careersuicide

The Judge show in Austin at The Mohawk during Fun Fun Fun Fest 2013 was one of the best things I've ever seen. It was inside, so in a room that's about 20 feet by 25 feet, with a 2.5 foot stage. Completely packed with people. As soon as they started playing it immediately turned into one of those rare "mosh to survive" situations. If you're standing still you're probably not going to leave without getting seriously hurt.

The best part was how incredibly close to the records they sounded. It was obvious that they still loved what they were doing despite how long it had been since they were last around. Sometimes older bands that get back together just seem to be going through the motions. Judge definitely wasn't.

Is this a reference to "The Last Starfighter"?

This is right up my alley. You might be interested in a project of mine I work on from time to time: https://github.com/seaneshbaugh/rosetta-euler

>More money leads in almost all people to artificial value, short term superficial happiness, degradation of the soul.

>Longer term less money creates in almost all people higher valuation of the most simple and basic things, which translates to true happiness for the soul.

Having been dead broke, severely underemployed while freelancing, and in a position where I would have been homeless were it not for my amazing girlfriend I can't help but feel a visceral amount of disagreement with this sentiment. Not having money is miserable. Currently I am pretty well off (greater than 75th percentile in the US) and the change in my life that I can directly attribute to having more money is astonishing. Placing a high value on basic things doesn't lead to happiness. It leads to stress, worry, sadness, self loathing, and worst of all envy. And if you have kids I can't even imagine the amount of guilt one might feel if you can't provide for them.

If you go to the grocery store and agonize over every item you place in your cart because not doing so means you might not be able to pay your rent there's almost no way you're going to have the will and the energy left at the end of the day to really enjoy the things that matter in life. It's just too draining and has a real opportunity cost. That's not placing a higher value on basic things, that's putting on blinders and only focusing on your immediate future.

This release is doubly exciting for me because it means my copy of the Programming Elixir book should be shipping very soon!

I think I can very closely relate to Dave Thomas when he expressed his excitement about Elixir and how similar it was to what he felt when he first encountered Ruby. Early last summer I took a fairly deep dive into Elixir and discovered that it left me with the same feelings as when I started to explore Ruby at the suggestion of my then boss many years ago. It just made sense. From the structure of an application to the way pattern matching works and even the larger ecosystem. I know a lot of people compare Ruby and Elixir because of the superficial syntactical similarities but there's something deeper there that makes me almost giddy: once you know the basics a lot of the rest just sort of seems to fall into place. Unlike a lot of other languages the learning process isn't filled with head-tilting moments of confusion, just lots of nodding up and down while thinking "Of course that's how it works!"

Funny you should ask. I actually started giving an honest go at learning Haskell before I started learning Erlang and later Elixir. So for me, I wouldn't say they were as eye opening as Haskell (truthfully Common Lisp and Scheme gave me more "woah!" moments than anything else so far) simply because of the order in which I learned them.

However, if you've never learned Haskell, OCaml, or F# I don't think it's a stretch to say that Elixir/Erlang's similar use of pattern matching and guards would have an eye opening effect that makes it worth learning. In both Haskell and Elixir/Erlang they're a core part of using the languages idiomatically. Once you see it in action you'd be hard pressed to not take some of the lessons with you elsewhere.

So, yes. Elixir and Erlang will make you rethink some assumptions about how to solve problems you probably never knew you had. Such as the "necessity" of explicit conditional statements. If anything you'll get better at using recursion to solve actual problems instead of just for contrived classroom-type problems.

I use it for some minor automation tasks at work (munging data in files and the like). That's one of the coolest things about Elixir in my opinion; it's great for the kind of stuff you used to use Perl for, while still being fantastic at the kind of stuff Erlang is used for. I'm obviously not using the full power of the language by any means and I'm yet to use all the OTP stuff except for toy applications for fun. But it's a refreshingly enjoyable language to work in. I haven't built anything that a client has directly paid for with Elixir yet, but sooner or later I hope to get something like an Elixir version of one of our Rails apps going in my free time and convince my boss we should give it a try for real.

In general great effort is made to ensure that probes don't contain any biological contaminates so if we do discover signs of life we're very certain it wasn't a microbe that hitched a ride.

As far as contamination from drilling (due to lubricants or something else entirely) I imagine that the desire for general cleanliness is for much the same reason. If we're going to spend hundreds of millions of billions of dollars on a probe to another world we want to be really confident anything interesting we find is actually from that world and not Earth.

Here's a little side project I've been working on for a few months: https://github.com/seaneshbaugh/rosetta-euler/

I've been a little busy lately so it's been neglected somewhat. Why is Prolog so hard?

Many summers years ago, during an internship, I got tasked with setting up a development machine from old parts lying around the office. One of those parts was an, even at the time, ancient hard drive. When I first powered the computer up everything turned on just fine, but it couldn't recognize the disk. I'd run into bad hard drives before, no big deal.I went to my bosses boss, an older engineer who had seen a thing or two, and told him we'd need another drive. He took the thing out and gave it a good hard twist, and told me to try again. Lo and behold, it worked!

He explained that sometimes when older hard drives have been powered off for many years the head some times sticks to the platter and doing what he did can fix it. I could barely believe that the phenomenon was actually real. I've spoken to a few people over the years about heads sticking to platters and it turns out, while it isn't (or wasn't?) exactly common, it's not exactly rare either.

In regards to a csv-like export of a store location database:

# This format is weird and makes no sense but it's what the client is expecting for some reason.

I think it's actually worse than that. Obviously I have only anecdotal evidence, but as far as I can tell, a large minority (maybe even a small majority) of people support what the NSA has been doing. They don't necessarily understand the technical details, but they completely understand the implications and consequences and they explicitly approve. When I go outside of my usual online and real life social circles the attitude about government surveillance is shockingly complicit.

I'm starting to believe the only way to change this isn't to get people outraged or make them understand the effects of pervasive surveillance on freedom. The solution is to instead make it clear just how ineffective it is at its stated purpose of keeping us all safe.

>Complacency is how tyranny works everywhere and in all ages.

I think your point specifically about Iraq is largely likely to be correct, but I have never been able to swallow this argument, which comes up just about every discussion of tyranny I see/hear.

A fundamental component of true tyranny is violence or an immediate threat of violence (as opposed to the somewhat more abstract monopoly on force that democratic governments have). At the risk of sounding trite: it's easy to call people complacent in the face of a tyrannical government when it isn't your family that will be the target of that violence. Resisting a strong and deeply rooted tyrannical government is not for the feint of heart or those with precious things to lose. To say those that don't give up the tenuous stability they have to attempt to foil the will of the government are complacent is dangerously close to shifting the blame on the victims of abuse.

I suppose it would be fair to say that in any tyrannical state that many are, in a way, resigned to their fate. For most people in that situation anything besides begrudging acceptance of the way things are is not far from suicide. In the case of the US I would wholeheartedly agree that apathy is a huge driving force behind our government taking power it should not. Implying that's how it works everywhere and every time seems very unfair.

This is exactly the reason why pretty much every house show no longer gets its location listed on Facebook or on flyers where I live. Instead we just put "ask a punk" for the address. You have to be in the know or you won't find out. Unfortunately it's a bit of a turn-off for younger people and anyone who isn't good friends with someone already involved in the scene. The alternative is to have every show busted before it can even start.