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udfalksoon To ORM or Not to ORM

Came here to say this. Ecto is solid. Also, the results come back as elixir structs and not bloated objects so it’s much faster than ORMs in many other languages. Additionally, the functional approach makes everything much less magical.

Changesets can take a little while to grok, but they work.

udfalksoon Ask HN: Who is hiring? (May 2019)

Diet ID | Senior Full-Stack Engineer | Detroit, MI USA | Onsite or remote | Full time

Diet ID, designed by leading experts in nutrition and preventive medicine, has reinvented how we assess and improve diets for better health. We empower people to rapidly figure out where they are and where they want to go, and give them a guided, step-by-step path to get there using a quick and accurate image-based pattern-matching system. Learn more about us at https://dietid.com

We are looking to hire a Senior Full-Stack Engineer to join our small team. Ideally you can join us on-site at our main office in Detroit, but we are a semi-distributed company with employees in New York, Connecticut and Texas as well.

Our application is a Ruby on Rails back-end with a React front-end (and some React Native). If you're deeply familiar with these (or similar) technologies, and find the idea of helping people assess and improve how they eat for better health, then please send a resume to tech@dietid.com. Thanks!!

udfalksoon Unreal Engine 4 Live-Rendered Photorealism Demo [video]

Wow

udfalksoon Boléro: Sergiu Celibidache (1971) [video]

So good, one of my favorites.

udfalksoon Dr. Rhonda Patrick on DHA in Phospholipid Form and the Prevention of Alzheimers

Here are some great notes from her talk with Peter Attia: https://podcastnotes.org/2018/07/03/attia-patrick/

(Disclosure, I'm part of the podcastnotes team)

udfalksoon Why I Prefer Dynamic Typing Over Static Typing (2017)

Elixir's pattern matching seems to handle this case quite well, despite having dynamic typing. This approach feels like the best of both worlds to me.

udfalksoon Why can’t a bot tick the 'I'm not a robot' box?

Imagine if those sites had to build their own captcha service instead. How much more expensive would they be?

udfalksoon The Man Who Invented Information Theory (2017)

The Information is an incredible book. I highly recommend.

udfalksoon Tesla Autopilot HW3 details

I'd bet that lag is simply a front-end display issue.

udfalksoon Coconut: Pythonic functional programming

I'm seeing a lot of the things I like about Elixir here. Very slick.

Are there performance implications?

udfalksoon Sketches of Elixir

I've written some rather large python apps with Django and Flask. I'd never voluntarily choose it again over Elixir/Phoenix. (Only if there was heavy numerical processing or something of the sort where a library like Pandas would be necessary.)

Working with Elixir/Phoenix is a far superior experience in nearly every way for web/api IMO.

udfalksoon Show HN: Yet another React global state container

What advantages or disadvantages does this have over redux? Thanks

udfalksoon Clojure at Netflix (2013) [slides]

I've built some pretty large apps with Elixir (FP and also has a pipe operator like Clojure). I guess it's the lisp syntax, the deeply nested parenthesis, the prefix notation, etc.

udfalksoon Clojure at Netflix (2013) [slides]

Yup, it depends what you're building I suppose. For an Elixir/Phoenix web application or api I've found the performance to be very impressive.

udfalksoon Clojure at Netflix (2013) [slides]

Another option worth considering is Elixir. It's also dynamically typed, but the pattern matching helps mitigate dynamic type issues if used correctly. It's a pleasure to work with.

udfalksoon Clojure at Netflix (2013) [slides]

I just inherited a Clojure project, one which I'm quite well acquainted with the business logic, and I find it extremely hard to read. It's very different from the many other languages that I'm comfortable with already. I'm sure with sufficient learning I can get comfortable parsing what's going on, but it is a problem.

udfalksoon Why Public Transportation Works Better Outside the U.S

https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2017/07/how-low-did-h...

"This summer, as New Yorkers head out to Long Island’s beach towns and parks on the Southern State Parkway, they’ll pass beneath a series of overpass bridges made infamous in Robert A. Caro’s monumental 1974 biography of Robert Moses, The Power Broker.

In one of the book's most memorable passages, Caro reveals that Moses ordered his engineers to build the bridges low over the parkway to keep buses from the city away from Jones Beach—buses presumably filled with the poor blacks and Puerto Ricans Moses despised. The story was told to Caro by Sidney M. Shapiro, a close Moses associate and former chief engineer and general manager of the Long Island State Park Commission."

This article says that the story is not necessarily that straightforward, but this does speak directly to your comment.

udfalksoon New Zealand travellers refusing digital search now face $5k Customs fine

https://i.imgur.com/gnejoIm.jpg

udfalksoon Electric Vehicles’ Day Will Come, and It Might Come Suddenly

Why is the weight of concern to you?

udfalksoon Bitcoin's Use in Commerce Keeps Falling

Yes, right now this is true (for those with easy access to credit cards and bank accounts at least). But the same criticisms could have been made about pretty much any technology in the early days of its adoption. A lot of smart, well funded, groups of people are working hard on these problems. It will only get better.

udfalksoon Elixir v1.7 released

I’m using gigalixir to host a few projects and have been happy with it so far. I believe it uses GCP by default under the covers

udfalksoon The Machine That Builds Itself: The Strengths of the Lisp Languages (2016)

It's more about Phoenix than Elixir alone. The language is approachable enough, although clearly different, and the frameworks are similar enough (router, controllers, templates, gem -> hex, etc.) that a rails dev can become productive in this environment relatively quickly. And, the effort to do so comes with a number of serious benefits.

udfalksoon Demand for Ruby on Rails is Still Huge

Highlights:

1. So much faster. I'm getting super consistent 30ms response times on a heavily trafficked web app. AND I did this while completely ripping out a complicated layered caching system that I was using in last iteration of the app. It's just web app talking directly to postgres database, which sounded crazy to me, but actually works.

2. Socket/Channel goodness baked in. I built a real-time chat experience in about a day with Phoenix channels/presence. Makes it quite easy.

3. Less moving parts. Language level support for async tasks and in memory caching lets you do A LOT without installing/managing redis, queues, and other tools. For fancier use cases you still might want to go there, but for a lot of common tasks (send email after user registers for instance) you can go a long way with just Elixir. And you can keep related code together more easily because of this.

4. Easier testing and maintenance. Functional language by nature tends to lead to more modular, maintainable and testable code. Hard to appreciate this until you build a large-ish project with it, but I've found this to be very true.

udfalksoon The Machine That Builds Itself: The Strengths of the Lisp Languages (2016)

Anecdotally I've seen quite a few job postings recently mentioning Elixir. That it can be seen, along with Phoenix, as a more performant, easier to maintain successor to Ruby/Rails gives it some legs imo.

udfalksoon Demand for Ruby on Rails is Still Huge

It’s great, go for it.

udfalksoon The Trouble with D3

It is a la cart here. Look at those two repos as examples.

udfalksoon The Trouble with D3

d3 has a lot of really useful libraries baked in. You can even use them independently and roll your own svg using its components as utilities. I find this super helpful when using d3 as a whole isn't really a good option (as part of a React/React-Native app for example).

Such as: https://github.com/d3/d3-shape

https://github.com/d3/d3-scale

Doing it from scratch without the help of utilities like these would be much harder.

A couple examples:

var line = d3.line() .x(function(d) { return x(d.date); }) .y(function(d) { return y(d.value); }) .curve(d3.curveCatmullRom.alpha(0.5));

line(data); // gives you svg path

and

var color = d3.scaleLinear().domain([10, 100]).range(["brown", "steelblue"]);

color(20); // "#9a3439" color(50); // "#7b5167"

udfalksoon How Judea Pearl Became One of AI's Sharpest Critics

Sounds like an interesting article

udfalksoon Why it’s so hard to fix banking: An interview with Simple’s exiting CEO

I’ve had a similar experience. Would never go back to The nickel and dining nightmare that was Citibank.

udfalksoon Bitcoin Sees Wall Street Warm to Trading Virtual Currency

This is not necessarily good advice.

If someone only wants to buy, say, $100 worth of bitcoin just to get their foot in the door and they don't put in the time to research how to keep their local wallet secure and make sure their computer/phone has not been hacked, they're very likely better off keeping that small amount of bitcoin with a service like Coinbase (and set up 2fa!)

Of course if you play with bigger amounts, and you take the time to educate yourself further about taking custody of your own funds, then I completely agree with what you've said.