skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: What is the best way to learn Lisp in 2020?
I've been eyeing Lisp out of the corner of my eye for years. I know I should learn it and it will likely change the way I think about programming.

What is the best way to learn Lisp in 2020? I tend to learn best when I have a project to work on that plays to the strength of the language.

Some questions:
- Should I start with Common Lisp, or some popular dialect (Clojure?)
- What are the big patterns that I should be aware of? What is easier to do Lisp than is missing from functional languages like Python?
- What are some big projects built in Lisp (other than this site)?
- If it's so good, why isn't it more popular?
The only thing uber has built really, is a way to extract more money from workers with less overhead while circumventing existing worker protection by acting as if they were just the messenger between customers and drivers.

I have the feeling that the real building of the past two decades lies in ever cleverer bussines schemes focused on lock ins, extracting user data, doing as if you are open while there is no practical way anybody could take what you did in any significant way and improve on it. The exiting things always seem to happen outside of that space however.
Intuitively, yes.

If something is irreversible then it's not 1 to 1 and you don't use the whole state space, so you'll likely have short cycles.

Second part, again yes. But you can add that useful irreversible transform in the finalization of the output, and not in the state transform itself.

I'm self taught so my understanding and terminology may not mesh with the people who have been taught this.
Fair enough - I think of opening a bookmark (What do you mean "in a new tab"? That's how you open a bookmark.) as a single action, so it irritates me immensely when I have to make a space, then put stuff into the space, and having to do that simply because I didn't know about middle-clicking - rather than the application being deficient - would be even worse.
> But complaining about either regulation or bureaucracy at a general level is the policy equivalent of approaching software by making general complaints about how terrible existing code is: sure, some of it is probably sub-optimal and should be rewritten, but anyone who's worked in the field for a while knows that the sweep-it-away/ground-up-rewrite impulse is more often wrong than applying Chesterton's fence (make sure you understand why it's there), profiling, and examine potential alternatives against studied outcomes.

This is sometimes true, but it certainly isn't always true. Housing policy, for instance, is largely driven by putting the interests of local property owners over those of new entrants and the broader economy.

> Sure. And would love to chase the wealthiest end of demand and externalize costs of community displacement or ecological impact.

Price the externalities. It's as simple as that. Nobody needs to externalize anything. Housing is plenty worth building to developers even if they fully internalize the ecological impact. And let's not neglect the ecological impact of long commutes when running this calculation.

> And would love to externalize the costs of risk and waste management.

Of course they'd like to do that. Everyone would like to externalize their costs and risks. The job of government is to let people do things, but force them to internalize the costs. You aren't making an argument against anything I said.

> They're arguments about specific incentives absent intentional oversight, supporting the general case that it is often irresponsible to believe or advocate that incentives tend towards optimal on their own, and that the primary problem is oversight itself.

Oversight is fine. Kafkaesque bureacracy and cost disease are not. The present state of our regulatory apparatus is abysmal. That isn't an argument for eliminating it, it's an argument for making it better.
The regulatory capture conversation from the likes of pmarca is always about advocating reduction of regulation because otherwise the regulator starts working in favor of the big guys against the little guys. But to me that is the wrong way to look at regulatory capture. The antiregulation politicians are the ones that tend to put big business lobbyists in charge of regulation. We need good regulation, not less. Good regulation that evens the competitive playing field and protects exploitation of externalities. without regulation the bug guys lock in the rents with no space for competition. We need good regulation. But you don't vote for the antiregulation guy to get good regulation, he's trying to destroy regulation not improve it. Less government is a red herring, we need better government.
I think separating the two is harder than it seems. A big part of government work is economic in nature, so there inevitably is overlap between the two.
will US learn to be less car-centric after this?
List of Remote Debugging Tools
Also related to bet #9, it doesn’t really come to term by the end of 2020, but rather 6 months into 2021, as an event on December 31st of 2020, has 6 month to accumulate casualties within the terms of the bet.
The text is almost unreadably small in firefox on a 1366x768 monitor. Screenshot: https://0x0.st/i1K2.png
It would sound a lot more impressive if you also count lives saved (yeah yeah I know covid-19 is killing a lot more, just measuring only the silver lining here)
its actually very easy.

1) regulatory capture exists is because you give power to individuals to make decisions for the collective.
2) freedom of speech will always mean if I have money, I can spend it any way I want. That will never change. Therefore, it is impossible to limit money in politics.

Once you understand these 2 principles, its very simple to understand the solution. Money will always impact politics. You simply need to raise the price enough so that you won't end up in regulatory capture.

1) Dillute power. Cause representatives to govern a fixed number of people. For example, 1 house member for every 50,000 people. So the house would go from 431 to 6500. That would make it very expensive to hire lobbysts to capture.

2) Limit power. Term limits for aggregate public service so people can't peddle power of public office. This makes lobbying expensive since you can't permanently buy favor.

3) Randomize outcomes. By far the most powerful. Introduce uncertainty into election successs. Randomly switch winners for the house with state at all levels. So for example, a citizen from VA running for president could end up instead as a state senator for VT, or FL (and vice versa). Same thing for vice president, and any other public post. You want to make sure the "bet" on a candidate win is a very long tail in outcomes so that lobbyists don't really know what power they are actually buying by contributing to the candidate's campaign. Given that we had people like Bush, Obama and Trump in highest office, with varied levels of public office "experience", I think it is a given that there is no real qualification for running for X, other than being a US citizen of a certain age, and actually winning.

That's how you fix the current corporatism running amok in america.
A new photon-counting camera that could improve AR and Lidar frameworks
RFC 2550 (https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2550) remains one of my favourite April Fools' RFCs. It even has support for negative dates.
no, it will not even learn to pick leaders that react quickly to pandemics.
> Interesting claim. Do you want to detail this more? Most of my experience is not with the State itself being an obstacle, but as a tool in the hands of landlords and capitalists to help enforce scarcity.

I'm not even sure I really understand your question. Rents in San Francisco are extremely high. What that means is that if you build a new apartment building there you can charge a lot of money for your apartments. Therefore, any halfway intelligent capitalist understands it's a great idea to build apartment buildings in San Francisco. The only reason they are not doing this is that the local zoning laws prevent them from doing so.
I think that's the most likely scenario, but I'm not sure the implied tactics are actually accurate - many religious groups have been able to get swift injunctions.
we will really only know when looking at yearly stats or even bigger stats, it's possible it may slightly increase yearly death toll but nothing close to those crazy numbers reported now when just cause of death shift towards virus from other causes

if your system is not overloaded or kills almost only the people who would die anyway soon

I feel pity for Spain, their economy was F up prior this virus, can't imagine what it's gonna be after virus
Several books on the history:

Fire in the Valley: The Birth and Death of the Personal Computer 3rd Edition
by Michael Swaine (Author), Paul Freiberger (Author)

Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins Of The Internet Paperback – January 21, 1998
by Katie Hafner (Author)
Anxiety to publish
>So, based on these 3 observable points, we should "Tax the living hell out of capital"?

Sure, because the government is supposed to provide infrastructure, which in turn allows all kinds of other stuff to flourish on top.

All those examples that private capital gave - who built the internet and spent enough money to create the early market for computers?

>I still not getting it.

If the government is supposed to supply education, health, and infrastructure, then it needs to be paid for somehow. Corporations don't care since there is no immediate monetization possible (plus tragedy of the commons aspects) and the free market simply assumes this stuff appears out of the thin air (externalize the cost somewhere else).
How can the US IC benefit from your project? That's #1
> Parts of Arizona.

Sure. Thats my point. And that is still very valuable.
The left is in control in both California and New York, and many of the problems there are in the realm of state/city governments rather than federal government.
I've had a scan that was scheduled five months ago cancelled, and one of my vitally necessary meds was three weeks late getting filled. Good thing I'm worried about running out so had some to spare, but it's no joke that people are going to die due to simply not getting what they need.
A SOFT MURMUR – Ambient sounds to wash away distraction
What was The Palace?
P. Nabais, J. Oliveira, F. Pina, N. Teixeira, V. de Freitas, N. F. Brás, A. Clemente, M. Rangel, A. M. S.

>The molecular structure of the medieval watercolor known as folium has finally been solved in the 21st century. The interdisciplinary approach taken was the key

>following medieval instructions

>multi-analytical characterization of its structure was made using HPLC-DAD-MS, GC-MS, NMR (1H, 13C, COSY, HSQC, HMBC, INADEQUATE), and computational studies.

Sometimes that's what it takes to build some momentum with technical innovations over a millennium.

But then you can come up with conclusions like this:

>In conclusion, chrozophoridin was used in ancient times to make a beautiful blue dye for painting, and it is neither an anthocyanin — found in many blue flowers and fruits — nor indigo, the most stable natural blue dye. It turns out to be in a class of its own. Thus, we believe that this will be not our final word on this amazing plant and its story and that further discoveries will follow soon.

I like that last part,

>this will be not our final word

>further discoveries will follow soon.

That's the kind of confidence and momentum too few workers will ever achieve, and in this case looks scientifically legitimate to me.
> The whole point is to build a machine that can go the speed limit.

Sure, eventually, when the machines and sensors and algorithms and so on are good enough. When the infrastructure can be rebuilt to accommodate them (e.g. Boring company tunnels for auto-trucking, sensors and comms in the roads and signage, &c.)

The rush to market is the whole problem. Not the ultimate concept.

I want a machine that can take my mother to her doctors appointment now that the dementia has gotten to the point where she shouldn't take the bus on her own anymore.

Let the experiences with the toy cars guide the incremental graceful adoption of faster machines.

> most of the real issues will show up when you go 45 in the real world.

Right! So don't go 45.
I like your design, simple and elegant.

One thing I did when designing random functions is run them against DieHarder and Practrand, but then also against SMHasher, you just have to use some construction to fold the key into the state. I think that's a useful somewhat orthogonal way to test. have you considered this?
There's is an interesting supposition: if Haskell wasn't pure functional (had imperative constructions) it would be more popular. But Ocaml is not pure functional and is not popular.
The introduction was chilling.

How do the preparations for the next big San Andreas earthquake compare to those that were (or should have been) made for Covid-19? What else do we need to build for something like that?

The impact of the two seem quite similar: at best, stuck at home on a dwindling pile of food that can be replenished sporadically every two weeks while you try to make a living online. Covid-19 didn’t take out physical infrastructure, but decimating the workforce has had a similar effect, and knock on effects are real (how do I service a broken car during lockdown?)

The two big takeaways from Covid-19 for me were: have better food security at home, and invest in a home grade wireless internet connection. I’d probably think carefully about exposure to natural disasters too, the next time I move.
Can only tell after reading the book.
There exist a culture of people who are happy sleeping outside and living on the streets. Even if all the homeless who don’t want to live on the street have a bed, there will be street people. It’s a lifestyle preference where the weather is nice, like beach bums.
"I expect this essay to be the target of criticism."

For starters, this might not be the right time to blame the victims.

"Our nation and our civilization were built on production, on building."

And yet, the people who physically build things are left destitute, while the managers are raking it in.

This ought to be a time of reflection, not action.
All hard drives have effectively infinite rewrite capability, unlike SSDs. I know I've seen surveillance drives before (WD Purple), but I never figured out what made them special compared to others.

Looking at the WD Purple drive marketing material... they describe "support for 64 cameras". Which means the CCTV community is willing to pay for write bandwidth. It'd probably be a standard 7200 PMR drive, but with assurances and maybe some tests on the write performance.
I have no doubt that money drives burdensome regulations, but most regulations are put into place because someone screwed up and hurt people.

Yeah, there are a ton of regulations If you want to bring a new drug to market. That makes it super expensive to do.

But in exchange we get pharmaceuticals that work, are reasonable safe, and are based solid data.
that's not contradicting what the Swede says, the weak will die first, you might as well have lower than average death rate in latter months when ask the weak will die out, we just dunno by how many weeks/months you shortened their life expectancy, it's gonna be hardly years

for all these stats we need to wait years and by then nobody will be interested anymore because people will be dealing with ruined economy from hysterical response
Hilarious: https://wikiwho.ailef.tech/diff/115cb29701ac58cd3cdf515ed043...

Airforce on the Pope: https://wikiwho.ailef.tech/diff/88dfea55a8f8f112b404c62da094...

Someone in the Navy taking offense at the content of the 'creation science' article: https://wikiwho.ailef.tech/diff/06d1afb0c1ff80f387c99d007059...
Why would losing 500% of California's 2019 GDP be impossible? It's difficult to imagine, sure, but that's just 5x $2.7T.

The sheer number of n'th order effects of this crisis might just mean that most of the economic pain is in the long, fat tail spanning decades into the future.

Amortize that cost as irreversible economic damage and it might be implausible, sure, but not inconceivable.
Lmao you guys are just
Especially as the outbreak was happening during the New Year.
Another thing I thought was interesting was, when China was building hospitals in a few days, I figured that's something we just could never do. Well we ended up converting Javits into like the third largest hospital in the world in 48 hours. Turns out we really can build a hospital that quickly if we really want to. Maybe it is just a matter of attitude.
Small businesses were approved for $350B, most of which has not yet been disbursed, and only about 50% of the needed amount has been approved.
This didn't answer the question
As an American, I hope so, but it is also pretty deeply ingrained. Cities and towns have also already been built spread out and many homes are completely dependent on getting in a car as a necessary first action. Around cities, many are also priced out of where they work with transit not up to the task.

But perhaps those who are able to WFH are getting a glimpse of what it can be like.
The "nobody expects anything from Harvard" statement might be a bit too strong. I've seen people say that Harvard has a responsibility to do more social good with it's massive endowment. Here's one example [1]:

> Endowments over $1 billion should be taxed if the university doesn’t grow freshman seats at 1.5x the rate of population growth. Harvard, MIT, and Yale have combined endowments (approximately $85 billion) greater than the GDP of many Latin American nations.

So maybe the issue isn't with expectations, but with incentives: to effect change in these old hierarchical systems, you need elitists to be anti-elitist; to make decisions against one's interests for the betterment of others.

[1] https://www.profgalloway.com/how-i-got-here
Yes.

Anyone that hasn't been exclusively using macOS for their entire digital life, or at least years, anyway.

'Command' (resp. 'Windows', resp. 'Super') is a different story. You can't say 'Super' with a straight face without also marking yourself out as someone who borders on saying 'GNU with Linux', or 'I run Arch'.

(For what it's worth, I do run Arch. ;))

IIRC Option is dually labelled as Alt on some Apple keyboards anyway.
They've made it a point to not change, which is frankly refreshing. It works perfectly fine as is for what 99% of people use it for
It was a paid livestream of the virtual conference. Free slides available below.

http://meetings.aps.org/Meeting/APR20/Session/C06.2
Where? CTRL-F Randen doesn't show anything, and the Randen repo claims it's faster than ChaCha8.
A capitalist blames a lack of demand for the deep socioeconomic flaws that disasters like this shine an ugly light on. By his logic, if people wanted these things, capitalists would be able to make a ton of money off of them, and so it's everyone else's fault for not creating the demand.

And I don't know the original quote, but the idea that "capitalism is how we take care of people we don’t know" is a hilarious feat of mental gymnastics to frame such a inherently self-centered economic system as some sort of inherent altruism.

He challenges the public sector to make better things than the private sector without even acknowledging the massive and growing asymmetry in the resources available in the private sector to accomplish these things.

And lastly he attempts deflect criticism like mine by writing off any counterpoint as "attacking" his ideas and instead asking we talk about what we would "build" and therefore take his deeply biased assumptions as axioms.

It's not the only factor, but to look at this problem without critically evaluating capitalism's role is like ignoring the elephant in the room. Now that we are in a point in time where the more wealth and power is being accumulated by an ever shrinking pool of people, capitalists like Andreessen have more power than ever to employ these kinds of changes. If the supposed demand is not there, then maybe take that one of many signs that capitalism is a dead end.
Speed is an important parameter: you can’t do freeway driving in a golf cart. IMO regular vehicles can be safe enough with appropriate supervision. It’s really once you get to the first runs without safety drivers where your backup goes away. Hopefully that will be only after your intervention rate is zero.
The Economics of Health (1918)
Waymo has had a single round with outside money, and that valued it at $30bn.
Google n-grams has "sexual perversion," "neurosis" and "psychosis" all picking up between 1860 and 1900, i.e. as psychoanalysis was picking up steam. Most likely they got there first.

Interestingly, the frequency of "perversion" was steady through that period, so in this case the psychoanalysts did attach a new meaning to an existing word ("the alteration of something from its original course").
I hope a16z puts money where their mouth is. Investors can own and drive a lot of what "we" want.
>GOP put party win before a nation by agreeing to nominate an unfit individual for office. They failed as gatekeepers.

Trump won the primary because he took positions that closely follow the article being discussed here, anti-war, anti-outsourcing (additionally he took an anti-immigration position) while all of the other 18 GOP candidates had the same pro-war, pro-free trade, pro-immigration positions that the party gatekeepers (big donors) favor.

I think Ziblatt and Levitsky don't like that voters agree more with Marc Andreessen and what Trump said in the campaign.

EDIT: People didn't elect Trump because they trust the gatekeepers and were tricked by them. They elected him because he was the only candidate who promised to do what the people wanted who was able to _go around_ the gatekeepers by financing his own campaign. We wouldn't be on the road to neo-Hitler if the gatekeepers allowed sane people with popular opinions into the major parties, but that would mean ending the middle eastern wars, raising wages, lowering corporate profits, and ending the cheap labor glut in ways that will seriously dent the fortunes and power of the gatekeepers.
Uhm. why is the website requesting access to my webVR?
Put simply the reason why America doesn't have these things is because the money went elsewhere.

Why e.g. would you build a new skyscraper for people to live in, if you could instead just profit from the scarcity, spend no money and still get out much?

Those who are on top will spend a significant amount of resources to make sure they stay on top and that others don't take their place. Very much of what goes wrong these days is emergent behaviour of that.
You can also use the more standard Home/End/Ctrl+Left/Ctrl+Right to do all of the above. Much easier to remember and works in any other editor also.
https://www.beachbody.com/
IT services giant Cognizant suffers Maze Ransomware cyber attack
Another benefit of a hard-money system (bitcoin would be better than gold nowadays) is that governments can only wage war by spending hard money. And they can only get hard money by extracting it from citizens. It puts a very strong limitation on the government’s ability to wage war, when they need to convince us all to pay for it rather than printing money.

Another common trope is that deflation limits the economy. News flash - you can have a single dollar as long as it can be split to 10000 zeroes. We had a successful global economy for years before fiat took over.
That's... unusual and concerning. You're talking about the gentle.app site, not the testflight link, right?

The only thing I could think of to cause that is the embedded vimeo iframe. But why? If you're open to share, I'd love to know what browser you're using.