dasmoth

See https://github.com/vygr/ChrysaLisp/blob/master/docs/VM.md

Like the article says, it was renamed to Visa

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visa_Inc.

The standup is still daily though, right?

Also, the “great wheel” in his Helliconia books (which takes this idea to rather extreme levels).

Sorry if I wasn't clear, I meant that most people I know seem to shower for >>2 minutes, so I doubted the credibility of the comparison.

Clearly, if you are fairly consistently sticking to 2-minutes showers, that's going to be more economical than baths -- even with some degree of sharing.

Shower flow rates are somewhere of the order of 10L/min -- potentially rather more if you're talking about power showers -- so the showers-are-more-efficient-than-baths thing is only really clear cut if you take relatively brief showers. I think some of the comparisons I've seen in the past have pointed to 2 minute showers, which seems pretty rushed, especially if you have hair to wash.

If you have a family, can you share a bath (taking turns)? That's a substantial and fairly easily-achieved saving.

If you've got a garden, adding a gray-water collection system also makes things that little bit less wasteful, at least in the summer (but I suppose that would also work with a shower too...)

Have you ever tried an APL-family programming language? If so, I’d be curious how you found it.

Clojure has got pretty nice tools for web development (both backend and — with Clojurescript — frontend). It’s definitely out there in some places.

Discussed yesterday:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20623562

One correction: it was only acquired by Cisco in 2011. Great that they open-sourced it though.

There’s quite a lot of pre-Cisco history in this paper: https://www.cs.indiana.edu/~dyb/pubs/hocs.pdf

It’s not quite the same thing as Recurse, but some of the previous instances of Iverson College look absolutely idyllic.

http://iversoncollege.com/

I hadn't realised he'd ended up at Intel! Will be interesting to see how much impact he has there.

Also a guide to how to usr all that to interpret medical nonclemature of mutations, like c.345G>E would be handy

Those mutation descriptions are called HGVS (Human Genome Variation Society) nomenclature. In the example you give, "c." means that it's in a (protein) coding region, 345 is the position within the region, and G>E would be the change (although E isn't a valid "letter" in DNA sequence, even if you allow ambiguity codes -- you'd normally see something like G>T there instead).

Complications include:

1) You need to know which gene this is relative to.

2) The "coding sequence" for the gene isn't always perfectly defined, due to splice variation and different versions of the annotation. Ideally, you'd see this code relative to a specific splice variant (which might have an ENST identifier, from http://www.ensembl.org/). But it depends...

More at http://varnomen.hgvs.org/ if you're curious.

Reminds me of:

https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-ear...

(Slightly startled to learn that was published nearly a decade ago!)

Do it! I've not actually tried gin myself, but vodka infused with rhubarb for a couple of weeks (and a bit of sugar to taste) definitely works well.

What's the main driver for excluding exercise?

Being outside on my own is pretty good in general. Walking or cycling are the defaults, but maybe count as exercise? I've recently started riding a motorbike and spin on some quiet-ish open roads can be pretty rewarding...

Those were pretty much the only reasons I continued to admire Google for as long as I did. They gave hope that the company might one day have a meaningful consumer revenue stream that isn’t advertising.

They’ve gone for “cloud services” instead. Drastically, drastically, less inspiring — and also pretty competitive. What happens if Amazon drop their prices a bit?

It's not the 100k hours. It's the very large odds they will have been for nothing, and picking up whatever is left of your life after.

That's an interesting take. But my experience is that there is a non-negligible set of people who would see a lifetime spent working on their chosen problem to be well-spent, even if they don't eventually succeed.

I realise that your numbers are only meant to be illustrative, but it's worth realising that this is "only" 65 hours a week for 40 years. A lot? Yes. More then I'd be willing to work at a typical desk job[1]? Probably. But feasible for a passion project? Definitely! (and doesn't even necessarily require starting before you hit 25, although that clearly helps...). The limiting factor is not so much that nobody can do this, but that (short of independent wealth, which I think can bring its own set of constraints and expectations) very few people ever get the opportunity to do this without a lot of interruptions. I don't think it's impossible to imagine a society where that isn't true.

[1] although... "thinking" can stack surprisingly well with some activities we'd consider leisure, like walking or (at least in my case) gardening. So maybe this isn't really going to be 65hrs/week at a desk...

Definitely try some different things and see what you like, but if you're looking for mission and impact I wouldn't completely dismiss web development. The web browser is a stupendously powerful tool for "getting things in front of people", and the combination of that plus some understanding of another area can achieve a lot. There could be opportunities to branch into scientific computing, fairly complex distributed systems, and more. Pretty much every area of computing except maybe hard-core embedded systems have a web component nowadays (and the "softer" end of the embedded market could have some good opportunities... can you imagine a consumer router with an actually-nice management interface? That's primarily a web-development problem!)

Cyclomatic complexity might be a textbook example of Goodhart's law. Of course few-paths code is easier to read, but that's often because it's doing something that's fundamentally simpler. And refactoring just to hit some arbitrary CC target seems very unlikely to be a route to happiness.

Ken Liu wrote an enjoyable short story ("Real Artists") about exactly that. Just looked it up and it was published in 2011. One of those unusual bits of SF that becomes, if anything, more credible over time.

Apple phones are relatively standard hardware with good software and a (unjustifiably?) high price tag.

In some ways, I wish this were the case. But my reading is that Apple's custom processors are still far ahead of the competition, and last time I looked it was hard to match Apple's fit and finish, especially if you are looking at anything other than the very top of the Android market. And for something that you keep in your pocket and handle regularly, a feeling of solidity is worth something.

It's a tragedy that you can't buy an iPhone with an unlocked bootloader. There's some interesting potential for innovation there.

(This is even more true in some other market segments. The hardware for the last couple of generations of Apple Watch is amazing, and that makes OS-imposed limits on what third party apps can do tragic).

I'm a long way away, but the entrepreneurship program looks great. Have you thought of videoing the lectures?

Paying Bay Area salaries for every employee just isn't feasible for most startups.

How does that explain the large number of Bay Area, on-site-only startups?

Fixed link: http://www.loper-os.org/?p=861

Where does your “should” come from? To my understanding, that’s very close to the current level[1]. So are you saying “here but no further” (and if so, why here rather that, say, 1980 levels?). What would be your preconditions for significantly higher energy usage?

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale

Really nice idea.

One thing that's adding to the "frustration factor" of the CSS problems is that the updates seem rather racy (Firefox 63, MacOS), in the sense that if you edit further while an update is already running, it doesn't seem to trigger a further update. Makes moving things around 1px at a time more annoying that it should be.

(I'm another one stuck with a just few pixels difference on the triangle for CSS Puzzle 7. Once someone's claimed the final prize, might there be an option to skip through to the later puzzles?)

I've been doing it in Scheme this year, as a major branch of the LISP family I've never tried before. Super-impressed by the speed and solidity of the Chez Scheme implementation, but still a little undecided about how much I like Scheme for day-to-day use. (After Clojure, both Scheme and Common LISP seem to have a fair number of "why is this taking so many keystrokes?" moments).

I know a number of people thought some of the "simulation with lots of details to keep track of" problems were a bit over the top this year. Personally, I rather enjoyed them, and in particular found day 15 really satisfying to complete. Not something you'd want to do every day, but it's good to have some problems which pose a bit of a challenge without turning into a "can you pattern-match this against an algorithms textbook" exercise. The overall breadth and balance of problem types was impressive as ever.

I hope it's back next year!

One thing that isn't entirely clear from this post is whether the software works. The unimplemented-functions thing doesn't sound wonderful, but I'd still argue that there's a world of difference between software that blows up the moment you look at it and something that's pretty much working except for a few loose ends where a relatively obscure feature hasn't been finished off yet.

In the former case, demonstrating that what they've done isn't "pure genius" shouldn't be too hard.

In the latter case, I think that -- especially if this is something you need reasonably quickly -- there's a good argument for focussing on value delivered and fixing actual, observable, bugs rather than spending too long worrying about the internal details. If need be, it can always be quietly rewritten once the dust has settled.