Could you give me some pointers?
I couldn't get gmail to recognize your email (after plugging in your full name in between the '.g.') I might be missing something obvious, but for now I just applied through the website!
...and was amazed how most of them feel comfortable being completely ignorant of new technologies/libraries/frameworks/best practices/whatever.

I don't know how to judge that comment.

It is true that if you take anyone who is competent and ask them to teach you something that they learned in the last year, they should be able to come up with something. If not, then you've likely got "1 year of experience, 15 times". However my experience of people who think that they can judge people in the way you are judging them will judge by asking random questions about random technologies. Which is basically rolling the dice - if the person is exploring the same things that you are, then they get the gold star, otherwise you are convinced that they don't.

Let me give you a concrete example. You ask me what my primary language is. Perl, but right now I'm doing a bit of work in C++. Now you know that I'm a dinosaur because I'm using archaic languages. But don't notice that I have actually programmed in a host of other languages, and at this point learning the latest language is not going to help me be better at what I do. If I need it, I'll learn it then.

You ask me something about promises and jQuery and I draw a blank. I never liked front end work, and I've been working on back end stuff for the last decade. Boom, I'm a dinosaur in your books. But ask me what I'm reading, and you'll find out that I'm working through a book on hierarchical Bayesian modeling. I've also been doing some thinking about how people fail to understand the statistics behind A/B tests, and have been working on a series of articles that a lot of people seem to like.

In short, it is likely that you would quickly judge me poorly. Yet I believe that this reflects more on your judgement than my abilities.
Internet Explorer could easily be the single biggest hinderance to human advancement ever, in the history of humanity.

Lame April Fools. (I am giving him the benefit of the doubt)
Because I have trouble wrapping my head around $150k straight out of college, even after we've set aside the outliers.
Assuming the economy grows, a fixed amount of currency causes deflation.
What does this mean?

I programmed and played video games in high school. I prioritized academics over everything. I sometimes ruined the curve (in some classes because I was actually gifted, in some classes in spite of the fact that I was terrible).

I drank on weekends. I played -- and enjoyed playing -- sports. I hung out with kids who wore football uniforms, with kids who had disgustingly massive gauges, with kids who wore fedoras.

Am I a nerd? I thought so. Other people thought so.
Biological Transistors Created Inside Cells Out of DNA
Yes, IE6's inability to render transparent PNGs and CSS rendering incompatibilities are as big a crime against humanity as genocide on an industrial scale and molesting/raping children.
Thanks for the feedback man. It was part of a 2-series trying to show the fallacy of getting a job and not doing your own thing and I abused 1st of April for it.^^

Have a look at my follow up post: It’s time to grow up. Fuck no! http://appreneur-diaries.com/its-time-to-grow-up-fuck-no

Hope you can get some value out of it. :)
Pretty piss poor reasoning there. Both oil and corn production and demand far exceed onions by a significant order of magnitude. Saying onions are more volatile than corn is like saying that the fortunes of individuals are more volatile than those of society at large (i.e. basic probability theory). Both corn and oil are more diversified than onion - and in turn - exhibit a lower variance - futures market or not.

Global onion production: 74,250,809 tonnes/year (2012 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onion#Production_and_trade)

Global corn production: 817,110,509 tonnes/year (2009 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maize#Quantity) (10x onions)

Global oil production: 84,820,000 barrels/day (2011 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_oil_produ...) -> 4,923,850,000 tonnes/year (70x onions)
When I started working in SF (moving from the Los Angeles area) I had great luck renting a temporary place and apartment hunting after work hours. I used AirBnB but you would be fine with any approach...the point is that apartment hunting is an infinitely better experience in person and you can avoid all the craigslist horror stories involved with remote renting.
I think Julia is a pretty good bet. Its target audience seems to love it. I've got too much on my plate right now to put the hours in on it.

Sure, you have to manage risks, but why not put insignificant but necessary projects on it? Just pick a few that someone can rewrite in a day or two if needed. (This is of course assuming you're part of the target audience and not just looking for a new web framework, but it doesn't sound like that's the case.)
The images are amazing. When looking for clear skies, I was curious if
you saved any metrics regarding how often a particular location (pixel)
is clear or cloudy?

(NOTE: I have no intention of visiting the cloudiest place on earth
with my vampire hunting kit. ;-)

You might find the weather simulation work done on the old (2005) "Earth Simulator" or newer
(2011) "K Computer" supercomputers in Japan really interesting.

http://www.hpcwire.com/hpcwire/2011-06-20/japanese_supercomp...
The frictive responses are unhelpful, but for the sake of courtesy an employer is entitled to a well-written introductory letter (even if only a paragraph) and an employee is entitled to a response (even if only a line). For both workers and employers who care greatly about common courtesy, the lack thereof does show the unsuitability of the other party.
As a customer, no matter what they do, whether it's a high margin risk or low margin profits, I'm supposed to be informed of their decision - whether they try to fix it or not, because I was one of the affected. They promised they would do so in their previous blog posts, hence the curiosity.

>So stop asking.

I have every right to ask and I will rightfully so. A disguised internet profile about sunglasses means nothing to me.
hey tim, humanity asked me to remind you that you're an idiot.
The thinking process behind both are very similar indeed. At the core of both is true problem solving. You are given a set of constraints and facts, and you have to apply some set of rules (man made laws, or algorithms) in order to take the input and create a result that you want.

I think it is for this reason that many on HN enjoy discussing the law (of course it does have many other practical consequences as well). And although OP did the opposite, I would encourage many technical minded people to consider law as an option - much of the reason that laws suck for technology is because the people who work with the law on a daily basis do not understand the technology, and it would be great if we had more general tech literacy in the legal profession.
It's not just a black hole, it's a well researched and cited black hole.

Gwern seems to be an awesomely motivated person. It really inspired me to take what I consider to be "interests" more fully.
We need to get a lot better at imagining the future
As if the line between malum in se and malum prohibitum was well defined. What you consider a magical set of rules others consider basic requirements for fostering an environment of respect and civil discourse.

I get that you don't agree. But you have no rational basis to assert that the acts prohibited by the community code of conducts aren't malum in se.
More background and discussion about Rendr and how it fits into the stack of the nodejs app AirBnB built: http://nerds.airbnb.com/weve-launched-our-first-nodejs-app-t...
It appeared to be syncing my entire Cloud Player music folder to my local machine. That's quite a few GB of data -- 12,000 songs or so out of a possible 250,000. So it's not going to be of much use to me until they add some kind of selective sync option.
Names do provide better results. If they are not provided in the ad, I just send them a quick email asking who is in charge of hiring. Then address the email to that person.
I'm responding to you as an example of a certain line of thought that limits on copying are somehow infringing on your "right" to do as you wish with copyable content.

Where does this right come from? People have some intuition about stealing physical things, but many areas of law involve intangible entities. In your example of suing an employee for releasing source code in violation of an agreement, you are using law to effect an outcome that is every bit as abstracted as copyright law.

There is also an aspect of arbitrariness to most law that can be annoying but it serves a function.
A web-based Feedly is their top request: http://feedly.uservoice.com/forums/192636-suggestions/filter...

Please pile on additional votes to keep the pressure up.

For what it's worth, they claim they are not monitoring your browsing:
http://blog.feedly.com/2008/06/18/feedly-and-privacy/

But you're right, still a good idea to push for the web version regardless.
Tesla To Race in NASCAR Sprint Cup Series
Looking for technical co-founder with Python and Django knowledge
I am currently looking for a technical co-founder to help build a cross-platform note-taking application (yes, I know...another one). Actually I think the term "co-founder" it's a little bit too much; I'm looking for someone to work with me on this project and see where it goes.

I've started this working in my free time, and realized that it takes more than one person working on it to get it going (apart from programming, there are other aspects as well - like design, marketing, attracting investment, etc). Everything it's still in early stages, however, basic functionality is implemented.

There's no deadline and we work in spare time. The only requirements that I am looking for in a candidate are:

- passionate about creating a solid note taking cross platform application, and have desire to succeed in turning this into a real product. It sounds simple, but it's not...

- have programming knowledge in Python, Django framework, feel comfortable working with jQuery & plugins, CSS styling, Tweeter Bootstrap, and other stuff like this that comes around main app.

- familiarity with storage systems, networking protocols, DNS, web servers, databases, and *nix in general (preferable)

- easy to work with, open to new approaches in web technologies, and willing to work/learn together with me on this. I am not looking for the "best programmer" out there - reasonable knowledge will be fine.

In the end, like any start-up, the app can be successful, or not. There is no guarantee. The good part is that the only investment is time spent on building the app and a laptop :)

If interested shoot me a line (gabriel at intranets-talk dot com) - and let me know.
Thanks,
Gab.