bmf

Wasn’t planning on it, but Show HN: JoinIn.AI?! We’re working on making a better audio interface to LLMs that is socially adroit enough to handle even multi-party conversation.

Richard Gabriel did a great write-up of the trade-offs during the ANSI Common Lisp standardization process:

http://www.nhplace.com/kent/Papers/Technical-Issues.html

What I took away from it was that macros get more tricky to write when you have possible variable capture for functions, which we humans seem to be a little more blind to than for values.

Item 18 contains the compatibility concerns for existing code, which the guys writing the standard seemed to think critical to keep the various vendors on board.

Many on Reddit are probably in agreement with the anti-SOPA movement, but that is why they are good to reach out to. Is there a phrase for "mobilizing the choir"?

I'm currently reading "Mastering Relational Database Querying and Analysis" by John Carlis, which posits that SQL is inherently flawed for several reasons. To paraphrase from the text:

First, both the syntax and the way querying is generally presented in textbooks, lead you to think that your task when querying is to display one unnamed table. The author objects to each of those four words.

Second, many people have found querying with SQL terribly difficult. Even experts find SQL hard to create and read. Do not be surprised if an analyst struggles to understand his/her own SQL. It is impossible for users to understand any but the simplest SQL.

Third, SQL practice suffers from the notion of a "correlated query" -- which has a monolithic subquery that is executed repeatedly via looping, once for each value of a candidate row picked by an outside SELECT.

The book has much more to say on the topic of SQL before going on offer relational algebra (built on top of SQL) as a n alternative.

nit picking, but many of the words listed (such as "smaller" and "crude") aren't verbs.