JimmyM

I think the mediocre stuff is often necessary for people on the outside of relatively specialist areas - like I am - to have a way in. Not that I've been upvoting much deep learning stuff, but I'm sure I've upvoted similar.

I seem to recall that the same thing happened when HN had a fling with Bayesian statistics...last year? Two years ago?

I think it's a necessary consequence of having a large, broad technical audience that really enjoys investigating very narrow niches. Eventually even the people on the 'edges' of that topic's appeal want/need to find a way in.

> It's the only game that minor spoiler has ever gotten Lovecraftian horror correct in a really convincing way. The tone is pretty much one hundred percent on target.

I would recommend the game Darkest Dungeon, which convincingly nails the atmosphere of some of Lovecraft's work, for me. It's pulpier and less serious (more purple) than Bloodborne, but I believe that Lovecraft himself was pulpier, purpler, and less serious than Bloodborne (going so far as to hide inside jokes in his work).

That tweet was extremely funny, but the argument that followed it was very much not.

I am beyond impressed with that person's patience.

> If you remove the cons you would probably also lose some of the pros.

Especially true of Lisps, of course.

What would someone who really thought about their technology run? Why would the most important things for an operating system not be cost and stability?

e: Realise this comes off as confrontational. Genuine questions!

I dunno it looks to me like they've just defined nil to be equal to null/empty, which is not exactly the same.

In Common Lisp, unlike Scheme/Racket, nil is the null value AND the false value. In Scheme/Racket, 'nil is true unless you define it to be #f. If you wrote an if or cond expression to evaluate the 'nil in the link, I think that it would return true, whereas in CL nil is falsy (I think it is the only falsy value in CL, but I would still describe it as 'falsy' rather than false, possibly incorrectly).

e: Ah, I see why I'm not understanding you now - you're talking about the differences between Racket and SICP/Scheme whereas I made the assumption that we were talking about the difference between Common Lisp and Racket (from OP's comment). To further clarify, I believe this was my fault in comprehension, not yours in communication.

Yeah, you could add 'nil' easily.

inc and dec I assume mean increment or decrement (I have no experience with CL) - racket/base includes (add1 .) and (sub1 .) for the same effect. If they didn't exist they would be trivial to add I think - if this isn't what inc and dec mean then I apologise.

In Scheme/Racket truth and falsity is really simple - #f is false and everything else is truthy. There's also already a null value for the empty list (which is 'true'). I don't know if nil would be useful.

I've enjoyed the following resources:

SICP - http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/

HTDP - http://htdp.org/

Dan Grossman's Programming Languages Coursera course - https://www.coursera.org/course/proglang

The Racket docs - http://docs.racket-lang.org/

Chris Jester-Young's StackOverflow answers - http://stackoverflow.com/search?q=user:13+[racket]

This list won't be as useful to you as it was to me, because you already know Common Lisp, but hopefully other readers will find it interesting.

NB - the ProgLang Coursera course features Racket alongside SML, Ruby and quite a lot of material that will seem very basic to experienced programmers, but it's a really good introduction of some of its key features. I think this is probably my weakest recommendation to someone who already knows Common Lisp (or similar) and my strongest recommendation to someone who does not.

Beyond that, the default DrRacket IDE comes with a whole load of teaching resources bundled by default, including (iirc) resources to help build a game in Racket - this package I think http://docs.racket-lang.org/teachpack/2htdpuniverse.html.

As for differences/advantages of Racket, I would say that there are few that I'm aware of beyond the simplicity of learning the language, the great tools, and the ease with which you can get up and running. Nothing inherent to the language that I'm aware of, and I would suspect that Common Lisp is great if you're already part of that community and 'know where everything is' so-to-speak. I've heard that CLOS is better than Racket's OOP abilities.

I really do love the language, though, it's one of the easiest and most joyful experiences I've ever had with a programming language. Just maybe not a necessity if you already know CL.

> Oh he'll be okay, the system's on his side.

I think Ronson strongly suggests that this is in fact the case.

Ronson's a great journalist for acknowledging the complexity of a situation without attempting to offer answers he's unqualified to give, imho.

> “So you’re in your new workplace…” (Hank was offered another job right away) “…and you’re talking to a female developer. In what way do you act differently towards her?”

> “Well,” Hank said. “We don’t have any female developers at the place I’m working at now. So.”

> “You’ve got a new job now, right?” I said to Adria.

> “No,” she said.

Incidentally thank you for all your comments on this article. They're really thoughtful and have helped me understand what is clearly a very big issue much better.

There are different forms of schizophrenia, such as paranoid schizophrenia, catatonic schizophrenia and hebephrenic schizophrenia, in which some or most of the symptoms associated with schizophrenia are not present.

Paranoid schizophrenia is most well-known, and is associated with delusions (such as GP comment outlined).

Schizophrenia in general is associated with severe anxiety and depression, explaining your friends' experiences.

Note that I'm not even close to the remotest possible thing to a doctor, and have no special insight - most of my 'knowledge' about schizophrenia should be treated with caution at best.

I've encountered a high number of IBS sufferers who've been exceptional academically. I think that there may be something about the syndrome that encourages academic & similar study, although attempting to speculate what that might be from the outside is beyond me.

I've been thinking about this. If I put my tinfoil hat on, I think they're telling the truth.

> The relationship with Superfish is not financially significant;

Again, with my tinfoil hat on, I believe this. I believe that either Israeli (check out Superfish's background and connections) or Chinese governmental groups have forced Lenovo into loading this awful malware onto its machines.

> our goal was to enhance the experience for users.

Not their goal in loading adware, but their goal in general. They are drawing a line (or semicolon) between what they wanted to do, and what the dark and mysterious forces behind Superfish forced them to do.

Again, tinfoil hat. This is all very conspiracy theory-ish.

> We are getting off-topic here. If you have questions pertaining to the differences between adware, spyware, potentially unwanted applications, and viruses please post on the Security & Malware Forum. We'll be glad to clear up any misunderstanding.

Ugh. Patronising, misleading and evading the point all in one answer. This was a horrible thread to read.

This is cool, but the Finnish system seems like it should be higher.

Yksi, kaksi, ... kahdeksan, yhdeksan, kymmenen

(diacritics etc. omitted because I'm lazy)

It looks as though the symmetricality between yksi, kaksi/kahdeksan yhdeksan implies a "two less than ten, one less than ten" pattern rather than an "8, 9" pattern. Can anyone comment on the etymology of kahdeksan/yhdeksan?

Bojack Horseman in particular has a tone and style close enough to British satirical cartoon Monkey Dust that it's a fantastic counter-example to a significant America-Britain disconnect. It also fits the bill in terms of being actual satire, however soft the target might be.

In turn, Metalocalypse - another spot-on satire of an off-beat target - is American. So is Best In Show, and for that matter This Is Spinal Tap is American.

Always Sunny is another great example, and I'm thinking of ever more now - I mean, Seinfeld would be the quintessential example of unlikeable losers losing, no? Or Frasier?

The remake of House of Cards is hilarious for a different reason, in that it resembles a telenovela set in the White House. "Push her down the stairs! Push her down the stairs!" as the cast of Friends might chant.

I don't necessarily believe in a huge gap between America and Britain in terms of satire, but I do think there's some structural difference that enabled a particular class of Britons to criticise the establishment with impunity - primarily disillusioned public schoolboys, and later Oxbridge types. My impression (it may easily be wrong) is that it is this class from which most of our overtly political satire has come from.

Criticisms you could make include:

* Frivolous about an error that's probably annoying to the audience. Not a major issue imo.

* Website Feedback link is relatively difficult to spot (but there, grey and in footer).

* Search option is relatively difficult to spot (but there, black and top right).

* Heavy (2.7MB) for a page which needs to load quickly. Not an issue for Bloomberg with their slick CDN but bad practice for most. The bulk of that is the .gif (http://cdn.gotraffic.net/business/public/images/bbiz404.3020..., c.1.6MB)

Criticisms I would actually make include:

* uh. I feel stupid for laughing so hard at it? I mean, really, it's pretty silly.

"hash, a milder form of the drug" - I thought hash was the resin, which could be made from any plant variety, including Skunk and Skunk-like types? I was also under the impression that hash, in the form of cannabis resin, was stronger, not weaker.

EDIT: Found a 'source' for my vague thoughts, even if it's just Wiki. Took a little while to overcome Google's inclination to serve me information about hashing functions and hash maps but I imagine, say, a journalist could have googled hash and found this with little effort: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashish

I think it's a story because of Molyneux. Peter Molyneux has failed to deliver completely for a long time.

With Godus, with Curiosity, it increasingly seems as though he failed to deliver even a finished game and in addition it seems as though he failed to even try.

For many gamers, it's the end of the final shred of Molyneux's respectability. People may snark about it, "Oh, what a surprise", but this was his last chance.

The royalty (or at least some prize) formed part of a concept that was at the heart of Curiosity - some grand, real, reward that justified all the cow-clicking nonsense. As such, it was an essential part of the game that people played. Meanwhile, Godus continues to languish without the promised features.

Comparing him with Shyamalan, this would be his Last Airbender. Not earth-shattering news that he messed it up completely, but final confirmation that his talent - if he ever had it - seems to have deserted him.

At first I thought they were supposed to be a parody. It was quite upsetting to realise that they were deadly serious.

The pound in particular is very old, and the practice of using a crossbar on the ascender of a letter to mark an abbreviation dates back to medieval times (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scribal_abbreviation#Suspension). In fact, given the proximity of the British pound's creation and the period during which these abbreviations were at their peak, it seems to me to be possible that the British pound was the first still-extant currency symbol that was a letter with a dash through it, nearly a thousand years earlier. I don't know if that would have formed a convention though.

The dollar is entirely different, and is essentially just a peso sign.

> Prices are dropping around the country.

> London prices are forcing people away from living in London. Businesses are moving away.

Wouldn't this force prices higher across the country?

As someone living in Bristol, I have to say that there's been a (noticeable) influx of people from London, and that this is what I believe has forced local prices up to the point where many can no longer afford to stay.

Friends of mine, who are local (I am an Essex import), have scattered as far as Darwen and Bournemouth.

That is interesting!

I like the way you present the Chipotle/buffet as a set of choices too - it seems to make choice into almost a data structure issue. Like Chipotle are succeeding partly because they're presenting people with a binary search tree rather than an undifferentiated cluster of choices.

This seems relevant to this post - http://stratechery.com/2013/obsoletive/ - that's often been posted on Hacker News about obsoletive vs. disruptive technology.

I see this as Chipotle offering what is effectively an obsoletive product - fast food that's cheap but also has some valuable nutritional content - compared with McDonald's, who were capable of offering a highly disruptive low-end product in an environment where there was an information asymmetry.

I find this interesting because, to me, it's a demonstration that themes of obsolescence and disruption can apply to much more than just pure tech businesses.

I've never eaten at Chipotle myself (do we even have them in the UK?), but wow this is some great PR for them. Reminds me of when everyone just happened to start raving about Nando's a while back. Kudos to whoever set this up.

I believe that many different groups including vegans, conservative Christians, extreme right-libertarian militia organisations and various anarchist/communist groups have carried out attacks that have been characterised as terrorist in the past - and therefore that they could plausibly carry out attacks again, implicating 'fellow travelers' as they did so. I'm not sure about Occupy I'm afraid, as it didn't really take off in the UK.

I also think that the general demographics of the people who make up the establishment are pretty important when you consider who ends up being imprisoned without trial.

I think that we understand each other, but you've added some interesting points and examples that I hadn't thought of.

"It fundamentally changes the relationship between people and state." is the most ironclad argument I've heard. Albeit a bit of a cliché these days.

There's some advantage to the tin foil hat, too. It's probably fine for now if you're not Muslim, but if you are then your associations and visited websites could be used to put you somewhere very uncomfortable without a trial. Say if libertarians or socialists or christian conservatives started carrying out attacks, your political and personal affiliations could make life very uncomfortable.

Great post. I thought I'd comment just to say about the relative URL ../what-is-special-about-nim not working as intended from the homepage and the link to http://nim-lang/ which should presumably be http://nim-lang.org

Seems a shame to make such a pedantic and insubstantial comment on such an interesting article about a language I'd not come across, but thought the author might like to know.

> What's your point?

My inference is the reference to deference

For me I am also extremely anxious on the phone (albeit getting better), but this is a niche case.

I think knowing the number is possibly the complication that Uber solves? EDIT: I'm pretty uninformed about this whole world, as I use a dumbphone and never take a taxi so my guesses may be pretty wild here...

Anyway, I suppose that you could have a number that you call that automatically delivers a self-driving car to your location as determined by GPS/voice-recognition technology but I think people would rather use an app.

It's the potential of self-driving cars to make use of this sort of company's services that looks like it'll be profitable to me personally.

I suspect that the amazing ease of use to the user - get a cab in just a couple of taps of the finger - is being backed not for its own sake, which appears to be of limited use to the average individual currently, but because the infrastructure behind it could easily and far more profitably be adapted to operate self-driving cars.

So I see it as a speculative sort of investment in self-driving cars as much as in these companies. To dominate the market when self-driving cars emerge, with their increased capacity and lower overheads, would be pretty sweet.

Apologies to cab drivers for describing you as 'overheads' and 'decreased capacity' within a single clause, I realise this sounds cold but this is how it will be seen within the companies.

Also, I've never personally used Uber - I don't earn enough to use cabs in general. If it's more complicated than I assumed to order a cab through it then my other assumptions are probably wrong too.

Oops.

I felt that the context of the claim "Pets != humans" meant that the commenter was claiming more than just the bare bones of that statement.

I interpreted my parent comment as dismissing the grandparent comment by saying that pets are not in the same 'moral class' as humans, without further justification.

It was this (probably imaginary, I now realise) distinction that I was trying to provide an alternative point of view for.

Sorry for attacking a straw man.

I have read Singer, yes.