noss

Also if you have a lot of data you use an ets table which is more or less an in-process but off-gc-heap key-value database.

Live somewhere where you can safely bike to work. I bike all year around in Stockholm's climate, and that way I get at least 1h physical activity every workday.

Glad to see that, however this is not very sophisticated. We used to build houses where the loading walls were thick brick walls, and from what I understand it was mostly given up because of the costly skilled labor requirements. I dream of technology enabling us to construct houses like those again, and of course more beautiful architecture.

I've seen some other brick laying robots, one that built prefab segments where fine distance and rotation of the bricks made a complicated pattern. And there is also those robots that lay brick roads.

This is interesting experimentation. However everything I see in 3D-printed houses seem very much built for the sake of being 3D-printer built. Technology in search of a problem to solve. And this is probably not far off the truth at this stage. Many people are also dismissive that see the productions and don't have enough imagination to see things possible here that are disruptive compared to what you do today.

Later years I have begun to see and appreciate the handcraft gone into masonry. The results are very decorative and the material used is very modular. You buy standard size bricks (but sometimes cut them). I would love to see 3d-printing include bricks in the process. And then advance them so much that the machines can build arches. This is just my idea. I think architects that are less interested in the 3D-printing technology and more interested in amazing architecture need to be involved and use it as a component in construction.

Android's target machine is google's dalvik vm, and not the jvm.

But they also provide a level of security that nothing else can offer for that currency. They literally can print more money if they don't have enough to pay you back.

It is true that big phones are popular here in Korea. It is not uncommon to have more than an hour in public transport to get to work, two hours happens quite frequently as well. Some people even have a telscope antenna for tv reception in their phones.

Using the telephone as an entertainment device on long commutes doesnt explain it all though. I think there is a small part status symbol in screen size, and the fact that korean phone makers have few other ideas in what to improve in their next top of the line model.

With java 7 and java.util.Objects there is a static helper method. Nice to have in the favourites in Eclipse.

    import static java.util.Objects.equals;

    if(equals(myString, "foobar")) { ... }

The local operator does not seem to be taking enough responsibility for the work they are supposed to do.

In Stockholm you can get your taxi fare paid for up to 400 SEK (~40 EUR) if you are running more than 20 minutes late because of schedule problems. (Details might have changed, was a long time ago since I used it.) You submit the bill and have your own money on the line until/if it is reimbursed.

Monitoring a bus by having a "tamper proof" GPS logger on the bus seem more reasonable than having points where punctionality is measured. The local operator themselves would obviously not be the ones verifying reimbursement requests against these GPS logs.

Definitely, I often catch exceptions and wrap them just to add more information from the try-finally scope. It is so frequently useful to get a full story of what the app was attempting to do.

My problems with shoulder and wrist pains all originate from stressful projects. When you sit entire days with your muscles tense, over and over again, that is when problems start to occur.

I can not connect my problems to bad ergonomics, because the way I was sitting in front of my computer all the way up until university years, those were far from ergonomic positions. But if you are relaxed and have fun, you automatically vary your posture and position.

Ergonomic chairs and keyboards are only one way to make you be able to endure your stressful work condition a bit longer when you sit there stressed trying to meet deadlines and whatever problems you fight with. The pains will show up, only later.

Myself, I often try to wake up from the work, feel my body and if I'm actually stressed. Take a deep breath, see if I can let my arms hang loose and relaxed. If I feel that I'm actually sweaty and have a high pulse, then I need to go for a walk. A good manager that I can bring this up with helps.

Also a bit of a fuck-off attitude also helps: My health is so much more valuable than the job and its compensation.

I have done code reviews in a scrum team setting. Often there are tasks that only one team member will implement, it would simply be too many chefs to have two developers on it, and the others are needed to implement other things.

What we found very useful is to do a pre-review of the existing code to discuss how it works, but this after everyone have done their own one-hour self-study of the code (actually, self-study time tends to be until one guy interrupts saying he grok it and can describe it). Then we discuss the approach for implementation, but only one guy go ahead and implement it. The other developers have similar reviews on their areas.

Afterwards, when it has been implemented, we all come together and look at the implemented solution, again first with self study of the commits, then review sitting in front of the developers desk.

By only being involved as a reviewer, you get a very good understanding of the implementation. You understand not only how it works, but why it was implemented that way. It also leads to more "talk about the code" in the team. Everybody gets a common understanding of some area, you can talk about code improvements.

It was quite interesting and humbling to see how my university class mates could absorb so much of the mandatory C programming course in only 2 months. Stuff that I had taught myself over the previous 5 years.

I think that the most valuable thing I have is that I'm enthusiastic about programming. These guys could do what I do, but they wouldn't want to make a career out of it.

Stackoverflow.com is really good at discussing these kind of issues, and the question has beeen asked and answered many times already as I found out with a bit of googling.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/761194/interface-vs-abstr...

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/479142/when-to-use-an-int...

More discussions can be found in Related questions.

Reminds me how I use HPROF for profiling the JVM. It is my next step after doing the simpler

(while sleep 1; do jstack PID; done) | grep -A 10 THREADNAMEPATTERN

I bought a baseball cap today, because I sport a buzzcut and I'm temporarily working in a climate where the sun is burning. So I need it to protect myself from the sun.

Could it be that the decline of the hat came with the office culture? Most people I see outdoor working actually wear something on their heads.

I recently uninstalled DroidEdit because I had to handle more updates to it than uses for a text editor on my tab. This is mostly because typing without tactile feedback isn't that great. The editor in itself was quite smart though.

How heavy would a small ICE unit need to be to produce enough current to keep the batteries alive for longer periods of time? And how much fuel would such a thing use?

I use www.glesys.se, they have hosting at two locations in Sweden, but also New York and Amsterdam. I'm quite happy with them for the 100 SEK i pay per month for some MFA sites.

I understand the resentment, but the right course of action must surely be to not upgrade. Instead go with an alternative, such as Mac OS or Linux.

I frequently take cold showers between sauna sessions. Both are extremes, in the sauna I like the feeling of hot steam making my skin shiver just after a splash of water on the heater. In a cold shower I like the initial gasp for air and the shiver down my spine before I get used to it.

I do remember reading something about intensive chilling would improve my immune defense, but that just made me start doing this. Now I do it because it feels good to have some ice cool water after 10 minutes in the sauna giving you a slight fever.

That comparasion came to my mind as well. One problem with the prostitution law was that prostitutes now had to go into hiding, since their customers wanted to be more discrete. This led to an advantage for those working with trafficking, their prostitutes were outside society. Althought, I don't know any numbers on how prostitution changed because of this. I can definitely see how it would from above reasoning though.

For bribes, I can not think of something similar happening. The receiver of bribes typically offer a service they can't go underground with.

I've had my own thoughts about how to deal with the prostitution issue, where the goal is to look out for the prostitutes: Make prostitution legal; but only with prostitutes that can display proof of a recent health check and meetup with some social worker. That would of course end up becoming a government prostitution-permit-in-disguise, which together with the whole "make prostitution legal", would make a pretty though pill for the political climate in Sweden.

It would however give the social agencies and the police a better overview of the "registered" prositutes and their situation, so the police can put their resources into fighting prisoned trafficking victims (which I consider to be much more urgent and important), and the social agencies can identify social problems that led the registered prostitutes into prostitution and what keeps them there.

All in all, this might be a very swedish way to think about it, turning it into a tax paid government program. I can't help it, I'm a product of that system. :)

Okay, how was it, did Lisp introduce if expressions or if statements?

I wonder how much different their project is to the bank-id and e-legitimation used in Sweden.

The "you fucked up somewhere" without any explaination of his opinion makes this piece look childish.

Sweden had a similar amount, but it was only lowered to about 5000€.

The goal, the scarce resource one optimize for, tend to be different. (To use the language from http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/30/know-your-s..., posted here earlier ).

Control-driven concurrency tends to be io-bound if being bound at all, and the major issue tends to be dealing with the complexity of the rules. I.e. if-that-happens then-start-that-thing which-tells-that-system and-then-continues-with-that-task which-notices-the-registered-plugins. These rules should not block for other concurrent but independent sessions. Scalability tends to be an issue here. A relevant scalability example for Erlang would be a telecom system where each machine-added make you able to handle X number of more subscribers.

Data-driven concurrency tends to be more about making use of the concurrency available in the current hardware generation to speed up very cpu-bound computations. Using more threads than cores available just mean more context-switches and less performance. These are problems that likely also want to make use of SIMD instructions.

For me, this article introduces some useful terminology in relation to concurrency that I had not read about before. I am thinking about "SPMD, Single Program Multiple Data" and data-driven vs control-driven parallelism.

As an Erlang user and forum/chat hang-around, I frequently see people come in with a problem that is very data-driven. Large matrix inversions, AI back-tracking, then dismiss Erlang as academic hot-air because spawning an Erlang process per element and taking care of calculation results was too much work and no speedup. Obviously they were having data-driven problems and Erlang is made for control-driven problems.

I would love to find well-written and succinct articles on the difference between these two kinds of problem domains to refer people to. I find that it is very difficult to describe this well myself.

For those of you that have been through startups that involved investors. How important was the cost of living, office rent space? How does that importance compare to how easy it is to hire the right people? I can see how "lifestyle startups" prefer cheap places.

PS. I visited Vienna this summer and really liked it. A one-hour train trip to the east and you're in Bratislava (i.e. daily commute possible) which also was a nice city. Prague, Venice, Budapest, all reachable in over-night train trips or less with ÖBB (austrian railroads). The whole area is interesting.

Myself I'm from Stockholm and I doubt we have anything else to appeal startups with than well educated people and a beautiful place to live.

I have heard this presented as "telcom companies do not want to be reduced to be a bitpipe".

It is a fear I find to be mistaken. Even though a bit is a bit any way it is transferred, things like latency, jitter, guaranteed throughput, those are things that do make a difference to applications.

If I was a telcom company, I would start to write android applications that besides providing VOIP and streaming video, etc, also would set up these connections to use a QoS level that the subscriber would have as extra charge add-ons to their account. QoS might require lots of technology on the server side that isn't there yet.

If I was an evil telecom company, I might even introduce jitter on non QoS and make VoIP completely crappy quality. Making people that pick this route sound like real cheapskates. Aren't you glad I am not a telecom company?