The Innards of Erlang | Hacker News Reader

The Innards of Erlang

contekst.org

327 pointsjasonlbaptiste34 comments

Greetings,

I am so glad I found this site. My two other favorite sites are valleywag and peoplemagazine.com. The only thing I really needed was a site devoted to Erlang. I'm glad I found it. I'm adding it to my Internet Explorer favorites.

thanks

IE? Why?

Because of its excellent ActiveX control support, of course.

You know, I might actually like a real article about the innards of erlang.

Being in Europe, I seem to have been sleeping during The Great Erlang Meme of 2009, so I was pretty disappointed to log in this morning, find what looked like a really juicy article about Erlang at the top of the list, and find out that 1) it doesn't really talk about the innards of Erlang, and 2) it's all a joke.

The innards of Erlang are fascinating, because they're really what make the language so good at what it does, and are fairly different from many other languages in terms of architecture.

My God, this is the most interes...

snore

You've truly found a way to help out HN.

I don't think I've ever seen a story get so many points so fast :D

And it continues. Is this legitimate?

It's by request http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=512145 .

I am in total agreement that all of these "boring" stories are far more interesting than most of the interesting stories have been.

Er, I think that makes sense.

Anyhow, maybe now we can pick a Language of the Day, or some other geeky topic to vote up on the front page each day of the week? Maybe C Efficiency Hacks, or Interesting Uses of Graph Algorithms, or ...

You don't need to pick. A weird unstable combination of the internet and the community on this site will do the picking for you. Furthermore, it will pick 29 other topics to fill your front page. Isn't that amazing?

Ah, gotcha. The Cult of Paul strikes.

The Cult of Paul or the legitimate desire of us old timers to keep this site from turning into just another reddit.

I just up voted all the Erlang articles and it has nothing to with pg.

(I also happen to genuinely like Erlang)

1. If you upvoted all the Erlang articles yesterday, it has something to do with pg. I like Erlang too, but much of what made it to the front page was bullshit.

2. A day's worth of Erlang madness will do nothing for HN other than squash a day's worth of the usual stories. And when a few hundred users mass-upvote a few dozen stories for no other reason than that pg half-joked about it, I'd say that has more Reddit-nature than HN-nature.

Sure it keeps the drive by visitors from staying, but it makes HN useless (unless you _really_ _really_ like Erlang) for the next few days.

There has to be a better way to control the audience than intentionally ruining the content.

First of all, Erlang is something very much worth learning about.

Second, it will only be this way for a short while. As you grow older your attention span will natural grow, don't worry about it kiddo.

Whether Erlang is worth learning about is entirely beside the point. The issue is whether it's worth sand-bagging the content for everybody on the tenuous theory that Erlang repulses "the wrong kind of people for HN".

Simply, it gets annoying when pg turn HN back into social-experiment mode.

Your second sentence is ad-hominem idiocy and doesn't merit a response.

"keep this site from turning into just another reddit"

Why, because reddit has a wide variety of interesting links on its front page instead of a page full of Erlang links?

Then why are you here?

Honestly, if you enjoy reddit, why waste your time here? Reddit is bigger, more diverse and customizable.

"Then why are you here?"

Well, I did remove the hackernews rss feed from my homepage today. I generally like this site, but I find the comments to be on the verge of elitist. I think it's sad that you guys think I'm part of the "riff raff" that needs to be filtered from sites like this, but congrats, you guys filtered me out.

HN is a community of human beings. Human beings are prone to do apparently temporarily insane/irrational things such as follow memes, jokes, silly suggestions, etc. If you dislike that here, I'm sorry but you probably won't find it any better anywhere else...

Cool, the comments are bit elitist for you, they're great for me. Reddit is a better fit for you. HN for me, everybody wins! Hurray!

You made my day. But Google obviously doesn't know the meaning of 'innards'.

Edit: Too bad your joke was so good it ruined HN for the rest of the day.

Should I be worried? Isn't this the kind of inside joke that permeates sites like 4chan, or heaven forbid, /.? (Albeit more tasteful?)

I wouldn't mind that too much. Erlang is a neat language.

The problem with 4chan and the like is that they take it overboard. I have hopes that HN will know when to quit.

There is another article that corresponds to this one. Keep reading to find it.

Yeah, I realize that. I'm just (half-jokingly) saying that if the inside joke results in more erlang articles being posted, that wouldn't be as devastating as the kind of inside jokes that take over other sites.

Why did you have to ruin the last good site on the internet?

A short concise description of Erlang would be welcome, given the Erlang tweet storm on HN.

I know nothing about Erlang, except for the hype :O

offtopic.. is there much activity around the arc lisp dialect [if you'll forgive me calling it that] these days?

http://marcusvorwaller.com/look/erlang-20090311-125410.jpg 18 of 25 Erlang articles on the front page. :)

I thought all the Erlang stuff was due to the site reboot :)

It took me awhile to figure why\how this happened but now that I understand it, it is hilarious to see this in real time on the HN homepage. Well done.

hahaha, Sorry I laughed out loud.

haha :) I laughed out too!

Edit: it appears a bit too loud, GF thought I went crazy for a sec

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