downvoted hard for assuming that most of the energy consumption by kerosene goes to visible light, LOL, come on man
1,393 karma · joined August 13, 2010
As of today (2/3/2016), this account is now 2000 days old with 1369 karma. I've decided to celebrate by announcing a switch to a (for better or worse) far-less-anonymous account, "pmarreck".
Given any programming task, you're just going to end up with better code in pretty much any other language, especially a functional one.
That's the real problem. The lack of a social safety net without being an Employee of BigCorp.
Metrics-wise perhaps a "spread spectrum" approach that covers so many things that most signs of being "productive" would end up at least reflecting in the numbers, yet would prevent "gaming" of the numbers since so many things are measured. Used only to inform and not base hard decisions on.
This would catch both people who care about their job but for whatever reason aren't producing anything measurable, as well as people who have produced but perhaps could produce even more if they were more engaged.
Which we hear about all the time. So WTF?
In any event, why would a squatter merit such a hostile response?
Fallacy of composition?
> Ultimately the only thing that matters are actions
Which were terrible. MAYBE they are better NOW. :P
> not the human personality traits that people project onto anthropomorphized corporations
So corporations are run by computers, I take it?
> anti-OSS
This position is literally irrational UNLESS you are a profit-making entity that considers OSS a threat to your own for-profit business model.
It's funny because I don't actually think this is the case. Not completely, anyway. That's their fear, but I think that the upside in the end would counteract the immediate downside.
It could also be structured interestingly- Basic Windows could be free, but certain diffs/patches/drivers could be for-pay (such as higher-performant stuff, graphics stuff etc.) A mix of free OS and proprietary profitable stuff. They could also employ an army of Windows consultants...
I mean... It's nice that they're trying to "come clean," now, and all. But it's sort of like a criminal who was never punished now claiming to be legit because he's seen the light... and there's PLENTY of us out there still who still feel wronged by the past.
I also love Ruby (I'm now trying to get into Elixir) so the IronRuby stuff resonates, I salute you.
> and 10 years of watching Microsoft blatantly steal from open-source and not give back
Oh you mean LDAP? ;) And whatever harm Outlook did to MIME or SMTP or... and not even going to mention IE
I know the latter is a downvotable attitude, and I apologize because it's very unlike me, but it is one of my few sore points, and this comes from years of web developer hell dealing with IE, years of working at places which only considered solutions that Microsoft invented, years of dealing with Microsoft BS left and right.
Before you downvote- If you honestly consider yourself a developer who cares about their craft and career, I want you to read these 2 books- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar and http://www.paulgraham.com/hackpaint.html (yes, I just plugged a pg book on HN... It's part of why I'm here, actually!). And THEN come back and try to downvote me.
The reason why they failed is because they, like many others, were "nebulously/quasi legal." (You know what was ALSO awesome yet not legal or respectful of creator pay? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audiogalaxy .) At least Apple was trying to make it all legit. They did start with DRM (note: no longer the case for years) but this was to make the record companies more comfortable with it.
The reason why SeeqPod was sued is because Warner Music (and others) had a case. It was not a purely frivolous, harassing lawsuit.
Which is a pretty good endorsement, in my book.
I will say that the production deployment process and tooling is not purely Elixir at this point (yet). People tend to use the Ruby Capistrano gem to deploy... which works... but to me gives sort of a cognitively dissonant experience :)
Another quirk I noticed is that IEEE floating point is not completely supported, for example there is no "Infinity" value and working with large numbers will often get you rounding errors. For example, using the Math.pow function (the ONLY native power function!) ONLY works with floating point values so using it will get you large-number roundoff errors. Some libs have been written to manage numeric data better (in my case I literally had to look up an efficient integer power algorithm and implement it, see https://github.com/pmarreck/elixir-snippets/blob/master/math...) but the lack of native support there is weird (and Erlang's fault, really), especially coming from Ruby.
Seriously, where did I say this? I just reread my last comment and I said "on average" aka "on net."
I did not claim you said ALL the people who visit it are bad. I even said "on average" in the comment you replied to. Are we reading the same things? BUT... for it to be a net negative, on average, most of the people would, by necessity, need to be bad. I'm taking issue with your average, NOT claiming you are trying to say "all visitors to AM are bad."
You cannot state as fact, nor prove, that most visitors to AM are bad. Your "gut feeling" is as good as a hole in the wall, and I'll explain why... Neither can you state, nor prove, that it is a net negative. Pure and simple. All's fair in love and war. Adultery and all its negatives are going to continue to exist regardless of whether or not AM exists. To paraphrase a famous lyric, "don't hate the [startup appealing to] players, hate the game." Don't conflate the two. Getting rid of AM will not only NOT get rid of adultery, it will spawn imitators which may be even better at this niche market.
Anyway, if people die with their secrets most of the time (which I STRONGLY suspect is the case), how is unhappiness actually added to the world, using your very hypothetical "world negativity measuring device"? To take it a step further, if AM (at least before this breach!) actually made it more likely to be able to hide things until the day you die, it would arguably result in a net positive. (Where the measurement is "happiness of people, even if it requires some ignorance")
The age-old aphorisms "what you don't know, won't hurt you" and "ignorance is bliss" come to mind.
What if the sad fact is that nobody can completely satisfy everyone for all time, and we instead choose to believe a fairy tale, at great peril to our own sanity?
What if there's a significant number of ambiguously-sexual people who are not serviced well enough by the marriage model that we're all pressured to conform to?
What if adultery and AM are just symptoms of society trying too hard to define strict sexual roles?
What if things like AM are simply a stepping-stone to realizing we're simply not a very good mating-to-one-other-being-for-life species and that marriages should be "open by default"? I mean, we're literally just a few genes away from bonobo monkeys who arguably engage in the freakiest most non-committal sex life imaginable: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/02/evolution-creati...
> I didn't make any blanket "everyone who does this is bad" statements
Yet you said that site's existence was a "net negative" for happiness in the world, which (unless I'm not being logical) implies that, on average, the actions of the people on that site are negative, i.e., "bad."
To be perfectly, bluntly clear- There isn't actually any suffering (and in some cases, still almost none) until the secret gets out.
By that definition (which to me is entirely obvious, but clearly not to others), OUTING all of these people is what will cause tremendous suffering.
I don't agree with these blanket "everyone who does this is bad" statements. (I think there's a lot of people who have been cheated on out there and their latent scorn always comes out in these things. Rationality goes out the window when personal feelings are involved.) It's awfully judgmental and sandblasts out all the fine details. What of the man who wants to stay married to his invalid wife but still needs to "get off" at times, and neither wants to break her heart nor can he longer function rationally without? What of the good husband and father who is hiding his bi-ness and therefore takes a man now and then on the side? (What of the woman in the same position?) What of the member of the church demanding absolute celibacy who has invested his life into it but realizes he simply can't function without sexual human contact now and then?
Do you seriously expect the amount of upheaval that would result from "outing everyone" to be LESS pain overall than the current situation?
1) Extreme concurrency due to Erlang underneath, which means not only being able to handle lots of connections at once, but very good DDoS resistance. See WhatsApp's blog post about it: http://blog.whatsapp.com/196/1-million-is-so-2011 An Elixir (or Erlang) process can fire up a million new nodes in a second on commodity hardware. No joke. The out-of-the-box concurrency in Elixir replaces many tools in Ruby that are normally separate gems: http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/ruby-concurrency-need...
2) Near-100% uptime possible. (Google "Whatsapp uptime"). Erlang was designed to run cell networks. It made them very reliable. The entire philosophy of the language is to "embrace failure, log it and try again ASAP." This ends up being a very good strategy when dealing with the uncertainty of the real world, and things like security concerns.
3) Live code upgrades without downtime. See this demo: https://youtu.be/96UzSHyp0F8
4) MUCH nicer syntax than Erlang. Especially for ex-Rubyists. It's a functional language (with all the advantages that provides) with a Ruby-flavored syntax. Best of all worlds.
5) Phoenix, the Rails-equivalent web API, has come out of the gate with a 2 to 10x performance improvement over Rails using a fraction of the CPU load: http://www.littlelines.com/blog/2014/07/08/elixir-vs-ruby-sh...
6) Elixir provides true macros (in the Lisp sense). It seems to be the very first non-homoiconic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homoiconicity) language to pull this off: http://elixir-lang.org/getting-started/meta/macros.html Macros allow for some very powerful code, but the homoiconicity of Lisplikes (which is normally the only place "true" macros are available) has been a turn-off for many. I probably don't need to sell you on macros if you're on Hacker News, Paul Graham has historically praised them as a key differentiator: http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html Also see his praising of Lisp: http://www.paulgraham.com/diff.html
7) No reliance on the JVM (and its spinup time).
8) The tooling is fantastic so far- Mix is like a combination of "bundler", "gem" and "rake". The test suites run in parallel by default, which means faster code turnaround.
9) You can take advantage of the entire existing Erlang code library. Trivial to include it in your project and call into it. That's quite the bootstrapping, and eliminates a lot of upfront work to make things useful.
10) Harder to make bugs in general- Making state explicit means less coupling, dependencies and bugs. Immutable data means less bugs (and trivial concurrency). Pattern-matching means less control-flow logic, and again, less bugs. Using typespecs in conjuction with Dialyzer means less bugs: http://learningelixir.joekain.com/elixir-type-safety/
Less bugs means far more productive programmers. More resilience means more uptime and more resistance to DDoS and happier customers. Live code upgrades mean more uptime. Faster test suites means far more productive programmers. Nice syntax means it "feels nice" for Rubyists (and likely Pythonistas). Faster language, period, means less hardware is necessary.
All of this and more, combined with the sense of intelligence and professionalism I'm detecting in the community (Jose Valim, Chris McCord, etc.) gives me a pretty good feeling about it.
I've been doing Ruby for over 10 years. Never seen anything like Elixir.
Rust, Haskell, Clojure will have their niches too. But Elixir will probably take over back-end web development.
I don't understand this logic. The answer is "no, it wasn't, because there were fewer vehicles." What would happen is that stations would become less dense, and there's a low density point there where "inconvenience" is reached, or at least, gas-range anxiety. This actually happened when gas vehicles were new.
The response also says that demand is already decreasing simply due to the emergence of more fuel-efficient vehicles, so a penetrating EV market may merely accelerate that decline.
Wait... What is this??
> a used Lexus that cost us $8,000. It's an extremely comfortable luxury car that seats 5 and can easily be driven across the country
How much did that Lexus cost new?
How much will a used Tesla go for in a few years?
> and can easily be driven across the country
Yes, NOW. But, you didn't read the article (or your reading comprehension sucks). If 10% of the cars on the road become electric, at least 10% of the gas stations will start to close (since that business is barely profitable), making it increasingly less convenient to own a gas car.
> A new electric car [1], on the other hand, costs approximately the same but can only seat 2 people and can travel 160 km on one charge.
Yeah, today. What about in 5-10 years?
You consistently use current state to argue against future state. There must be a fallacy named for this.
> It takes 6 hours to fully charge.
Tesla's tech is here now and takes far less time. He also released all his patents.
> The costly lithium-ion batteries will have to be replaced at some point.
Yes, in 10 years, when they will be far, far cheaper, due to manufacturing economies of scale. In that time they will lose only 10-15% of their total charging capacity.
> True, it is convenient for trips around town without much luggage.
Using electric motors over gas engines is a HUGE space savings. Again, see: Tesla. (You really need to see one of these up close and drive one. It may be the only thing that will "show you the light.")
> I'm fairly confident that the used Lexus will outlast and outrun the new electric car.
Nope, because the ICE (internal combustion engine) and transmission has hundreds or thousands more parts (any of which can break) than an electric transmission. The Tesla only has ONE GEAR, for example. Teslas, and other electrics with 3-phase AC induction motors, will last faaaaaaaaaaaaaaar longer than gas powered cars. I've seen 60 year old electric motors running like a top, and in googling the reliability of electric motors, they are far higher than gas motors. Coupled with the "tipping point" effect of many gas stations closing up due to lack of business, that cross-country trip will end up needing to be routed through available stations one day...
Did I mention that a Tesla, going the same distance as an ICE vehicle, has 1/3 the carbon footprint.
Source: I own a Tesla Model S P85+ and fully expect this thing to still be in tip top shape in 10 years while continuing to run circles around gas cars (ohhhh, I can't wait till you experience simply passing people by at speed in this thing... you think the thought and it's like you're a pinball coming off caroms to your destination...)