chops

The misanthrope in me has almost completely taken over when dealing with incoming sales calls, and I've almost completely abandoned the idea that anyone calling me to sell anything is worthy of the "humanity" label.

The moment it's clear they are selling something (it's usually pretty quick) the reply is "fuck off, never call this number again, and go fuck yourself" then I hang up and block the number. I only wish I could be vengeful in response and actually retaliate in some meaningful way to those that are particularly annoying or persistent.

The same applies to door-to-door sales people, moreso to door-to-door missionaries.

This has the same energy as the opening of Joe Armstrong's (RIP, Joe) talk, The Mess We're In: https://youtu.be/lKXe3HUG2l4

It is indeed very websockety. While it is a server-side rendering framework, it relies heavily on javascript and websockets (or fallback to ajax, if websockets aren't available).

However, there isn't a built-in mechanism to handle a client who simply doesn't have javascript enabled at all. Interfaces could be built with traditional HTML forms, but I understand that's not the same thing.

Honestly, only tangentially (at best). Nitrogen is fundamentally an Erlang web framework, however the OTP skills learned should be universal. but we don't dive too deeply into OTP. We introduce gen_servers and supervisors and leave it at that. Most of the book is spent with the specifics of Nitrogen.

That said, the demos[1] on the Nitrogen homepage can give you a pretty good sampling of how the framework works.

[1] http://nitrogenproject.com/demos

Thank you! You're right, the leanpub listing should have a link to the project's homepage, and a link to the Github.

And I had removed the "Fork me on Github" banner thing from the nitrogenproject.com homepage, and forgot to re-add a proper link to the github. I've rectified both of these.

Thanks again!

I just want to say thank you to Stripe for being amazing.

I'm just now dealing with canceling service with a traditional merchant account (I switched completely over to Stripe back in August), and the experience has been terrible and stupid.

Around 2003 or 2004, I was working on my first startup. I signed up for an authorize.net account through a merchant account called Capital Merchant Systems (later acquired by EVO Payments). At the time, the process required filling out a pile of paperwork, including writing an actual cover letter to get approved.

Things were fine until recent years, business for this particular service had slowly dropped to the point where it was no longer feasible to run through authorize.net. So I decided to finally make the switch over to Stripe (which I'd used for a number of years on another project).

Signing up for Stripe is so painlessly easy, straightforward, and friendly.

After switching my system over, I called and emailed my merchant account to cancel (this was in August). Then I called and emailed again in November. Then I called and emailed again in January.

All the while, they've been withdrawing from my checking account.

Then I emailed again in April, and filed reports with the BBB and FTC. Only then have I heard back from them, and they're claiming my January request is the first request.

So the short of it is, use Stripe. They are amazing, open, and transparent, their API is a joy to work with, and their dashboard is great. I wish Stripe was around 16 years ago when I first got started processing payments.

And DO NOT, under any circumstances, use EVO Payments. Cancelling with them is like cancelling a shitty gym membership - at the end of the day, you'll have to file complaints with every 3-letter organization you can think of, and file transaction disputes to cancel your account.

It blocks the on-page ads, but, if you opt-in will show you notification ads (non-invasive notifications), and will pay you for them.

Indeed! Evan was a great member of the Erlang community. In addition to those qualities, he is just a very friendly and likable dude.

Holy moly!

So cringeworthy!

Screensavers are great. I spent endless hours watching Screen Antics (aka Johnny Castaway)[1], and the silly things he did.

But I also watched countless hours watching this art screensaver that came with my Canon printer (I think it was Canon). It just animated the painting process. I think it was called something like Canon Creative, but I'm not sure. I'd love to find that screensaver again - That'd instantly take me back 20 years.

[1] http://web.onetel.net.uk/~gnudawn/johnny/

I imagine Unity will live on in some way with a Ubuntu flavor called Uubuntu.

I have averaged a sale per month for the last 10 years from people clicking through onto this page.

That might be enough of a "Why" to justify the title.

PG doesn't appear to be active any longer (https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=pg). Looks like 2 comments in the last 2 years (and last post is almost a year ago).

My favorite is PG's request to limit the fluff and get back to technical discussions like posts about the "Innards of Erlang": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=512145

Which lead to the famous "Erlang Day", making the HN homepage look like this: https://www.flickr.com/photos/stilist/3348380060/in/photostr...

Interestingly, this day is what personally introduced me to Erlang, and it's been my primary programming language since.

Oh man, I remember that thread when it happened. That was something else.

A glorious exchange.

I have one major use-case for (very cheap) inkjet printers: on the beach. I run a non-trivial number of beach volleyball tournaments[1], and the beach is not a terribly hospitable place for electronics.

So I carry with me a cheap printer that's light to carry. If it takes a fast-moving ball that breaks off a part, or it gets overloaded with sand, dust, destroyed by rain, whatever, it's no skin off my back, since it was just $30.

So far the same crappy printer has been serving me for about 4 years in this capacity.

Toting around a laser printer would be a huge pain in the ass.

Otherwise, I'm completely onboard with the overarching sentiment: there's not a lot of reason to own an inkjet printer.

[1] My flagship product (http://bracketpal.com) is a tournament management system, and beach volleyball is the niche I focus primarily on.

Surely sometimes when you glance over a patch that even without actually working through the code, you get a vibe that something doesn't seem quite right. I know I've gotten patches like this before, and my code isn't nearly as mission-critical and complicated as the SSL libraries used by basically everyone on the planet.

In the show House M.D, Dr. House explained his desire to become a doctor as based on an experience as a kid with the Japanese caste system:

"When I was 14 my father was stationed in Japan. I went rock climbing with this kid from school. He fell, got injured and I had to bring him to the hospital. We came in through the wrong entrance and passed this guy in the hall. It was a janitor. My friend came down with an infection and the doctors didn't know what to do. So they brought in the janitor. He was a doctor. And a Buraku. One of Japan's untouchables. His ancestors had been slaughterers, grave diggers. And this guy, he knew that he wasn't accepted by the staff, he didn't even try. He didn't dress well. He didn't pretend to be one of them. The people that ran that place, they didn't think that he had anything they wanted. Except when they needed him. Because he was right. Which meant that nothing else mattered. And they had to listen to him."

I always liked that little monologue.

Autocorrect? My phone corrects postgres to "postures".

The idea that Erlang/OTP is an OS is something promoted by Garrett Smith in this talk (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ZGHzI9F5YE), and the idea that it is intentionally OS-like has been promoted by the Robert Virding and Joe Armstrong (https://twitter.com/rvirding/status/386612140242915328)

And two different lisps:

* Lisp Flavored Erlang (http://lfe.io/) * Joxa (http://joxa.org/)

Thanks, I'll look into them!

After years of only reading technical, business, and philosophical books, I finally decided to take the plunge and read some fiction about 2 years ago.

Since then, I've caught up with Song of Ice and Fire, read the first 11 books of Sword of Truth, and did the first 2 Dune books.

Most recently, I finished Stephen King's Dark Tower series, and I'm currently going through a bunch of HP Lovecraft (it feels good to finally understand the Cthulhu mythos and all that it implies).

When I finish that, I'm going to finish up the Sword of Truth series (the most recent 3 books), and I'm eagerly awaiting the 6th book in A Song of Ice and Fire.

These days, I don't actually read all that much, as I've picked up an appreciation for audiobooks and how you can read your stories while doing other things like driving, cooking, and shopping. So I don't read in freetime anymore, but instead just rock the audiobooks in the "between" times.

Obviously, audiobooks don't work with technical books so much.

Now if only the headline had been "This person just poured water on their scanner and you won't BELIEVE what happened next. Find out why scanner manufacturers HATE this one weird technique!"

But yeah, I do agree it's a catchier headline than "Immersion Scanning".

So if I understand you correctly, what you're saying is that if one were to bury a radio in rich soil, it will grow a large antenna and eventually become self-aware.

It's pretty common in the small business world, or even printing envelopes/labels for christmas cards, wedding invitations, etc. Most recently, I'm using it for rapid prototyping of cards for a board game I'm making, but I do also use it for small direct mailing campaigns (under 200 destinations) for my business.

Next time I encounter this, I'll definitely do it. I might still have a file around that's doing it, in which case, I'll give it a send hopefully today or tomorrow. Thanks!

Inkscape is great. I've only recently started using it more heavily as a tool for building a board game with my wife. It gets the job done for me, and I don't have to unlearn anything, as I'm not coming from illustrator.

I'm very pleased to see it's under active development.

While I appreciate effort put into making the interface prettier, one of the things that really detracts from LibreOffice and why I almost invariably end up installing MS Word for clients is the confusing way which the mail merge system is designed in LibreOffice. I've done it enough times now to know mostly how to get it working for myself, but there's no way in hell I'll try teaching a client how to do a mail merge in LibreOffice.

And even myself, I've had to completely scrap documents I'm working on because LibreOffice gets confused and does what I'm assuming is some kind of join, resulting in tons of duplicates when it comes time to print[1]. It's almost certainly user error, but where to fix it is unclear. That whole mechanism needs to be gutted and reworked.

But I continue to deal with it because Linux is my primary environment and it's good enough in everything else I have to deal with.

[1] something like multiple data sources used accidentally, even though both point at the same source file, and even after wiping all data sources, the issue remains.

It was called Queueview. I couldn't find its homepage (in sure it was taken down), but the Facebook page, complete with all the notices about the API changes is here: https://m.facebook.com/profile.php?v=timeline&filter=1&id=31...

It's too bad, but the writing has been on the walls for a long time. A close friend of mine had build a great little iOS app a while back designed to let you know when items on your queue were going to be pulled from Netflix instant. After several months of the app being live in the app store, Netflix decided to limit the results to showing either greater than 2 weeks or less than 2 weeks. Eventually, that information was removed from the API altogether, and my friend pulled his app from the store.

From that single anecdotal data point, I had the Netflix API has always been a mess anyway, and poorly documented.