softbuilder

'Elegant' is probably not a word I would choose, although it may apply at times. Erlang was the first place I saw pattern matching and is also how I came to actually understand list comprehensions, although I'd seen them elsewhere. There were other little things. And I liked the syntax! I don't think it was any one thing though. It was more the way things worked together, and worked much differently than other languages I had worked with. At that point I had been a programmer for 10 years and felt kind of jaded. Everything seemed fundamentally the same. I was even surprised now not-weird Lisp was when I finally got around to it. It seemed like once you get to a certain place with programming you think you basically have it all worked out and everything becomes implementations details. And then something comes along and shakes that understanding. It's that shake that I was grateful for. It was a personal experience. Others have probably had that with Haskell, etc.. I hope everyone gets to have that now and then.

Every time I see these (LFE, Elixir, perhaps others) mentioned I feel sad that people don't seem to see the beauty in the Erlang language itself. Learning Erlang was a watershed moment for me and it had little to do with the actor model or OTP.

That should not be meant to take away from these other projects that do interesting things. It just seems like people needlessly avoid Erlang because it's unfamiliar and they miss something amazing in the process.

Yes, that sounds right. I think the particular case with my watch was somewhat unusual and what you describe was the more common situation.

I was telling someone about Best the other day. They show my hometown store in Sacramento. It looked like the corner had exploded out. I always thought that was just a one-off and it was only that particular store with the weird architecture. I had never been to another Best.

They had a weird business model too as I (barely) recall. You didn't usually go there and buy a product and take it home. It was a showroom for products that were in a catalog. You would order what you wanted from the catalog and then come back a few days later and they would have it for you. I bought a calculator watch there in grade school, which was very exciting. However the experience was so odd, even for that time, that I never bought anything else from them.

About 5 years ago we had a nice talk on M4 from Bart Massey of Portland State. He gives a nice survey of the language and a demonstration: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULZxHSPWn98

I once tried to sell a software library as a product. Bad timing, concept, and execution, so it flopped. The thing I remember most is putting the phrase "slam dunk" in my initial product announcement. I took a lot of flack about that from non-Americans. That wasn't so bad, but I let that very temporary error distract and derail my marketing efforts, and that was a mistake. Personally, I'd have stuck with the underwear logo and put that energy elsewhere.

This was how they lost my business forever a few years ago. I had to tighten spending for a bit so I called to cancel, thinking I'd be able to renew in a few months. The experience was horrible.

I once helped build a fingerprint processing system. One of the things I learned is that police technicians essentially photoshop fingerprints before searching to ensure the best possible match. It took a lot of the shine off of the process and made it clear that as high-tech as things seemed, there were a lot of organic factors at play that were hard or impossible for a computer to sort out by itself. I expect facial recognition has similar constraints.

Edit: Conjugation

From Wikipedia[1]:

>The habenula receives input from the brain via the stria medullaris thalami and outputs to many midbrain areas involved in releasing neurotransmitters, such as dopamine, norepinephrine, and serotonin.

[1 ]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habenula

No, COM files had no header. [2] I think that's part of why they were replaced. ZM was for EXEs. I think that one was someone's initials. (Yes, looked it up. [1])

I think what parent is remembering were characters that effectively created a jump instruction at the beginning of the file.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOS_MZ_executable

edit: [2] Section 6 of the paper talks about that, just noticed.

Back in the BBS/FidoNet days someone sent me a comic GIF that, when renamed with a .COM extension, would execute under DOS. It was a nifty little demo, although .COM files were going the way of the dinosaur around then.

Thanks for that pointer, all I could find was a vague wikipedia article. Obviously soldering was well established. The specifics of what was available weren't clear.

When I look closely that work actually looks fine. Solder flow is reasonable and I don't see cold joints. The only true WTF was where a resistor had been ripped out for whatever reason. Also it's unclear whether they had flux-core solder yet and they are essentially soldering in 3D. (Former electronics assembler here.)

>Micropayments have been talked about since the 1990s.

A little longer than that, perhaps. http://transcopyright.org/hcoinRemarks-D28.html

>but why did they give them such weird names? (map = select, filter = where, reduce = aggregate?)

SQL.

The first thing I thought of was the Dragon 2 capsule.

That project looks like a lot of FUN, which I think some folks have missed was the point.

Already there. I just force-refreshed Facebook and am seeing 1.8M. I've made smaller native Windows apps.

There is a scene from Silicon Valley about taking less: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1w5R2PGCb4 (NSFW language)

What I find myself wanting to fight is not the prevailing views on a topic, it's the willingness to lie and mislead to promote those views. I saw that this past week with the Google memo situation. I also saw a shocking amount of it last year with the US election. Sloppy journalism feeds the people who seem to want to believe the worst in everything, who in turn feed entire social networks. Eventually sufficient people have heard a thing that the network as a whole believes it. Individuals have little influence. I suppose public consciousness (and social media in particular) could be thought of as a big NN.

I'd never heard of the UF[1]. That is totally fascinating.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unidad_de_Fomento

That makes sense. Thank you for explaining.

Slightly O/T: What is that insane heatsink sitting on? TPU? Is it that stacked up because it's passive?

I don't doubt it. They always treated me well on the phone, but when I needed them to actually fix a problem they fell on their face and thew up their hands like they were powerless. I ended up having to solve it myself which blew the whole point of using them. I may be an outlier.

I don't know what the perception is today, but Amex used to be known for outstanding (like, truly outstanding) customer service. I had a regular Amex and then a gold in the mid 2000s and I found that was no longer the case. They also used to stand apart from other credit cards, much more like old-school bankers used to be. When I was using them they started to act more and more like regular credit card companies. There was also an ownership change at some point iirc. I think they just lost their way, and along with it their differentiating value.

With [c] a spam filter

You can't mention Seattle without mentioning the helmet law though. [1][2]

Portland, a few hours away, has similar (though not identical) conditions and no helmet law and seems to be doing well.[3]

[1] http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/transportation/will... [2] http://www.citylab.com/commute/2017/01/seattle-bike-share-pr... [3]http://www.bizjournals.com/portland/news/2017/01/18/biketown...

I believe you're thinking of J++.

It's on my bucket list. They totally have a shot at my tourism dollar.

1993. I had to look: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Will

And David Fincher? Wow. No idea.