lmm

Shimano is famously a company that people in about four seemingly random/unrelated fields/hobbies think of as a specialist brand in that hobby (e.g. fishing).

(They are or at least were originally a bearings company, specialising in things that need to spin with very low friction, and all their seemingly unrelated businesses started from that)

I don't know what specifically is wrong with the US-centric numbers you are citing, but I know they don't match the lived reality of the UK, which compares favourably with not only Mississippi but with the US as a whole.

Presumably because he thinks (rightly or wrongly) that the one is damaging his reputation while the other is not.

If there was enough soap residue to matter you'd notice the taste.

Imagine using an ftp program to transfer files.

> there's a long line of well-known names from Alan Kay to Steele, Matz and Goetz, etc. who publicly said great things about the grand idea of Lisp.

About the ideas, yes, helped by being such an early language that it can lay claim to being the originator of a great many things. About the syntax, rather fewer.

> Apple, Cisco, Netflix, Walmart, CircleCI, Nubank and many others have successfully built and maintained large projects

There are a great many success stories and just as many failure stories. 60+ years on, Lisp continues to exist but remains niche.

> rigid, ceremony-heavy, anti-interactive approaches consistently faded, while the dynamic/interactive/symbolic cluster that Lisp has pioneered keeps getting re-adopted.

Yes and no; the pendulum swings but the oscillations get smaller. At this point the programming world has pretty much converged on present-but-lightweight typing with inference and optional annotations, for example; there are no new serious pure dynamic languages being made, and all major dynamic languages are putting huge effort into retrofitting typing. Long edit-deploy-test cycles aren't coming back but nor is live-editing your production system.

> What serious programmer ever ignores Lisp influence or importance?

That's quite a different thing from saying that it's pleasant or even good. Every serious critic acknowledges that e.g. David Foster Wallace was influential and important, but many openly hate actually reading his work.

> actual, pragmatic, lived experience

Hardly. You've built this a whole edifice of beliefs that wouldn't withstand 5 minutes outside the Lisp bubble.

> why all of a sudden does management need to micromanage my tools?

Because doing so increases the value of their stock options. They might privately think it's as dumb as you do, but apparently the stock market disagrees.

> unchangeable law

WTF do you mean by this? Even constitutions can be amended, and if an odious law cannot be changed through politics then that only means it will be changed by other means.

> Compare it to natural languages.

Assuming any such comparison is valid is purely speculative. There are significant differences.

> anyone who reaches fluency in a foreign language just "magically" stops hating it.

Not true (plenty of people learn Mandarin and regret doing so), and even if it were true it could just be survivorship bias - of course people who hate a language are less likely to become fluent in it.

> Turns out they don't really hate the language, do they? They don't hate phonology, morphology, syntax - they "hate" the culture, the idioms, the orthogonal stuff, right?

No, sometimes people really do hate the language.

> nobody in the right mind would ever join a discussion only to say "I hate Spanish, it's weird and hard to read".

That might not be a productive thing to say in a discussion, but that doesn't mean it can't be true.

> Like I dunno, how could anyone hate recursion, or closures, or pattern matching, or parametric polymorphism - these are just ideas, specific tools to use in specific context and situation.

Plenty of people hate any or all of those things. I'd say it's reasonable to hate a tool that tends to have bad consequences - e.g. a language feature that makes code superficially easier to write but hard to refactor or debug.

> The cost of restructuring has also gone down.

> The cost of shoring up behavior with tests ahead of a restructure has gone down because of AI.

Disagree. The growth in brittle AI-generated tests means restructuring is more costly than it was before. Pruning your test suite so that it tests the essence of the problem and not the incidental design decisions is something AIs aren't yet capable of.

HN moderation policy is to replace informative submitter-chosen titles with the title of the linked article in most cases.

They said they were selling it, all over their site. The button said "buy". They can put whatever crap they like in a section that they know nobody ever reads, that doesn't negate what they said in large print up front and no sane court will entertain the notion that it does.

> It was an objective public health measure, because it is well-known from actual examples that opening such option would lead people to try to get infected instead of being vaccinated, breeding even more variants and hospital saturation.

Bullshit.

> Note also that "previous contamination" has never been an acceptable derogation in any public health system for any of the compulsory vaccinations.

Nonsense. Literally the first example I looked up was the CDC's measles vaccination advice https://www.cdc.gov/measles/hcp/vaccine-considerations/index... : laboratory confirmation of immunity or of the disease is considered presumptive evidence of immunity in exactly the same way that a vaccination record is.

There are some things that are hidden, but they're the exception not the rule; but by default most things need to be global. You need to know how much capital the whole bank has at risk if <XYZ company> were to go bankrupt, or interest rates moved by x%, for example.

> I'm not opposed to anything, I don't know where that conclusion comes from. I'm just trying to explain why people hate s-expressions.

You seemed to be implicitly claiming that there was no point presenting the ideas with a different syntax.

You're making very strident claims based on very little evidence. Maybe you're right, but I think we should at least entertain the possibility that people who think they hate s-expressions actually do hate s-expressions - which would be an ample explanation for why those people never got into Lisp.

> 1) mRNA technology was not experimental

Perhaps, but the specific vaccines were.

> 2) I don't know about you but I got my shot in the shoulder, not the back door

As I'm sure you understood, I was talking about coercion by the back door - the whole "we're not going to force individuals to vaccinate, but we're going to force restaurants and gyms to require vaccination" approach. (And don't try to say it was an objective public health measure - if that was the case they would've made natural immunity as acceptable as vaccination)

> Secondly, "AI ... can .... safely modify my infrastructure", OP is either being a troll or haven't seem how the whole IT world is upside down because of those very same statements.

That's exactly why you want your infrastructure defined in version controlled files with easy revert when something gets screwed up.

> Thirdly, "my entire infrastructure is defined in text files", you clearly never heard of Ansible.

Ansible is a half-assed version of what nix or even Puppet gets you. Having a version controlled record of which shell commands you ran doesn't help that much when you're still running random uncontrolled shell commands and hoping they do what you want them to.

> All their antivax outrage was because they didn't think they personally were going to die from COVID, and didn't want to help save anyone else's life.

Suppose you're right. They're still entitled to their views, they're entitled to honesty from their government, and frankly I'd say the government should not be trying to coerce people into taking an officially-experimental vaccine by the back door any more than they should be directly forcing people to do so.

> 2 million dead Americans later

Maybe. Depends very much on who's doing the calculations.

> complain about a shutdown which should have lasted a few months max if people had done what they were supposed to

Bullshit. Countries with much higher social compliance saw the same endless lockdowns.

> temporal seems to be a virtual machine like the evm, it handles computation.

It stores the app's work-in-progress state as well (probably as a blob full of serialised internal datastructures, at least in some cases):

> You write your workflow as ordinary sequential code, and the platform records every step in an event history. If a worker crashes mid-workflow, another worker replays the deterministic prefix to reconstruct the state, then continues from where it left off.

> When I read about internal app state being stored in Barbara I'm interpreting that the policy is for the data to be centralized for more vertical control.

That wasn't the way I experienced it, if anything it was the opposite: app developers would push to use Barbara for their internal state because it was easy: the app is already accessing it, the APIs are simple, and since it's just pickled objects you can just store your state without having to worry about serialisation (much) or ORM. Whereas policy and leadership would if anything prefer you to use a separate traditional database. The point of Barbara is to provide a unified interface onto "everything the bank knows", it's primarily for data that multiple teams use, not internal state owned by a single team.

Morgan Stanley's version is open-source at https://github.com/morganstanley/optimus-cirrus , although I don't know how practical it is to actually run yourself. (They don't go quite as far as having the code itself be bitemporal and kept in the datastore, but most of the stuff in the article exists there)

That's only half the answer. These large investment banks' value-add is partly that they can integrate everything they know into these closed-world environments (kind of like a Smalltalk image), which is something that simply isn't done in the wider world because you can't accrete it out of smaller pieces and it doesn't make sense at all for smaller entities.

It sounds pretty similar actually. Barbara fills the same role that Temporal is doing at Mercury.

> It's not about survivorship bias, it's about notation. It's like "hating Leibniz's dy/dx because Newton's dot notation already exists" and I'm arguing that people don't just "hate the notation", they simply misunderstand the principles of calculus.

Ok but where is the dot notation? If this is the only notation available for those ideas, how can you be sure that it's the ideas that are the problem and not the notation?

> I've seen far too often the evidence that programmers ignore the underlying ideas outright, simply because they didn't like the notation on first sight.

Then why are you opposed to people presenting the ideas with different notation, if the ideas are what you think is valuable?

Many times I've thought "what kind of idiot would try to use our app on a phone?" only to find one of our execs was doing exactly that, but YMMV I guess.

> In all my time I have never come across a single Lisper, neither in person nor online, and I know far more than a few dozens, who once grokked the REPL-driven workflow and the structural editing idioms only to later, for whatever reason, suddenly start disliking or even hating s-expressions.

And we've never seen bullet holes in these parts of the plane, so there's no point putting armour there.

The irony is that coding agents are, if anything, more affected by technical debt than human maintainers (who at least occasionally have the taste to rise above the level of the current codebase they're working in). The impact on productivity may be initially delayed, but it's going to compound faster.

> Not sure if this is better or worse than the UK's Network Rail story, but at the end of the day the only thing that will solve this is if they re-nationalize the tracks & infrastructure. What kind of an idiot thought including that in the privatization is a good idea is beyond me. It's not like you can build a 2nd railway network in order to get free market & competition. (For comparison, imagine privatizing the entire road network, village street to Autobahn.)

If you privatize the infrastructure and trains together you can at least compare one region against another, even if they're not directly competing. Trying to operate the trains separately from the tracks was a disaster in the UK and lead pretty directly to two mass casualty incidents.

The EU has less democratic accountability than I would like, but it is there. National governments have been brought down over their poor choices at the EU level. Even if you think Visa/MC made the right decisions in these cases, the fact that they're being made by private companies accountable to no-one should worry you.

> why EU doesn’t try and develop a homegrown card provider? It would provide exactly what MC/Visa does

They have. A combination of petty squabbling and the lack of any real value proposition has always killed it. To have any chance of succeeding in the EU a new system needs to be something that no-one currently provides, because consumers are unlikely to adopt something that isn't clearly better than what they currently have, but more importantly no EU country is going to adopt a different EU country's system.

The OS-component-oriented approach was defensible in the days of desktop only (though personally I think it was a mistake even then), but it's not sustainable now. People want your app on their PC to look and behave like your app on their phone (whichever combination of PC and phone they happen to have), and that's a lot more important to them than having it look and behave like other apps on their PC.