skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Oh wow, I was first introduced to Java in my undergrad and somehow I had some serious issues with the whole OOP stuff.

Thankfully, I took some AI courses, which came with LISP and I was so excited to use it everywhere.

Unfortunately, however, doing basic I/O, networking (this is around 2006) and testing was too complicated for me so I dropped it again in favor of C++ in grad school (performance was also an issue, we needed to crunch a lot of data fairly quickly).

I would love to go back again and give it a shot - any pointers on the best way to learn/start?
Yes and it's not even close.
I second that. I actually see it as a positive. The "scammy stuff" that surrounds cryptocurrencies might generate demand and raise prices in the short term, but they are also very likely to deliver devestating blows to public perception and acceptance of cryptocurrencies in the long run.
What made it click for me is the nature of scheme: a few, very well thought out abstractions, that compose well to build a really neat language. I never really made friends with other languages. Where scheme composes the primitives for problem solving, I find that languages like python or ruby provide either one way for each different thing, or a very large hammer for every problem you might find, be it list comprehensions or generators or whatever OO voodoo you can come up with.

The feeling I got when learning scheme was that of liberation. People have that epiphany all the time, but with different languages and techniques. For me it was scheme.

And of course, I could never be bothered with syntax. If something becomes too verbose in scheme, I write a macro to simplify it. The only thing I need to know is whether something is a function or a macro. After 3 years of writing python on and off, I still manage to mess up syntax unless I think very hard before writing.

I am however not a programmer, and of average intelligence. In fact I am on the very top of the bell curve, looking down on the rest of you.
Stephen Hawking Publications
I think you are using different definitions of laundering. turning drug money into legitimate money in a bank account is not really useful for these small amounts, but turning stolen goods into cash is.
Shorting is legitimate—under certain conditions. In many markets throughout history, shorting has been explicitly forbidden. This is because it encourages destroying value. It's much much easier to destroy a company's value than to raise it. So anyone holding a short on a company has every incentive to disrupt its operation. This is in contrast with the traditional position, where you hold stock in a competing company. Then you have only a very minor incentive to disrupt your competitors, because it translates in small gains for your own stock. Only when companies are neck-to-neck does it become profitable, but then any sabotage is scrutinised much more closely.
Previous discussion (2013):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6502229
As much as I am opposed to the collectivist view points on society in the world, it seems this is one area where an individualist perspective doesn't work as well.

But the problem here, as you pointed out, is that to implement this idea in America, people would have be less selfish and more responsible for their own health. Neither of which is a core tenant of our modern society. 50-70 years ago is when we should have done this.
Career mode is great after playing around in free mode for a while.

I wouldn't recommend anyone starts on career mode, it's just too hard and too constraining for someone who's just starting and doesn't understand the basics.

But when you have some experience launching silly rockets into space, it becomes a really nice challenge to try and achieve the goals from career mode without having free reign over your technology and funds.
>Any attempt to bring costs down in the US - whether single-payer or market-based - would result in higher costs for drugs and other supplies to the rest of the developed world[0]. Put another way, countries like Denmark and Canada and the UK have the appearance of negotiating leverage only because they're such a tiny market[1] compared to the US - and, crucially, a completely segregated market as well. So even if pharmaceutical companies end up selling drugs at very low rates there, they can easily make up the difference in revenue by increasing prices in the US[2].

I see this economic fallacy so often and crop up in so many different places that I'm thinking that it might actually need a name - maybe the "fallacy of immutable profits". For example, elsewhere:

* If you raise the minimum wage, the inevitable outcome is that people will be fired and prices will rise so that the "natural" state of the company's profit remains unchanged.

* If you raise land taxes then landlords will just raise rents so that their return on investment remains static.

As a profit making entity, this is naturally what you'd want to bluff people into thinking would happen. It's not what actually would happen though, except in one very specific scenario (the profit making entity has all the power and the other parties have no leverage).

The reality is that if you put economic pressure on one valve and there are three potential exit points, the pressure will be distributed across them relative to the leverage on each side. Has Walmart employed way more people than they need or are they barely getting by with what they have? The answer to that determines whether how much their profits get cut and whether employees get fired. Can customers just get their stuff off Amazon if walmart raises prices? If yes, then Walmart has to eat a shit sandwich of lower profits.

If the power of the drug companies relative to the power of Denmark is very high then Denmark will eat the losses. If the reverse is true, well, then Pfizer will eat shit.

Pfizer, of course, hate negotiating with large parties - especially whole countries because their relative leverage is much lower. They will lobby furiously to try and break the country down so that they can lobby on a more local level. This is also partly why Congress barred medicaid from negotiating with drug companies - it was hitting drug companies in the profit margins. Can't have that.

And, I think Pfizer's power on the global drug market is consistently overestimated, though most proposed "free trade" deals coming out of the US (e.g. TPP) seem focused on increasing the leverage of companies like Pfizer - e.g. with the ISDS and stronger intellectual property provisions.
I was scared no one would mention Elon Musk. I actually came to this thread, did cmd-f and typed Musk just to check.
There's more to it; The paradigm is so different and so effective at a large problem domain (which includes mostly mathy things and big data), and you can do similar things in many languages, although not quite as elegantly and succinctly.

I faced two problems after K:

1. The whole software engineering world starts to look like a ridiculous house of cards; When you're used to seeing implementations of fast and efficient in memory databases in ~20 lines, or an npm-style package manger[1] in less than ~400 lines (comments included). Modern software engineering practices enable and encourage solutions that are inefficient in many respects. Maybe it cannot be better at a large enough scale, but it affects and infects the smaller scales as well. It is extremely frustrating.

2. Getting actual work done requires interfacing with the world, which isn't quite up to the k/q/apl standards of terseness and efficiency -- mostly "accidental complexity"[2]; So, e.g., if you have to have web presentation, or work on import/export, they dominate your effort due to accidental complexity that cannot be removed. Which is doubly frustrating.

[0] http://nsl.com/k/t.k

[1] https://github.com/yang-guo/qp

[2] https://www.quora.com/What-are-essential-and-accidental-comp...
Ask HN: What is the best way to get started with practical LISP?
Looking for tips and pointers on learning and getting started with practical LISP, i.e. say build a web API or a basic GUI, etc.
I think it's harder to find stand-alone sites dedicated to dark topics than it is to find a group of subreddits.

Reddit streamlines the process and provides a one-stop shop reducing the barriers of entry.
I've seen instructions to build a noise traffic light. Basically turns red when the noise level is over a threshold. I found that useful in an office environment. Bonus if you can hook that up to a real life-size traffic light.
> Nope, drugs sales in the EU alone are enough to cover pharmaceutical R&D costs worldwide. What they aren't enough to cover is Marketing costs, but that's OK since most EU countries don't allow direct marketing of drugs. That's what the US covers. Not quite so noble sounding that you're covering the cost of advertising though, is it?

I usually avoid responding to comments that are this snarky, because it's generally a strong indicator that the person isn't actually having a discussion in good faith. But I'll bend my own rule to say:

1) EU sales of pharmaceuticals are nowhere near enough to sustain the level of R&D we see globally.

2) Direct-to-consumer advertising is only one part of "marketing". Even in the US, it's not the majority of money spent on marketing. Marketing absolutely does happen in the EU, and it's a necessary part of the entire R&D lifecycle.
>>It's the goal of software to provide more and more features.

That's the goal. The key question is: are we writing features that users find valuable or are we writing features that developers find valuable? They're two different things. What's happened is that the community has become incestuous. Instead of focusing on value to the user we're focusing on selling frameworks to one another.

>>Software development severely lacks any objective metrics of performance and quality.

Agreed here as well. But this is related to my first point. Nobody wants to focus on the users. It's far too easy to focus on the technology (or other developers). You write a feature for a user, you can instrument it and see whether users use it or not. You write a feature for a developer, even if nobody uses it you can argue that somewhere, somehow, that feature is going to be critical. It's an abstract value argument -- which is intractable.

>>As a result, we are fundamentally unable to reuse already written code on scale, crumbling development and putting the whole industry in constant early-stage.

It's a sad state of affairs. I suggest that your conclusion continues the broken thinking I'm describing above. We shouldn't be striving for reusable code at scale. We should be striving for people who have strong basic programming skills and are experts in some business domain. Then we would shoot for the minimum amount of technological abstraction necessary for these programmers to solve problems in that particular domain. Because that's really what the whole point is, not creating large codebases that last twenty years, creating tiny bits of code almost instantly that solve business problems for twenty years. We've got our head stuck in the wrong bucket.
He has later clarified that ”mind of God” was figurative and from an atheist angle more like ”the reason for creation”.
I disagree. It is true that many Javascript developers lack the formal CS education, but since it is the de facto language of the web with relatively lower barrier of entry, there are many people working on great projects. NPM is the largest package registry in the world, and whenever working on a project I find that I can solve most of the mini problems with a quick search. Jumping from framework to framework without really understanding the underlying technologies/thinking is a problem that should not be attributed to language itself, but to some of its users.

Although this low barrier of entry sometimes lead the users of the language to bad results, I especially like Javascript because of its welcoming nature. One can even argue that it democratises the software creation process on Earth by allowing anyone to quickly start tinkering with it and see the results immediately, most likely in a web environment.

Also, although it definitely has some quirks and may cause some frustration to starters, it also allows an experienced developer to be expressive and quickly build products, and may allow its users to enjoy their martinis.
Very well said. Really like the way you framed it.
> we are fundamentally unable to reuse already written code on scale

Actually I disagree - it's just that when something does become reusable it immediately vanishes from people's consciousness. You can see this both in things that become standard library features, and open source components that end up ubiquitous. The list of "incorporates software from" in licenses gets ever longer as people embed copies of SQLite, logging libraries, ORMs, serialisers, and so on.

One of the original article's points was that the things he loved in Lisp became features of other languages, and so ceased to be special.

http://uk.businessinsider.com/how-many-lines-of-code-it-take...
This is fake news, imo.

You can currently run Hotz' software Openpilot on your car and many do. The general consensus is that it's as good as Tesla's AP2. There are hours of footage of Openpilot driving by actual users (not PR videos) on Youtube.

It most certainly does "come close to even an alpha version of a commercial product".
Being able to solve people's problems doesn't mean you need to be able to program.

What is a "real programmer", anyway? Is it knowing how a CPU works? Managing memory? If you rely on the garbage collector, do you really know what you're doing? If you write a Rails app without fully understanding HTTP, are you just plumbing?

Does it matter?

The reason we build tools and abstractions is to allow us to accomplish higher-level tasks without worrying about lower-level ones. Does it help if you understand lower level ones? Sure. But for millions of apps and websites that aren't Facebook or Hacker News or Firefox, the only problems are high level.
Tovalds: It looks like the IT security world has hit a new low
in general, i find the aggressive title changing on hacker news confusing. it’s been happening a lot recently where i can’t find a post by eye where i know i knew the title or where the title was changed away from the exact title of the linked post or article.
How far down the rabbithole do you need to go before your complaint about "uncensorednews" being censored is not that it happened at all, but that it took too long!?
But remember you can always put the very latest bugfixed version of bootcode.bin standalone on an SD card and use that instead of the version in your Pi's bootrom. This also works for older models (Pi/Pi2) that don't have PXE support in their bootrom.
If your concern is pervasive internal theft by your managers you need a lot more than this speed bump.

Saying that the algorithm screwed up is confusing a symptom with the problem: making business processes so inflexible that local staff cannot correct mistakes.
> The depths of Reddit is truly an horrific and appalling place to be.

So are the depths of our very society.
Scam artists aren't a protected class
Anecdotal evidence to be sure, but I've had only excellent experiences with Bunnings staff on both returns and warranty claims.
Lots of things banned world over are legal in the USA.
GBPUSD: Bullish, Remains Biased to the Upside
Yeah, although adding usable wireless is a big bonus - I wish it had 2-4GB of RAM and I wish you could put the USB ports into gadget mode like you can with the zero, but preferably at least two or more ports that can work with it. Also - I’m really disappointed there’s still no GbE.
That's a great point.

I watch teams a lot. When I listen to them, I notice how much they talk about tooling instead of solutions. The more they talk about the tooling, the more they're sucking wind.

The truly good stuff just disappears from awareness. That's how you know if a framework or abstraction layer is working for you (instead of you working for it.) It's invisible.
>I wonder if physical activity also has to do with this? the U.S is a very car oriented nations, which means people walk less?

I visited Japan, and I saw 1 single fat guy. He also was the only homeless man I saw in Tokyo... (it's illegal to pan-handle in Japan, so he did the universal thumb/fist-to-the-mouth-head-back motion to ask for a drink.)

And yes, everyone walks a ton there. There's no reason people can't walk here, they just don't. To quote the movie L.A. Story "Go for a walk? In L.A.? Hahahahah."
Although that approach to string creation tends to fall apart quickly in non-English languages: adjectival agreement, plural rules etc.
If you merge our memories afterwards it doesn't matter who you kill. Otherways it's a murder.
If you want quality, fast care, live closer to your providers.

This is a symptom of provisioning, not single payer vs profiteering.
... but your laughs are logged in binary format by systemd, so no-one can share your joy ;)

FreeBSD forever :)
I have a feeling that the deeper we get, the more physics will be based on “magical numbers”. We have already come across some. But yes, it is extraordinary how the most pure and simple physics with numbers from quantum randomness can create something like this. Very weird to me.
That's the second time I've seen Ada mentioned in as many days. Before that, I did Ada as an undergrad about 1989 and never heard of it again. Is it becoming a thing again?
>Disturbingly sexist

Yes, I always hear this repeated breathlessly. Then I go look at that hive of scum and villainy that is the Gamer Gate sub and find:

"The Metropolitan Police's (Greater London) Orwellian definition of "hate incident" is actually terrifying"

"[Censorship] Lauren Southern talks with Sargon about her Detainment and UK Censorship"

"[Gaming] Violent video games not welcome for Olympic esports consideration"

"London Mayor warns big tech on hate speech."

"[Related Politics] The creator of the world wide web is disappointed that huge platforms "control which ideas and opinions are seen and shared"

Point me to the omnipresent hate please. They seem pretty on point about censorship and free expression.

See, you are free to believe that it's a misogynist and hateful movement all you want, but you should at least be honest with yourself about the kind of argument you are making. Namely:

"Black Lives Matters is about looting."

I assume you don't need me to tell you why that is dumb.

(And every time this gets brought up here, some dedicated flaggers come out of the woodwork)
Yes, the pharma companies get a great deal of revenue from the US, but the great majority of it is spent on marketing, not R&D:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/02/11/big-p...
When discussing social problems of (for example) rumour mills, propaganda from niche and large causes, and conspiracies to commit crimes, it’s missing the point spectacularly to point out we’re under no obligation to ever visit those groups — their influence affects our world regardless of out patronage.
It depends what you're interested in. If you go for some pretty narrowly focused ones, they tend to stick to the topic.
This is clearly coming from someone whose views generally align with the progressive/leftist/globalist reddit hivemind.

As someone very much on the other end of the spectrum, it might be interesting that everyone in my circles loathes reddit for the censorship and manipulative propaganda. I hate how well they "control" it, and I despise your euphemistic use of the term.
I'm not trying to impose that one is more "noble" than the other. As you said yourself, businesses usually run on plumbing.

I'm trying to understand the industry, as it appears to be(at least to me) different than what I thought was true. I believe it to be important if we're going to do better and there is a ton of metrics showing we should do better(percent of projects failing, percent on projects exceeding budget and time, percent of projects becoming unmaintainable).

If you could prove that only a handful of people is capable of actually developing software project pass the stage of 'piggy-backing' on libraries, that would probably distinctly change the way we develop software. Maybe we could prevent death marches better. Maybe we could improve our working environments so nobody has to crunch or have a depressing spaghetti-code maintenance job.

It doesn't mean in any way that 'plumbers' should/would be treated worse. If anything, I would expect the opposite.
> Prescribing costs for the NHS are only about 10% of total costs, I don't think the effect is as big as your post implies.

You're saying that like it contradicts my point, but it actually corroborates what I'm saying. The US spends two and a half times as much per capita as the UK does, in addition to being five times larger.

As I said, this is just one example - pharmaceuticals aren't the only way that the effects of a global market are visible, but it's a good example because it's one that's very easy for people to grasp.
It's not possible through all types of accounts though: https://support.spotify.com/uk/article/How-can-I-change-my-c...

"Premium [...] Note: For licensing reasons, you need to update your payment method to one that's been issued in your new country."
Memory Models for C/C++ Programmers
Core developers of the game were being paid about $200 a month. Does that sound ethical to you?
> Kevin Rose famously built Digg with $20/hour Rent-A-Coder talent.

I'm so doing that next time (and on elance, et al., coding "talent" can be had for even less than $20/hr). I spent a year coding my current product (b2b) myself, and now I'm discovering user acquisition is the hardest thing in the universe.
The last time I checked out the Asus Tinker it was still suffering from horrendous software support and cost nearly twice as much in the UK (which it still does, £32 vs £55). So unless you NEED those extra features, I strongly disagree.
>You need some form of government intervention to prevent healthcare providers and drug companies from charging the most optimal price...

Can't do it, to much focus of power in DC. The Democrats were supposed to achieve this and they couldn't. In fact even their attempt at it made things worse.

The only decent solution is to be healthy yourself as much as possible and get catastrophic coverage. Or perhaps get state supported insurance? (state level politics is easier to deal with, but the fights with the feds backed by the multinational corps. often times doesn't go well.)
Blockchain – The Next Disruptor in the Ad Industry – iCoin Blog
The Hardest Problems in Your Software Career Will Not Be Technical
Lots of people say there are superior devices - however the community size and support for Raspberry Pi cannot be overstated.

The price of an Odroid XU4 is significantly proportionally higher and I have no guarantee that certain features or projects are feasible on it. First result from Dec 2017 when searching for "XU4 Kodi" is someone having a problem installing and then saying "I would prefer a version with long term support and wide use base." Well my answer to that is RPi.

I'm merely implying that RPi has a higher chance of certain things working simply because its more popular. I'm not disputing that there are higher performance platforms for "similar" money but it's reliability and a little more certainty that some people are after.

I would love to try one of the ODROID devices, I simply don't have the time. And I love seeing suggestions for these other devices so please don't stop posting them :)