skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Programming More Efficiently?
I've been programming for a few years now, and I've written a lot of code, but there are times that I want to write quality code 2 or 3 times faster. I do my best to keep my workflow straightforward, eliminate distractions, and stay focused on my tasks, and I get quite a bit done each day but the more I can do, the better, right?

I'm wondering if any more seasoned developers have good advice for me, as far as improving my workflow, and coding more efficiently? I use Vim, and am trying to improve my muscle memory for operating on code. Any vim user tips? At what intervals should I take breaks from coding? Should I stay away from developing on the weekends to let my mind rest? Should I keep working on weekends to keep my brain active? At times I have to switch projects and work on something completely different, sometimes even in a different language, and that seems to throw my mind of for a few minutes. Is there anything I can do to make the process of switching projects easier? Is it normal to be thrown off by an abrupt project-switch? Sometimes I have to do 2 or 3 projects concurrently, and I end up having 2 or 3 bash windows open with different projects in each one. Should I try to just work on one thing at a time?

Thanks for any advice, I'm just trying to improve my developing habits and consolidate my workflow into something that's as efficient as possible. Any advice from seasoned developers would be awesome!
I know haha. Give me a computer language and I'm good, but those pesky human languages... Who knows, maybe the problem is all in my head. Anyway, thanks so much for the info!
It was a heavily classified project, as evidenced by the enclosure to hide its shape. I don't think they would want to be flying it out of Burbank in plain view of everyone. Additionally, its first test flight occurred at Area 51, after this move, which is an ideal location for testing such things. Test flights near a city are probably not a good idea.
This is not a reply specifically to you, but just in general to every "I don't have Linux" post I've ever seen:

I don't understand how this is a reasonable objection when http://prgmr.com/xen/ and https://www.virtualbox.org/ exist.
Entirely agree, when you are poor your biggest problem is not actually quantity of money. It's the flow of money.

So the problem is often not "I have £50 to plan food for the rest of the month" but "I have an unexpected expense and now I have £2 I found behind the sofa and a bare cupboard/fridge to feed myself until I get some more money".

I also found that when I am poor I am much more reluctant to go out and buy in bulk. Even though it would at least give me food enough to last, there's something scary about blowing your entire budget in one go.

If you are poor it is also harder to get to places that sell things cheaply in bulk (because perhaps you don't have a car) and you are more likely to get things from a corner store as needed where there is a higher markup on prices.
Is this question about programming more efficiently or managing your workload more efficiently?

I would definitely suggest working on one thing at a time. If you have multiple projects, just timebox them. 3 hrs working on project A, 3hrs working on project B (or 1 day working on project A, 1 day working on project B, etc).
If you think there aren't homeless people (and others) who don't gain any money at all, you are living in a fantasy world.

Some don't get $2, not even $1. Some are lucky to get $0 instead of losing money every day.

Sure, some homeless people get assistance from public or private sources, but many others are too mentally ill, depressed, or self-destructive to seek, find, or even accept aid (when aid is available, which it not always is).

And yes, these people do die of starvation, exposure, malnutition, illness, suicide, drug overdose, etc..
Concurrency: A single human body cell versus the internet
One piece missing here is how to write code that can be diagnosed/debugged without a debugger. Writing code that dumps useful information to a log file such that you can get real work done is important.
Opinions on some of the movies from the list I've seen:

Idiocracy – Basically an ordinary comedy, with an above average plot, but overall nothing that special or interesting. Overrated.

Fight Club – One of my favourite movies, perhaps in my top 10. Really loved it.

The Game – Another great movie from David Fincher, I love the mysterious atmosphere of his movies.

The Man From Earth. – Huge disappointment, I never understood why people like this movie. It's basically one guy telling a predictable and boring story. One of the most overrated movies ever. (I mean overrated in subjective sense obviously.)

Traffic – One of the best movies about drugs and organized crime.

Inception – Above average but overrated, logically inconsistent, nothing really special about this movie. The Cell is another movie where people enter someone else's dreams and even though it has only 6.2 on IMDB, I think I enjoyed it more. The depictions of the dreams were definitely more creative and looked more dreamy.

Of the top of my head I would recommend these:

* Something from David Lynch – Lost Highway, Blue Velvet or Mullholland Drive.

* Requiem for Dream

* Evil (2003)

* Sin City

* Crank – not very known, but wow, this is the best action movie ever.

* Elite squad – another great action movie, very realistic, borderline documentary.
It doesn't.

Big runtime, VM, no mutable state (really), no direct access to memory, pattern matching, exceptions, no side effects other than sending messages, no destructive assignment, single assignment variables - that's an incomplete and subjective list of Erlang features. How much of it is even comparable to what Go offers?
Sorry for the up coming stupid question but...

What is the value of this? Why can't unique identification be done using just regular increments on an ID column? Or even a composite key?
Excellent question and some great answers here. Most of the ARM designs are similarly in SOC's that are targeted to a fairly integrated space (like a phone or tablet) so getting the server peripherals on them is painful. A good example of that is the RasPi which does everything through USB basically and attaching storage via USB isn't really great.

That said, there is growing interest in dis-aggregation (think of it like component servers) and there are some interesting changes that brings into the space. Reasonably soon we could see an ARM SOC with a couple of nice network ports on it, and a "rack" where part of the rack was a shared storage pool for the rack and the rest was a swarm of compute. In applications where there is a high data to compute ratio (think digging though multi-petabyte date sets for stuff) The channel bandwidth benefit of many replicated compute nodes gives it an advantage over the larger 'server' type nodes. Fun times to design distributed architectures.
From the litecoin front page:

>The Litecoin network is therefore scheduled to produce 84 million litecoins, which is 4 times as many currency units as Bitcoin.

This seems like a completely useless and arbitrary statistic for highlighting the advantages of a currency.
Thanks for your reply, from looking at Iconfinder it did not look like a large piece of software with lots of business requirements.
Breast milk versus formula is an intensely studied issue, and despite all the study the proven advantages of breastfeeding are extremely tenuous. WHO recommendations to breastfeed have far more to do with poor water quality in developing countries than health benefits of breast milk over formula.

See: http://www.ntnu.edu/news/breastfeeding,
http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/are-the-benefi..., http://jhppl.dukejournals.org/content/32/4/595.full.pdf+html,
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-1200943/So-breast-...,
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-07-02/breast-feeding-is-n...,
http://www.halfsigma.com/2007/11/breastfeeding-d.html

From the last article: "In one analysis of multiple studies, combining data from more than 5,000 children, the IQ differences associated with breast-feeding were eliminated when the mothers’ characteristics were taken into account. Among 332 pairs of siblings in which one was breast-fed and the other bottle-fed, researchers also found no difference in IQ."

At the same time, breastfeeding is insanely expensive. It is insanely difficult for a working woman to breastfeed, and breastfeeding makes it extremely difficult to share the child-rearing burden between the mom and the dad.

Like with most recommendations having to do with child-rearing, those involving breastfeeding are both unscientific and aren't subject to cost-benefit analysis. Given the extremely tenuous proven benefits of breastfeeding, a baby is almost certainly better off in the long run from the mom's increased earning power from not having to downshift her career to breastfeed.
Thoughts on YC Interview Prep
Chicken and egg, for many people if you can't view certain files you can't use Chrome OS. I hope it works as well as their PDF plug-in, I always hate getting a link to a spreadsheet or doc and have my downloads folder clutter up (not to mention the bloat of Office).
But the same food really IS different across borders. There was a test of Coca-Cola published, within 8 close countries of European Union, each had different composition (esp. type and amount of sugar):

http://i.sme.sk/cdata/5/58/5843725/800-med.jpg

I remember a similar test done with Milka chocolate, the content was even different on the packaging label, only the artwork on the front was the same.
Imagine a distributed system where you want to preserve uniqueness across the board. Using a uuid more or less (by the sheer number of possibilities) guarantees that this will be the case.
Star Wars is not especially a "good" per se (BSG > Star Wars...heh). But to (a lot of) us, it's always fun to watch and became akin to a beacon of sorts and somehow this beacon is shared by (some) techies, (some) Trekkies, (some) browncoats, (some) Tolkien readers,... to the point where it's hard to take it seriously sometimes =)
Hi everyone, if you like, you can checkout the social graph among the characters of some movies at our page http://moviegalaxies.com . Enjoy :)
Sure. print sum(map(float, open('somefile.txt')))
I travelled around the middle east for 6 months spending $100 per month in 1997. I hitch hiked and slept with Bedouin or in monasteries. It is possible in other parts of the world too - maybe not Europe though. Save Europe for when you are rich.
My wife and I spent a month in Thailand a few years back. We paid $120 for an apartment in Bangkok for the month, including utilities, and spent about $6/day on food. Travel to and hotels in Laos, N. Thailand, a beach town, and Cambodia probably cost us about $300.

I do speak the language, but that only helped with finding a cheap (i.e. Thai-priced) place to rent.
The git repository is empty. The actual source is available at https://code.google.com/p/google-glass-kernel-source/downloa...
Sorry but I don't consider people who don't want to get help as homeless people. They have issues.
good point, or customizable like mobile phone covers (like the good ol' nokia days)
kernel-glass-XE04.0-RC06.tar.xz 65.7 MB

SHA1 Checksum:	555661ff568a0d89de213ea0c32915cd908cc582
I also doubt they would have long enough runways in Burbank to take off with that beast.
True or not, the word is that Litecoin was created so that people who were bitter about not having been amongst the earliest of the early Bitcoin adopters can have a new chance at a steep value increase. It's not even clear to me that Litecoin is an improvement at all, it just contains certain tweaks.
It most certainly is. A kilogram of fresh apples costs $2 to $4 here in Canada. $1 if you can get it from an orchard. I was just trying to exemplify that Apples are not free.

When I paid $4 for that apple: it was the middle of winter in Paris, France. I was in a grocery store, or Paris' equivalent of one at least.
Cool idea. I always use HN as a starting point for tech purchase. For example, I'm looking for a NAS and the first thing I'm going to do is search HN to see what other people are using. I would totally use this if you expanded to other areas.
Idiocracy – Basically an ordinary comedy, with an above average plot, but
overall nothing special or interesting. Overrated.

Agreed. I found it surprising when some relatives started overusing the jokes contained on the movie, as if they were part of the idiotic society portrayed on it.

Maybe the movie is a joke about itself, but I am afraid that's not the case.
that's actually good enough for my purposes :-) (I'm looking to get a zip code from the browser and then show stores, for example, in a 50 mile radius). 2 adjacent zip codes would still be around 50 miles from the store.
Do you have more details about prepaid VISAs and Patriot Act? As of a bit ago, you could just walk into any store and buy one with cash.
It's really a question about improving my workflow and improving my programming habits, in an effort to product quality code quickly.

Sometimes I'll get pulled onto different tasks abruptly and I don't really have a choice of when I get to switch, it usually happens only four or five times a day, so it's not a huge problem but it does interrupt the blocks of time I try to spend on other larger projects. I'm just wondering if there's any way to make the process of switching between projects easier?
Bread, jam and biscuits is "healthy"?

The ridiculous dietary-fat-fearing, obsessed-with-fruit Food Pyramid looms large in this article.
He's totally not right. He's regurgitating intensely unscientific hippie bullshit (the technical term for it is appeal to nature fallacy). See the articles in my other post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5618299

> It really is ridiculous when poor families who have a free way to feed their children are putting in the time and expense to get subpar nutrition from overseas.

Breastfeeding is only free if a woman's time has no value. This is especially relevant in poor families where women have to get back to working as quickly as possible to help support the family.
I wrote a blog post about why exercise is important to mental health and I think the title sums up how I feel about why exercise is so necessary: "The Body is a Distraction for the Mind" - http://felixthea.com/the-body-is-a-distraction-for-the-mind
True enough. You can't have everyone owning two full-time-occupied houses; the mean number of full-time-occupied houses owned per capita by the population has to be 1, modulo things like abandonment and cohousing. But you probably could have 90% of the adult population living off investments. With AI it could be 100%.
This is so true. We grow all those herbs in small pots. We also grow chives, beans, peppers, tomatoes and squash in a few medium sized pots and topsy turveys. No traditional garden needed.
Yeah, I agree. Don't spend money seeing Europe until you are old and have money. You won't be able to properly enjoy Europe unless you can stop worrying about your daily spend. Places like Laos and Bolivia are the way to go when you're young: super cheap and lots of adventure!
Yeah, this is an important point. When I said bulk, I meant £10 of stuff, rather than the massive quantities you can get from Amazon.

I think instant pay day loan companies like Wonga have done a lot for the cash flow problem. Personally, I've never used them, but if you have a bill and need to avoid a £50 late penalty, you can get a $100 loan at 1% interest a day, which is a brilliant value proposition if payday is a week away. I've seen a lot of criticism of these companies, but I think it's from people who don't understand the problem.
Now if only I could get this working with Postgres.app
As pallinder said, it can be very handy: the IDs can be generated by the nodes, not the db server. Very useful in disconnected environments. Imagine being able to create data on a smartphone whilst sitting on the plane, and not having to do anything messy with ID replacement when you sync with the server in the office.

The cost? The keys are larger, and (unless using a sequential algorithm) are poor candidates for clustered keys (because they force page splits). The impact can be rather large (this lead to terrible performance in early versions of Sharepoint).
true, I also don't like these articles when the guy magically has a rice cooker, strainer, pots/pans and all cooking utensils ready to go.

these articles should be done starting in a single room occupancy hotel with a hot plate and nothing else, because that's what you get when you are poor: nothing.
It's always baffled me that people think I'm sinister because I once worked for the CME.

* Exchanges don't do "evil finance things". Exchanges are middlemen; not only are conflicts of interest legally prohibited, but also an easy way to lose business. LIBOR rigging was not good news for the CME.

* I have about as much loyalty to my former employer as any other hacker would have to a big corporation--that is, I think it's a valuable business, but I'm not going to go on the Internet and shill for them because of some sense of loyalty.

But finance discussion causes people to enter "good vs evil" mode. Go figure.
My first review portal which uses an invited community model. Thoughts?
Of course, both of those methods are members of ActiveRecord and will work regardless of how you filter your records.
Yeah youre right. This article is total BS. He is not actually living on that amount of money
Here's a loaf from Tesco for fifty pence (seventy-seven US cents). Looks like twenty or so slices, so call it 2.5 pence per slice; about four cents a slice.

http://www.tesco.com/groceries/Product/Details/?id=262358089

As I recall, however, you have to be quick. The cheapest bread tends to vanish from the shelves within minutes of being put out.
With Dropbox, you are free to pick the editor. Not so with Drive. The 'Docs +' in fact adds a constraint.
You can still visit Switzerland while living on $500 per month, especially if you can manage to avoid hotels. You probably can't stay there too long, but you can visit.
The poor also make bad financial emergency decisions like using payday loan companies and loansharks, so a significant amount of their actual income just goes to paying off debts.

I lived in the "poorest postal code in Canada" and it was full of guys who traded food to each other like they were still in prison. If you didn't pay the huge interest payments you found yourself assaulted, unable to work, and deeper in the hole
The Texas plant was fined by federal regulators in 2006.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/04/18/fertili...

A better question is why local zoning failed to keep the plant away from homes, and why their insurance company wasn't more concerned about conditions at the plant.
What are your favourite movies BTW (regardless whether they are about startups)?
Your friend is right; the brain has a beautiful system called neural/sensory adaptation which eventually leads to the same patterns being less stimulating and even ignored.

Off-topic, but I wonder if some people with autism lack this mechanism and are therefore constantly overwhelmed by sensory input.

The brain is such a beautiful, but delicate hack of evolution.
All they have to do is issue a press release saying that it most definitely was not a UFO and the rest will take care of itself.
I suspect profligacy and indebtedness are criticized on the basis that many people who practice them come to regret it later, no matter how much of a good idea it seemed at the time, when they end up in poverty. A bit like how smoking cigarettes and/or eating an unhealthy diet and/or not taking exercise can lead to health problems.
I agree, though I can't think of a good way to fix it due to ambiguity in film names that aren't explicitly marked with "this is a film name".

With relatively unique names like Star Wars you could match the names as text strings. But that would lead to over-counting films like "Brazil" whose names are also names of other things.
> I would be a bit worried to eat one that cost over 10x less and the seller was still able to make a profit.

A lot of supermarkets, at least in the UK, sell various basic foodstuffs as loss leaders[1], so they are making a significant loss on each one they sell. They do this to get you into the shop, in the hopes that you'll buy other more profitable items once there. Also, in university towns supermarkets are prepared to take a loss in order to secure the long-term brand loyalty of students who are shopping at supermarkets for the first time and forming their opinions, and will go on to become professionals who can afford the more profitable products.

If you are smart you can take advantage of these to get food very cheaply indeed.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_leader
He's right. If you travel to the right places when you're young, you will actually spend less than if you were just carrying on with your life as usual. I did an around the world trip when I was 23 and only spent $8000 total (5 months on the road and 13 flights).
Do you have any comments on Mullholland Drive? Perhaps I'm showing off my shallowness here, but that movie just seemed to be mostly random scenes, under the guise of being deep.
> $500/month? But a simple train ticket that takes you 600km away will set you back $100. Here in Europe at least.

If you hitchhike, walk, or bicycle, you can avoid the trains. Even if you take a train every three weeks, that's only US$130 out of your US$500 budget.

> Hell, the basic government fees (insurance, pension etc.) to keep my sole proprietorship running costs me 300 euro/month.

Typically backpackers pay very little in taxes because they aren't making any money, or if they are, they're doing it under the table.

> I really don't see how you could live on the road on $500/month, you're making stuff up.

No, there are a lot of people who do this. You should meet some of them. Sign up with Couchsurfing and host them.
> Obviously you haven't seen the lisp ads from the 80's :)

I studied computer science in the 80's. Maybe that there were some business ads of Lisp (especially Lisp machines). But I had the strong impression that Ada was much more hyped than Lisp. Where is Ada today?

> if it was features, then smalltalk would have won

It depends on how "features" is defined. C won over Lisp and Smalltalk because of the single feature of performance. At the time when C was invented hardware was very expensive.

> Even racket had to get rid of the word "scheme" from their name for marketing reasons.

Racket is a different language. Scheme (R6RS etc.) is a subset of that.

According to your logic Rust will have no chance at all. We will see.
To me the dividing line is more a question of motivation. Some things with affiliate links are written because the person genuinely wants to say something about the subject, and then adds in affiliate links to get a little money without (as you note) diminishing the user experience at all. But other things are written solely as scaffolding for the affiliate links, content-farm style. The latter I think generally add noise, while the former are unobjectionable. It's not always clear which is which, though it's clearer at the extremes.
I've found Flask-WTF to work quite well for validating JSON. It looks a little weird at first due to the naming scheme mismatch, but I haven't encountered any actual functional problems with it.
Of you can use xmms on Linux. It's not dead yet!

http://www.xmms.org/
How did the sleeping with Bedouins thing work? Do you, like, walk into a coffee house in a Bedouin neighborhood and hope to meet someone who will invite you to stay at their house? Or is it more a meeting on the road kind of thing? Do the monasteries charge you hotel-room-like fees, or do you have to belong to their religion, or what?
Viewer only it seems?

Doesn't microsoft publish free versions of their Viewer? Though this does support multiple browsers.