jfoutz

I don’t know what readers are aware of this. American football fields are all the same size, but soccer fields can vary.

That little bit of trivia makes this extra funny. For me anyway.

You nailed the key point my muddy intuition (and the article) failed to express.

Pro gamblers simulate problem gamblers, so they can bet more.

I said, "Casino's can't survive off casual players. They need the addicts to make payroll"

> To what degree is this true?

I don't know the ROI. It's hyperbolic, I'll freely admit that.

But I think there is an important point. We let problem gamblers gamble more, and it's not fair pros take advantage of that dark pattern.

The article appears to break gamblers into 3 groups.

1) casual players

2) problem players

3) professional gamblers.

so basically casual players gamble something like 50 bucks a year. Problem gamblers get money however they can (and although it's unstated and I have no evidence, I think this is where the actual money comes from). And finally, people that can snipe the mispriced bets, and make a lot of money.

Feels sort of submarine-ish. Casino's can't survive off casual players. They need the addicts to make payroll. The pros eat up casino margins.

I dunno. Feels like a "I run a business, but I'm not really good at it so we need laws to force the pros out". Please don't regulate me, but regulate who can play.

Interesting that it's in Bloomberg. Interesting that the casinos are so bad at laying odd they lose. I have no sympathy for anyone but the addicts. Those folks are sick and need help.

100%

If I had to put scheme in production, I think I'd pick racket. I think that would give me the best chance at helping other dev's get set up, explain the problem, and show the solution. anta40 asked about packages, and racket has the db interaction as part of the normal distribution, I see there's a mongo client in the package manager, but no idea about firebase. I guess wrap the cli?

Racket has been ported over to the chez backend, and got a big performance pop. And they've done stuff with arrays instead of lists, immutable lists. Pointer chasing is always going to have certain tradeoffs.

As much as I love scheme, it's going to be a fringe language. Small shop, that can be ok. You need to hire 50 people? yeah, that's not really going to work out I think.

anta40 also mentiond stuff like Haskell and Ocaml. I feel like those are much easier to refactor, the compiler helps so much, you just chase errors and feel good about code staying correct. scheme, I feel like I just throw it away and start over.

For personal stuff, language doesn't matter, think harder, you'll find a way out.

For "team" stuff. Ugh. That really depends on how dysfunctional the team is. I think go is a pretty solid default. But everything is very textured and nuanced. Just you? go with what you know. Wasting time ramping up on a shiny new thing won't ship. You have a mostly working team? Keep doing that. add linters or whatever to improve code quality.

Screwing around with a weekend project that might turn into something big? Racket seems like the path of least resistance. it's a hard question to answer optimally.

as I read it, it's any struct! Not just strings. which is cool.

Interning is neat. Most of my experience is really dated. Primarily in the JVM, and mostly for class names, for reflection and class loaders. It's sort of surprising seeing this added to go, with its desires for minimalism. But when you can use it, it can be a big win.

Look past the "loading the whole book in memory" the author gets to the point soon enough.

The ip address example is ok. It's true, and highlights some important points. But keep in mind pointers are 64 bit. If you're not ipv6, and you're shuffling a lot of them, you're probably better off just keeping the uint64 and converting to string and allocating the struct as needed. interning doesn't appear to be much of a win in that narrow case. but if you do care about ipv6, and you're connecting to millions of upstreams, it's not unreasonable.

It's neat it's available. it's good to be aware of interning, but it's generally not a huge win. For a few special cases, it can be really awesome.

** edit uint32 for ipv4. bit counting is hard.

Rto is really important in dysfunctional organizations. Sometimes the only way forward is to know a guy. Lean on that personal connection, and unblock yourself.

Ya know, the Roman tradition was, you gotta stand under the bridge while the army marches over it. If it collapses, you die too. Maybe there's something to having nudes of that dev.

Real engineering is expensive. And hard. moving atoms around is tough. I've never cut stone, but I've melted and cast copper and aluminum. That's real and dangerous work.

Computation is cheap and plentiful. And I kinda like having full control of "stuff". But maybe we do need licensing or personal liability. If I could wave a magic wand, and make that exist, I don't really know what rules I'd put in place.

How do you think people should get skilled up?

Eternal September. Everyone starts somewhere, it’s just all the time now. In ten years, the dev will explain to a junior how bad they messed up, and why they have to validate this way. Well, I don’t know, but that’s what I hope.