hassy

The title of the article is misleading. Yearly revenues do not necessarily mean technological innovation. There is plenty of innovation in Europe (and a lot of it gets sold to US companies who get to increase their annual revenues with it).

Yandex and Mail.ru IPOs I would guess.

Io is worth learning just to see what a clean prototype-based language feels like. It'll probably improve your understanding of Javascript.

I think "www" will make a comeback with increasing popularity of non .com/.net/.org TLDs. "whatever.io" looks like a web address to most of us here, but not to many others, even computer-savvy "normals".

You forgot another popular choice: "consultant".

Looks like he's running them on OSX which means they're likely to work on BSDs too.

Most mathematical symbols haven't been in use for longer than a couple of hundred of years. Leibniz's now standard calculus notation was introduced near the end of 17th century.

This "guy" studied electrical engineering and computer science at Caltech and UC Berkeley, I am sure his grasp of mathematics is ok. Perhaps you should try to stop feeling offended at his proposal and try to see where he might be coming from. Also as he admits in the article, it is by no means a comprehensive set of thoughts, but rather a few hunches hinting at a bigger idea.

Highly recommended reading by the same author: http://worrydream.com/#!/MagicInk

(To pique your curiosity: read it to understand why Hipmunk is awesome - there's much more to it than just that of course)

And less than three years ago we heard that the next decade would be very tough, from Sequoia no less. The hunt for suckers is on.

> Personally I'd love to see the term "front end developer" lose some steam.

I don't think it will. There will definitely be more dabbling but the APIs and environments are so different it'll still make sense to specialize.

There are two solutions to this. First is to have some kind of flow control between producers and consumers (send/wait for reply/continue). Second is to pull messages from sender whenever receiver is ready, perhaps with some rate-limiting or buffering.

The GC in Erlang VM is also per-process which allows it to be soft real-time. An application can be using gigabytes of memory, but it it's split between thousands of processes, garbage collection can be very very fast because the GC only needs to work through a small heap at a time.

That reason is likely to be jQuery included in every other project on Github.

pdftotext can produce garbled output, especially from two-column PDFs.* Depending on what you need, scripting Adobe Reader may be an option as it does a better job.

* I did a sizeable data mining project a while ago which required converting a lot of scientific papers to plain text. pdftotext didn't work well on a lot of them, so I had a script sending click events to Adobe Reader running overnight.

That's true. I wasn't responding directly to the article, but just wanted to share a convenient solution to the problem of "I want my private stuff synced, but I don't want to trust Dropbox or anyone else with it".

A great feature of OSX is the Apple Disk Image. [1] It lets you have a single file, with AES-256 encryption, that can be mounted and then used as a disk (put files on it, create folders etc). Perfect for keeping anything sensitive in Dropbox, such as passwords, statements from your bank etc etc. Even if your account gets compromised and the file gets copied, your data is safe.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Disk_Image

Stick it out, you will get used to it. Comma is AND, semi-colon is OR, and period means END of function definition.

LFE is probably your best bet in case you never learn to like Erlang's syntax, as it's only a thin layer above Erlang to provide a Lisp syntax + more powerful macros and doesn't try to bolt on any new semantics a la Reia.

so having joshu and not selling in desperation is worth at least $13 million

Cross the bridge when you come to it. You only need a handful of programmers in the first couple of years of a startup's life. The better they are the better. Worrying about whether you'll be able to hire 20+ Clojure programmers is best left for when/if the company is successful.

You make a good point. The solution is quite simple though, look at what they did with the non-mainstream language and ask a few questions. In my case, it would take me a couple of minutes to find out if someone just read "Programming Erlang" or a few online tutorial or if they have indeed built an OTP app.

It's "whatever programming language is not mainstream paradox" to be precise (and the author of the blog post would agree since he also nominates Haskell, Erlang, and Clojure). Which is obvious. And since "whatever programming language is not mainstream paradox" is a mouthful, "Python paradox" is a much better name. Those unfamiliar with the term can always be directed to PG's article to enjoy.

EDIT: Using "esoteric" languages can also be a good long-term hiring strategy. It's pretty easy to get a place in people's minds as the "go to" company to work with a language. Google did that with Python, Twitter is doing it with Scala, Basho are doing it with Erlang.

You should also mention Mochi Reloader and Distel. The first one takes no time to set up and removes so much friction from the dev process. Distel requires some set up and learning time, but that will pay off very quickly.

This. Spotify is amazing, they've done extremely well, and they will be huge.

> I have a hard time explaining spotify to people that havent used it not because its complicated, just because they dont believe it can work like that.

Any HN readers in the US that want to see Spotify for themselves, send me an email and I'll set you up with an account that will last you two weeks.

An example going the other way: Russian does not have an equivalent to "artist". There are words specifically for "painter", "singer" etc, but nothing generic. The closest is "творец" (tvorets) but it's closer to "creator" and calling yourself a "tvorets" would be very very pretentious, unlike calling yourself an artist.

I thought it would be an interactive console, like http://tryruby.org. Imagine being able to play with an API like that, with nothing to sign-up for or download and set-up.

JIT is great http://thejit.org/

No curly braces, no hashtables, awkward strings, doesn't look object-oriented.

(This coming from someone whose favorite language is Erlang.)

In addition to the tenuous link between the two activities, the 10 to 1 ratio is almost certainly untrue.

Details here (in the main text and in cited materials):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F-86_Sabre#Korean_War http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MiG-15#Operational_history

Isolating success in dogfights to flight controls seems like a gross oversimplification. I would like to see the original source for this (attributed to Boyd in the article).

I worked on a spreadsheet compiler at hypernumbers.com and some backend stuff for vidiowiki.com (video transcoding, file uploading/streaming and some other smaller stuff).

Erlang excels at distribution. People tend to forget its raison d'être is fault-tolerance (not concurrency), so when you set off working on an Erlang application you presume that it will run on 2+ machines. That's why it's great for things like Facebook Chat and Riak. In addition to those, it's also good for writing control and supervision layers, where workers are written in Python, Java, C etc.

While I'm at it, I'd like to plug http://veldstra.org/whyerlang/ It's in a real need of an update, and I'd love to hear any feedback.