yosh's comments

Yeah, this is Erlang:

    fib(0) -> 0;
    fib(1) -> 1;
    fib(N) -> fib(N-1) + fib(N-2).

Having recently run into some non-obvious crappy performance characteristics with I/O in Erlang, I'm curious if you have any pointers to docs or code that shows how to use Erlang I/O correctly so it's fast?

I'm curious, why would you write that game in Node now, if you already know Erlang?

From my perspective, Erlang is a better fit than Node for all the problem domains that Node is good at. I understand using Node if you don't know Erlang, but do know JS, but if you're already skilled with Erlang...

Probably Musion Eyeliner:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musion_Eyeliner

Weekends are forced vacation too. It'd be great if companies adopted a "floating weekends" policy too, for the same reasons I outlined, but no company I've come across seems to do so, officially (you do see unofficially here and there bosses who recognize an employee working the weekend and allow them to take a couple days off later, and simply not reporting the vacation).

As to your first question, yes I've experienced both. Not month long shutdowns, but week long ones, but it's the same thing: if it's not convenient for you to take a vacation during that time, it's pretty much a waste and it sucks. If your spouse doesn't get 4 weeks off on August, are you going to go on a 4 week vacation then? Probably not. But then you'll resent the people who do actually take that 4 weeks off to go somewhere. It's bad for morale.

I agree that a solid 4 week vacation is enriching, but just declaring an arbitrary 4 week shutdown is a cop out. Fix the structural problems that require every one to be in the office at once, and then give everyone that much vacation time to be used when they like it. I'm not saying that this is easy to fix, but if you really believe in giving people time to have significantly different experiences in their lives, this is what you'd have to work at.

Forced vacation isn't freedom. If August isn't a convenient time to take a vacation, and the employee would rather work, let them work and take that chunk of time off at some other point. If taking that time off another time during the year is unacceptable, then your policy simply isn't fair to all your employees.

Where I work even the national holidays are floating holidays, so if I want to work on Christmas that isn't a day off for me, and I can trade that for a day off for any other day of the year.

Especially for travel, it's way cheaper to do so for off-peak seasons, so forcing August or the last week of December etc. when just makes for more expensive vacations. This is one reason why I think the "French model" kind of sucks.

There's actually 5 charging stations that Tesla installed on the 101 between SF and LA. If we got serious about electric cars, higher charging station density would help with long trips.

And I agree, SF<->LA is not a long drive.

FWIW, the longest stretch of interstate without services is I-70 in Utah, at 106 miles. I don't think I-80 has any >100 mile stretches without gas, but possibly 80 mile stretches.

Off interstates though, the west can get pretty empty. This is near the Nevada/Oregon border:

http://i675.photobucket.com/albums/vv114/cherokeeprogressive...

Reasonably good presentation, but this stuck out at me:

> One team that started with Erlang and moved to Java so they could find programmers. Think about those scenarios.

If the people you are hiring can't pick up Erlang in a couple of weeks of being on the job when they are doing that full time, with colleagues around who already know Erlang to help them, you are hiring the wrong sorts of people. Same goes for any other language/technology stack.

I've also used private ETS tables for this.

Kayak's got them now actually, but only schedules, not prices.

git ls-remote will help you to get the hash of HEAD. It's much cheaper than doing a zero-depth clone.

Yeah, here's a paper on that topic:

http://www.sussex.ac.uk/linguistics/documents/where_do_mama2...

I've noticed that sorted sets have noticeably more overhead than the other types.

T-Mobile is fine in the mission in my experience.

http://www.thinkwiki.org/ is a good resource for figuring out Linux compatibility.

I also recommend Thinkpads. The T and W series are good too.

Careful with casting strings to ints like that, it'll break on architectures that require aligned accesses, i.e. if you try to load a uint32, the address of the memory location must be a multiple of 4. x86 happens to be fine with non-aligned access, but many other architectures aren't.

If you look at the nginx source, that #define is guarded under NGX_HAVE_NONALIGNED and there is a fallback that does straight byte by byte comparison.

> No security check, no long waits, no cattle herding.

Not all trains. With Eurostar (Paris<->London) there's a security checkpoint with an x-ray and metal detector, along with passport control.

Yeah, but tweets aren't limited to the GSM 7-bit character set, so if you tweet in say, Russian, 140 characters is too much, because the whole message needs to be encoded using 2-byte characters.

Twitter's limitation is based on thinking around SMS, but it doesn't actually match up to real world SMS, because they didn't think through all the international language considerations. It's pretty botched up.

See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=660986

Not to impugn on your care packages, but if your friend wants such more often, there's a store in San Jose that sells them:

http://www.aussieproducts.com/contactus.asp

(They do mostly mail order it seems, but they have a storefront in SJ)