PieSquared

I really hate to be repetitive in these posts, and I've posted a similar thread on HN before with little to no replies... but...

Who's Hiring... Students?

I can't help love the power of real macros, though. Can you get something like loop to work in Scheme?

To me that's just part of the beauty of Common Lisp. While it is rather ugly in some places, it has these nuggets of just pure gold.

(I actually do not know scheme well enough to say. Are such complicated macros possible in it?)

Now, if only Common Lisp declared an anti-moratorium and decided to make some language changes, maybe it would become decently relevant.

While you are right that a text-box is a bad example of a programming language, what he is talking about is a text editor.

A text box is not a text editor. After all, take a look at Vim or Emacs. They have their own languages, syntax highlighters, language analysis tools, GUI and ncurses tools, etc... A goodtext editor is a huge piece of software - millions of lines of code (I think), perhaps, in the case of Emacs.

Although I do agree with you - good examples are important.

I meant these: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Promethean_Ltd

I've seen the MIT OCW courses, and yeah, professors seem to be pretty efficient with them.

Our county got smartboards in every school, and, the thing is, about a third of the teachers can actually use them effectively.

And they cost 6000 dollars to lease. And our county is short on money anyways, so all in all people aren't really too happy about them...

But at least it's a step towards progress.

Hi, I'm Gibi.

I'm a high school student with a lot of free time and a large (for a high school student, obviously) amount of experience, as well as a year of experience working at a startup.

Favored languages would be C, Java, Python, OCaml, Common Lisp (listed in order of experience with them).

If anyone happens to have some part-time remote programming work for me to do, I'd love to - leave a comment or send me an email at piesquared AT gmail and I'll follow it up.

I think I've actually posted something like this on HN, but didn't get too far.

Thanks!

Perhaps the 'jobs' section should be expanded to allow posting in it (for those who have jobs to offer).

Well, iguanas used to be very popular pets. Just let one roam around your apartment!

I find myself doing this so often.

Please, please, imagine yourself talking to someone and saying that.

You do not say, in real life, "You are an idiot [because you didn't know this fact]" to people you have never met before.

This is the Internet. There isn't enough civility on it anyway - at least do your part and don't detract from what exists.

Practice capoeira, spin poi and contact staff, contact juggle, read, program my own projects, play Dungeons and Dragons and see moview with friends. In general, live.

There is nothing really 'dead' about Lisp, whether you're speaking about Common Lisp or all Lisps. But it is true that most programmers would not turn to it when considering new projects.

I essentially see two problems with the state of Lisps. First off, the one with major library support, Common Lisp, is often times lacking in good library support. You'll find 10 libraries to do anything, but 5 of them will be undocumented, 3 of them will be dead projects, and 2 of them are incomplete.

The second problem is community. Again, I speak of Common Lisp, because it's the most fully-featured Lisp out there right now. Where is the community of Common Lisp? Who do I go to ask for feature requests in the 'next version'? Do I get some form of support? (I mean, c'mon, just compare it to Python!)

I think that Clojure has solved the second problem, more or less, with it's BDFL. However, I don't think it has the breadth of features that CL has, and being on the JVM brings some of its own problems.

Clojure is getting there, but I think that if a group of, say, 10 people decided to 'popularize' Common Lisp, they could. Just create a distribution of Lisp (say, using sbcl or anything else cross-platform) and ship it with a few helper libraries - since Lisp has macros and reader macros, it can essentially be transformed into the clean language it sometimes isn't.

Not only is it an awesome game, it can be a true art. I have seen four-square players who turned the game into a noncompetetive sport, similar to hackeysack, which allowed them to pull tricks you'd never imagine.

Ever seen someone do a flip after deflecting a four-square ball, land in a push up position, and then deflect it again with their head? I'm telling you, these guys were amazing.

There's no guarantee there's oil in either place. Remember, oil is the product of organic matter being compressed under heavy pressure for millions of years. Even if microbes or their remains are discovered on Mars or Venus, which they haven't (definitively), there's no guarantee that there was life of any considerable biomass.

So I really wouldn't get my hopes up for extraterrestrial oil at all, sad as that may be. On the other hand, minerals and metals most certainly exist outside of Earth, so...?

While I am not an expert in the oil industry, I found the above comments quite fascinating; they're spurring me to do a bit of my own research, in fact. I don't know who is right, but I just have to ask: "You obviously have absolutely no clue about what you are talking about." Would you say that to someone in person, too? The Internet is a good place to keep as much civility as possible, since there's so little of it to go around.

"But when he really did ask if he and a couple of buddies could have a few beers at my house, I just said no. No follow-up, no prevarication, no buddying up for a sympathy injection."

While I see the purpose of a clear 'No', in some cases, it just seems like it's rather jerkish even if said in a nice tone. How hard is it to say instead, "No, and that is final; my reason is such and such, just so that you know"? I know that I would be accepting of the latter answer, but questioning of a pure "No", since it would seem as though he was just being instantly judgemental.

I'm having such a great time telling all my friends about this :) (who are also coders)

Well, to everyone, thanks for all the responses. I really appreciate.

What I've decided is that I'm going to take the safest road I can. I have the option to apply to colleges, then wait for a response, and afterwards decide whether or not I want to graduate (or drop out). If I am satisfied with colleges' responses, I will most likely end high school after this year; otherwise, I will stay for another year.

As someone said in the comments, the truth is that in my situation, it will be good no matter what I decide. There is no use brooding about it for too long.

Again, thank you to everyone who responded. Hacker News is a great community for things like this.

> "Starting life" always seems just around the corner when you finish yet another milestone, but I'm slowly becoming more aware of the fact that life starts now (not to get too philosophical).

That's my main inspiration for trying this. Why waste time in high school?

Anyway, thanks for the response and the pointers as for what to consider. 1) is really the major one, as well as 2).

(I think I'm mature enough? Well, then again, who would say they weren't? And I do not drink, and do not plan to start.)

Thanks :)

While I see that you got a few people slightly irked, I really appreciate your input and time.

I think I understand what you're saying. However, my question is such: Can't you just switch out your senior year of high school for a year of college? Stay in college an extra year. If you were to do that, what would you be missing?

I do not think I'm rushing my life; I'm just trying to get the most that I can out of it. Is the social experience of college going to be that much different (worse? less educational?) than the social experience of high school?

What are the possible repercussions of graduating early? That's really what I'm interested in most.

Thanks for the response.

My social situation. Hmm. In the past year, I've gained social skills, so I have a lot of friends - however, I have no problem maintaining contacts or gaining new friends. I feel that while my current friends are very important to me, I could make new friends easily (while keeping in touch with high school friends as well).

I think that my parents do not need the extra year to save for college.

I'm interested more in your point about being over 18. I'd be 17 for the first year of college - but where would that limit me? Where are binding contracts necessary? What complications are there?

Thanks.

Maybe I misformulated a bit? Perhaps.

I'm not having a rough time in high school. You might even say I borderline enjoy it at times. However, I also recognize that a lot of my time is wasted, and that some things and policies are just silly.

What I meant by 'less crap to deal with' wasn't angsty. I meant two things: First of all, many teachers teach as babysitters, not as teachers; second of all, many students act as rowdy, uninterested kids, making class essentially pointless. That's what I meant - not any teenage angst. (Well, maybe, maybe just a teeny bit :P)

Among other things I find important is transportation. I take 1.5 hours on a bus every day to get to and from school.

Thanks for the response, by the way.

I'm trying to compromise by asking for as much information and advice as I can and being as well-informed as possible, then making a decision, and making sure that the people I respect and trust don't disagree. :)

> I wonder if the many other prone to depression people have similar reaction as I to "life-hack", "feel-good", "aphoristic" blogs/articles/people like this one.

Erm, I found that minorly confusing as to what you meant. Could you elaborate?

Dear WhyIsThisOnHN,

I note that your account was created less than a day ago, and already has over -20 karma. The three comments that you have posted have been the same, "Why is this on Hacker News?"

You seem to care about the quality of content on Hacker News; at least, this is what the spirit of your comments would indicate.

However, by posting solely inflammatory comments such as "Why is this on Hacker News", the only thing you are doing is further diluting the quality of content here. Not only that, but you are getting others - such as me - to write these lengthy metaposts, which definitely don't help either.

I don't know whether you are just trolling or genuinely want to help the community, but please, stop. Your time would be better spent finding interesting articles on topics that interest you, submitting them, and then commenting on them if they get somewhere close to the front page.

Thanks, and I really do urge you to consider your future comments. I wish you well.

It wasn't the actual buying of the lunch, it was the friendly and outgoing gesture and attitude. (Which can be characterized and cultivated by buying people lunch.)

What I personally find most interesting about this article is the demonstration of purely human insight.

We're used to new techniques and new discoveries, but many of them seem obvious, just yet unimplemented. What the author does in the article, on the other hand, is just completely brilliant deductive logic.

This is probably because the articles which are interesting people a) upvote and b) don't understand well enough to comment on.

For example, if we were given an article on protein folding, it might be very interesting - causing upvoting - but also difficult to comprehend for many of us - causing a lack of comments.

A nice heuristic. I think I'll try it a few times.

True, I guess, but it seems a bit extreme to say that anyone downloading a Greasemonkey script should be examining the javascript inside it to figure out what it does. That's all I meant by my 'Wait, what' comment. Should've elaborated, then.