oinksoft

Lynn has its own water supply, and they switched us over to MWRA for a couple months during some maintenance work. The MWRA water has a funky taste, not a fan. http://www.lynnwatersewer.org/Images/LWSC-MWRA%20General%20N...

Haskell, Erlang, and Clojure all have sane lambdas (assuming that's what you mean by "properly implemented functional syntax"), and list comprehensions are useful and idiomatic in those languages. Agreed about sequence names feeling out-of-order in nested comprehensions in Python.

Small thing, but `final_function` here needs to be passed `fun maybe_function/1`, not the atom `maybe_function` alone.

I mentioned those, but you're right that they're inconsistent with what I said about people not leaving NW. 2006-ish I think there was a big debate on if they'd be allowed ... they've always seemed like a special case, being part of the arena itself. In any case, billboards are few and far between in NW.

Agreed, there are very few billboards in northern Virginia; I think Fairfax and Arlington Counties have stringent requirements for them, if not outright bans.

When I lived in Sacramento, on the Cap City Freeway there was a highly visible, gaudy billboard advertising liposuction, fat belly and all. I always wondered about that one ... there's no way the funds from renting that space justified the terrible light it cast on Sacramento for visitors passing through, and there must be other bidders. Also it's not as though this is the norm, I can't think of any similarly awful billboards in the Sacramento area, and the Cap City Freeway itself has few billboards.

If like many Washingtonians you never leave NW, sure. But there are plenty of billboards in NE and SE. There are definitely billboards when you get a little ways out on 66, also on 50E towards Annapolis. 95 in VA is non-stop billboards, I forget if 395 has them. The one I'm not certain about is the beltway ... but pretty sure I've seen billboards on the beltway in parts of MD. There are (were?) also what amount to billboards along H St in NW. So I have to disagree, and encourage you to explore the area more.

You're underestimating the difficulty of scaling Mnesia the way WhatsApp did (one source says "In-memory Mnesia database using about 2TB of RAM sharded across 16 partitions to store about 18 billion records." [1]). The prevailing wisdom in the Erlang community was that Mnesia could not be made to do such things. The only well-known user of Mnesia at anywhere near this scale prior to WhatsApp was Klarna. To achieve this, Klarna employed at least one of the original Mnesia developers who wrote proprietary patches for their system [2]. So while you accuse parent of being reductionist, your views of WhatsApp's engineering challenges also seem reductionist. Erlang/OTP software doesn't write and scale itself ... large-scale distributed systems are decidedly non-trivial no matter what tools you've chosen.

[1] http://highscalability.com/blog/2014/3/31/how-whatsapp-grew-...

[2] https://www.erlang-factory.com/upload/presentations/601/EUC2...

My cat just forks the project because I reject the bird animation PRs... you know what they say, cats don't have owners, they have upstream.

Due to the variability of cane, every reed must be tested.

That's incredible! The good news is that it's already warm and humid (woodwinds have a much harder time with being warmed up after very cold storage).

This looks great! I bet she could get away with charging a little more :)

Interesting, I didn't know decent bassoons were available cheaply. I played on a couple of old Fox bassoons in school (a decent brand but nothing incredible) and found even these instruments to cost at least $7,000 used. More palatable, but still quite expensive for a musical instrument that might need repairs. I'll have to take a look at these Puchners some time!

Very cool! Now I just need to save up, for a long time, for a bassoon :)

Brass and woodwind instruments are very different beasts though. Plastic clarinets for instance are mostly found in marching bands due to their inferior (brighter) sound, and those instruments are certainly not all plastic. Most woodwind instruments are mechanically intricate, so I'd be impressed if someone could make a pTrumpet version of a clarinet or bassoon (I'd be just as impressed by a pFrenchHorn). Note the difference in sound between a plastic and wooden recorder, one of the simplest woodwinds. I played on a plastic bassoon for the first year, and they do not sound good at all.

I used to pay $20 for a reed that my tutor made (about the same price as a box of nice clarinet reeds). It's possible they could be produced more cheaply in another part of the world, but you need a bassoon to test on (again, not cheap) and the manufacturer should themselves be a skilled bassoonist to capably test the reed across the instrument's significant range. A reed's musical qualities are influenced by local conditions (humidity, etc.) so a reed that works well in one place may sound terrible in another. The current model, where accomplished bassoonists and teachers make reeds to meet the small, local demand, seems to at least be workable.

I pointed out reeds as only a secondary issue because there seem to be more oboists than bassoonists. Oboists have the same challenge of finding a good reed-maker, or acquiring reed-making tools and canes, and learning the craft themselves. Oboes are much cheaper than bassoons and sometimes can even be rented (good luck finding a place willing to rent a bassoon -- the vast majority of bassoonists get their instrument from their school system).

I played bassoon for years and would love to play bassoon now that I am not in school. The trouble is that bassoons are extremely expensive. Even a terrible plastic bassoon costs thousands of dollars, and a "good" bassoon is $20k-40k last I checked, though you can get lucky on a used wooden one, which still won't come cheaply. Another less important issue I think is the difficulty in finding a good reed source: Mass-produced single reeds (clarinet, etc.) play very well, but mass-produced double reeds are practically unplayable (a double reed is the mouthpiece so any inadequacies are glaring).

Demand for bassoonists shouldn't diminish anytime soon, the sound is a crucial part of a symphony orchestra.

It looks like that was added in 2008[1] by an anonymous editor likely affiliated with SolarCity[2]. This is par for the course for a Wikipedia article about an operating business.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=SolarCity&type=re...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/UVHaight

Yes, anybody who sees Tolstoy as some saint ought to read Troyat's excellent biography of him. Tolstoy was a great novelist and a powerful personality, but a vain and hypocritical man.

That named helper function isn't necessary, so this might be more appropriate:

  return <ul>
    {this.props.items.map(item => <li>{item}</li>)}
  </ul>;

vs. the Angular version:

  <ul ng-repeat="item in items">
    <li>{{ item }}</li>
  </ul>

The Angular template is more readable at the expense of ngRepeat's complexity. Neither example includes Component/directive boilerplate. The directive boilerplate is generally worse, because it requires a separate template file or an ugly template string, knowledge of the directives API itself which is baroque in the extreme, and $scope-wrestling (whereas JSX' scope is the same as JS').

In my opinion reuse of the React component is more straightforward, you explicitly import/require it while in Angular you specify its providing module as an angular.module dependency, which has implications for config block ordering.

The Closure Library definitely has its bright spots, and it was my library of choice for many years. For all its warts, I particularly like the design of goog.ui. goog.editor is a wonderful part of the library too. I still run ##closure-tools on Freenode[1] but nowadays we might get a question or two a month, at most, which is definitely a sign of the times ... there was brief uptick in activity when ClojureScript first became popular.

When developing software for evergreen browsers, or not needing to target old IE in general, the cross-browser reliability and performance the library provides is less important. I was lucky to get to pick a prominent Closure Library developer's brain about this last year, and he expressed a similar opinion. I agree with the author of this post in that ClojureScript has breathed new life into the Closure Tools, and gave a presentation last year that touched on this with some code examples showing the brevity CLJS allows[2], but it seems that Closure Library's ship has mostly sailed.

[1] http://oinksoft.com/closure-tools/irc/

[2] http://oinksoft.com/closure-tools/sgdg-jul14/

I hate to break this to you, but as somebody of similar age, we are the "younger generation," at least in the professional world. Beyond that, "the young'ns are useless!" is a tired trope. If anything I notice recent grads being wiser and more industrious than my peers were at that age, possibly due to some combination of being too young to have experienced most of the peaceful and prosperous 90's, the economic fallout they witnessed through high school/college, and the cynicism they learned from the lukewarm "liberal" politics of the Obama administration with its burgeoning surveillance state.

It's especially cowardly to use what appears to be a throwaway account to wish that a personal, inoffensive blog post "prevents this person from ever being hired again."

Not only that, being so adamant about using Arch Linux would make you look ignorant/partisan. Now don't get me wrong, I'm more likely that most to make a stink about not being able to use Linux on the job, but you can still get most of the important tools on a Windows box: Unix utilities (cygwin), nice tabbed terminal (Console2), GVim, Emacs, Perl, Python, Ruby, etc. One tool I lean on heavily is the Silver Searcher (granted, you could could install Perl/App::Ack) and I was able to even quickly find a Windows port of that just now: https://blog.kowalczyk.info/software/the-silver-searcher-for...

Given the availability of most of the good stuff on Windows, I don't think my workflow would change very much if I were forced onto a Windows box right now, apart from the occasional bummer about some bleeding edge software being unported or some library assuming Mac/Linux. Indeed, it was being forced to work on a Windows machine for a couple years that made me switch from TextMate to Vim (it made sense to become proficient with a single cross-platform editor).

Ten years ago this would be --xml. Who knows what it would be ten years from now. Text streams are timeless.

People tried to clone Bingo Card Creator because you meticulously documented it being capable of bringing in small profits, and because there are some particularly lazy and stupid people out there -- the type who would post a want ad to "Create a clone of bingocardcreator.com." They read your popular blog, and in their stupidity thought they could use it as a recipe to make $X/year. I agree that they represent some form of competition, but that it is the weakest kind imaginable. Like you said, BCC succeeded on the back of "health/focus/energy level/ability to continue executing on the businesses." Without those things it scarcely could've turned any profit, let alone year after year, which is what makes your story so compelling. But I'm not sure it's a useful lesson about the supposed small threat of competition.

sshd would still be authenticated. It's defense in depth.

You think those are the only confounding factors? What about tolerances so that no balls will be damaged in transit? Or is there an acceptable loss rate? How are the balls to be loaded into the trailer? Surely this is not a special ping-pong ball delivery trailer with a feeder and drainage pipe, so how will they be boxed? Do human factors affect the box size, and as a result, the number of balls that can fit? Will the trailers be stacked, and does this alter their capacity? If we don't have to box the balls, and they are stored tightly, could they settle in such a way as to become jammed, risking loss during unloading (tension is relieved, and they burst out the trailer)? Ping-pong balls are spherical, and the geometry of their fit is not as simple as that of rectangular objects, too. Are you expecting the candidate to solve a non-trivial geometry problem in a high-pressure situation? Why? Will the balls be transported between substantially different air pressures or temperatures? Is this important for ping-pong balls?

See how this could coax a poor performance out of an inquisitive, somewhat introverted candidate, rendering a false negative?

Beyond that, there's the more important adversarial tone: As an employee, will the smallest misstep result in termination? What if I have a problem that cannot be easily solved with a search engine? Is this a cooperative environment where I will feel somewhat secure as an employee, or is my status fragile? Is Mike a mercurial person who gives his employees brain-teasers with job performance implications?

It's not the expectation (irrelevant and "hoop jumping" as it is) but the rigid, adversarial tone. And like I said, there are numerous physical confounding factors that render your force-fed approach inadequate.

Note that ping-pong balls can be crushed or melted. Anyway, your reply establishes a weird power dynamic so if that's really how you do business, the candidate dodges a bullet by your forthrightness.

You can certainly port slow Erlang code to C, but it's not as straightforward as doing so in, say, Python or Ruby. For one, if your C code crashes, it's not the calling Erlang process that crashes, but the entire VM [1]. Second, NIF implementations are supposed to cooperate with the BEAM scheduler and only run for 1ms at a time. jlouis points out that most NIFs fail at this [2]. Third (and maybe the expectation here is too great), binary data (structs, etc.) used/provided by NIFs are "magic binaries" which cannot be pattern matched and are represented in crashes, the REPL, etc. as "<<>>" which can be confusing [3].

[1] http://www.erlang.org/doc/man/erl_nif.html (see "Warning")

[2] http://jlouisramblings.blogspot.com/2013/07/problematic-trai...

[3] http://erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-patches/2011-April/002046...

The MTA has multiple tracks and express trains, that alone makes it a world apart from the DC Metro.