vincent-toups

Cool, can't wait for anti-bot protection to start rejecting me because I use firefox.

What I mean about macros is that there just aren't a lot of problems that are really well suited to solution via meta-programming. People should be free to program however they want, but if we're evaluating the power of a language I think its fair to talk about the frequency and type of problems you might need to solve.

I think you're right about CL and CLojure, though. While I really prefer Scheme, its not really appropriate for solving a large set of practical problems.

I'm programming in Lisp (Chez Scheme) now.

I've been a serious Lisp programmer (recreationally and sometimes professionally) for around 10 years and I have programmed in Common Lisp, Scheme, my own weird dialects, Emacs Lisp, etc.

At this point I feel like almost everything written about Lisp is silly. Taken as a language family as a whole, there isn't much that separates Lisp from most of the other languages that are out there _except_ syntax-transformations or macros which, frankly, most people should never use.

For me, the best thing about Lisp is the regularity of the syntax. What I like least about almost all other programming languages is all the useless syntactic doodads and wingdings. The brackets, the indentation sensitive stuff, the unneeded complexity that languages insist on associating with what is and must be the denotation of a tree, in the end.

The other great thing about the language is that you must use `let` or `lambda` to introduce variable bindings and their scope is, therefore, always perfectly clear.

Despite these niceties, Lisp isn't going to make you into a super programmer. It won't really help you solve hard problems. It might help you quickly solve easy problems, but in the end, most of the job of a software engineer is grappling with conceptual problems with which Lisp is only sort of helpful.

As long as I'm holding forth, I will say that I enjoy programming in Scheme _much_ more than I enjoy Common Lisp, which feels incredibly, uselessly, and old-fashionedly complex with all sorts of weird corners to stub your toes on.

God please anything to liberate me from pandas, which has one of the wildest API's I've ever had to routinely work with.

Crazy, I just recommended this exact approach to a student in my data science class.

Whenever I see this stuff I wonder how much fraud is being perpetrated by people with enough statistical know how to make it hard to detect.

The epistemological relevance of statistics at the level of daily news is almost non-existent. Heck, professional scientists routinely fail (for various reasons) to apply statistics correctly to very controlled circumstances. News reporting is quite far from the controlled experimental context in which statistics would be applicable.

Seems like a weird suggestion.

Seems interesting. I used to live with an abysmally slow rural broadband connection and so this kind of thing was impossible to imagine.

What is my escape hatch for my workflows and data if your startup dies, though?

I'd be shocked if this weren't the case.

As an old Lisp/Scheme guy all I can think whenever I try to figure out what is going on with Rebol/Red is "What a mess."

Gotta ask: is this gravity example real? You really have friends who have some sort of mystical commitment to the idea that gravity is somehow entirely epistemologically self-grounded?

Almost literally every physicist since Newton has believed that there is some sort of underlying theory which explains gravity. Its hard to imagine how anyone could get the idea that the matter was somehow settled.

I'd love it if you could share more context.

The usual story is that neuron were initially characterized experimentally using current injections to which their firing times are (in a certain sense) maximally disordered and thus the response is characterized only by firing rate.

This idea is also born out in most real neural systems, where firing rate is well correlated with various sorts of feature presentation.

But at faster timescales other things seem to be going on.

This is what (mediocre) my PhD thesis was about.

I'm not sure that I buy you're assertion that kindness is either necessarily or sufficiently described by a lack of aggression per se.

Kindness is maybe better described by keeping the the inner life of your fellow beings in the forefront of your mind and treating them with respect relative to that inner life and your own hopefully well though out ethical frame. I can certainly see how that would often limit the amount of aggression you would employ but I see that as a secondary effect.

Are you using Hackernews' built in anti-procrastination features?

I really liked the initial version of Duo Lingo but I've found it increasingly less fun to use as all the engagement hacking has crept into the site.

I expect that will accelerate and things will start falling behind a pay wall soon.

I don't mind pay walls even remotely but I hate the bait and switch which is the mainstay of startup products. I guess I understand that it is often the only way to reach enough customers to have a chance at all, but it still sucks.

Also, I personally hate gamification, even when it is operating over something I want to do. It feels condescending and manipulative. I'm an adult. I can learn things without earning little virtual jewels and shit.

This really strikes me as a "not even wrong" post. I'm not sure there is anything wrong with programming and if there is something wrong with it, the problem sure isn't "there are not enough operators."

My favorite languages don't even have the _idea_ of operators and in languages with custom operators, with all their crazy ass rules about precedence and content-free representations, I'm always re-translating the code to s-expressions in my mind.

The Scheme way seems fine to me - operator-like functions when the meaning is universally understood and then human-readable names for literally everything else.

Honestly, I'd be fine with 99% of the internet going away.

I'm really looking forward to not engaging with any of this stuff at all!

Not really the point I am trying to make: if you love History, getting the PhD might be worth it. Money isn't everything.

Counterpoint: I've got a Phd (Physics). I did not pursue physics as a career but I think about and read physics research papers and textbooks _almost every day_ and derive enormous pleasure from the pursuit.

Sure, I could teach myself everything I learned in grad school on my own time (I guess) but to me, those stipended years wherein I had no responsibilities other than to learn were the best years of my life, and they have served as the springboard for more learning in this, much more busy, period of my life.

Would it be better if I had made full professor somewhere? Sure, but in the end the education was its own reward. I consider the trade offs a bargain.

The most literal possible interpretation of "move fast and break stuff."

"Everything looks like a graph" is more damning of the idea of a graph as storage than it is praise. The whole point of a database is to impose _additional_ constraints on the data to ease subsequent application development or data analysis.

Relational data may be a hassle but its a hassle you end up having to deal with anyway at some point.

I can see a graph database as being a useful place to stash a ton of shitty data as an initial place to start an ETL but I can't imagine using it as a system of record except in very limited situations.

I'd rather experience more stress than believe dumb shit. Editing lest I seem glib: I have tried spirituality. The amount of work I feel I must do to maintain anything but a relaxed materialist worldview is not worth the promise that believing in some silly cosmology will reduce my anxiety about death or whatever.

The Economist certainly doesn't break down easily on the American political spectrum, but in the more coherent language of higher level policy, the Economist is almost 100% liberal.

I agree its a well put together publication, but a socialist (for instance) would argue it is deeply ideological.

I'm all for people getting out of their bubbles, but the idea that the truth is "somewhere in the middle" or is even discernible by a process of digestion applied to the two "sides" of the American political spectrum is pretty dumb.

"I’m arguing that secularism when taken on face value lacks the tools to recognize it’s own belief system."

Truly a bonkers assertion when secularism includes enormous institutions to fund and perform tasks as various as the hard sciences to the most abstract philosophical investigations and the entire gamut of cultural production around and between.

The average person doesn't much participate in these institutions but the average Catholic hasn't read Humanea Vitae either.

I'm not a non-drinker but I would say I have less than one drink in a typical 4 month period.

I'd rather go without internet than have one of these damned smart devices in my house. I can't believe how popular they are.

Imagine getting bent out of shape about someone else getting bent out of shape over the color of shutters? Its pure spite.