I just had the opportunity to sell a large 30-year fixed-rate bond with massive leverage into an overheated bond market with damn near a guarantee of serious inflation over the next 30 years. Thank you, Bank of America!
Absolutely you can. Good managers support their people and do their best to make sure the people they're responsible for are doing their best. Bad managers abuse the outdated hierarchical model for ego trips.
You can absolutely be friends with your boss, because his or her job is to make you great, which is more than I can say about a lot of friends.
Frankly, I agree with you (and I wrote that title). I'd much prefer to have submitted it with the actual article's title, but I didn't think anybody would read/upvote it in that case, so the post would die without HN seeing it. I've noticed a lot of people lately getting all excited about async I/O, and I wanted something from the other side to hit the front page so people would read it, think about it, and comment. It would be interesting to A/B test submission titles, but unfortunately HN doesn't really support that. When we do get dupes, it does seem that the most inflammatory, least informative titles tend to win.
Oh my god yes! This is exactly the kind of tempting I've been gravitating towards lately. In Lisp, with macros no less! Thank you so much for putting this tutorial together.
Is this somehow running natively on the underlying ARM cpu instead of in the Java VM? Can you put an app in the Marketplace that does such unholy things?
I believe that kind of list already exists. A friend of mine is consistently given extra screening every time he passes through an airport. They put a mark on his boarding pass and he gets a pat-down.
The two best killer apps I've heard of for the iTablet are gaming and magazines. It seems likely to me that this will be the first Apple device with Apple silicon for the CPU, and from what I hear that means it's going to have some serious 3D muscle. The magazine bid is riskier, but has significant payoff. The Kindle isn't going to deliver gorgeous full-color content any time soon, but the iTablet surely will. I predict games and magazines will be the killer apps for the iTablet.
This is why I like Clojure's pragmatic approach. FP doesn't solve every problem easily, but often your core challenge is handling state transitions. Clojure attacks mutable state better than most languages out there, lets you get functional when you want to, but still allows for reasonably easy imperative code for things like Java interop.
I don't do it much lately due to school, but I spent several years learning to be a weaver. I've done everything from belts to blankets, and even tried my hand at spinning yarn. Weaving is actually a lot like programming (the Jacquard loom was one of the first machines to use punchcards) in that you set the system up with a set of rules and then run it. Different systems give you different languages to express the pattern in, just like programming languages. The awesome thing about looms is that they're bootstrappable technology: give me some wood and tools and I can build a loom that I can then weave on. On top of that, the potential patterns you can create with these simple programs are innumerable, many of them quite beautiful.
I really enjoy IEEE Spectrum, although it's not worth the price of professional membership to me now that I'm losing my student status. It's pretty deeply technical, but not way off into academic land, and it gives me a great read on where the EE industry is at. Things like crazy new semiconductor technologies or batteries that will enable whole new categories of electronics show up in Spectrum all the time. The future of technology is notoriously hard to predict, but Spectrum at least provides an overview of what might be coming.
I've been wondering lately whether MIT's approach of starting with Scheme has any lasting impact on students. After almost a decade of coding, I'm finally grasping the power of Lisp, but I wonder if I'd started with a Lisp would I have gotten here sooner? Does it help or hinder students to learn something as alien as Lisp for their first language in college?
I'm just a student, but I feel it's still my responsibility to donate. My research project next semester is going to focus quite a bit on Clojure, and I feel lucky to have access to such a great environment. Thanks, Rich!
Programming has always seemed like a language-oriented, not math-oriented subject to me. I think my three years of Spanish have helped my programming more than any of the calc or linear algebra I've done.
Yes, the mechanisms are completely different, but from a programmer who hasn't yet had the Lisp revelation, they appear similar. The goal here is to write higher-level code to more clearly describe your solution to a problem. Ruby lets you get part of the way there, which is often good enough, but it hits a wall that macros cross without even glancing back.
I haven't gotten far enough to demonstrate the icky part, but I should get there within a few months. I definitely plan on going further with both Ruby and Clojure to see how they compare in the end. I knew this whole “Lisp revelation” thing would hit me at some point, but I doubt I’m going to switch completely. I'd love to post again with both side by side to compare and contrast.