skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
All this poetic non-sense about flexibility and writing prototype programs is irrelevant. Lisp has real technical flaws that prevent its use:

1.GC that prevents it from using real-time and performance-oriented code.

2.Pervasive use of inefficient lists and dynamic typing, which puts steep memory requirements on top of performance costs.

3. Arcane write-only syntax which becomes context sensitive with Domain-Specific Languages which Lisp programs devolve to, creating unreadable and overly condensed spaghetti code(especially macros), making existing code inaccessible for developers.

4. Huge runtime which is embedded in every executable, that makes it less competitive with scripting languages. Lisp requires eval() and runtime interpretation which other languages optimize out and replace with fixed code paths. (some external programs called "tree shakers" remove the lisp's runtime cruft, but they're exception rather than rule)

5. Lisp has very loose safety. Any piece of data can be potentially executed at runtime and lisp programs have to be excluded from WriteXORexecute/NX protection, since lisp code/data are intermingled.
Executable stack and heap expand areas for exploits and create a general lack of stability - any bug can corrupt running code, Lisp is so far removed from any concept of safety it even allows the programs to be modified at runtime(this is a fundamental feature shared with polymorphic viruses).
The blog post author, according to his architectural studio github [1], uses it "in production".

[1] https://github.com/uncreatednet
backed in the sense of too-big-to-fail. Otherwise, deposits of only upto Rs 100,000/- are insured, that too per person, irrespective of how many bank accounts. Insured in the sense that if bank tanks, Customers will get back minimum (of deposit or) 100,000 Ruppees back after all the bankruptcy proceedings.
Is buying a new car with cash really that weird? Not to mention that he could have obtained the money elsewhere at a lower rate(say a 5% loan from a bank vs 8% on dealer organised finance) - in which case as far as the dealer is concerned,he's paying in cash from his own account.
What is it about Rust that helps with the deterministic timing thing you mentioned? Just not having a GC? Do you still use C or C++?
I'd remind myself to set a quantitative and measurable goal every once in a while.
> At the very least, we might have far fewer Christians who insist upon Biblical literalism.

Many of those who insist on Biblical literalism have already read this stuff.

You lose one life. Try again.
On the other hand, adding object orientation to C requires the programming chops of Bjarne Stroustrup

I'm not sure this is true. You can get basic OO going on C in an afternoon with structs and function pointers. That is a very, very common technique in graphics programming (or was, before C++ optimizers got any good). ObjC is also a thing. The achievement of Stroustrup - and this is no minor thing, so don't think that I am discrediting him in any way - was he got everyone else to buy into his vision for a particular way of doing it.

Incidentally I recently attended a talk given by Stroustrup and he is a super nice guy and certainly doesn't think of himself as a genius.
The Argument Against Terraforming Mars (2016)
I don'f quite understand what you want ot build. In general a moise only makes sense for screens bigget than a typical mouse-pad or phone screen or look arround stuff like 3D games
"The Self-aware Universe" by Amit Goswami. Opened my eyes to a new way of looking at the world around us, and finding new ways to react to events that affect us. Wish I'd read this when I was much younger - before I had decided with a high level of confidence that I am completely in control of everything I do, all that happens to me and how I react to events. Seeing yourself as a minuscule part of a whole you perhaps will never fathom, allows you to simply focus on doing your best when you can and not get overly possessed with results. One of the many mystic-physics books that were very much in fashion for a while, but the one that stuck to my consciousness the most.
UK absolutely has car leases, probably half of my friends are on proper car leases where they don't own the car at the end and they don't have any equity in it.

I'm personally on PCP which is basically like a lease except that I have an option to purchase the car at the end for an amount agreed at the beginning of the contract.
>Lisp is so powerful that problems which are technical issues in other programming languages are social issues in Lisp.

This is so true.

Common Lisp is like post scarcity anarchist society where everyone already has a replicator. The culture of getting together to solve problems don't exist. In other language, implementing something is so damned hard that if you have half-assed implementation, others will take it and improve upon it because it saves work and it gains momentum. In Lisp world people take a look at it and say: "This is half-assed implementation I could whip something better together in a weekend." If takes a village, village will form. If not, everyone goes their own way and never gets together.

"I am reminded of Gregor Kiczales at ILC 2003 displaying some AspectJ to
a silent crowd, pausing, then plaintively adding, `When I show that to
Java programmers they stand up and cheer.´" -- Kenny Tilton

Time and time again you see the following pattern:

A: Why Common Lisp has no X?

B: Writing rudimentary X takes 2-3 days. Writing it as solid package takes 2-3 weeks. Why don't you implement it?

What A meant is that it would be a standard that could be used across different software packages.
Possibly You & Yours? There was a section on PCP a couple of weeks ago, might get repeated early in the morning. Although it sounds like there was a report on it so maybe a few people have done articles

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08q31ct (about 33 min, towards the end of the show)
I really like the idea of your universal playlist format, are there any players that support it?
>> Isn't that what Ethereum is for?

Sure, but Ethereum is a tool. An ICO is the result of a process.

My thesis is that many companies, large and small, could benefit from an ICO...and that the majority of these know little about ICOs, Ethereum, or the relevant government regulations.

The newco would present the following offer to the prospective customer: --We will ready you for a legal ICO within xx weeks. To do this, we will help you define the unit-of-value for your token and then put all systems, paperwork, and processes in place for the ICO. In return, we will receive coins worth nn% of the ICO as a success fee.--

This is a novel variation of an investment-banker play. Over time, large parts of the process could be systematized in software. Much of the ICO scene is scary and wild. [0] Pathfinders might be valued in this wilderness.

These are my raw and unvetted thoughts.

[0] https://www.ico-list.com/
Workout daily.
Apparently, the following Verizon SMS text[1] Cody Brown got was genuine:

>Free VZQ Msg: You're on the phone with Verizon and just authenticated with an alternative method. Not you? Please call us at 800-922-0204 immediately.

And one of CB's followup recommendations is:

>Make urgent text alerts actionable through SMS. If I received the original alert and was able to text a reply stopping it, or even delaying it, this entire hack would have stopped in its tracks. Instead I was told to ‘immediately’ call a number for Verizon that no one was there to answer.

It seems inevitable that the Verizon SMS alert as a bonafide safety check would embolden social engineers to use that very same method to trick people into calling their own 800-555-2222. Then, a fake Verizon customer service agent "phishes" for even more sensitive identification data by asking official-sounding questions in the guise of "verifying the account".

The tone of that Verizon SMS is panic-inducing and it's very easy for people to not realize they need to verify that the 800-922-0204 is actually a legitimate Verizon phone#. Even if non-techies take the extra step of googling "800-922-0204", they may get conflicting information and get confused on whether it's safe to call back: e.g. http://stopthecap.com/2015/10/05/got-a-call-from-1-800-922-0...

EDIT ADD: I think it's very challenging to come up with a generalized decision tree for non-techies (e.g. your 75-year old grandmother) to follow such that they know they are "really really REALLY talking to Verizon".

If the techie-grandson thinks they can simply the decision matrix by instructing his grandmother to simply get a hold of him when she receives such an alert, then in the 15 minutes plus it takes the grandson to research the legitimacy of the SMS, the grandmother's life savings in the bank account is drained. In that scenario, the alert was legitimate. The extra delay introduced by the grandson made the situation worse.

In substituting in-person transactions that require biometric verification (e.g. thumbprint at the bank counter) with non-physical "information verifying other information over information channels to unlock access", it creates new vectors of social engineering attacks. It's a very hard safety problem to solve for the mass population.

[1] https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*TJo_9dnPNqJC0eecYp...
7 Configuration Management (CM) Tools You Need to Know About
The Repugnant Conclusion
Scala.js could write their own GC to hook into WASM as a library,
and ship it with Scala.js until WASM has its own GC. Indeed, such
competition could spur on the the WASM team(s) to accelerate work
on GC.
This. Helping child re-create an Open Source game he/she plays is great idea. Especially availability of game resources and learning materials will be tremendous help early on. For eg. Tux Racer for Linux/Win or Frozen Bubble for Android are great resources.
Yes, of course. AGPL is good for this and should be considered as alternative for GPL or LGPL. It depends on the business model.
He writes a seductive argument, but it isn't very satisfying to conclude "this language is so powerful that it defeats itself". Likely there are other, more mundane reasons why the theoretical purity of the lisps isn't useful in practice.

For example, the endless (bracketing). My understanding is that the power of lisp macros comes from this questionable, but distinctively lispy, syntax. And I say questionable compared to natural human scripts - none of them work from inside to out. I've seen left to right (eg, English), right to left and up to down (eg, Chinese). If there were some better known examples of what lisp macros were good for then maybe it would get better traction. But lisp macros don't seem to have an example of why they are worth that trade.

Also, in the early days, C was a pretty close mirror to the underlying code execution - there was probably less mental overhead to squeezing out better performance.
Oh no, another VW hit piece, attacking the biggest US competitor.

It is definitely NOT what really happened with the emissions scandal, as it omits the most important facts, how this cheating scandals began, and how it spread out.

The first emission cheating scandals happened with US carmakers, then the US and EU emission testing laws deviated, allowing the US to cheat with their drivers, giving national carmakers the advantage, whilst EU and Asia committed to reproducible tests. But only on one model out of R&D, and not every single engine coming out of production. And then of course the tricks began to detect the tests, probably at Audi (certainly not VW), with Bosch being the one who needs to take the blame. They implemented it.
Then many others detected the same tricks, and either used the sophisticated cycle detection in the Bosch ECU or used simplier timers.
In the last list I saw 50% of all tested engines cheated with the NOx emissions, and VW was not even at the top of the numbers.
Well, 10 days later and 2.2.4 is still shown as the latest version when trying to upgrade... :/
Without telling why that post is rather meaningless.
UK Election: Why we need to change our method of voting
I wonder if Goal-Oriented Action Planning would be a fit here: http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~jorkin/goap.html

Ultimate goal being to destroy the opponent, different build orders meet that goal, scouting could show which direction the opponent is moving, and action plan adjusted to counter or take advantage of a weakness.
That would not solve that essential part:

> it needs to integrate with JS objects, which means with the JS GC

Otherwise we would have done it already.
The HP books also suffers a bit from being written one chapter at a time. But at the same time, it's an interesting concept seeing a story evolve that way. I found some of the first chapters a bit long-winded, but after that I think the book found its direction.
Togelius is pure mental (in a good OOTB way) his evo-devo HyperNEAT approach to problems intractable to random-walk SGD learning learning leaps over snares and pitfalls, bypasses cul-de-sacs and avoids oubliettes -traversing the whole search space by a sort of teleportation - a fast global search.

Backprop can then refine the most efficient net architectures. Curiously some evolve structures akin to LSTM units.
What's Rust like in ...

Isn't that less a question of Rust (which due to its affine types, should be usable for generating code with predictable performance) but of compilers? It should be possible to write a Rust compiler that optimises for predictable performance at the cost of speed.
> Call your cell phone provider and put a “do not port under any circumstances” hold on your phone number.

How do I do this for my cell provider (T-Mobile USA)?
Funny they mention with so much insistence Vulkan as being "better for Windows", but no word about how it fares on Linux vs OpenGL.
So there isn't much new stuff in Rationality that one wouldn't already find in HPMOR, for those who have read the latter?
> A legal doctrine where one can not bother reading contracts and yet get them decided in favor of ones imaginary terms doesn't sound like a workable system.

Having to agree to dozens of pages of contract every day just to do seemingly ordinary things like using websites or ordering stuff online doesn't sound like a workable system either.
"Oh by the way - Qt is pronouced as "cute", not "que-tee". If you read the above as que-tee, you need to go back and read it all again."
How to do pagination in codeigniter
> 1) performance costs

Keep in mind that a compiler like SBCL will put Lisp performancewise in the range of other statically compiled language/implementations.

> 2) puts steep memory requirements on top of performance costs

Such that the Dylan IDE ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14478942 ) written in Macintosh Common Lisp needed 20 MB RAM. Steep memory requirements! Current Lisp implementations run nicely on a first-gen Raspberry Pi.

Lisp fought with memory efficiency in the 80s (the Lisp Machine operating systems ran in 20 MB RAM + 100MB virtual memory -> which were 4 MWords RAM of 40bit memory), but hasn't grown much since then. The jump to 64bit implementations has brought some size increase. But the size varies widely between large machine code (say with SBCL), space efficient byte code implementations (CLISP) and tiny executables created by whole-program compilers like mocl.

> 4) Huge runtime which is embedded in every executable, that makes it less competitive with scripting languages

If you want to compete with 'scripting languages', then just don't include the runtime. You can use many Lisp implementations just like scripting languages.

> Lisp requires eval() and runtime interpretation which other languages optimize out and replace with fixed code paths

If a compiler is used (say: SBCL, ECL, LispWorks, GCL, CCL, Allegro CL, mocl, ...) , then Lisp does not require runtime interpretation.

> some external programs called "tree shakers" remove the lisp's runtime

They don't. Treeshakers remove unused code and data. Parts of the runtime are still there.

> 5) Any piece of data can be potentially executed at runtime

If you remove the compiler & interpreter from the executable, that can't happen. See for example the LispWorks documentation on 'Delivery':

http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/lw70/DV/html/delivery...

> since lisp code/data are intermingled.

Not necessarily. Code in compiled Lisp implementations is machine code. If all fails, you can always compile Common Lisp to C code using GCL, ECL, MKCL, mocl, CLASP (C++).

> Lisp is so far removed from any concept of safety it even allows the programs to be modified at runtime

Only if you include an interpreter.

Actually one of the nice features of many Lisp implementations is that usually all data is tagged and that Lisp code checks applicability at runtime, incl. array/string/vector bounds checks...
Top 7 SQL interview questions for tech professionals
Illustrated Self-Guided Course on How to Use the Slide Rule (2012)
That's a fair point.

I don't quite follow why speed needs to be sacrificed to get predictable performance though.

And I don't know about writing a (whole new?!) Rust compiler (!) - if the current Rust compiler wouldn't be a good fit for this purpose, well, I definitely don't have the resources to anything about that, considering the unbelievable amount of attention to detail and wrangling that's gone into getting rustc to where it is today.
This is an interesting spin, in that it absolves a mortgage industry which did everything short of drag people in off the street and hold guns to their heads to try to issue more loans. Omitting that, when a major source of the massive drive to issue loans was the popularity of mortgage-backed securities as an investment vehicle and the incredible demand for such securities, is... well, it does make one question your understanding of the problem, or if you do understand it perhaps the motives behind your choice of framing.
Theresa May says the internet must now be regulated after London terror attack
Do your know that you have done the impossible and single-handedly revived Scala?
It was slowly dying two years ago, with all that Dotty uncertainty and Typesafe->Lightbend transition.

Then you came and showed us that Scala can be productively used beyond JVM. A new hope appeared, Scala-native was inspired by your example, and Dotty was upgraded from a purely academic exercise to a viable pragmatic way to Scala 3. The attitude was "if Scala.js guys did it, so can we".

So thank you, from me and all Scala hackers out there. Martin owes you a beer. :)
>Mars has many features of extraordinary natural beauty. It is home to the tallest known volcano on any planet, Olympus Mons, whose cap reaches 13.6 miles high—two and a half times the height of Mount Everest.

>The decision to terraform Mars would also exhibit hubris.

Speaking of hubris: if we terraform Mars, people are going to want to climb Olympus Mons. Perhaps the volcano would acquire a reputation and body count similar to Everest.

Obviously the future holds great potential for lifesaving technology, but at the same time there's always purists. After all, the people who have climbed Everest probably wouldn't have if there wasn't any danger involved.

I imagine much of the danger would depend upon the finer details of how the Mars was terraformed. Namely sea level, atmospheric composition, and anything else that affects weather at altitude.

Would reaching the summit even be possible without oxygen? It wouldn't be on Earth at that height, but I've no idea if that holds for a terraformed atmosphere on another planet.
Ironically Google's Yubikey implementation requires you to register a phone number to your Google account, which many people don't want to do.
MCQ Questions on Software Engineering Set-2 – InfoTechSite
> Programs written by individual hackers tend to follow the scratch-an-itch model. These programs will solve the problem that the hacker, himself, is having without necessarily handling related parts of the problem which would make the program more useful to others. Furthermore, the program is sure to work on that lone hacker's own setup, but may not be portable to other Scheme implementations or to the same Scheme implementation on other platforms. Documentation may be lacking. Being essentially a project done in the hacker's copious free time, the program is liable to suffer should real-life responsibilities intrude on the hacker. As Olin Shivers noted, this means that these one-man-band projects tend to solve eighty-percent of the problem.

I guess this is true for all programs in all languages. Distributing anything needs lots of care to following community practices and to possible edge cases stemming from incompatibilited in people's setups.
Previous discussion of "The Bipolar Lisp Programmer," cited in this article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20012
How about we use 24 bits of data pointers to keep the array size, or 1 bit to indicate "this is a pointer with a size" and 23 bits for the size

That would imply a pretty big granularity for the sizes - if the maximum size is 4GB, the minimum is 512 bytes. Packing more efficiently might help (for instance, the way segmentation limits on x86 are) but introduces hardware complexity.

then our load/store with index instructions, as well as freshly added pointer arithmetic instructions, trap when the index exceeds the size?

You've described x86 segmentation pretty clearly here. It's been around since 1978, but most of the mechanism has been disabled in x86-64. Two of the registers involved are still used for things like per-CPU data and stack-smashing protection:

http://www.software-architect.net/blog/article/date/2015/03/...
"How to get what you want", by Raymond Hull. Everything else follows, like a bootstrapping process. Wish I had found it 10 years earlier. Changed my life forever. I could recommend dozens other books, my walls are lined with shelves of books, but you and me are different and all you'd need is this one book to find everything else you'd need to read or do.
Well, why? If someone uses GPL only, it means they are not looking for money, but is more of a choice to not use more permissive licences. Dual licensing does not solves anything for them.
Did it? I'd heard so much about it and I was very disappointed - seemed to be a lot about door knob design (Yes I know it's an example but seemed a bit obvious, maybe it's been absorbed into the design literature so much that it's everywhere now and so the book is no longer surprising)
Or just Google authenticator without a phone number. You can still be phished but it's better than sms.