TheLarch

They'd have a lot more clout if they were customers.

The common distinction between machine and life seems arbitrary. Suppose for instance you had essentially infinite resources to design a machine that self-replicates by stealing blood from mammals, etc etc. You would end up with something very much like the mosquito. Why is it a machine only when man designs it?

This is perhaps more apparent with viruses. They aren't living per se, but are halfway there. The assertion that the virus is not a machine seems to be a difference without a distinction.

"But having one main syntactic and data structure- the list- is what makes LISP annoying too. You have to translate other syntax and data structures into lists. Its always possible, but sometimes kludgey and unreadable."

I like everything but the quotation above. This is a higher-level version of the ubiquitous "the parens are ugly" objection.

This objection misses the point because "Lisp is a building material, not language." In order to use Lisp effectively you design an intermediate language appropriate for the problem domain. This approach is fundamentally at odds with a language such as Java, whose premise is that it provides all the abstractions you need to solve the problem directly. With Lisp you literally have whatever language you want.

Non-Lisps leak more and more as complexity increases. Two examples that jump to mind right away are lambdas in Python and generics in Java. In both cases the designers plugged holes in the abstractions they chose years before. Both are kludgey in my eyes, clear afterthoughts. Both features are trivial in Lisp. Lisp is so simple that the limitations never arose in the first place. Your language has made a compromise to simplify these things, but at the expense of flexibility. C++'s accretion disk is a marvel at this point.

You can use macros to streamline elaborate data structure creation by the way.

I've made several great investments, including one that is currently paying out over $6,000/mo. However, these payments are made to someone else, because I always, always sell early. The markets are a painful place to come to know oneself.

I do have one tried and true piece of advice: invest in index mutual funds over managed ones. Their "average" return routinely outperforms most actively managed mutual funds. Worst case, you haven't paid a lot of management fees to the person who has lost money for you. (This is less true than in the past because traders now arbitrage against index funds. Nimble traders exploit the fact that index funds are mandated to buy certain positions.)

Don't use stockbrokers. If they really knew what they claim to know then they'd be fabulously wealthy without your help.

Burton Malkiel's Random Walk Down Wall Street is a good read.

In the case of Java you can use Clojure or Armed Bear Common Lisp anyway.

How is string processing worse or uglier in lisp than other languages?

I wrote a client/server crypto system on Windows. The client was in C, the server code in Python. The Python code took maybe 5% of the time for a similar amount of functionality as in the client. No discernible performance impact from using Python. C was not in of itself a bottleneck in this case, rather the complexity of the Windows crypto API was.

Bah! IDE's seem always to be stifling, and they create complicated projects that are not readily usable outside of the IDE. For instance I often need to build software on a server, and naturally do not wish to install some enormous program to accomplish this. I don't use Eclipse for Java or Visual Studio for C#. I did not use the Racket IDE when I was writing a lot of Scheme code. I do like the new Visual Studio Code editor however. Caveman that I am, I use plain old makefiles.

The book is a wild, wild ride. He regularly sold "investments" that would ostensibly benefit the Nazis, and never did a mark make moral objections to the investment. Another striking aspect is the value that con men put on their props: there were cottage industries at the time to produce formal-looking documents and fake telecommunications equipment. The Sting was surprisingly accurate, it turns out; there really were many cons of that sort.

Totally support you pointing this out. However I hope you will indulge a random person, and let me suggest that your angry, aggrieved tone diminishes your contribution.

Sadly it appears we will reach the point where media must be dishonest to generate enough clicks to keep the doors open.

Why is the federal government more inclined to corruption than a corporation?

On the subject of corruption I can't recommend reading this highly enough: https://www.amazon.com/Conman-Master-Swindler%C2%92s-Library...

Lisp Weenie assertion that "OO" is a feature list not a solution in of itself, and that CLOS is embarrassingly better than the OO in C++/C#/Java.

I read Erica's infamous email without any knowledge of the situation, and only a vague impression that she was the wrong end of some campus non-event. The letter was so well-written and thoughtful! The key line, that she does not trust herself to police Halloween, was so effective.

Then I watched the video of the children yelling and cursing at Nicholas. Yes, they fixed that all right.

[TheLarch proffers curmudgeon fist bump]

I don't remember where I picked up the bit about synthetic C. Thanks for pointing this out.

Not sure if you are speculating that I am a supporter or detractor of his. My only impression of the man up until now was that I thought he and his wife conducted themselves with grace and forebearance during the Halloween fiasco. I find this research fascinating.

The lead author, Nicholas Christakis, is the man who was reviled by some students at Yale during the Halloween costume debacle: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/11/the-new-....

Oh yes. After Linus Pauling advocated high vitamin C doses, lots of people started taking synthetic vitamin C, which turns out to be carcinogenic. A product called Geritol was marketed to the elderly for many years on the premise that they were iron deficient. Geritol was behind lots of cases of iron poisoning.

We laugh at the quaintness of the snake oil salesman or yore -- but he never left, not really. ==== Edit ==== Not calling Pauling a snake oil salesman :-)

Um, you do realize that a fair summary of your argument is, "nuts too require much water, therefore beef is a sustainable food source?"

One pound of beef requires 1,847 gallons of water. Cattle produce a huge amount of methane. Ranchers use antibiotics profligately. Cows require a terrific amount of energy to grow, relative to plants, meaning lots of the corn we grow in the US goes to meat, which is far less energy efficient.

Unsure why Diet Coke is always specified. My son and his friends tried grape soda. Inside. It worked just fine.

"Bjarne Stroustrup bolts everything he's ever heard of onto C to create C++" was validating. A friend who has worked on desktop software in C for 30 years has it figured out IMO: he uses the C++ compiler, but always defines no-op constructors. Instead he defines an init() method on each class, which he calls explicitly. Essentially his only use for the C++ compiler is to sort out inheritance and build a correct function dispatch table.

Thanks for the great feedback. All I have to say in response is to point out that the TSA budget is $7.55 billion for 2015. I imagine you'd agree that a cost/benefit analysis over this figure would yield disappointing results, especially if you include the productivity losses imposed at airports.

The article doesn't mention that Israeli screeners are highly trained. There's a term of art in law enforcement, "hinky", which denotes the red flag that LEO's develop with experience. To fly in Israel, one stops in a bombproof room and is merely questioned by professionals, who will pull you aside if you are hinky.

The underwear bomber's father was worried that he was violent and crazy. He CONTACTED THE US STATE DEPT about his son, out of concern. His son the bomber traveled internationally to the US, without any suitcases. He was as hinky as you could hope to find.

Our relatively untrained TSA is nearly useless; at best it is security theater. I would be heavily against the underwear bomber sneaking by professionals successfully.

Also, I don't see how airplanes are not such a rich target any more. Killing a lot of people without access to the cockpit is challenging (they are sealed in the US now). A McDonald's employee could fare much better with a slow poison I suppose.

Credit where due: a great deal of this post is gleaned from Bruce Schneier writings.

My belief is that you have apples and oranges. Nomadic goat herders are not reliant on the internet. In the US the starvation clock starts running without it. Guns are more effective in the Middle East, but control of the internet is more effective in the US.

"Actually looking forward to MS's UX folk cleaning up LinkedIn"

Why do you think that will happen? Azure had AWS as a model, yet the UX is not just worse but surprisingly worse. MS bought a product I was on, and I was excited to clean it up. The exact opposite happened; we were given no time to fix design problems, and instead had to pile on features. The MSDN site has been tired for almost two decades now. I feel as though we were talking about two different companies.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali expressed the difference between classical and modern liberalism perfectly. Classical liberalism values freedom, whereas today's liberalism often favors justice. To take Islam as an example: the classical liberal response would be to strive for the the freedom of individual women, heretics, and homosexuals. Today's liberal response would be more along the lines of judging how justly society treats Muslims as a group. Identity politics is rife in modern liberalism. In Ali's view (and mine) freedom is a precursor to justice.

Erika Christakis' email https://www.thefire.org/email-from-erika-christakis-dressing... expresses an unwillingness to police costumes. I don't pretend to know much about the issue though.

In my view the hostility to free speech on campus comes from the left, not from the right. Lots of people seem to think of authoritarianism as developing exclusively from the right only, but Stalin is a counterexample.

I agree with the first and third paragraphs but not the second. I don't believe campus administrators are the weak link. The truism among elementary teachers is: forty years ago, when the student comes home with an F, the parents yelled at the student; today they yell at the teacher. The US has a shortage of skilled trades workers, I think because everyone "deserves" to be a white collar professional now. I am not saying university admins are commendable, but rather that they have no room to do a good job. It's becoming less and less clear what a good job would be, as the liberal arts education becomes more and more of an obvious anachronism.

Rather I believe your first paragraph is the larger answer. We have tossed aside the notion for sacrifice for the greater good.