skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Remember, programming languages are a tool and problem solving is a skill. Learn data structures and algorithms. There are plenty of good books and websites out there on those topics. Once you have a basic understanding of those you can learn to apply your language of choice to implement solutions to problems. Next, find problem and solve. Also, some languages lend themselves to solving certain problems better than others. Don't limit yourself to one language. Once you have the knowledge of one language you are only a different syntax away from the next. Logic does not change, problems do.
Preparatory Refactoring – how to get your codebase to run marathons
An interesting question. In some cases it seems to be cheaper to house the homeless than pay for emergency medical and police services.

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation spent some money researching housing of homeless alcoholics in Seattle and found a monthly per-month savings of $2,500, a reduction of 53 percent compared to previous spending: http://www.rwjf.org/en/about-rwjf/newsroom/newsroom-content/... In Seattle I guess it costs about $13,000 to house a homeless person for a year.

In Florida it apparently costs about $10,000/year to house a homeless person and provide some job services; it cost about $31,000 a year to leave them homeless and provide emergency police and medical responses at the current rate. http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2014/05/27/3441772/florida-...

Here's an article from Fox (?!): http://www.foxbusiness.com/economy-policy/2014/07/07/how-hou...
Can somebody more up to speed with the LHC and Higgs announcements clue me in? I remember the announcement[1] a couple of years ago that the Higgs particle was detected, but then I read another article[2] casting some doubt on the announcement.

The article posted in the submission seems to imply that the Higgs particle was conclusively found, and now this hunt is to determine 'how' they form. Is this understanding correct?

[1] http://press.web.cern.ch/press-releases/2012/07/cern-experim...

[2] http://www.redorbit.com/news/science/1113275750/higgs-boson-...
It's easy to save with no debt, no family and an income that is even 50% of the typical entry-level SV income. Most--as in the majority--of people who "work in tech" especially of they're younger than 40 had to take on significant student loan debt to get degrees, certifications and what have you to get those jobs. Your savings rate is extraordinarily unusual, and it doesn't necessarily mean you're smarter about money matters, or that everybody else is dumb about them.
Is elixir just a different syntax for erlang, or are the semantic differences? Their website doesn't seem to make it very clear.
I'm from Lexington, KY, the blue dot in a sea of orange on the map. You hear a lot about Appalachia's woes (the stories on the local news from Bell County, Bath County, etc are depressing beyond words), but it's been hard for me to understand why Appalachia is the way it is: chronically, horribly and uniformly poverty stricken.

So I just read this PBS author interview which tries to put some reasons to it: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/countryboys/readings...

The main takeaway, as I read it, is that in cities and other rural areas there is a middle class and even some upper class folks around and the resources they bring along (and maybe even the example they set... sorry if that's offensive) is a positive influence on the extremely poor. In cities, obviously you have better municipal services and programs and a professional class of doctors, lawyers, etc. In rural farmland many families own their land which has some value and there are some wealthy landowners with large tracts sprinkled in.

In Appalachia, there's none of that. The land isn't worth anything and it's just poor poor poor as far as the eye can see (which is large, geographically, unlike inner cities).

Except for coal mine owners and operators. That, I can't explain. Do they live in the area? Do they not contribute to the communities? The PBS article goes as far as to say they actively held the poor down to keep them working in the mines, but I'd have to see more evidence to believe that wholesale.

In any case, it strikes me that this wasteland of poverty with very few middle class or wealthy folks is the opposite effect of tech hubs. Brad Feld and others have written about how the density of entrepreneurs and angel investors with deep pockets is what makes a tech hub viable (very liberally paraphrased). From a general perspective, it seems like a normal curve where the outliers at the top are places most uniformly non-poor and populated densely and the outliers at the bottom are uniformly poor and populated sparsely.
Gin, a Go web framework similar to Martini, would probably performs 10 times better. Since the only purpose of using Martini is because it has a similar style than Phoenix, I would suggest changing the framework to Gin or another Go framework since Martini is not the only framework available.
Read Programming Pearls to begin flexing your mind in the right direction. It's a somewhat older book in terms of the actual practicalities, but in terms of getting you thinking about how code is applied to situations, it's timeless.
This is way harder than 1024 because of those 3 coin combinations needed.
Yes and no. I think it's more a federal responsibility and here is why. When you have an economic magnet such as NYC, SV, north Dakota shale fields, etc., these places bring a disproportionate amount of economic immigrants (people from outside the metro area). You can't honestly put that oversized burden on the local working population. Unfortunately, we don't have a good structure to deal with that. That's a political shortcoming I wish were fixed.
There may be a bias in the scale making the rural-city divide look worse than it is. Rural areas are often cheaper, so the median income could represent more purchasing power. Also a bachelor’s degree here is used as an indicator/measure. In some places these are less valued and relevant to employment as others.

Every basket of measures is imperfect and I quite like the ones used here (education, income, unemployment, disability, life expectancy and obesity), but there probably are some weird biases someplace.
>“What these techies don’t realise though is that we’re no different to them - they’re just one misstep, one paycheck away from being us.”

This is what happens when you have a runaway cost of living.
Doesn't work Chromium 38.0.2125.111 Ubuntu 14.10
I think you forgot the most important potential fix out there - instituting a Living Wage in some form or another. The bulk of the 'burden' of which would fall on taxing corporations and the ultra rich.
The media have been fueling class and racial divides in society since the 1960s, and particularly since Watergate, when journalists started thinking that they were crusaders for social justice rather than reporters of factual events.
I learn it backwards. Take something slightly complicated (so much so that you find it challenging to read) that solves a problem that you understand.

Then think of a feature or modification that you think would be useful. Try and implement it.

It's incredibly painful but I find this works better than trying to build something from 'hello world'. Before you know it, you can understand why stuff was implemented that way and what not.
Elixir is to Erlang what Scala is to Java. They leverage the Erlang VM in the same way that Scala leverages the JVM.
Can you move those tabs just above webpage without third party addon?
I know Classic Theme Restorer solves it, but Firefox also keeps changing stuff I got used to like every other release.

I don't get why they can't leave it alone for existing users and ask explicitly if I want to turn on all those new fancy features on updates. I don't mind if options will be hidden in about:config.
JSON Parser & Visualizer
Ursula K. Le Guin Accepts the National Book Foundation's Medal
The western counties are very wealthy with outside money and have a booming tourist industry with the ski resort and Grand Teton and Yellowstone NPs. Elsewhere coal, gas and uranium is booming. Add in the lack of income tax, Cheyenne and Laramie's proximity to the Denver area and the lowest population of any State equates to a 'good time.'
Loudon County, Virginia is a very similar county to the Virginia County I live in. The geography is the same, the politics is (was) the same, the laws and societal structures are almost identical.

But the last time I visited Loudon, it was freaking amazing. Instead of seeing rural farms, my road trip consisted of driving past mansion after mansion. Talking to some folks at the local supermarket, the county is having a heckuva time trying to coordinate all the new growth.

It's federal contracts. You can't borrow and spend the amount the government has over the last ten years or so without the management and prime vendor layer skimming off a tremendous amount of cash. These aren't necessarily folks putting in the commute to do the 9-5 every day. More likely they'll have a hired car, or come into the city and stay at a nice hotel (or an apartment rented for just this purpose)

Loudon is a really interesting experiment in growth and unintended consequences. I'd love to come back in 20-30 years and read a study of the inside game of everything that's going on there. Must be weird to have a PTA meeting with out-of-town, newly minted multimillionaires sitting next to minimum wage folks who grew up there.
Elixir makes a lot of the syntax of Erlang (derived from Prolog) simpler and more familiar to people working from, say, a Ruby background.

It adds better support for UTF8, better metaprogramming tools for declaring custom constructs, a standard library for things like collections and streams, proper default setup for some use of OTP patterns, and various other things. It adds a few sane default conventions for things like documentation, testing, and private/public visibility in modules.

It in turn transpiles to Erlang, so has all the same performance characteristics.
Elixir is Erlang with some Ruby-like syntactical sugar that vanishes when you look very close at it but makes the transition very easy. It's not like moving to Erlang or Haskell or OCaml coming from procedural languages.

I have experience with Sinatra and Rails and I did a small project with Elixir and Phoenix in September. My bet before looking at the benchmarks was Phoenix >> Sinatra > Ruby, and that's the way it turned out to be. I was curious about how Martini and Node would compare.

That said, I enjoyed developing with Phoenix and it's really similar to Rails in its structure. The differences are about having views+templates (decorator pattern) instead of Rails' plain views (which would be Phoenix's templates) and having first class handlers for websockets. The developers of Phoenix answered quickly to all my questions and to the issues I opened on GitHub (it's still 0.x software in heavy development).

Anyway I still can't use it to replace Rails in the projects I do for my customers. There many reasons for that, some about Phoenix and some about me.

1) There aren't enough developers and it won't be wise for a customer to become too dependent from me (or any other developer)

2) There isn't an ecosystem comparable to the Rails one yet. Example: it can take forever to develop a replacement for all the basic functionality a Rails developer gets for free from a gem like devise (everything that revolves around authentication).

3) There might be many useful tools from the Erlang world but it takes time to learn them and become decently productive with Erlang and Elixir. How to make decent money while going back so many years productivity-wise? Obviously this applies to any transition to any ecosystem.

4) Performances usually don't matter at all: most servers have to sustain only low loads and Rails is good enough for that. In 20 years I probably had to work with only two web applications were speed really mattered. One was done with Java, the other one was PHP+Java and it was constrained more by the db than by the frontend. However I would consider Elixir right now for any heavily concurrent server, let's say a game server with thousands of players.
Quantum factorization of 44929 with only 4 qubits
Aside from giving them the freedom to create and explore new ideas outside of their usual job descriptions, I suggest pairing them up with "hacker mentors". The young don't necessarily need new skills, but guidance on applying their existing skills in new, creative ways.
That is exactly why I made this collection of problems: https://github.com/karan/Projects

> A list of practical projects that anyone can solve in any programming language. These projects are divided in multiple categories, and each category has its own folder.

Feel free to also look at other people's solutions (many in JS): https://github.com/thekarangoel/Projects-Solutions
It's median income though, not mean, so that's not just a few hyper-wealthy individuals throwing the stats.
The 20% fee seems ridiculously high.
I suppose this has to get passed on the customers, but the review system alone will probably keep people going there.

On product reviews, I know some are juiced but I still look at Amazon reviews when examining something (and try to figure out which ones appear authentic). I imagine most people take these reviews at face value and reviews are worth a lot when having a service performed. I've never been on Angie's list but it seems a bit scammy from the little exposure I have had. Amazon likely appears more trustworthy, so I grudgingly predict success for this program.
System for Public/Private Access to Large-Scale, Confidential Data
Last year, Amazon unveiled its drones the day before Cyber Monday (2013)
I tried using Phoenix for a simple web app I wrote last month. It was a couple of static html/js files and a single WebSocket connection, so nothing fancy. Unfortunately, I found the documentation lacking, and the framework much too "magical" for me to quickly understand and make use of. I have no experience with Rails but rather with Django, so that may explain a lot. Anyway, in the end I used Erlang and Cowboy instead. I checked out Cowboy from github master which is "almost 2.0" now, and I had no problems at all setting basic project up. Defining routes was straightforward and explicit (which I like), upgrading connection to websocket and handling incoming data was simple and explicit too. I added eredis and jiffy to the project and that's basically it, it did everything I wanted it to do splendidly, with little magic and very little overhead.

Now, I know Erlang much better than Elixir, and I worked with Cowboy before and I needed to make this app quickly, which resulted in me not spending too much time on learning Phoenix. Between controllers, routes, views and channels I got an impression that Phoenix has too many moving parts and that it would take me too much time to fully understand what's going on. Especially because I really didn't need most of these, just a static file server and a single WebSocket.

However, I see Phoenix potential for more complex projects, where investing the time to learn it is going to be worth it. It looks like Phoenix provides an awful lot of conveniences and makes a project much better structured than my "a couple of files in a single directory" approach.

I guess what I want to say is that I almost used Phoenix this time and that I would probably use it if it had better docs - especially a solid tutorial(s) for use cases similar to mine. And that, while I didn't use it this time around, I'm certainly going to keep an eye on it and consider it next time I have to write something similar. It looks very promising and - like Elixir itself - very interesting, I hope for it to only grow in the future :)
Asking the right questions + reframing the job interview
They are pretty much the same. This is what Erlang's creator wrote about Elixir 1.5 years ago http://joearms.github.io/2013/05/31/a-week-with-elixir.html

tl;dr there are good innovations and bad things, not a surprise :-)
Aren't they quite different creatures, though? It's clear that language is not the only determining factor, since Sinatra is so much faster than Rails, and the Node example is so much faster in a cluster configuration. If the experience of programming for Sinatra, Phoenix, and Martini are very similar, it's fair to compare them (though maybe benchmarks may not be super useful, given that the database layer is likely to be the bottleneck in most large site deployments rather than simple routing and other stuff being compared here). If Negroni is very different (I don't know that it is, but a brief perusal of the site for Martini and the github for Negroni indicates very different experiences) then it's possibly no more useful a comparison than Rails to Phoenix.
>Homelessness is a problem with or without the tech backdrop.

Agreed. But is there something about the tech industry as practiced in Silicon Valley (the sheer concentration; how VC money might prevent the Schumpeterian forces of creative destruction from regulating the local economic cycle; the exercise of political clout) that has made homelessness there particularly bad? Has anywhere else in the country experience this kind of sustained housing boom, of this magnitude?
Is it therefore possible to use Erlang libraries in an Elixir application, or to "drop to Erlang" in places where it could be advantageous?
I don't have any experience with it, but your question reminded of this article[0] that came up on HN a while ago arguing it's more than just syntax differences. Basically that it's more a Clojure/Scala than a Coffeescript.

[0] http://devintorr.es/blog/2013/06/11/elixir-its-not-about-syn...
Just part of our industry from what I have seen over the years. It always seems to me that I am working with mostly technically competent people who know very little about anything beyond technology or their own personal experience in life.

Maybe this is true of most people (limited ability to empathize) but I think the intelligence and ego that many engineers exhibit to drive their performance impedes the ability to absorb information sometimes.
The article doesn't go "beyond just pointing at tech companies" -- it tries to paint a picture where the obvious, principle causative agent (the tech boom) isn't responsible for the housing problems in San Francisco. Instead, it must be NIMBYs, or zoning, or owls, or...anything but just acknowledging that we've crammed a bunch of very wealthy tech people into a very small city in a very short time (circa 2007).

Once you acknowledge that this is an acute crisis caused by a single industry, you have to consider that one reasonable solution might be to discourage tech companies from coming to the city via taxes, zoning and so on. There is, after all, no inalienable right for startups to have offices in live/work lofts in SOMA.

Again, the whole thing was written to appeal to an audience of tech people who want to believe that they're not the problem and shouldn't have to sacrifice, even though the facts clearly point in the other direction. Why should the fabric of a city change instantaneously because a group of relatively entitled new arrivals believe that they somehow "belong" more than the people who arrived before?

We can't have a useful conversation that doesn't start from the acknowledgement that tech is a big part of the problem.
What have you done that's more advanced than 'Hello World'?

I'm assuming you don't literally mean you've written 'Hello, World!' a thousand times, and I assume you've tried more complicated projects, so where do you keep getting stuck?

Logic and structure doesn't leap, fully formed, from the head of an architect like some prophecy. It starts with some notions that are carefully honed into a working implementation.
Red face...can't believe I missed that.
I don't see "database" mentioned anywhere on that page. What direction are you going to head in with that?
Awesome, what a cool library. I almost wish I had even an inkling of notion of need for it, just to try it out.

Nice job, well done.

EDIT: And the syntax and semantics are clear from the examples. Again, well done.
When you compare it to this dot map which shows population density you can see a relation to high density in rural areas to the worse areas on the other map. http://demographics.coopercenter.org/DotMap/
Do you think this article is guilty of blaming the engineers? I thought nuanced views like this were actually quite well represented here:

>“It’s not necessarily their fault, but they are stakeholders in the homelessness problem and have the power and brains to change it.”

Where are you detecting notes of "us" vs. "them"?
I've known people who commuted from as far as Winchester WV and Richmond VA for their DC job.
The industry as a whole should move to an apprenticeship model. We're a trade, and should start recognizing that.

A four year paid apprenticeship program from 18-22 would do wonders to help the diversity and inclusiveness of the industry as well. The Ivy League CS degree can come later.
Atlassian Git Tutorials
You can use whatever database `app` you want, such as Ecto.
Try make something that interests you, see how you would go around implementing it. If you're stuck with a feature, google it. Then see how you did against the "proper" way of doing something, and maybe adapt your code to use the "proper" method. By proper, I mean that it's a more efficient way to do something than to hack it together and have it just about work.

You've learnt the language and the syntax, but it's the experience of just doing something that counts is where it's at! Good luck :)
It will be a long time before you will actually need something other than Mnesia :)
WebKit is open source, and it's easy to make your own if you want to.
"Either way, I would steer clear of doing any business with Amazon, unless you are fine with the fact that you aren't building yourself a business. You are building up amazon's"

The type of people that will use this (an electrician as an example) will be like lambs to the slaughter. While many of us know about the mercuriality of places like Amazon and Google (dropping projects and services when they don't pan out or when they get bored) most "normals" are not aware of the dangers of having their eggs in this type of basket. And the risk that is involved.
Show HN: Simple(like Gmail) job board for AngularJs developers
International Space Station’s 3-D printer creates sample replacement part
> shun higher education in favor of strict adherence to the bible.

Which passage in the Bible tells Christians to shun higher education?
I'm really glad to see this wonderful work that people have done based on the original SimCity source code! many thanks to Will Wright and the people at EA/Maxis and OLPC for helping make it open source, and to everyone who worked on making it run so nicely and easily in the web browser. This project shows exactly why that was an important thing to do, and I hope it inspires others to do similar things.