joisig

Too bad about the reWind Mac app, which they've kneecapped with the latest update starting on Dec 19th even though it could probably have continued to function as a local-only thing. It was kind of nice as a local everything-memory, made some of my compliance work easier and stuff. Now deleting all the data and uninstalling it.

I also bought the Pendant but more out of techno-curiosity, never really used it much, so not much loss there. I'm sure a lot of people will be upset with the discontinuation of that, though.

Very cool!

This is how I learned Erlang and the BEAM back in the day, and I'd still recommend it.

I've used both heavily and I'd have to say no. You are in general better off with Elixir, with easy access to all Erlang and Elixir libraries, all BEAM functionality, a better package manager and build tool, and a more modern feeling / easier to learn programming language. Also starting to see a progressive type system and just a much faster developing ecosystem in general.

I think by now there's also more open source Elixir code out there, which means LLMs will be somewhat more proficient in Elixir (they're not great at it though, but enough to help).

It's harder to work in Erlang and incorporate Elixir libraries than the reverse, although it's certainly possible (you would use the mix build tool from Elixir to do so).

My main pros for Erlang are that it's a simpler language than Elixir with less "magic" and fewer footguns. I still use both, in the same system even, but most new code in the system is written in Elixir.

Hi Sam! It will get better. Merry Xmas from Iceland :)

This is such a cool project!! The best kind of Hacker News candy!

Some part of the reason for this is that pretty much anybody who is owns a single-family home in Iceland outright and is otherwise mostly debt-free would count as a millionaire (in USD) these days, because housing has appreciated by ridiculous amounts in the last 20 years or so.

One of the reasons there are a lot of house-millionaires is because some of the oldest generations, who bought their homes before 1980 or so, took normal loans with fixed interest rates, just before massive inflation in the 80s. The decrease in value per krona in ten years starting 1980 was something like 99.7%, so the loans went pretty quickly to something indistinguishable from zero. Inflation-indexed loans have been the only type of housing loan you could get for most of the time since about 1981, and are still the norm. The effect around that time of transition was that the younger generations (next waves of house buyers after them) were saddled with a lot of the burden.

Source: I'm Icelandic.

Neat! Driving HA through API is a clever alternative so you can build exactly the UX you want.

OP here, the switches we used are push-button Berker switches. I can't say I'm 100% happy with them, they look nice and are tactile but they are the "toggle" type - push and hold to either dim or brighten (never really know which) then again for the other direction, or quick push for on/off. My other annoyance is that sometimes a quick push does not register, but I don't know if this is because of the switch or because of the Shelly dimmer... I think more likely it's the dimmer.

Happy New Year from an Icelander in Garðabær (10 minutes by car south of Reykjavík... our definition of a suburb )

Me too, initially in a chat with GPT-4 [0] and then in a (private for now) wrapper that sends me a text message when analysis is complete, sums up the day's meals, and compares to my total calories burned per Apple Watch.

[0] https://joisig.com/gpt-4-passable-personal-nutritionist

Yes, the BEAM VM allows you to write native code in a few different ways and call it from BEAM-native languages. For Rust there is a library called Rustler that simplifies the process a lot.

I'm a very long-time Beeminder user and would recommend it to anybody looking for another motivational mechanism. It's not always the best approach to motivation, but for certain types of goals like "work out frequently enough", the one-week "akrasia horizon" which kind of means you're mentally committing to work by your future self rather than your present self (and as your present self you can only un-commit with a week's notice), along with staying on a good-enough-on-average "yellow brick road" as they call it, is a game-changer.

It's the total amount of money he'd be paying to Beeminder if he failed all his goals (money at risk).

The "vertical" example looks contrived in JavaScript, but if that's your thing, I think it's OK.

But please don't promote antipatterns from languages that actually have a pipe operator (like Elixir) such as the '''concat("!")''' where the previous implementation's version using an operator is much clearer and more idiomatic.

I see a ton of Elixir code where people shoe-horn things into a vertical pipeline where the "normal" code would be a lot more readable, for example invoking '''Kernel.+(2)''' instead of just doing '''my_var + 2'''

Elixir/Phoenix is a great option. Oban for batch processing. Everything runs either in the Elixir VM (BEAM) or on PostgreSQL, no other servers to set up or manage.

Same for personal projects.

Sentry is great for monitoring. Prometheus/Grafana for operational insights. All are easy to integrate with Elixir.

funet.fi and sunet.se - quite a bit of nostalgia and gratitude attached to those domains for me, first used them in '91

Similar in Icelandic. Most Icelanders when speaking English will use the Icelandic "v" sound for both v and w, it is somewhere in between.

I wrote a CMS / personal website hosting system that lets me publish straight from the Bear App note taking app that I use every single day.

Write or edit any post as a note in Bear, give it a tag so it gets published as a blog post or a new page, run one command and my site is updated.

The software is available as AGPL licensed open source.

I blogged about it, if you'd like more details: https://joisig.com/bearly-a-cms

MV2 background pages were already by default in a mode where they are suspended when not in use. MV3 doesn't improve on that except to make it impossible to have persistent background pages.

Same here, been lifting since 1989 and online since the year after, and this is the first I hear of this website.

I'm seeing a pretty big ad at the top of every page. Is my experience unique?

For software startups there has never been a lesser need for funding.

For anybody willing to start their own thing, it's never been easier.

And for anybody else who's smart and wants to do big things, message me.

It's a lot of fun!

0.2506 is my nearest match

Looking back, and filtering for things I built from scratch, probably GRIT [0], the Google Resource and Internationalization Tool. I originally wrote the tool when I had enough of 3-way merges of resource files for Google Desktop, and it ended up being one of a couple of key technologies that enabled Google Chrome to launch from day one in 43 languages, which I think was probably quite impactful to the adoption of that browser.

[0] https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/tools/grit/+/...

> How do you reconcile being a machine made of matter with the feeling that you're free to choose what you do?

First, accept the fact that "you" are _only_ that machine. No higher "soul".

The machine (you!) has free will in that it decides for itself, through physical processes occurring within it, what it wants - albeit with some outside forces, circumstances and other individuals influencing this anywhere from a bit to a lot.

You are this mostly-independent machine operated by physical forces. Therefore, you have free will.

A secondary question is whether the state of the universe and therefore of you the machine at time T also pre-ordains what you will do and what you will want at time T+1. I think a more interesting question is whether that actually matters in any practical or even metaphysical sense, given that we experience time linearly in the direction we do?

Why only outside of the US?

This is really neat! In general I think there are some interesting niches for non-standard linkers. One example I considered (but did not start) when I was on the Chromium project was going to be a debug-only linker for Windows with a focus exclusively on iteration speed (but also debug symbols), as the linker being used for that platform at the time was tremendously slow.