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Showing posts from November, 2014

Come the revolution, the WSJ will be first in line

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This, and I swear this is true, is definitely not from The Onion .  Veronica Dagher writing in the WSJ (and with an accompanying oh-so-helpful video ) explains how you can be broke on $400K/year.  In Chicago. (emphasis below is all mine) They live comfortably, travel frequently and pay the mortgage on a home worth more than $1 million . They send their two teenagers to public school and put away about $12,000 a year for retirement and $10,000 for college tuition ... The couple's annual take-home income is $273,000 after setting aside money for retirement and college and after paying U.S. and Illinois income taxes... They spend   $87,000 a year on their mortgage , $24,000 on property taxes, $25,000 on home maintenance and $15,000 on utilities, cellphones and other household bills...Groceries for the family of four cost $575 a week, or $30,000 a year. The family buys a new car every four years, which amounts to $15,000 a year on average, and spends $9,000 annually on car

Java vs Javascript

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/via leftoversalad

As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly

Happy Thanksgiving!

IKEA - by Escher

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Coffee Is Life

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It is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion.  It is by the beans of Java that thoughts acquire speed,       the hands acquire shakes,       the shakes become a warning.  It is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion.

Awesomeness in Restaurant Takedowns - #TheGuardian Edition

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Jay Rayner takes a deep breath, channels his inner Pete Wells , and lets forth long and proud on the hilarious insanity that is The Beast in London. Go read the whole thing, it is both riotous and brutal at the same time . Selected passages follow.. If Beast were a chap, he would be a part-time rugby player smelling of Ralgex who’s trying to tell you he’s deep and thoughtful, even though he’ll later be implicated in an incident involving a traffic cone and a pint glass of his own urine. [...]The corn-fed, dry-aged Nebraskan rib-eye, with a carbon footprint big enough to make a climate-change denier horny, is bloody marvellous: rich, deep, earthy, with that dense tang that comes with proper hanging. And at £100 a kilo it bloody well should be. At that price they should lead the damn animal into the restaurant and install it under the table so it can pleasure me while I eat. [...]I finally conclude that Beast is the sort of restaurant invented solely to be photographed for in-

Net Neutrality - a Flow-Chart

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/via Medium

Why Erlang?

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A straight cut-and-paste from erlang-questions - it pretty much sez. it all, and very eloquently at that Anything can be done in any language, so the technical answer is "nothing". But the spirit of the question begs for an answer, especially in a company situation with deadlines. My company does mostly business data systems and custom extensions to certain products of ours. Originally we used a mix of Python (probably 70%), PL/pgSQL (maybe 10%), Guile/Scheme (probably around 10%), C (5%ish) and a smattering of Bash, Perl, Scala or Java, etc. where necessary. I am extremely familiar with Python and Guile, and between those two a one-dimensional solution to any conceivable problem can be reduced to triviality. They are great languages. They have great libraries. They tie into the rest of the *nix world smoothly. Super tools, *vastly* superior in every way (for us) than more prolific tools such as Java. But when it came time for us to deal with some new feature requests --