skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The whole engineering/NIH/underestimate situation certainly rings true.

OTOH, there also tends to be a vast underestimate on how difficult it will be to integrate an existing product (even if it is already built) into a new company.

It is extremely rare that a product the company is acquiring for is exactly the product they need, it is usually 90% of the product they need, and they're still going to have to get the second 90% done while simultaneously working on all the culture issues that pop up when trying to bring two companies together.
Thank you, that's a very helpful analysis. It's just that between the raccoons and walks in the garden, I totally missed it in the original post.
I wrote Noir primarily to help people new to Clojure to get up and running really quickly. It provides a simple set of core abstractions that allow you build whatever you want. As others have said though, I don't think something like Rails or Django should exist in Clojure. Large frameworks like those are very limiting and I would argue don't really end up letting you build real apps any faster than you can using simple composable libraries.

There's immense value in the approach the Clojure ecosystem has taken. For example, how many other places can you seamlessly swap out your webapp's server from something like jetty (thread-based) to tomcat (battle-hardened) to netty (NIO) to ...

FWIW, https://www.readyforzero.com/ is a non-trivial app in production that is built entirely on Noir.
I've played with Google Music for quite some time and while its a really great service I have one major gripe... Data Usage!

For some reason Google Music will use almost 2.5x the amount of data that Pandora or Spotify use on my phone. (Keep in mind this is with Background data and High quality streaming turned OFF!)

In this mobile data cap / throttle world that we live in I can't afford to have my music app use more than 2gb of a data a month!
How to Get More Women Hired for Technical Roles
Launch Festival: Apply for free tickets if you're a broke startup founder
That's interesting, as I use Exact Audio Copy with Accurate Rip, which actually compares my rips to other user's rips to ensure it was done properly. This means that I have FLAC files that would compare to other user's; sans the differences in Metadata.
The difference is that those people never intended to make money of those projects. Or at least not directly (Red Hat).
First, what Amy says.

Second, http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/03/20/running-a-software-busin...

I run two software businesses. One of them is fairly critical. I'm taking off ~2.5 months this year for my wedding. (I.e. I anticipate less than 10 minutes a day of work during that... assuming I can't hire anyone to do it for me.)

I've previously sustained that level of work for weeks or months. It really is doable.
Textastic: Powerful and fast text editor for iPad
This is true. The classic example IMO is Amazon: they didn't have "killer IP." Their "moat" was their mastery of fulfillment and distribution, and owning all the links in that chain.
The only reason merchants get any business on Amazon is that customers are at least partly protected by Amazon's support infrastructure.

I'm sympathetic regarding some of the more egregious stupidities Amazon has foisted on some merchants, but when it comes to this part, it's pretty unambiguously what you signed up for.

Consider it from the other end: If you were selling autonomously on your own site, would you treat customers this well? What does your answer say about you? What impact do you think your answer will have on potential customers' choices?
An Entrepreneurs travels to the middle east
Experiencing new cultures and people is key in building new connections and relationships, live through this entrepreneurs journey.
Pretty cool, but I'd love it if it would show all the projects I've contributed to along with how much I've contributed.

The list of projects on my account isn't a good way to see what I've done, loads of it is stuff I've just forked and not done much with (or maybe fixed one tiny thing), then there's the odd thing I've commit more to, but you can't tell that.

It would be even nicer to have a way to highlight bits I'm especially proud of :)
"M&A guys can smell it when you really want a deal, and that makes them want it less."

That smell thing is really important.

Essentially anytime you are dealing with someone who does more of a particular transaction or negotiation than you do they will be able to sense and pickup things that you would never think of because of the quantity and quality of patterns they've experienced in the past.

We find this happens all the time with domain sales. Buyers say and do all the wrong things which cause a seller to be able to get the most for a particular domain name. I've seen it also happen in real estate as well as other negotiations (buying cars as another example).

It's hard for the less experienced person on one side of a transaction to avoid this since they don't know the signals they are setting off.
I have taken 100-400mg of Modafinil daily for about 10 years.

I happen to have my 23andme results (thanks for the tip, tene!) and it looks like I'm rs4680(A;A). Despite what the paper in CPT says, it does have a significant effect on my alertness.

The comments about procrastination and focus all sound familiar to me. So do the comments about addiction: sometimes I'll forget to take it and if I don't have any because I forget to pack it while travelling I don't feel an urge to do anything about it. I only have a few things to add to what's been said already:

1) Modafinil is not a substitute for sleep for me. I've gone without sleep for days while using it, and I do suffer from the effects of sleep deprivation. I just don't notice that I'm suffering from them. The best way to describe it is that I am alert and thinking, but I am missing half my IQ points and don't realize it unless I'm particularly mindful about how I am feeling. I'm great at driving, working out, the boring parts of reverse engineering firmware, and other mindless repetitive physical tasks, though. A few years ago I decided to spend a lot of time at the gym and was performing at superhuman levels: it's just not normal for a 5'8" guy to feel happy about running 6 minute miles at 4 AM on no sleep. When I did that on no sleep I kept losing my keys and phone, though...

2) Modafinil significantly increases my ability to get out of bed in the morning. I've never taken a sick day since I started using it. If I don't get enough sleep I still zone out a little during the day, but it makes it so much more pleasant to get out of bed and go through my morning routine if I'm missing sleep. I'm certainly in better shape because I have the energy to go work out, as I mentioned.

3) I'm quickly approaching the point where I'll have been on Modafinil for more than 50% of my life, and as far as I can tell there have been no long-term side effects. My partner is a MD and although at first she couldn't believe that it wasn't permanently screwing something up, she's come to accept that Modafinil seems to be pretty safe in my case.

4) Despite what others have said about Modafinil affecting their creative thinking, I have no problems assimilating entirely new concepts or doing other abstract thinking while using the drug.
Shouldn't `hamon2` be

hamon2 f (Just x) = f x
hamon2 f Nothing = Nothing

? The author's definition doesn't seem to typecheck if `f :: a -> Maybe b` (as in `(>>=)`).

EDIT: Ah, I see; looking at the blackboard picture suggests that the author has confused `(>>=) :: Monad m => m a -> (a -> m b) -> m b` with `fmap :: Functor m => (a -> b) -> m a -> m b`.
Detroit Startup scene energized and preparing for takeoff?
Detroit Startup scene is one that is finding its self supported by the entire michigan community, with aims and vision of becoming a tech hub for mid-west.
Top websites to sell your car plus their pricing fees
Well, there are SOME clues. Mention of Silicon Alley means it's probably in New York. The fact that they were having dinner with the CEO means it's probably not Google-scale.
I haven't tried any of the pills you've mentioned, but I'll second #4. I run all summer and fall, but take the winter off. I find that I'm much less happy and more irritable when I'm not exercising regularly. I'm sure there are a billion [1] studies showing that exercise is good for your mental health, but I'm lazy and don't feel like googling for one.

[1] An exaggeration.
That suggests what might be a good rule of thumb for distinguishing a rock star programmer from the other kind. The rock star says they can do it, and mean it. Then they do it. Done.
Bylines for Web Articles?
Thanks! This and the other comments in the thread are definitely motivating me to check out clojure. My dream of the moment is to make my command-line text-based game playable through a web front end and deployed to heroku using the clojure buildpack. I think that will give me at least, like, 5 geek points.
Whether a format is lossy or not plays no part in whether the algorithm for transcoding is deterministic or not. The input (a CD) is digital and provided whole; there is no "realtime analysis" needed, and no reason why "prediction" would produce non-determinism.

Some multi-threaded encoders may be non-deterministic (from using concurrency), but encoding MP3s (or nearest equivalent) on modern hardware is generally fast enough for casual use even on a single thread, and parallelizing the operation would be better done at the level of tracks rather than within a track.
> I really think writing any script longer than 20 lines in JavaScript instead of CoffeeScript is stupid)

I think OP will get by without your career advice pretty well.
From what I understand--

The "lossy" part of MP3 is that the encoder decides to throw away frequency bands to reduce the information size.

This is more than just choosing a bitrate and being done with it - different encoders treat different bands as important or unimportant, attempting to make a smaller sized file still sound better.
Amazon doesn't do that to all tracks, and they tell you when they do.
Why speculate when you can test?

$ ls -l KDE_Startup_new.wav
-rw-r--r-- 1 jerf jerf 970882 Feb 27 21:42 KDE_Startup_new.wav
$ lame KDE_Startup_new.wav 1.mp3
$ lame KDE_Startup_new.wav 2.mp3
$ md5sum *mp3
0bc5fee9b5d67ca2d6f1bf61a186067a 1.mp3
0bc5fee9b5d67ca2d6f1bf61a186067a 2.mp3
Anyone here grow up on a farm?

I grew up in a very agricultural area, and many of my young friends' families owned farms.

You really can't make any kind of comparison between modern farming versus old-timey farming. For example, you can now ride in an air-conditioned combine harvester where you can't chat with your friends, but you're not out in sweltering heat. You can clear vastly many more acres, but is it more or less 'work'?

Also, the amount of work would seem to vary tremendously based on season.

I think it's more interesting to look at pre-industrialized, non-agrarian life. Like, a shoemaker in a city. According to a historian on a Planet Money podcast, you might go a couple of days without doing any meaningful work. Just sort of hanging around the shop, going to chat with friends, and so on. Then, someone would have a need for boots. So, you measure them up, get to work, and a couple of days later you hand them their custom boots. The guy's claim was that these sorts of jobs involved quite a lot of just waiting around for your next customer/project.
There's a difference between using an MVC pattern (which is easy with Express, but is completely optional) and relying on an ORM (which the project forces on you). One of the great things about minimilist frameworks like Express is that you can build it out and customize it like you need.

The types of projects that benefit from being in node.js instead of Rails, Django, etc, don't really benefit from having all those decisions made in advance. If the "Rails Way" works for your project, you'll probably benefit from doing it in rails. There's certainly more library support and it's easier to find more experienced developers for Rails than node.js.

There's a tendency to put all kinds of projects in node now, just because it's "hot". Some projects benefit from node, and some would be easier to do in some other language/framework. If you're experienced with Rails and are working on a project that fits that style, you're probably better off just doing it in Rails rather than switching to node and using a Rails flavored framework.
To some extent that's true for all drugs (as well as all foods). It's like poking random numbers into memory and restarting your Asteroids game to see if you get 65,536 extra ships, or if the process locks up.
This looks good. I've messed around with Railways http://railwayjs.com/ but some parts are funky and the docs haven't been updated since they opened the project. Also looked at Matador http://obvious.github.com/matador/ and actually was re-writing it in coffeescript to use CS' classes instead of the Klass plugin, but lacked docs. Zappa http://zappajs.org/ is written CS but really isn't an MVC. This looks well documented and it's in CS which I like. +1
Last time I checked, Gecko and all the other browsers still had a long way to go before being fully HTML5 compliant. Chunks of the File API, postMessage, and a variety of other specs are incomplete and underdocumented.

Sites like caniuse.com vastly overestimate what has been sufficiently implemented.
We've considered hierarchical modeling, but concluded that there were no real gains. We have enough data from each of our clients to identify the parameters of the model. We will probably add more hierarchical modeling as we improve predictions of seasonality, primarily it will be useful for predicting the 'christmas effect' for new clients.

The posterior mode of the Pareto/NBD obtained through full MCMC is extremely close to the MLE, and the MLE is much faster to calculate so we use MLE. [1]

There has been some work done on using HMM to predict CLV. It turns out that in most cases the Pareto/NBD is a robust model for CLV. [2]

[1] http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1305575

[2] http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1904562
> I assume that owning a business proper would require a ton of forms and licensing. But just doing odd jobs for oneself? I didn't think anything special was required.

You don't need anything at all to do odd jobs under a 1099. I probably should not have said "officially self-employed" as that isn't really a thing. I meant I've gone through the hoops to become a sole-proprietor business.

If you wanted to incorporate you basically just file a few forms and sign on a few lines. It does not involve a great deal of paperwork, and even that can be reduced to signing on a few lines if you use an accountant.

I'm not an expert but the reason that I believe a lot of people in your position (1099-ing it for N years) incorporate is three-fold:

First, liability. Your corp can get sued into bankruptcy but your personal assets are safe. If you're not incorporated someone can sue you directly with more disastrous results. I'm not a lawyer but this is what I'm lead to believe is the case.

Second, tax-wise it can be in your favor to be a corp.

Third, it just keeps everything separate. Having a company account that I can pay myself out of keeps my books clean.
I never said that Pop is 90% of sales, but you call me an elitist and then refuse to look up facts. I think you're lying to your self about the quality of music in the industry.

TOP TEN SELLING DIGITAL ARTISTS
(Based on Digital Track sales from 7/04/2004-1/02/2011)

Artist

Units Sold
1	Taylor Swift	34,269,000
2	Black Eyed Peas	33,831,000
3	Rihanna	33,673,000
4	Eminem	33,279,000
5	Lady Gaga	29,311,000
6	Kanye West	25,343,000
7	Beyonce	25,136,000
8	Nickelback	23,919,000
9	Michael Jackson	23,218,000
10.	Katy Perry	22,574,000
I installed Google Music to my MacBook Pro a few months ago. It kept prompting me with the install screen, long after I'd dragged it into my apps folder.

I didn't use it and uninstalled it by dragging the app icon into the trash. Didn't work.

I tried the AppDelete path. No go.

I googled around and found I was not the only one. Uninstall is broken and you are basically stuck with a prompt twice a day to install the Google Music app until you reinstall your OS or go slogging through the guts of your box, throwing switches you don't understand by mixing internal uninstall tutorials (ok, to be fair, this is how you do just about everything...).

In conclusion, that app is a daily annoyance and I'd caution people against installing it.
Make Your Thing: Tips for Success
Backs up your entire Flickr stream to a local site
As far as I know, they'll only do that for really expensive items. I've never been given the pickup option for my returns (the most expensive was worth a bit under $300).
"Conceptually, if very smart people did it, and other very smart people say it can't be done"

Don't forget the third part, which is what the author described, i.e. "not very smart people say they can easily do it themselves". They do not have to be able to do it, they just have to be able to convince the CEO to spend $1 million in salary on the internal delivery time to try to do it.
I've already hooked my own Python project up to it (http://travis-ci.org/#!/AndrewIngram/django-extra-views) and was very pleased with how straightforward it all was.

I'd really like to see more detailed test breakdowns and code coverage reports. But I expect this will be a lot harder if there's no standardised output format for such things.

Very good work though!
For those playing along at home, there is a better image of the complete note in this article:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-210 6384/Rapper-Kieron-Bryan-jailed-25-years-codebreaker-exposes-gangland-hitman.html?ito=feeds-newsxml

The @code array in jcg's perl script is a bit off. It seems his sister's name might be "Koh Koh" --probably pronounced like "Coco" of "Coco Channel" fame. I haven't found any supporting evidence, but it could explain the "6 25 4, 6 25 4," at the start of the message.
Quick look: Silicon Valley’s wicked young CEOs
Hot Tech Boy of the Week: Zach Holman
By "at the expense of more typing", I assumed he meant "at the expense of more banging on your keyboard"
The thing that I found particularly interesting about my cardio experiment is that I'm already more fit and active than average. Every other day (barring the occasional extra rest day), I'm at the gym, doing 60 - 90 minutes of free weights. My heart rate is often 140 - 170 when I come off a set, and I pretty much jump on the next set when my heart rate hits 125. By the definitions I found, that is technically cardio, yet doing 30 minutes of daily bike riding still seemed to have an effect.

I've also found that having a bright light helps, particularly in the darkest of the Pacific Northwest winter months.

I started taking 2,000iu of vitamin D upon waking, too. This may or may not help with wakefulness and may or may not assist in combating depression.
...okay? What is your point?
More details would be great. I've had no problem using the APIs you've listed, nor have I found discrepancies in caniuse.com.
I suspect the answer is more simple than you make out. They will not publish what they are sure will not sell.
If two users were using a ripper that uses Accurate Rip, and both were using lossless compression, then you could end up with identical decompressed wav files.
Well, I recently quit to become a fulltime freelancer and I'm absolutely loving it. Here's a quick brief on my background:

Until about 8 weeks ago I was an academic neuroscientist. For a variety of reasons, I quit and started working as a fulltime web developer.

I had just about $8k in my bank account at that time. This may seem low (it is!), but it was about 1/4th of my yearly salary so it is a lot for me. I'm don't need a lot of money to survive, so other than taking the girlfriend out every now and then I can live on a fairly tight budget.

I've found several clients through Hacker News, which is pretty awesome. I'm charging a low rate right now to make up for my unorthodox background and lack of professional experience. I imagine you'll have a much easier time since you have real experience to put on your resume, whereas most of mine were side projects.

I'm not sure what else to write, but if you have any questions feel free to ask!
I agree that a good portion of the "hiring crunch" right now is an issue of mis-allocation rather than raw under-supply.

Yahoo! has tons of great engineers working on really hard technical problems. What qualified engineer there wouldn't be better off at even, say, Facebook? The engineers who work on Sherpa, for example, are highly qualified.

I have a hard time seeing Coderwall as the solution, though. (Not that you're arguing that it is.)

Why?

The core design decisions in the product are going to attract the kind of people who like to show off. Badges? Achievements? Public profiles styled a la the Facebook timeline?

Those are the engineers who, by and large, are already showing off. They have public personas, whether on GitHub, Twitter, major projects they contribute to, or just being "personalities" in their community.

The product that gives exposure to engineers hiding inside companies like Yahoo! needs to be something less, well, game-like. I'm not sure what that looks like, but that's my first impression of Coderwall.

It feels like a cargo cult. All these little gamey doodads don't add up to a coherent thesis about how to get engineers more exposure. It feels more something that came out of this kind of conversation:

Person A: Hey, we need to increase engagement. How can we do that?
Person B: Achievements! That'll do it!

This is why GitHub is so marvelous. It didn't start out with the idea of getting engineers more exposure. The exposure is a side effect of making it easier to contribute in public than in private. That'd be my starting point for doing something really radical: what can we make public that used to be private, in a way that excites developers?

Making GitHub activity "even more" public, or aggregating it in a way that's easier for non-technical people to consume, is probably not the first thing I'd try. It is the easiest, though. (For me, that's a reason not to do it, rather than a reason to do it.)
Nah, that's cool. I don't want to gamify my life.
It's not quite "realtime analysis", but...

MP3 compression works by FFT-ing the audio stream, which is something that has to be ingested sequentially. It's not realtime since the encoder does it much faster than realtime, but it is doing sequential analysis of the file.

Usually a high quality encoder does multiple passes of the file to better fit it's FFT with the source material.
You should try http://www.audiogalaxy.com. I think you'll like it. Don't take my word for it though - I've built it. Look up user reviews on iTunes/Android.
Evaluating parse.ly's predictive and semantics tool Dash
We use OpenStreetMap data for all roads - for some political boundaries and labels, you've got to bring in some other open data sources to make things look decent. Copyright on this rendition of the maps is MapBox's, data is OpenStreetMap's - that distinction is cleared up by their licensing.

Besides that, the relationship is that we contribute, with a lot of hours, to OpenStreetMap's data & code, and try to get more visibility for the project. There's very little official about OpenStreetMap, so it's not like anyone has a title or secret plans.