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Serious question: Is it so bad to live and die with some regrets? Should we live our lives according to a "regret-minimization" framework? Does regret, which most acknowledge as a negative emotion or feeling, actually serve a positive purpose in our lives?

I'm liking the new trend of making databases "fast" by default, with "safe" configurations. People who care about safety should take the time make it so; people who want it fast, well, give it to them faster! So maybe PostgreSQL should offer faster defaults?

I hope they did; We tried this app, but ended up having to roll our own because of missing features. Of course, we were using it for hex display, not hex editing, so what we came up with was mostly better visualization of binary wire data (specifically, more custom data types than int and float)..

Anything tangible or intangible that is capable of being owned or controlled to produce value and that is held to have positive economic value is considered an asset. Ideas aren't special; they're assets, just like any other economic resource. However, ideas are very illiquid. To extract the value of an idea, you have to execute it, which can take months or years and is very uncertain. Liquidity makes assets worth more, so ideas take a significant price cut since they're so hard to "sell". So that's why ideas aren't worth very much...

I'll await the blog post; I can't be the only one who's interested the know the motivations. And for the record, I agree that it's the practical results that matter (for those who would criticize an OS choice). We're doing "embarrassing" things with what amounts to an EAV/graph database built on top of MySQL (with all the vertices in-memory), but we're incredibly happy with our results.

Facebook tracks your movement across every page with a Facebook asset? Does Google do something like this as well?

Obliged to respond, even if this is from two years ago, as a lot of our work is in Erlang... 1) is completely wrong; Erlang doesn't have anything to do with Prolog, and the syntax is actually pretty straightforward. 2) is for the most part true, though the bigger problem is finding one library that solves your problem (rather than choosing from two or more). 3) is mostly true (there are plenty of Erlang charlatans; try hiring for an Erlang position and see what manner of Erlang programmers you find). 4) is completely false; large (100K to 1M+ SLoC) Erlang codebases are manageable. 5) could be a good point, but might be said about any language; in the end, results speak for themselves. 6) might be a valid concern, but for the most part, Erlang code is behind the web layer, and some other application relays the requests to the back-end.7) is pretty much irrelevant.

At the end of the day, if you're happy with the results you're getting with Erlang (and you can get great results), who cares if the rest of the world thinks Erlang has no fashion sense? Erlang is still beautiful.