What can I only do in Erlang? • Hacker News Board

Re: What can I only do in Erlang?

#171

Post by saganus » Sat, Nov 08, 2014, 4:21 PM UTC

Fuzzwah wrote: post #114

Ixiaus wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Down voting is not for disagreeing, read the guidelines for HN. If you disagree, provide a comment as to why. Down voting is for completely irrelevant comments, inappropriate comments, etc... [EDIT] To be clear, I did not downvote you and I disagree with the down votes on your comment here, even though it's off-topic it's important to acculturate people that are accustomed to "downvoting for disagreeing". Which is wh…

Downvoting is for however the user wants to use it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171 > pg 2455 days ago | link | parent | flag > I think it's ok to use the up and down arrows to express agreement. Obviously the uparrows aren't only for applauding politeness, so it seems reasonable that the downarrows aren't only for booing rudeness. > It only becomes abuse when people resort to karma bombing: downvoting a…

What I have never understood about HN's use of the down vote as "I don't agree with you" is that it also changes the color of the post to one designed to be hard to read, so it's like imposing a kind of progressive silence.

Why not just a change in color to something different, not harder to read? If down vote is to be used however the down voter wants then why attach the "punishing" color to it?

It's an interesting system in that I have not seen it anywhere else and indeed does seem to work. But still I can't understand it.

Re: What can I only do in Erlang?

#172

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Nov 11, 2014, 2:55 PM UTC

lostcolony wrote: post #68

amelius wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay. But let's take the example of the C++ webserver framework written by Facebook employees, which was discussed here a few days ago, [1]. This project contains lots of protocol-handling logic for HTTP/1.1 and SPDY, and beneath that TLS. Are you saying that such projects are better written in a combination of Erlang and C/C++? [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8563199

Facebook has two scaling problems. One is the code, sure, but one is also the employees. They need to be able to hire and scale out their teams, and have had to do so quite quickly. It's easier to find C++ people than it is Erlang. That is a consideration. It's why Facebook chat was originally in Erlang, then switched to PHP. Facebook already had a lot of PHP devs, they are a lot easier to find, so rather than having…

[deleted]

Re: What can I only do in Erlang?

#173

Post by tim333 » Tue, Nov 11, 2014, 3:08 PM UTC

lostcolony wrote: post #68

amelius wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay. But let's take the example of the C++ webserver framework written by Facebook employees, which was discussed here a few days ago, [1]. This project contains lots of protocol-handling logic for HTTP/1.1 and SPDY, and beneath that TLS. Are you saying that such projects are better written in a combination of Erlang and C/C++? [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8563199

Facebook has two scaling problems. One is the code, sure, but one is also the employees. They need to be able to hire and scale out their teams, and have had to do so quite quickly. It's easier to find C++ people than it is Erlang. That is a consideration. It's why Facebook chat was originally in Erlang, then switched to PHP. Facebook already had a lot of PHP devs, they are a lot easier to find, so rather than having…

>It's why Facebook chat was originally in Erlang, then switched to PHP. Facebook already had a lot of PHP devs...

You sure about that? I was curious and googled and from the Quora reply below it seems they switched more from Erlang to their own C++ libraries because:

"...some of the abstractions Erlang had that allowed one to transparently have a distributed system across multiple machines actually caused reliability problems -- one server in the group would fail and cause cascading issues. Secondly, we found a number of instances where Erlang wasn't scaling well to multiple cores."

http://www.quora.com/When-did-Facebook-switch-away-from-usin...