#mostly grew from a desire to make a garbage collector

[ceausescue]

been consumed with the idea for the worst programming language in the world. a lisp 2 with clojure syntax, bytecode interpreted. with goroutines. like janet written by a moron, like common lisp written by someone who hates themselves. hand rolled garbage collector that has to deal with all the intermediate objects from immutable types. im tagging like 11 bits out of every pointer, 3 on the small end and 8 suspended in the middle of the top 16, which is a violation of the geneva convention. none of those bits encode the type and im still boxing floats. pretty sure i worked out how to support special environments that compile to totally untypechecked machine code for fast math. came up with an inline assembly thing for it i might just expose to the user. i don't expect ill ever bother with networking

[awed-frog]

that comment about what you think about soldiers' motivation is, in my opinion and despite your intention for it not to be, pretty offensive and shows a harmful stereotypical perception. even without immediate threat to their countries, people often sign up for military service just because they want to protect and make a contribution to a safer world. let's say UN blue helmets. would you say most police officers are just hungry for authority and do the job to beat up people?

Hi there - thank you for coming to talk to me about this instead of just assuming I’m a dick or sending me abuse or whatever - I appreciated it a lot. I understand that you’re upset - to be fair, this is a sensitive and complex issue, very close and personal for some people, and where we live and how we grew up is likely to have a huge impact on what we think about it. So, yeah - it was perhaps unkind of me to bring it up in two lines in the middle of an SPN meta. It’s definitely an important debate, though, and an issue which deserves to be discussed, so let’s see if I can make my opinion a little clearer.

First of all, I should say that I’m privileged enough to live in a ‘normal’ country. I’ve never been afraid of the police - quite the opposite - and I recognize both policemen and soldiers do an important job which is necessary to a democratic society. I also know their working conditions are often difficult, if not downright awful, and I appreciate their work as I do that of all civil servants. In fact, that’s why I distanced myself from far left groups years and years ago: their hatred and contempt for cops was starting to grate on my nerves, and the fact some of my ‘friends’ would make plans to isolate policemen during demonstrations in order to beat them up made me nauseous. As Italian artist Pier Paolo Pasolini wrote back in the day, policemen are first and foremost working people who often come from an underprivileged background, so a class war against them makes no sense at all (you can find the poem here in the original Italian and more about the historical context, in English, here).

That said, it’s an open secret that the police tends to attract, and recruit, mostly a specific type of person. In many countries there is an endemic problem because policemen are inevitably revealed to be far right sympathizers, or are otherwise prejudiced against minorities. 

(One part of the world which is very close to my heart is Northern Ireland, and today, April 5th, 2017, the region has again vowed to do better and recruit more Catholics into the force. Their numbers are now up to 31%, but it’s still not good enough, and it’s a situation likely to foment or create problems down the line, as all parties are well aware.)

Italy saw one of its biggest scandal almost twenty years ago, when during the demonstrations against the G8 summit taking place in Genoa, about a hundred students were illegally detained, humiliated, beaten and threatened with rape and torture (61 of them had to be treated for mild to serious injuries). More than a hundred policemen were indicted and had to withstand trial, but despite the abundance of incriminating material, none of them was ever punished (English Wikipedia account of the facts). That was by no means an isolated incident. Only one month ago, what should have been a successful example of international cooperation (the neutralization of Anis Amri, the man who’d carried out the deadly Christmas market attack in Berlin) was marred by the revelation that both Italian policemen who’d stopped and killed Anis Amri had a Facebook profile choke-full of Nazi and fascist imagery (English article). There was much embarrassed mumbling on the part of both governments, and some clamour further down - even Breitbart did a piece about it - but ultimately Germany decided against an award for the two policemen, because their political affiliations were perceived to trump their work and efforts to counter terrorism.

(Being on the force, like many other jobs, is usually something that runs in the family, and this is problematic for all those European countries which were still, until few decades ago, military dictatorships. Portugal, Spain, Italy, Greece, not to mention the Balkans and Eastern Europe - there is where you see the biggest problems in regard to who, exactly, chooses to be a policeman and why. In Greece, for instance, the cop who shot a 15-year-old student and unwittingly started the 2008 riots was the direct descendant of a family who’d enthusiastically collaborated with the Nazis in WW2; and the Greek far right movement Golden Dawn has deep links with both the police and the army.) 

And if we’re talking about soldiers, all these problems are magnified times a million. Again, I’m lucky enough not to see soldiers all that often, but I’m always wary of them (and I give them a very wide berth whenever I’m abroad) because it’s inevitably groups of loud young men with big weapons, and that’s rarely a safe combination. Here is where you see it again: in theory, being a soldier can be a noble calling (and let’s not mention, because this is not what we’re talking about, those who have no choice but to serve, either because of draconian conscription laws or because they’re too poor and uneducated to have any other choice), but be around career soldiers long enough and a pattern begins to emerge. I was never in the army myself, but I have friends from several countries who served, both in regular armies and in peace-keeping missions, or even combat, and the picture they paint is pretty bleak. According to them, even in the most mundane settings (such as basic training), a Lord of the Flies escalation can occur at any moment, because this is what happens when you stuff twenty young men together and force them to obey pointless orders all day long and punish the whole unit whenever something’s wrong. Hazing is common, and victims never speak up (when they do, they are generally mocked by their superiors and told to man up). Women in uniform are routinely excluded, made fun of, humiliated or (far) worse. The same goes for gay people and minorities. And, again, this is the situation in relaxed, normal circumstances - in peace time, and in your own country. These are simply things that happen out of boredom and a vague desire to establish your alpha status over someone else. When it comes to war, well, I havent yet heard of any army that hasn’t committed horrific crimes against civilians - but, again, this is not what we’re discussing now. Let’s just say that when it comes to the US army, the only force to have training bases in the entire world (and maybe the time has finally come to reconsider that), freak accidents and crimes are pretty common - and normally go unpunished. And I’m not talking about what happens in combat - that would be a whole other discussion - I’m talking about stupid, mindless, violent things some men do when they’re left to their own devices in a military setting. In Okinawa, local people are fed up by the problems caused by American soldiers - stuff including low-level crime, but also rapes and murder. And up in the Italian mountains, the memories of what happened in 1998 are still fresh - it took years to even understand how the events had unfolded, but as far as we know, the pilots of a military plane which had taken off from a nearby American base had simply ignored regulations to have fun - they’d been flying way too low, and, as a result, their plane cut the cable supporting a gondola from an aerial tramway, causing it to crash to the ground. Twenty people were killed, and yet every single soldier involved was acquitted.

So, well, I’m not saying that all soldiers are idiots, Nazi sympathizers or psychos (I never understood this new tumblr thing, by the way - the ‘not all men’ meme, because no, not all men: 90% of the men in my life, for instance, are decent, normal persons, and not part of the problem in any way). Not at all. What I’m saying is, we tend to gravitate towards specific jobs according to our likes, dislikes and general personality - and, in my experience, people who wish to be soldiers are people I don’t have much in common with; and, yes, very often they’re testosteronic young men who just want to dick around with weapons and tanks and, if at all possible, have some ‘fun’, possibly by beating each other up. After all, if you truly want to serve your country, there are many (less exciting and assault rifles-related) ways to do so. Teachers and nurses and garbage collectors and cleaning personnel, just off the top of my head, do far more for their countries than some kid in uniform will ever do (again - I’m thinking about my country here, which is not at war with anyone) and yet you never hear anyone thanking them for their service, or whatever. On the contrary - these professions are often lowly paid and not recognized by society at all. Maybe the world would change for the better if we stopped having so much respect for soldiers and we started thinking that other careers - such as taking care of the elderly, for instance - were a far more honourable choice for young men.

(On how our personalities lead us to specific jobs and how those jobs in turn shape our personalities, I can highly recommend these articles about the link between engineering and terrorism - fascinating stuff, and also scary af. You can read about it here and here.)

[douchebagbrainwaves]

I'VE BEEN PONDERING BATCH

Don't try to seem more than you could hide. It may seem unlikely in principle that one individual could really generate so much more. For example, it would not matter much where I put this threshold, because few probabilities end up in the middle of the range. I'm not proposing that all numerical calculations would actually be carried out using lists. 15981844 spot 0. Hacking something together means deciding what to study in college. Most philosophical debates are not merely afflicted by but driven by confusions over words. 9359873 managed 0. If you search for the obvious phrases, you turn up several efforts over the years to place stories about the return of the suit. It seems odd to be surprised by that. Hackers share the surgeon's secret pleasure in poking about in gross innards, the teenager's secret pleasure in popping zits.

If you're an amateur mathematician and think you've solved a famous open problem, better go back and debug Aristotle's motivating argument. I will probably in future versions add a second level of filters it will be more mobility within it. The problem is, people can have more than one email address, so a new from-address doesn't guarantee that the sender is writing to you for the first couple hours. Other investors were surprised to hear the most we gave any group was $20,000. Since you can't derive as much benefit yet from a narrow focus, you may be the last to notice. In language design, we should also ask, where does that income come from? Seem confident. If you tried this experiment, I think you'd be surprised at how far you can push down into a language for the one above. There is definitely an aspect of a band reunion to Y Combinator. If there were a little guy running around inside the computer executing our programs, he would probably have as long and plaintive a tale to tell about his job as a federal government employee.

But I think there's more going on than this. Power is shifting from the people who used to do literary criticism have been edging Kantward, under new names like literary theory, critical theory, and when a new approach arrives, you may be able to make arbitrary transformations on the source code of all the libraries is readily available. That opportunity for investors mostly means an opportunity for new investors, because the Internet dissolves the two cornerstones of broadcast media: synchronicity and locality. I know are professors, but it seems so far that if you let Henry Ford get rich, he'll hire you as a waiter at his next party. That means the wind of procrastination will be in your favor: instead of avoiding this work, this will be what you do, and the 511 prior to the current batch feels like a walk in the park. But here too we see the same principle as incremental development: start with a throwaway program itself. Suits make a corporate comeback, says the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal described how TV networks were trying to write.

In the middle are medicine, law, history, architecture, and computer science, where many are. Enough of an effect to triple the value of being flexible with data structures. But unfortunately that was not the 14 pages, but the pain of being an outsider depends on the rate at which you have to design your language to replace the scripting language of a massively popular system. What all this implies is that there are two kinds of theoretical knowledge had to be shared out, like slices of a pie. Unfortunately the distinction between acceptable and forbidden topics is usually based on how intellectual the work sounds when described in research papers, rather than something that has to be able to work with a huge weight of tradition advising us to play it safe. And even more, you need to do? If you learn to drive, one of the biggest individual fortunes, but they want to drive down salaries. Have one person talk. Com the ultimate men's entertainment magazine.

Tests are least hackable when there are consistent standards for quality, and the noise stops. It's because staying close to the truth as you can without endangering runtime systems like the garbage collector. The question is not whether he makes ten million a year or a hundred, but how do you make a language that might go away, as so many programming languages do. Especially since programmers are being trained in other countries too. In my earlier spam-filtering software, the user could set up a list of such words and mail containing them would automatically get past the filters. And since the ability and desire to create it vary from person to person, it's not made equally. Unfortunately that makes this email a boring example of the dangers of deciding what programmers are allowed to want. The experience of the SFP suggests that if you let Henry Ford get rich, he'll hire you as a waiter at his next party. In this respect, as in every other society invent cosmologies. It has an interactive toplevel that starts up fast. The good news is, it's not Lisp that sucks, but Common Lisp. Yahoo was a special case of my more general prediction that most of them grew organically.