vincent-toups

Cool, can't wait for anti-bot protection to start rejecting me because I use firefox.

What I mean about macros is that there just aren't a lot of problems that are really well suited to solution via meta-programming. People should be free to program however they want, but if we're evaluating the power of a language I think its fair to talk about the frequency and type of problems you might need to solve.

I think you're right about CL and CLojure, though. While I really prefer Scheme, its not really appropriate for solving a large set of practical problems.

I'm programming in Lisp (Chez Scheme) now.

I've been a serious Lisp programmer (recreationally and sometimes professionally) for around 10 years and I have programmed in Common Lisp, Scheme, my own weird dialects, Emacs Lisp, etc.

At this point I feel like almost everything written about Lisp is silly. Taken as a language family as a whole, there isn't much that separates Lisp from most of the other languages that are out there _except_ syntax-transformations or macros which, frankly, most people should never use.

For me, the best thing about Lisp is the regularity of the syntax. What I like least about almost all other programming languages is all the useless syntactic doodads and wingdings. The brackets, the indentation sensitive stuff, the unneeded complexity that languages insist on associating with what is and must be the denotation of a tree, in the end.

The other great thing about the language is that you must use `let` or `lambda` to introduce variable bindings and their scope is, therefore, always perfectly clear.

Despite these niceties, Lisp isn't going to make you into a super programmer. It won't really help you solve hard problems. It might help you quickly solve easy problems, but in the end, most of the job of a software engineer is grappling with conceptual problems with which Lisp is only sort of helpful.

As long as I'm holding forth, I will say that I enjoy programming in Scheme _much_ more than I enjoy Common Lisp, which feels incredibly, uselessly, and old-fashionedly complex with all sorts of weird corners to stub your toes on.

God please anything to liberate me from pandas, which has one of the wildest API's I've ever had to routinely work with.

Crazy, I just recommended this exact approach to a student in my data science class.

Whenever I see this stuff I wonder how much fraud is being perpetrated by people with enough statistical know how to make it hard to detect.

The epistemological relevance of statistics at the level of daily news is almost non-existent. Heck, professional scientists routinely fail (for various reasons) to apply statistics correctly to very controlled circumstances. News reporting is quite far from the controlled experimental context in which statistics would be applicable.

Seems like a weird suggestion.

Seems interesting. I used to live with an abysmally slow rural broadband connection and so this kind of thing was impossible to imagine.

What is my escape hatch for my workflows and data if your startup dies, though?

I'd be shocked if this weren't the case.

As an old Lisp/Scheme guy all I can think whenever I try to figure out what is going on with Rebol/Red is "What a mess."

Gotta ask: is this gravity example real? You really have friends who have some sort of mystical commitment to the idea that gravity is somehow entirely epistemologically self-grounded?

Almost literally every physicist since Newton has believed that there is some sort of underlying theory which explains gravity. Its hard to imagine how anyone could get the idea that the matter was somehow settled.

I'd love it if you could share more context.

The usual story is that neuron were initially characterized experimentally using current injections to which their firing times are (in a certain sense) maximally disordered and thus the response is characterized only by firing rate.

This idea is also born out in most real neural systems, where firing rate is well correlated with various sorts of feature presentation.

But at faster timescales other things seem to be going on.

This is what (mediocre) my PhD thesis was about.

I'm not sure that I buy you're assertion that kindness is either necessarily or sufficiently described by a lack of aggression per se.

Kindness is maybe better described by keeping the the inner life of your fellow beings in the forefront of your mind and treating them with respect relative to that inner life and your own hopefully well though out ethical frame. I can certainly see how that would often limit the amount of aggression you would employ but I see that as a secondary effect.

Are you using Hackernews' built in anti-procrastination features?