skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Cover letters are worthless unless you're looking for salespeople. You don't want applicants that can convince you they're obsessive fans of your company, you want applicants that are interested in their work and whose interests line up with the job you're offering.

For many jobs, you don't even need that. There are a lot of jobs where any given applicant will have applied to dozens if not hundreds of companies. The only thing an enthusiastic cover letter tells you in those cases is that they are lying.

Unless you're looking for co-founders or C-level managers, they don't have to have big ideas about how they can make your company better. But they should know how to do their job and be interested in finding ways to help you help them do their job better.

Job applications are for coarse filtering based on vague qualifiers. Two years experience as a C# drone at a bank? Too bad, we're looking for Clojure greybeards. Shoddy formatting and everything is misspelled? We need people that care about the quality of their deliverables. And so on. It's a first impression, not a hiring decision.

Of course this all depends on the number of applicants, the number of openings and the size of the company.

But yes, if you expect certain things to be in a job application, be explicit about it. If you want the cover letter to answer some interview questions ahead of the actual interview, say so.
Interrupt and exception handling in the Linux kernel, Part 4
He's suggesting the lobbyists are in the right in this case, and the tax rates for repatriation should be lowered to something more reasonable. Then companies would be paying more tax than they are currently giving the govt getting more revenue, as well as bringing more money into the U.S. for investment in local economies. Everyone wins if they lower taxes. At the current rates, it's simply irresponsible to bring the money back instead of leaving it where it is.
Enjoying your work and working 9 to 5 on-the-dot aren't mutually exclusive.
Apps that are "beta", "demo", "trial", or "test" versions will
be rejected

Interesting that free trials periods are entirely unavailable to developers in the app store but mandatory for musicians.
They would not - paying their artists is a deductible business expense.
Some countries have since recognized that mistake and have been successful in getting cars out of the city center.
I'm almost always using PEG where regexps are typically applied.
> offer stock options

Outside the valley nobody cares about stock options. Even within the valley many people are aware they're a gamble at best. You're most likely not working for the next Facebook.
I really don't like this idea that artists should be compensated for having their music listened to. I find it hurts the consumers, and it will hurt the artists in the long run. Basically, I don't think the concept of intellectual property works. What I believe is that artist should find a way to be compensated for the actual crafting of their work, and for the act of performing (Patreon is a great example of what I'd like to see more of).

Intellectual property wasn't a thing for most of human history. If you performed a song in public, anyone who heard it could write it down and perform it or do whatever they wanted to do with it. If you released something to the public, it belonged to the public, and legally that was that. And art still happened. Great art.

The idea that whoever made something owns it (and I really think it's absurd to own an idea) means that everyone else loses out. And I don't see how that can be good, even for the owner.
I don't think it's so much legal liability as:

1.) Why go to the trouble? What's in it for us? Yes, we shouldn't leave you hanging and should in general behave professionally but detailed feedback as part of a formal process seems more than one can reasonably expect.

2.) It invites prolonging the process. A lot of people told that they have insufficient experience in X will want to respond that they really do and it must just not have come out in the interview.

3.) This may be truer for non-technical roles, but think of it like dating. A lot of the time people get rejected because the potential hiring company "Just wasn't that into them" or just preferred someone else better.
I thought these were great examples. He demonstrated that he was able to solve reasonably challenging, atypical problems with Magic, and that the service brought a lot of value to the table by being thoughtful (knowing to provide KBB reference values without having to be asked, being able to negotiate prices down on behalf of the buyer, having paperwork sent over by a driver etc). It's true that a lot of back and forth was involved, but they facilitated a process which would have taken days of effort on behalf of the buyer (buying the bike) via a few text messages. I personally was both highly amused and very impressed.
The months there are dates marking fiscal quarters, so each number is for 3 months. Fedex monthly revenue is a bit less than $4 billion.
I'm not sure how the tax system works in the US, but I was just talking to my accountant about this issue the other day.

In Australia, my company gets taxed at a flat 30% on all profits in a year. If I want to take cash out of the company after that tax has been taken, I pay "top-up" tax that brings the total tax paid to the level of my income tax rate.

For example, if the company earned $10000, after all expenses, then it would pay $3000 in tax, leaving $7000 left that I can take out. If I earned no money in the year, my income tax rate is 0%, so the top-up tax is -$3000 (I.e. I get a tax refund for $3000). If I earned $50000 in the year, then my income tax rate is 32.5%, so I would have to pay top-up tax of $250 (I.e. 2.5% of the original $10000, which has already been taxed 30%).

Double taxation shouldn't happen, and while my company was set up for tax minimisation purposes, international corporations are able to do an insane level of fuckery to avoid almost all taxation.
Spot on. Going agile, with whichever methodology you want, is a mindset change, more than anything else. You can try Scrum, Kanban, Scrumban, you name it. But if the CEO and top management aren't deeply involved in that change, it's never going to work.

There'll be a lot of pain, lots of frustrations. Implementing Scrum is hard. Very hard. And it takes a while before the real benefits start surfacing, so most teams will just quit and blame it on Scrum. I've seen and felt this directly some times.

The mindset I have within my teams is to try different things until we find what works for us. We may start with Scrum and eventually fine-tune here and there to a custom process (call it Scrumbut, I don't really care). As long as we stick to what outcomes we want out of it, we should be fine.

As for decision making, I'm all up for having the people that have more context on something to be the ones making the decision. My ultimate goal as Manager/Lead/Whatever is to have nothing depending on me, and that means coaching and empowering everyone on my team do make decisions.
Sure, because no hunter/gatherer tribes had a chief, medicine woman or other revered person who both gave direction to their tribe, and to whom the tribe was responsible.

A pretty weak argument against bosses. Humans naturally tend to form hierarchies - the boss is simply one node in that hierarchy.

That some people thrive in such positions doesn't mean it's our natural state.
I mean, the solution is simple to fix right? Raise the wages for these positions.
And what is this person's definition of unmotivated? Is only doing the work and not beyond what stated in your contract unmotivated? Is having a life outside of work considered unmotivated?
Everyone discussing this seems to take as fact that this is going to take away revenue from some other music distribution channel. In fact it could just as easily increase music consumption on the whole. If it does increase total royalties then it makes sense for the artists share the costs of promoting it through the 3 month free trial.

It's almost certainly not in Apple's interest to cannibalize their existing iTunes sales for the streaming service.
Last night I grabbed a JavaScript text to speech script http://responsivevoice.org/ and tossed it into my laptops Apache public directory and wrote a few lines for Ajax request to a script I tossed on each server that would just return some status info stuff like

exec('uptime',$response);
echo $response;

In around 15 minutes I now have a siri like bot to take with me that will alert me to anything funky which is necessary after a week of some rogue processes.
There is a disconnect between <decisionmaker> and <programmer>. They may be separated by 2 layers vertically and 5 horizontally in the org chart. There is no situation that occurs where <programmer> is making appointments with <decisionmaker> and taking him out for drinks to find out what problems he has and what solutions would be valuable. (I used to sell $10-50K equipment; I used to joke that I got paid to visit people, and listen to their problems. A roving bartender)

Could you imagine that? BigCorp paying <programmer> to schmooze <decisionmaker> AND PAY FOR the meals, drinks, travel etc. Never going to happen.

So insert <salesperson> layer. Because <BigCorp> would never allow a setup like above, 2ndCorp gets into the action. BigCorp doesn't care how much 2ndCorp spends on <salesperson> because it doesn't cost them anything unless a purchase is made. 2ndCorp sends the <salesperson> out, pays them, pays their expenses, and <salesperson> chases after not only BigCorp's <decisionmaker> but another 100 BigCorps at the same time. 2ndCorp is focused on providing a really good solution in one specific area; there are free ways to do this, but the free ways do not have <salesperson> doing market discovery and finding solutions to <decisionmaker> problems. 2ndCorp has advantages of scale; free solutions have no marketing, staff, etc.

When BigCorp purchases, once <decisionmaker> has been the decider and selected a solution from <salesperson>, then 2ndCorp deploys the solution, the same solution they have deployed hundreds or thousands of times before. Advantages of scale apply. Ultimately <decisionmaker> has to answer to someone (even if they are sole owner of megacorp, their spouse will have comments) and because <decisionmaker> HAS TO ANSWER TO SOMEONE, they will choose the solution that comes with a built in problem fixer and person to yell at called <salesperson>. Nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM.

If <decisionmaker> goes for an open source free solution, then they have to personally support it over the upcoming YEARS (sometimes stuff stays in use a long time; Y2K), so the likely result is that they would not deploy a solution that they were not experts in, so probably no code they have to maintain themselves.

In big ticket sales I had three jobs; visit people and listen to their problems, be the person to stand there and get yelled at by the customer. and then get the company to fix the problem. I was the human interface layer.

TL;DR - the suckers are the ones not doing this. It works for good reasons on all sides of the deal.
> Well I am far more likely to take the measured, legally considered statement from Apple over a single independent artist's Twitter posts. Apple would be in a for a world of hurt if they deliberately mislead people.

Considering the way Apple lied... ehem... misspoke? misled people?... about ebooks, lying about music isn't that far fetched.

> No. I am an iOS user and half my music collection is from the web. It is completely legitimate to use iTunes to add it to your collection. Otherwise third party apps exist which allow you to download from the mobile web. I am not saying it isn't as flexible as Android but it is disingenuous to say it isn't possible.

So, as I said, it is impossible for an iOS user to just download a song and add it to their music library on the go. It would be technically easy for Apple to enable this, but they purposely disallow this to make it harder for customers to purchase from 3rd parties. The same way they won't let 3rd parties sell music within their apps without paying 30% to Apple (making it financially impossible).

Having to go all the way home, add your music to iTunes, plug your phone into your computer, and then sync to iTunes just to be able to add a single MP3 to your phone's music library may be "legitimate" but it's anything but reasonable. It's in this state solely to make it inconvenient to the user and push them into the open arms of iTunes.
For everyone suggesting that artists are simply being greedy or unreasonable in expecting Apple to pay them during the trial period, I'd encourage you to consider the hypothetical I posted in the last thread about Apple Music's 3 month trial. It might help contextualize the artists' and labels' complaints:

> Tomorrow, Apple announces that it will be introducing an "App Store Subscription." For $9.99/month users will receive unlimited access to all apps on the App Store. Developers will receive a share of each user's subscription payments in proportion to app usage. Apple simultaneously announces a 3 month free trial for all App Store accounts, and states that it will be making no payments to developers during that trial since users are not paying for it.

I, personally, would ditch iOS development for Android in a heartbeat if that happened. I can't blame musicians for having a similar reaction.
1. That is incredibly far fetched. China isn't stupid, and nobody wins in that scenario.

2. If that did happen, we'd be in a world war, and I'm guessing that would lower iPhone sales and nobody would much care about repatriation taxes.

3. Every other country in the world has the same concerns of incredibly far fetched ideas as this, and yet they don't take 35% for protection money. In your world the U.S. Govt sounds a bit like the mafia. I'm not sure that's how it's supposed to work.
^Z suspends the current application and returns to the program that ran it (typically the shell), which will then print a prompt. ^S and ^Q leave the output entirely undisturbed and unbroken.
Didn't the PyPy folks have some issue with the language shootout, which led them to make their own?[1][2]. IIRC a lot of the Python code wasn't that optimized at all compared to the C/C++ programs.

1. http://speed.pypy.org/

2. https://alexgaynor.net/2011/apr/03/my-experience-computer-la...
The "Python is the language, not the implementation" answer has already been given by @dalke, so I'll answer whether cPython, the implementation of Python that Python developers commonly use, is slower than C/C++:

cPython is necessarily slower and uses more memory than C for most tasks, and that's because cPython is implemented in C. You couldn't expect a new programming language that was implemented in Python to be faster than Python, either.

This is less of a concern for scientists and others with very tough performance requirements than it otherwise would be, in part, because cPython code can delegate C and C++ code[0]. This means portions of your program that need to be highly optimized can be implemented in C or C++, while the rest of your program can continue to be written in Python.

[0] https://docs.python.org/3/extending/extending.html
Taylor who? And why should we care about her so-called muzak?
Right, but it'll adjust to the point just above the "intolerably sparse" threshold.
Actually, the carnage caused by primate-driven cars exceeds that of the machine gun; we lose around 2 million dead or seriously injured every year, a death rate rivalling that of the first world war, on an ongoing basis.

(Self-driving cars can't come soon enough; 90% of RTAs are the result of human-driver error ...)
This is about free access to a set of highly engineered content, which is not just a back catalogue you are trying to milk but your current latest creation.

We do not think that software engineers should be prohibited from charging for copies of their software: neither do we think that musicians should be prohibited for getting paid for their music.

Yes, people will continue to make art for free, because they love doing it. No, that has nothing to do with whether people are (implicitly) banned from charging for their art/labour if they want to.
Hyperbole much?

There is a very obvious difference between trucks and aircraft: the third dimension. Trucks operate on streets and roads, which are clearly identified and known to pedestrians as a hazardous location where extra attention to the rules and conditions is required. While streets and roads could be made safer for pedestrians (and, often, should!), there are literally billions of pedestrian-vehicle interactions every day that are perfectly safe. This is possible because a street is largely a 2- or even 1-dimensional environment with clear, well-known rules for sharing safely and (generally) good visibility so that every participant can get a full mental picture of that environment.

Aircraft operate everywhere, and at an altitude well above where most people would think to look. The danger from aircraft is not that a 10kg craft rams you horizontally at 5 m/s while it flies 1 meter above the same sidewalk you're using (though even that would probably cause significant injuries). It's that a 10kg aircraft you never saw, thought to avoid, or even had an opportunity to avoid falls 100 meters onto your head. That, by the way, is going to "kill or cause horrific injuries" every single time.

It's fine to hate automobiles. They're not perfect. They do have collisions, and sometimes those collisions kill humans. That's unfortunate, and worth improving. Most of them also burn fossil fuels, which needs to stop (in most of the world, drones will either burn fossil fuels or have batteries charged by electricity generated by a coal-fired power plant, so they're not better). But your "consistent solution" is absurd: a near-total elimination of economic activity in exchange for a very modest reduction in the human death rate. Which reduction would be immediately reversed and then some by the inability of hospitals to procure medical supplies, among many, many other problems.

You should probably think about learning to accept a need for nuance. It really helps in thinking about solving problems, which is what engineering is all about. Insisting that everyone must either agree to ban all automobiles or accept the uncontrollable and unavoidable risk of having others' property fall on their head anywhere at any time is not a constructive position and will not help you solve problems.

A more useful approach might be to ask yourself what would be required to make UAV flights safer. Are there environments or applications for which these problems could be minimized? What regulations or restrictions would help? Or maybe you'd like to tackle pedestrian safety in urban areas, a much better-studied set of problems. Or maybe you'd like to do some research, gathering some data on UAV failure rates and modes so that you could inform regulators as to which risks matter most.

That is, if you want to do something useful. That wasn't clear from your post.
The only thing swift about her "music" is how quickly/swiftly listeners turn off when her wailing comes on.
And Taylor? Pah! She needs a tailor - have you seen some the crummy outfits she wears?
> 30 years playing in and recording with independent bands. Dong just fine on understanding up front investments.

Apologies, then. Though I am curious about your take on this... specifically why it differs from my other friends. All of my independent musician friends I know online and off think this is a raw deal as soon as they learn the details. I understand why it makes sense for the big labels (they don't care about artists' incomes and likely got a sweet payoff from Apple). But I'm curious why a smaller musician/music producer would be happy with it.
A number of developers have been complaining (unreasonably, IMO) about the recent refund policy. Oh, and there's the 30% cut which can be seen as a bit too high.

Otherwise, I would also be genuinely curious to hear what problems developers have with Steam.
I thought that was only true in Zurich and surroundings? Most cantons didn't have a similar policy in place when I lived there 7 years ago.
That sounds like an amazing offer. who wouldn't want to trade a one time free or 99 cent payment for recurring revenue.
They created a language called 'whiny'?
5 Principles That Lead to More CleanTech Startups
If you consider the raw languages, C/C++ is indeed faster. But unfortunately it's not that easy.

It's easier and faster to write a program in python that in C++. So given limited programmer time, it might be possible to write a faster solution in python than in C/C++ because you have more time to optimize your algorithm instead of fighting with the compiler. If you have a big project, you can spend the extra programmer time you gain by using python by moving crucial code from python to C. The crucial code can be found by using a profiler. (Saw an article about this some time ago, but don't remember which company actually did this)

Finally, python has a lot of math libraries that offer good speed for computation intensive operations, see http://www.scipy.org/.

So yes, it's not that easy. I would suggest use Python because it programs easier/faster, and if you really run into a wall, you can always port parts to C.
The safety of airliners comes at a cost -- operating expenses (a lot of which is for maintenance) running so high that they're uneconomical except for bulk/public transport or the hyper-rich. Private flying cars they aren't. Small delivery drones, almost by definition, are your "flying car" paradigm, downsized to just the cargo compartment because they don't need to carry 70-300kg of shaved apes. Maintenance and QA is going to be a big issue, and will drive up prices.
Programming languages aren't slower or faster. The implementations of them are.

Provided no FFI or extensions written in other languages, non-I/O bound interpreted CPython is 50-100x slower than C/C++. JIT compiled (PyPy, etc.) Python might be in 2-10x slower bracket.

If extensions written in C/C++ are used, then you might be effectively comparing those extensions against another C/C++ implementation.

So if your code is going to be I/O bound and/or can effectively offload all computation in modules written in C/C++ (like NumPy), then Python might be practically as fast as C/C++.

If you use pure interpreted Python and implement compute limited algorithm in it, your code is going to be 50-100x slower than C/C++.

Real life scenarios are probably somewhere in between those two extreme cases.
Case study: At Sears, Eddie Lampert's Warring Divisions Model Adds to the Troubles

Eddie Lampert’s big idea is that markets and competition rool, so
he’s forcing the different parts of Sears to compete for resources
just as if they were independent firms, with individual division
profitability the only criterion for success.

...

If the different divisions of Sears have no common interests,
if the best model is competition red in tooth and claw, why should
Sears exist at all? Why not just break it up into units that have
no reason not to compete?

For that matter, why should any large firm exist? Why not just have
small firms, or maybe just individuals, who make deals for whatever
they need?

...

There are some things you don't want to leave up to the market — the
market itself is telling us that, by creating islands of
planning and hierarchy.

More here: http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/07/16/john-galt-and-th...

And here: http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2013-07-11/at-sears-edd...
Some places just have a single wheelie bin.
You seem to be confusing Taylor with musicians.
That's dangerous advise. I worked at a company for about 3 years and did some amazing things, was diligent, etc. but couldn't get ahead. In some companies you just can't: I'm not bitter, but jumping ship was a good move for me.