HN user

lectrick

1,393 karma

ruby/rails coder (and recent dabbler in clojure, haskell and Elixir), gamer, philosopher, technologist, sailor, swimmer, biker, music lover, partier, hourglass-figure adorer, and fan of Bitcoin, Apple, Tesla, open-source, and startups. I lean liberal and libertarian, although I love debating anything controversial.

As of today (2/3/2016), this account is now 2000 days old with 1369 karma. I've decided to celebrate by announcing a switch to a (for better or worse) far-less-anonymous account, "pmarreck".

Posts0
Comments953
View on HN
No posts found.

"Throughout its history Norsk Data produced a long string of extremely innovative systems, with a disproportionately large number of world firsts."

Still seems like something worth being proud of. It just got sideswiped by the personal computer industry (a lot of things did).

As someone who has only recently (finally) become disillusioned by OO (especially in larger codebases and/or on programming teams, which both seem to rapidly escalate tech debt and complexity thanks to things like mutability, class reopening and stowing-state-everywhere)... I'm so sorry, man. The difference (which is significant) unfortunately seems to require years of real-world experience with both to see it.

I've been pointing OO people to these thoughts by John Carmack, who is pretty well-respected in the C++ OO community: http://gamasutra.com/view/news/169296/Indepth_Functional_pro...

I also like the immutable variables aspect.

Elixir has the same immutable variables. I don't know why this is such a misconception. Erlang conflates rebinding and reassignment, Elixir does not, and the tradeoffs seem to (overall) be better in Elixir's case. Here, read the language creators' explanation as to why that is, it's the best:

http://blog.plataformatec.com.br/2016/01/comparing-elixir-an...

Very succinct and (hopefully) puts this misconception to bed.

I thought Erlang looked weirder than Elixir (to the extent that I was turned off until Elixir came along), but fortunately, both of our opinions are compatible as everything compiles down to BEAM and is interoperable :)

From a semantic persopective I've found that I almost automatically understand Erlang just from working with Elixir. Some things like OTP are pretty much identical. Plus you get "real" macros :)

"I couldn't be bothered to Google the problem, but based on my sample size of 1, I think your problem doesn't exist"

Thanks for that useful comment, man.

This is a quite beautiful post about engineering in general, actually. You try to solve a practical problem as best as you can, and you get sort of an unintended-beneficial-consequences effect and end up creating principles that have a more universally-applicable nature.

I personally hope Elixir helps thrust Erlang into ever more success. (But not so much success that it becomes a victim of it...)

Might I recommend Witcher 3 (amazing!) and Metal Gear Solid: The Phantom Pain, both of which I enjoyed (slightly) more than FO4 (sadly) and DA:I. They are both also more "mature" games (and TPP is set in 1980's Afghanistan and allows you to collect just-off-chart hits from the 80's to play on your in-game Walkman, which I found rather cool). (I haven't tried JC3 yet, I got halfway through JC2 and then kinda dropped it.)

Now I'm afraid to try Boom Beach lol

Homebrew... The only Homebrew I know about is http://brew.sh/

1) There is almost definitely an emacs equivalent for iOS

2) Pycharm- Maybe Textastic (https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/textastic-code-editor-for/id...) or Codemate (https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/codemate-syntax-highlighter/...). I'm not an IDE guy (I use Sublime Text), so YMMV.

3) OK so I get it, you're a Python dev. Admittedly, iOS is lacking in doing native app dev (in fact, I just posted something of that nature to this very thread).

4) Java, etc... I wonder if https://c9.io/ would work...

5) MS Office- Haven't used in years, anyway. I use Google Docs for all that.

6) Adobe stuff- Well, iPad Pro has some version of photoshop, I believe... PDF's are rendered natively in iOS (and quite nicely, actually... just like on OS X)... Illustrator?

I am ONLY interested in this if it will be possible to code on it. I am fairly certain most of the HN community would agree that a device that "completes the circle" (allows you to create native apps on the device, for the device) is better than a device (almost) purely designed for consumption and communication over creation.

EDIT: I was wrong. I assumed Chrome iOS and Chrome Android used the same rendering engine. I'm rather shocked that they don't, actually.

Of course I can't find the links now via Google, but I saw an announcement recently (multiple actually) about batteries in development that are not affected by cold temperatures AND have higher charge capacity AND speed than Li-Ion. I believe (guessing here) it involved aluminum (but not those charge-only-once aluminum-air batteries... something else).

If those batteries were released commercially within the next 5 years, it would be a game-changer

1) The Tesla just surpassed the Leaf as the most popular electric car (yes, even with the price difference).

2) Electric car perks are everywhere and rarely mentioned. Free charging, way better parking, fielding questions from curious onlookers, more cargo space, no noise, no warmup, no oil changes, etc.)

3) In the winter months in areas of the world with real seasons (read: not San Francisco area), cabin heating will detract significantly from your range on a long 20 degree F drive. Talking 25% less maximum range or so. You can mitigate it somewhat by using seat heat instead but I've found that passengers REALLY do not want to go that route (or worse, they want BOTH lol).