chops

Code on Github: https://github.com/urbit/urbit

This seems crazy ambitious on its own, and add to it that it's public domain. Very curious where this will be headed.

Nitrogen for Erlang (http://nitrogenproject.com/) does much of this. N2O, also mentioned in another post, is a variant of the Nitrogen approach.

Basically, you build your application frontend with pure Erlang terms to construct server-side templates, then make live changes to the interface over and websockets (as of the soon-to-be-released v2.3), ajax, or comet (if websockets are not available, or the websocket connection crashes, it'll establish reconnection or fallback to comet/ajax).

I recently did a talk at the Chicago Erlang Conference about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nlV4gm8SpVA

Also came here to say the same thing. IIRC, it was also free-form data, so it was NoSQL before it was cool.

begins trailing off... I wonder if I still have any old PalmOS app code laying around on an old hard drive somewhere. Would be fun to have a look at that. I think that was the last time I did C++.

I, like many others on this thread, have dabbled in the Gravity Simulation game. I've done two of them.

The first one was back in 1999, I wrote one with 13h[1] graphics for DOS (Borland Turbo C++), and to make it more fun, I used flat sprites to represent the objects (so the objects progressed from being rocks to asteroids to planets - with the largest sprite I used being an image of Jupiter).

A few years later, I rewrote it in OpenGL (using the GLUT library) for a class. It worked much better (and of course the hardware was much faster too).

I had always planned rewriting the physics engine to use Barnes-Hut, but never got around to it, so it always ran at N^2.

Anyway, for the curious, the code is up on Github amongst my collection of other old garbage stuff from back in the day: https://github.com/choptastic/OldCode-Public/tree/master/Gra...

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode_13h

At first, I thought "you meant $100 billion" not "million", until, on a 2nd or 3rd rereading, I realized you were referring to an average single Walmart store does over $100m in revenue.

So I thought I'd throw this comment in here in case others were misreading it as I did.

Notch's Ludum Dare video for Metagun (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZV-AFnCkRLY) was inspiration for a series of scripts I now use for clients and my own entertainment purposes (for some loose definition of "entertainment").

It's a series of shell scripts I use that screencap videos of coding and set them to music (so, for example, rendering a 48-hour coding competition to a 5-minute song, or as I more typically do for clients, render the development process down to a few minutes for them to watch in fast-time how their development was done).

It's called watchmecode (https://github.com/choptastic/watchmecode) and I just have to do

  ./make-av-video.sh /path/to/video.mpg /path/to/song.mp3

And it does the rest, and outputs it to "done.mp4"

The result is something that looks like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hwn7mfmo0SQ

(disclaimer, I've plugged this before on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5685859)

I learned to program with a combination of self-learning and high school programming classes. On my own, I built programs that solved the problems of mid-90s high-schoolers: Midi Playlist managers, Leetspeak talkers, etc.

My first job was as a vendor/usher at a local movie theater. The process of daily tracking inventory was painfully tedious, slow, and error prone.

I got permission to work on a solution to this using the vending computers (486s running a DOS-based touchscreen system), and the back office computers (running WinNT), and was paid my usher rate of $6.25/hour, but I didn't care - I was excited to be being paid to program.

The program was a success and was used at my local theater for a few years after I left. I even gave free tech support for it because of all the friends I had who worked there.

That experience helped me to land an entry-level programmer/general-purpose "computer guy" position at a local startup that built attendance tracking software for schools and non-profits.

After a little over two years at the startup I quit to start my own company.

I finished my bachelor's degree about a year after starting my own thing, so all this was just without a college degree.

I've been doing my own thing for over 10 years now.

So if you love it, then work hard at solving problems, eventually someone will pay you to solve their problems. Until then, keep making things.

Timeline: started learning programming at 16, was paid a hair above minimum wage for programming at 18, first real programming job at 20, self employed at 22.

Erlang with the Nitrogen Web Framework (http://nitrogenproject.com)

Also, a future project I've been kicking around will likely be done with Erlang and ChicagoBoss (http://chicagoboss.org) - not because Nitrogen is lacking, just in the name of mastering another framework with a different focus.

irccloud.com - For running a few open source projects, I find an always-on connection and getting instant mobile notifications to be totally worth the $5/month.

Otherwise, for fun non-worky-type stuff: Netflix, Spotify, and Amazon Prime are the most prominent ones coming to mind.

I dunno. Did the first hammers have a claw? Because that's a pretty handy innovation.

It sounds to me, based also on your replies so far, that you just have a case of impostor syndrome (and possibly some Dunning-Kruger thrown in there). Just power through it - we all get it too. Just keep making things that you're proud of, or that others find useful, and you be fine. We can't all be experts in everything, and even the experts are noobs at somethings.

I cycle between working in my basement "office", my living room with a convertible standing desk, and when the weather is permitting, out on the back yard semi-patio-thing.

Relevant pictures:

https://twitter.com/jessegumm/status/460019341355143168

https://twitter.com/jessegumm/status/460020285786578944

https://twitter.com/jessegumm/status/460019950338727936

Thanks for sharing this. I did not know about this talk, but the game itself is fantastic, and has a very unique feel. I suspect I'll learn a little something from this.

I could not agree more. I wrote about this exact thing a year and a half ago: http://sigma-star.com/blog/post/startup-idea--classical-musi...

One day this will happen, and classical music enthusiasts everywhere will rejoice.

I have a buddy who released something similar to this a little over a year ago called "The Carousel" (https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/carousel-slide-projector-for...). It's complete with the old slide projector sounds and slide replacement animations (iirc). It sources the gallery images from Instagram.

While being a standalone ipad gallery app, it can also be tethered with apple TV to make your ipad act as the slide projector by mock-projecting the gallery on your TV.

How about a PHP interpreter for erlang?

https://github.com/altenwald/ephp

Trinity Resource Kit: http://trinityhome.org/Home/index.php?wpid=1&front_id=12

Among other things, it boots a live linux CD that's packaged with a handful of 3-5 antivirus scanners.

Candy crush is a match-3 game like bejeweled, while candyswipe is a "draw an unbroken path on similar things" game. The game play is a different mechanism. Though the graphical and stylistic similarities are there, I'd hardly call it a clone.

(not that I'm defending King in their douchebag tactics)

Originally, I did just that with my service. The problem is when you need simple information like "What browser and version are you using" when someone says something "isn't working". Capturing User Agent during form submission takes an otherwise painful step out: asking a non-technical person to find out what version of Internet Explorer they are running. There are still people who think "The Internet" is "the Blue E on my computer". Similarly adding required fields like "What's your site's address" when you run a multi-site service. All valuable things to have specified so that you can answer any questions with the first response rather than having to ask a pile of followup questions when customers don't provide enough info.

With a general purpose email, you don't get that.

Just like he said: Though it was an amazing game (I bought it opening day), it only sold 4m units. Unfortunate that that's considered a flop.

By comparison, Modern Warfare 3 sold 10m copies on day one.

Yes, it was indeed a joke. And one which has apparentlly fallen flat.

The solution here, which the article fails to mention, and which every security expert will undoubtedly tell you, is to make sure you use super random numbers (that's the technical term, for the layperson) by adding two random numbers together.

I've given a handful of talks at miscellaneous user groups ranging from 5 minute lightning demos to one way-too-long-but-there-is-too-much-to-cover-in-45-minutes talk about Erlang types (I felt bad it was so long).

While I'm the last guy to walk up to a stranger and strike up a conversation, and I break out in cold sweats preparing to cold-call prospects for my business, I've always had this thing about public performing, whether it be speaking, playing and instrument, or even (gasp) singing.

I'm not sure of the psychology of it all, but it feels like the pressure of presenting, combined with a strong fear of being viewed a failure gives way to a certain comfort zone in presenting. And once up there for a minute or two, I notice that I quickly find myself firing on all cylinders (probably from the adrenaline), and then everything from then on becomes quite natural for me (even if my natural presentation style comes across a little neurotic).

Anyway, that's my anecdotal contribution to the public speaking discussion.

Isn't that how everyone prepares to give a presentation? I thought it was standard operating procedure.

Also, South Park Episode "Crack Baby Athletic Association" skewers the college sports system in the US.

http://beta.southparkstudios.com/full-episodes/s15e05-crack-...

Same. Chrome for Android also says Windows 8.1.

I've used https://github.com/jceb/vim-orgmode for a while now for managing documentation written with org-mode. It gets the job done, but if my project's docs weren't written in org-mode already, I'd just use markdown.

Whenever I give a talk about Erlang-related stuff, I almost inevitably get asked "do you do this for fun or for your job?" And I can genuinely answer "both, really".

While I'm the project lead for one of the more popular Erlang web frameworks (http://nitrogenproject.com), my main focus is on my sports league management system[1] (http://bracketpal.com), which runs on Nitrogen.

As a result, I can justify spending "free" time working on open source because at the end of the day, it improves my main products.

It's an interesting way to piggyback the so-called "unicorn" project onto a product (the design of which I get to control). Granted, it'd be nice to just get paid to work on Nitrogen all the time, since that work is generally more mentally stimulating, but I can't complain.

[1] I know the landing page is a total dog. It's the current project to fix that up to something not terrible.

So he's an assault rifle inventor, not the assault rifle inventor. The title isn't necessarily misleading so much as ambiguous.