How To Wrap A Cat For Christmas

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Erlang, Binaries, and Garbage Collection (Sigh)

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The nice thing about garbage-collection is that it is makes memory management absolutely transparent to you Of course, the above is true right up to the point when it stops being transparent, at which point it does a phase change from nice to clusterf**k of biblical proportions .  There are entire posts, books, and suicide notes that have been written about this, and I have no great desire to add to them, save with the minor comment that paranoia about garbage-collection is still justified , albeit only in the edge-cases for most people. That said, I'll give you that Erlang GC is in many ways much, much better positioned in this regard than, oh, Java, but it still rears up and bites you in the butt when you least expect it. ( More information about Erlang's GC vis-a-vis Java here , and Jesper's truly excellent description of Erlang's GC here ).  A story from the past should serve to illustrate this. Once upon a time, in a magical land far far away - well, Her
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Visualizing Prime Numbers

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From Jason Davies , we have El Patron de Los Primos , probably one of the coolest prime number visualizer that I've seen.  For every Natural number, he draws a periodic curve that intersects at that number and each of its multiples.  Needless to say, prime numbers are touched by only two curves (itself and 1 ). You can scroll to the right, and move up the prime food change. (The image above is a screen grab.  Go here to see the actual thing)
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Its time to call Bullshit on "Technical Debt"

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Seriously. You know what " Technical Debt " is, right? Ok, heres the (official?) Wikipedia definition   Technical debt   (also known as   design debt   or   code debt ) is a   neologistic   metaphor referring to the eventual consequences of poor or evolving   software architecture   and   software development   within a   codebase . The debt can be thought of as work that needs to be done before a particular job can be considered complete. As a change is started on a codebase, there is often the need to make other coordinated changes at the same time in other parts of the codebase or documentation. The other required, but uncompleted changes, are considered debt that must be paid at some point in the future. And in this - somewhat purist - sense, " Technical Debt " is absolutely valid. The problem arises in the way it is almost invariably used, viz., as an excuse to not do something. Herewith a simple exercise - the next time you hear someone cite &quo
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