Perhaps a different topic is appropriate this time. I wasn't here when we did Erlang the first time, but I'm assuming that those who were are now tired of it. I think (though I may be wrong) that I'd be more interested in seeing some clever brainf and other esolang entries.
I personally just want to see a return to more technical topics and less human-interest pieces - if I wanted those I'd turn on the 6 o'clock news.
I love reading random stuff on languages/tools I don't even use - it expands my breadth and is always fun. I've never written Erlang, but now I may give it a shot.
This is what HN is great for, let's keep it that way.
I do too, but right now a directory of Erlang-related articles is on the front page of HN, along with a niche-interest article about patching Erlang for a future version of OS X.
This was cute the first time, but now it's kind of inane.
This is a one-day thing (or so I would hope), but I hope the overall effect would be to drag HN back towards its roots - as an interesting place for technology discussion in all its forms.
. . . or maybe the effect will be to make people whose level of interest in Erlang is somewhere on this side of sane stop coming to Hacker News, and go back to the programming subreddit.
I kind of like the erlang marker - as soon as I see a front page full of erlang, I know that people are fed up with whatever used to be there. Once I know that, I can easily help the cause if I agree.
Hilarious. I was just scanning the headlines and thinking "WTF is up with all these Erlang articles?!" I'm trying to decide if posting this article is ironic or annoying.
Interesting. In the absence of a downvoting feature, HN has evolved a mechanism for clearing unwanted articles off the homepage: Massively upvote an entire home page's worth of alternative articles. This is done by groups of unrelated people who concentrate their votes by using the word "Erlang" as a flag.
But really, even before why worship HN seemed really piss poor lately. Until few weeks ago I hadn't visited in long time and they types and quality of articles was way down from what I remember.
I've only ever been interested in about 20% of what's posted but recently I felt compelled to read only 1-2 postings a day. And the mix of articles that were uninteresting had shifted from Haskell this / circle jerk around my new startup to really poor fluff.
i personally don't like _why, his writings, his code, his neuroses, or anything else about him. in the beginning i was willing to hold my tongue, because he was pseudo-dead, his fans were holding a eulogy of sorts, and that's hardly the time to be a critic.
the 15th or 20th submission on the front page was way too much, though. i am now officially supporting the backlash. bring on the erlang.
So for those erlang-knowledgable, I understand that erlang is thread-scalable more than most anything. Are there other areas that erlang is similarly more scalable?
Not a bad gambit actually -- I'll sometimes turn on my air conditioner to drown out the sound of my neighbour's music.
The analogy only works if, like me, you consider Erlang articles to be a sort of white noise that you hardly notice, and the-programmer-formerly-known-as-_why articles as being slightly annoying.
It's kind of dumb since all it takes to get the _why stuff off the front page is for people to upvote other submissions that are arguably more relevant (and current).
Which I started doing when it got out of control, but I'm apparently in the minority. I don't really care one way or the other, I just don't read what I'm not interested in.
. . . if, by "working", you mean "replacing one form of noise with another, much louder form that will probably outlast the likely lifespan of the original form".
I just hope that it doesn't become a weird meme, where submitting an Erlang article is the equivalent of expressing disapproval of the current trend in headlines.
"Oh no, people are submitting the same old Erlang articles, the current focus/glorybaiting must be getting annoying!"
