gull

Yes, it's more comfortable than QWERTY.

The switch was largely a wake up call in how adaptable the human mind is. The learning process was slow and comical until I started having Dvorak reflexes on a Qwerty keyboard.

I finally also learned to type properly. I type faster in Dvorak than I used to type in Qwerty.

What's not to like from a clean slate?

You built good software.

How good? So good no one else has even thought of, and actually written, that software before.

You know a lot about this area. How would one flip advertising around?

Between this austerity and this default, default is better. See above.

The Greek finance minister recommends defaulting in (2). Also note one of his points is defaulting would poison the Eurozone. That's one more reason this isn't as simple as "default would be bad" for Greece. It's a lesser evil for Greece and it's bad for the Eurozone. It gives Greece leverage.

"Does this mean that Greece ought to grin and bear the massive and misanthropic idiocy of the bailout-austerity package imposed upon it by the troika (EU-ECB-IMF)? Of course not. We should certainly default."

Defaulting could lead to further negotiations if Greece stays in the Eurozone, like slashing a big part of a loan handed out when projections showed Greece would not be able to pay it.

Why do you loan to a country when projections show the country can't pay? Is it to keep the country economically enslaved for years?

That's probably why the second-to-top-level comment translated the following as FUD. The gains for Greece from defaulting would be better than accepting the austerity measures.

  >For Greece the gains from defaulting would be slight, and
   the costs potentially vast.

   Translation: FUD.

They weren't that perfectly free. According to Noble prize winning economist Paul Krugman:

"if Grexit happens it will be because the creditors, or at least the IMF, wanted it to happen."

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/06/25/breaking-greece/...

http://www.businessinsider.com/krugman-europe-greece-2015-6

Here's a project idea you are free to steal: write a browser plugin that analyzes HN comments and shows up something on the screen. Like "honest", "deceptive", "gratuitously negative".

Brownie points for HN admins if they add text analysis as feedback when we press submit.

I'm tired of signing up with a brand new HN account every few months to cover my tracks after embarrassing myself with less than noble posts.

Check this out: http://www.secretlifeofpronouns.com/exercises.php

This is a good point: Revocation is probably a cure worse than the disease.

Thanks for Milton Keynes but that can't be the only result in the whole world.

One proposal is Arcosanti, an urban laboratory focused on innovative design, community, and environmental accountability. https://arcosanti.org/

You touched on most points, primarily avoiding the situation of reasoning about concurrent old and new code. I didn't know a gen_server manages code loading like this, thank you for that.

An upgrade doesn't involve only the in-memory state per process though. It also involves state outside the process, like state on disk. Even if each process upgrades it's own state (I'm assuming the gen_server isn't limited to in-memory state; I don't know), an old process accessing from disk a data structure that differs from the one used by the new process isn't safe. You can't just upgrade old processes in stages.

An upgrade can also involve multiple processes. It's hard to upgrade all of them at once. As you mentioned, in the hardest case of all, a distributed system, loading in stages may be the only option, provided the system was explicitly designed such that old and new processes can coexist without safety issues.

http://pmg.csail.mit.edu/upgrades/

From http://www.sidewalkinc.com/: "By 2050, the population in cities will double"

Is the best solution a frontal attack? Or could it be moving away from existing cities?

Could one design a new city from scratch?

That's not guaranteed to be safe.

Having new code check if your state is old and upgrading isn't enough. You also need to check old code doesn't process new state. That becomes harder under concurrency.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_software_updating#Updat...

Erlang doesn't offer this check.

"Old code may still be evaluated because of processes lingering in the old code."

http://www.erlang.org/doc/reference_manual/code_loading.html...

The holy grail of high-availability isn't upgrading stateless software. It's upgrading stateful ones.

Like upgrading when a data structure changes between versions. The HTTP protocol nginx serves is stateless and by comparison far simpler. Same goes for Erlang. It offers nothing more than simple function replacement, and that's not enough to handle data structure changes either.

A different view is countries compete for knowledge-based workers that may go on and start startups. The key criterion in starting a startup isn't academic performance. In a startup heading towards a foreign environment and navigating it may be just as valuable.

The article may also be pointing to the beginning of a trend. That globally competitive universities exploit a major flaw in the US education system.

"I feel like my child is getting an absolute wonderful education over there for free. Betrayal is too strong of a word, but why can't we do that here?""