chops

As far as I know, there isn't.

This particular question highlights a shortcoming of long-form changelogs though. It would be nice if there was a way to have community-voted highlighting of a changelog pointing out the significance of each line-item of a changelog.

http://sigma-star.com/blog/post/changelog-voting (Blog post inspired by this question)

For those new to Erlang conventions, the "A" in the release number is an indicator that this is a beta release. The stable releases are the "B" branches. So in this case, R16B will be the stable version.

The pmod arguments have been a pretty ongoing war[1] on the mailing list, especially since it was announced R16 would be removing official support for them.

With ChicagoBoss being one of the highest profile projects to use pmods extensively, Evan Miller has been arguing for them pretty extensively.

At least support wasn't completely dropped, since they are providing the parse_transform to re-enable the functionality:

https://github.com/erlang/pmod_transform

[1] A friendly war, anyway: http://erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-questions/2013-January/07...

The only beef I have with cloud/VPS hosting is the price.

Conveniently, the data center I've worked with for years[1] supports a hybrid setup, where you can use their cloud hosting combined with coloed physical hardware all in the same VLAN. It's hugely effective, since I can have physical hardware there to deal with the high-load/high-memory stuff there (like database servers) affordably, while at the same time, using VPS for less processor intensive/more ephemeral-load type stuff like webservers.

The result is that I drive to Chicago to work on hardware significantly less frequently than I previously used to, and it's fully worth it. If their cloud system goes down for whatever reason, I know their staff is on it, and I'm not worried in the slightest.

When I was 100% hardware based, I lived in a bit of terror of being out of town. If something happens, I had to get there. Now if something happens while I'm out of town, as long as I have internet access, I'm okay with it. Eventually, when prices go down enough, I'll go 100% virtual, and I'm not looking back.

[1] Steadfast Networks in Chicago: http://www.steadfast.net

> - New London, CT used eminent domain to take an entire neighborhood of private homes to give the land to Phizer because Phizer would generate more tax revenue.

...and after bulldozing the neighborhood, lost their funding, avandoned the project, and turned the neighborhood into a literal dump.

Wow! What a grossly offensive thing for the courts to support, regardless of the fact the outcome was a net negative.

Thanks for posting that. I had not heard of that particular case.

Ah yes, I forgot about all the mouth-work that went into clarinet. It's been almost 14 years since I last played with any degree of seriousness. Thanks for the reminder :) It's starting to come back.

That kind of slide involves subtly easing off the holes of the clarinet, leaving partial openings. It's a skill I practiced, but never really mastered. I could slide a few notes, but it was never make it that smooth, nor could I slide that many without easing off too quickly and making the slide "jump".

Pretty sure it was a joke.

Holy crap, the overdone continuous scrolling and animation makes that page almost useless. Scroll a little bit, and suddenly I'm jumped to a different part of the page. Don't scroll too far up, or it loads the previous article right in place, and doesn't keep you where you were. Then the top-bar seems to come down at random.

What a frustrating example of overdoing an attempt at a "rich experience" thus hindering the user experience of trying to just read the goddamned article. I'll take the bullshit multipage approach that clickmongers use over this goofy and unintuitive interface.

That's not my experience at all. I get that "Install our app" popup on Android when loading many forum/discussion-type sites.

And it's really goddamn annoying.

> In most cases, if we just got a lot of stuff done, we'd have no need for an app, because the list of stuff to do would be rather short.

I find quite the opposite: The more things I do, and the more productive I am, the more rapidly things get added to my todo list. It's when I'm less productive that my todo lists stay short.

It's an interesting phenomenon that (at least my) todo lists are effective sticks for the carrot in that the size of the todo list scales with productive output.

Erlang: Concurrency should be easier

web.archive.org has its first snapshot of it from Feb 2002, so it's at least 10 years old.

http://web.archive.org/web/20020210063149/http://paulgraham....

FWIW, I didn't get any sense of defensiveness from the question - just a direct, succinct, and honest question.

Is this code available on github?

Alternatively, you have the attention and the publicity, you could turn this into an a revenue producing product, sticking an ad somewhere on the page, and then providing it like a YTMND kind of "fill in the blank" system. At the very least, you could use the Romney thing as a springboard for a viral entry.

At the bottom, stick a "Make a graph for any project" link and commence.

At the very least, this could net you a decent handful of cash for minimal work, and, presumably, you already have the attention. Now take advantage of it before the spotlight moves off you.

Disclaimer: I say all this, not as a marketing type, but just as a geek who's run his own stuff for years, and I see a possibility to make a couple extra bucks with this well done implementation. Maybe it'd turn out to be a waste of time, maybe it'd score you some pizza and beer money every week, or maybe it'd serve as your entry as a "Social analytics" company or whatever. Either way, I think it's worth exploring.

This is funny to me in an admittedly schadenfreude kind of way, as I've had to deal with their false positive system before, and it was an exercise in frustration.

In short, one of my products is a guild hosting system for games like WoW. One of my tools offer is a profile harvesting and uploading system in the form of an executable that simply uploaded the Lua files generated by my WoW Profiling Mod (collecting things like character level, name, class, professions, skills, etc - nothing personal or potentially dangerous). After getting a few customer emails about Sophos detecting it as a virus, I contacted Sophos to let them know about it.

After verifying that it did indeed not contain a virus, they decided to still flag it as a supposed "PUA (Potentially Unwanted Software) or Adware". I protested, saying that no one would ever accidentally install this (it's not bundled with anything, it's a direct download), nor does it generate ads, nor does it do anything the user doesn't expect it to do, which is exclusively uploading character profile information to their website. In no way should be classified alongside Adware.

They responded with something of the order "Sophos is for business computers, and because this is for games, it potentially unwanted on the business machine." They refused to remove the flag.

So my Sophos users just have to accept that Sophos basically tells them that my app contains malware - since who's going to see "PUA/Adware" and think anything other than "This is adware? Screw this, not worth it. BRB cancelling this scam of a service."

So I have absolutely no sympathy for Sophos, and it's funny to me that a company supposedly dedicated to keeping malware and viruses off business computers is riddled with security vulnerabilities, and then tries to brush them under the table because they have not yet been detected to have been exploited. Stay classy, Sophos.

I have to agree with this sentiment.

My personal anecdote is more that I have a handful of better computers in the house, but the laptop I spend the most time working and programming with is my crappy 8-year old gateway running Ubuntu. I'm not entirely sure why I'm drawn to it over the others, even if it's the slowest and oldest machine in the house (excluding my netbook). But I type faster on this keyboard than any other keyboard I've ever used.

There's just something about it that I prefer, and I'm perfectly willing to deal with its warts, as it's used almost exclusively for programming (vim and ssh don't exactly use a lot of resources). Chrome does have some memory issues on it (and I'm considering switching back to Firefox for that laptop), and sometimes compilation times get annoying, but overall, this system has been tweaked and configured to be my ultimate programming machine.

Plus, testing server software on slower machines can be helpful to find bottlenecks that might not present themselves as obviously on blazing fast machines.

All that said, I'd say we've gotten to the point where a casual user will do just fine with 4-year-old technology. Most Core2 machines are fast enough for just about anything. And Casual PC users typically aren't PC Gamers, which is its own segment, and even then, my Core2 PC for gaming is "fast enough" to play the games I play.

I have a friend who emigrated to US from China when he was in his 50s, and that was about 15 years ago. He's an entrepreneur who sells machine tools via paper catalog and his website. It's truly fascinating to meet with him every few months and just talk business, family, life, all that stuff.

He has this hypothesis that one of the primary reason for American innovative dominance is due to the ubiquity of basements in America. His theory goes that while much of the rest of the 1st world countries are very crowded in the cities, America has room such that even folks who live in the cities have basements.

Basements being where the majority of the "tinkering" is done, because you don't have to leave home to go work on your pet project. Because basements aren't as "livable" as the rest of the house, they are usually relegated to work benches, mini-offices, and the less-sightly kind of things you wouldn't want sitting out in your living room or cluttering up your closets. And they're as big as the house - so plenty of space to work with.

Because just about everyone has basements, everyone has convenient access to a private working sanctuary to attempt to live out their dreams.

So that's basically how his hypothesis goes. It's one of the more interesting thoughts I've heard, and it's fascinating to see it from the perspective of an outsider who moved here and made something of himself.

Coming from a machinist background (rather than a hacker who can work just about anywhere with a laptop), the availability of a basement for him to keep his machines is something that might seem obvious to him, and certainly lends to why he holds this as true.

Surely it's not the whole truth, but it certainly makes one think.

If you have not yet read "Masters of Doom", I strongly advise any aspiring hackerpreneur to read it. It's an enthralling and easy read and details the early day of id, including the releases of their breakout hits "Commander Keen", "Wolfenstein 3D", "Doom", and "Quake", as well as the fall of Romero, following his departure from id, particularly with the "Daikatana" flop.

http://www.amazon.com/Masters-Doom-Created-Transformed-Cultu...

I read it when it was new 8 years ago, and I think I'm probably due for another reading, myself.

You don't get hellbanned for meta comments. You get hellbanned for being grossly offensive, overly aggressive, or other similar kinds of postings.

Thanks for posting this. This sounds quite the shady venture.

Obviously, the next step for you, at the very least, is disputing the charges with the card company, seeing that the company is unwilling to refund the fees.

> I cannot, almost as a rule, trust anybody who has not tried a variety of mind altering substances.

EXCUSE ME? I'm sorry, but give me a fucking break!

I work hard, hit my deadlines, contribute to open source, am loyal to my friends, ready to help at the drop of a hat, and I'm risk-taking enough to be an entrepreneur, yet, look out, I can't be trusted because I choose not to smoke it up? How does that follow logically?

I've attended many parties through the years (the early ones were what are so commonly called "drinking parties" because, well, they're college and high school kids getting drunk), and I grew up in a family who enjoy with a few beers after work and on the weekends.

And throughout this exposure, I've never once had even the slightest itch to actually partake, despite the incredible amounts of peer pressure. But I attended the parties, I hung out with my friends and watched them get drunk (and later high, as they experimented further), and never once I did think "Hey, these conversations are so stimulating, I should totally do this too to improve my cognitive faculty."

No, I thought "Hey, you continue doing what you're doing. Me? I'm going to go back to playing the piano and talking with whomever is coherent enough to hold a conversation, and tomorrow, we'll laugh about all the stupid shit you won't remember doing."

Instead, watching folks get drunk, and holding conversations with folks who were high has only helped to strengthen my complete lack of desire to do these drugs. Not because of some aversion to risk, but because I just frankly don't like what I see in people when they are under the influence - they're generally just idiots.

And yet, despite all this, I know I can trust the trustworthy and not trust the untrustworthy, and I do not hold it against someone if they choose to enjoy certain recreational drugs. Indeed, despite my teetotalism, I paid for the open bar at my wedding.

Frankly, your almost complete trust-wise dismissal based on such a trivial criterion as "willingness to do drugs" is as closed-minded as I can imagine. At least I haven't completely written off an entire section of the population because of a disagreement in how we spend free time.

You could go to Basho to work on Riak Enterprise.

http://basho.com/products/riak-enterprise/

I'm sure he's talking about the Snuggie, a ridiculous looking blanket with sleeves, known for its ridiculous infomercials in the US.

http://www.mysnuggiestore.com

But he's not an AOL employee and had no contractual obligation to them. He just crashed there, working on his own computer, and eating AOL's food and sleeping on their couches.

As excited I am for The Hobbit, I'm also leery of the 48fps. If you've ever noticed the difference between watching movies on a 120Hz/240Hz, it's definitely extremely noticeable and distracting. It makes movies look like reality TV.

Why this is, I don't fully know. The fact that this is filmed at 48 fps (rather than simple interpolating the extra frames) might make it better, but I'll just have to see for myself.

What I do know, is that if watching a film at 48 fps is like watching a typical bluray at 120Hz, I'm going to find it distracting. It really does mess with the "feel" of the movie. Whether it's simply cognitive dissonance or not will take time to determine.

Here's a relevant article from last year that really hits home for me: http://prolost.com/blog/2011/3/28/your-new-tv-ruins-movies.h...

"There is a level of cowardice lower than that of the conformist: the fashionable non-conformist." -Ayn Rand

Easy mode quick clone:

  git clone https://github.com/addyosmani/backbone-fundamentals.git

With some pull requests, I've encountered the "probably should have emailed the list" and the "here's the style guide" in a single pull request.

As a maintainer, however, I'm far more lenient in these things. If someone takes the time to fix a bug or add a neat new feature in something I maintain, I'm greatful for it, and I'm not going to get anal about the pull request. If there's something about it I find needs changing, I'll accept the pull request and fix it myself (with a few exceptions), and inform the contributor of the changes I've made, why I made them.

I'd rather not make pull requests be an exercise in frustration for the contributor[1]. Usually, you want more people to help with your project, and frustrating your contributors isn't a good way to encourage that.

[1] I say this as someone who, with one pull request, spent several hours over a few days trying to get a 15-line change accepted (about 10 of which were comment lines), with lots of debate over the most of the requested changes being anal things like "add a space after the comma, remove a space after the =". I was damn near the end of my rope and ready to just say "fuck it, if you don't want my fix, don't take it, I'll just maintain my own fork."

I do use screen for my servers, however when I go out of town[1] (our family cabin is in the north woods of Wisconsin, not exactly a 4g hotspot), getting a connection to drop, and having a variable 200-900ms ping while tethered to my phone makes working extremely difficult. Getting that dreaded "server down" text at 2am while on vacation is that much more painful.

[1] Or, for example, right now, where my home internet just went offline about 15 minutes ago and I'm tethered to my phone for connectivity.