hydandata

This is amazing news! I was really worried about how the first run was going, because this format is just so great! It just makes sense. Kudos to all the teams for their performance, I am sure that had something to do with YC considering to do this again. I am super excited, and I really hope to apply this time.

What a sad day, he was truly one of the great minds of the twentieth century. Inspiration to generations.

P.S. Web of Stories has an extensive, autobiography style interview with Marvin Minsky [1].

[1] http://www.webofstories.com/play/marvin.minsky/1

I have 9 invites and none of my friends want them. If you want one let me know @hydandata.

Very inspiring interview. I do not think 50% of Earth dedicated to the preservation of life is too much, not at all.

Lisp is often advocated for the big ideas like macros, but I personally enjoy small things like this the most. Every day I write Lisp code I discover new ways of making my work easier and walk away with more appreciation for the effort that went into designing this language.

Thank you for this series, everything is expressed clearly and concisely.

For me, the key is that they are even considering remote. I think that really is the part that is needed to get to another 10x. I am not saying remote work is intrinsically 10x better in quality or quantity, I am thinking about it more from the point of view of people who cannot or will not travel, new people that can be reached this way.

Take myself for example: I do have this thing that I am working on.. but I also have a wife and a daughter whom I adore, and I would hate to go away from them for any period of time. Having my wife close, playing with my daughter, these are the things that keep me going, not some dream of jets and fancy cars. I already have a job that I like, I am not running away from anything, I just want to do something better, because I know I can. I already work mostly remotely, and there is no going back to old ways for me. If I ever found anything, it will be remote and remote only.

Maybe there are fewer people who really get remote work, but in my personal experience, it is an absolute joy to work with them. And is it not repeated over and over again that you should not pursue something you do not believe in?

I have never considered applying because of the travel requirement, but now I am really tempted.

There is a great book about Lisp from Christian Queinnec titled "Lisp in Small Pieces" or LISP. Here is a little excerpt from it.

"There are subjects treated here that can be appreciated only if you make an effort proportional to their innate difficulty. To harken back to something like the language of courtly love in medieval France, there are certain objects of our affection that reveal their beauty and charm only when we make a chivalrous but determined assault on their defenses; they remain impregnable if we don't lay siege to the fortress of their inherent complexity. In that respect, the study of programming languages is a discipline that demands the mastery of tools, such as the lambda calculus and denotational semantics. While the design of this book will gradually take you from one topic to another in an orderly and logical way, it can't eliminate all effort on your part."

Lisp has some of the best literature around of any programming language. Anybody who really cares about craft of programming should make use of wisdom therein.

I learned to touch type using this website. Now I am learning Colemak there as well. There is also a setting for Dvorak and ability to enable punctuation and other characters.

I find it really good for practice. The not-quite-correctly-spelled words actually force me out of comfort zone and that is exactly what I need for practice.

Since English is not my native language I also use Type Racer but find that Keybr forces me to focus on typing correctly and fast better than other websites by giving me a typing score along with the speed measurement.

The statistics and the dark theme are also really nice features since I use this for hours.

> Perhaps 70% of developer time is spent dealing with parsing, serialization, and persistence. Values are encoded to and from JSON, to and from various binary formats, and to and from various persistent data stores… over and over again.

Off-topic but.. by using Lisp one can refocus that 70% to actually solving problems.