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.

This is readable and interesting - https://legacy.cs.indiana.edu/~dyb/papers/3imp.pdf Dybvig's dissertation (he wrote chez scheme) it's easy to follow.

IMHO, it's a lot easier to write compilers in Haskell or ocaml, for a bunch of reasons. you might take a look at https://wespiser.com/writings/wyas/00_overview.html which walks through writing a scheme implementation in Haskell.

Do what's fun. I think both of those are worth poking at.

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.

Friedman's books are all great. All of them. But they don't work for everybody.

If you can be relaxed and think of the interaction as play, they're very good. If you're feeling more of a "serious business" mindset, it can be hard to get in the groove of his style.

There are a lot of jokes about food and encouragement to take breaks. If you can get into the learning as play mindset, I'd strongly encourage taking the recommended breaks. maybe grab a snack, but spend some time noodling around with the ideas in each section. I think that's the real point, food is a good excuse to pause and get your hands off the keyboard.

Racket should be easy to install. Big download button for a ton of platforms here - https://racket-lang.org

I believe HN still runs on the racket runtime. it may appear to be a toy, but thoughtful design can take you a long long way. it's well supported and a great way to get started.

If Friedman doesn't work out for you, the racket docs link to how to design programs - https://htdp.org/2024-8-20/Book/index.html Which is also pretty darn good.

The other classic is the wizard book - https://sarabander.github.io/sicp/html/index.xhtml the structure and interpretation of computer programs. This'll walk you up to and somewhat through compilation.

There are a ton of programming languages all with amazing assortments of features.

Scheme is much more "there's nothing left to take away". I think it's very much the undisputed champion in that regard. While still being able to ship software. Scheme may not be the optimal choice for all people in all situations (obviously). It's a spectacular place to start though. It may not turn out to be the language for you. That's totally fine! But it'll get you deep enough to figure out what you like and don't like. And, when it comes down to it, you can shape it into pretty much anything.

Yeah, I hope you enjoy the little schemer.

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.

I wish I could find a better source. My memory is of a wired article, on paper. This touches on the "hiss" from the nervous system - https://www.americanscientist.org/article/quietest-places-in...

Decades ago I read about NASA's silent room, with the big wood spikes on the walls. All you can hear is your heartbeat and this high pitched whine. NASA figured out the high pitched whine was the nervous system (like, your brain).

I've got some mild tinnitus. I always wonder if it's my brain listening to itself. That little recursive loop is enough to distract me, even if it's not true.

I think ascents and descents fall under keming. You don’t want a j to bump into a b on the next line. So you have short letters from time to time. But that might be an archaic usage, or I’m wrong.

Ahh, you’re saying something like every sequence containing at least 2 ones, does not repeat.

There may be some long repeats, but not all sequences repeat. Thanks!

Starting from the fourth digit,

    01000100

I used small numbers to focus on the mechanism. I think the point is, if I purchased the sock for $100M+, that loan shouldn't be taxed. If I purchased that asset for $1M, and take a $2M loan, only the second M would be, in some sense, realized, and subject to the tax.

unrealized gains in property are already taxed by "property taxes".

If I buy a $1000 dollars worth of stock, and use that to secure a $1000 loan. ok, fine, I don't see why that should be taxed at all. But if the lender believes the stock is worth lots more, and offers a $2000 secured loan, something's going on there.

I don't think it should be as much as actual capital gains, because it's not actually turned into cold hard cash. And there's still risk of the underlying asset price falling.

But if the lender says my $1000 is worth $2000, I'm getting some benefit of the higher value. And I can see why that would be taxed. I'd really want to see the details. probably that tax should be deducted from capital gains when finally realized.

I dunno. it's complicated.

Ya know, this was a some time ago, and memorable for the relation to Carlin's bit. Let's place any errors in terminology on my foggy memory.

FWIW, I dated a psychologist for a while, and we talked about this specific monologue.

She primarily worked with sexual abuse victims, but spent a lot of time veterans as well. Her focus was PTSD, and talk therapy is really effective for PTSD.

Her opinion was, in world war 1, They didn't really have the psychologic or physical frameworks to really distinguish. Certainly, some people had mechanical damage, like football players. Certainly, some people really had a hard time experiencing the horrors of war. They just didn't really know.

Calling it shell shock, that helped some of the veterans. Helped them sorta get that they're not alone. People have dealt with this for a long time.

Rape victims, shell shock isn't a great name. For a lot of reasons.

It's kinda about recognizing that this trauma is a real thing, there's nothing wrong with you. This is a normal reaction, everyone goes through it. Some people need a little help finding their way back to normal.

I'll take a stab at it, but I'm not a doctor or a biologist.

Cyanide will kill you. Almonds have trace amounts of cyanide. You can eat almonds till you get sick, but that tiny amount of cyanide won't kill you. The dose makes the poison. On the other hand, those fancy car-fentanyl, if a flake touches your skin, you'll od and die. It's super super toxic.

One flake of microplastics in your body isn't going to do anything.

Now,

although recent studies associated MNP [micro- and nanoplastic] presence in carotid atheromas with increased inflammation and risk of future adverse cardiovascular events

It's not like every muscle fires on every heartbeat. They try, but some are old or dead. There are a lot of them, all working together. And they're constantly repairing or regrowing new muscle cells. How does the heart shed microplastic? Can it? How much till the immune system kicks in and starts causing inflammation? Inflammation is generally good, but super dangerous in the heart. Too much inflammation, and well, it stops firing correctly.

what is not clearly understood is the internal dose in humans.

How much microplastic is too much? nobody knows. Seems like, you get too much, and repair systems start kicking in. The repair systems can't actually fix anything, but make you weak/sick, and you're generally worse off. When some other thing shocks the system, your body is already in panic mode, so the "normal" response of panicking doesn't change anything. Odds are, you just die.

I tried for a long time to use this keyboard effectively. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FingerWorks but I never really could. I like the touchscreen idea, your user interface is the user interface you were trained on, Star Trek style.

I think light and sound engineers probably have the best setup. everything's hooked up to a big board with sliders. you can physically move the sliders, and the position of the slider represents what's actually happening. But you can also set up a scene on an attached computer. Click the button, or tap the touch screen, all the sliders move to the predesignated state.

I don't know a damn thing about battleships, or destroyers. But a big ass console, with physical knobs and sliders that represent the current state seems like a really good idea. Sure, you can adjust whatever from whatever glass station you want. But everyone can tell at a glance, the state of the world. You can walk over and turn the knob, overriding everything else. And everybody can see you do it, and hopefully understand what that action means.

The closest I get to that sort of stuff is my car. The hazard lights are one big dedicated button. There may be a way to turn them on with the touchscreen, I don't know. Volume has a physical dial on the console. There are buttons on the steering wheel, but I find myself reaching for the dial when I really need to turn the volume down.

Physical controls are expensive. I imagine there's stuff that's common and essential, that, it's probably a good idea to spend the money and have the control. I have strong feelings about this. There are little fiddly settings that you can tuck away under five layers of menus. But there's other stuff That you touch all the time, or you need in an emergency, that IMHO, you should be allowed to build up muscle memory to accomplish.

When the MacBook got the acceleration sensor, I hacked up a little program to estimate velocity, and a button to reset at stoplights. Some friends drove me around, it worked poorly. it did pretty ok on the highway, but awful in the city.

I think if I kept messing with it, it'd get a lot better, but I sorta lost interest. This was more of a fun weekend toy.

I think all phones have them, and they might be reachable through chrome/safari. And it is kinda fun to play with, but you'll probably hit sampling rate errors pretty quick. you gotta guess the shape of the curve between datapoints.

They don't.

The rule is clear and explicit. There are rules that are written down, that you agree to abide by.

There is a second set of rules, that is not written down, that is the actual standard you're held to.

I don't know how to do that. so I didn't.

I bowed out of the process. I just couldn't quite figure out how to reconcile what was asked of me.

Don't be around people in possession of illegal drugs. Ok, well grandpa died and I know for sure his oxy is in his medicine cabinet. Grandma hasn't thrown that away. You're not really allowed to do that, ya know?

I understand why the rules are the way they are. I understand that they would not care about that situation. The FBI agent asked rather pointed questions about, am I the kind of person who follows the rules when no one is watching. I feel pretty comfortable saying I do. I feel pretty comfortable believing they do not.

There are plenty of smart hardworking people with clearances. I believe in them and I believe they're generally trustworthy, but are held to an impossible standard so they can be fired at any time. I get it, but I can't accept that, so I don't.

Also the the OPM breach was cool.

No they don’t. Opinions are customary, but there is no law or regulation requiring that.

Lawyers make arguments. Judges make decisions.

I was going to make a pedantic argument/joke about memoization.

It is kind of an interesting thought though. A big wall of SSD is a fabulous amount of storage. and maybe a clever read only architecture, would be cheaper than SSD. and a clever data structure for shared high order bits, maybe, maybe there is potential for some device to look up matrix multiply results, or close approximations that could be cheaply refined.

Right now, I doubt it. But big static cache it is a kind of interesting idea to kick around Saturday afternoon.

sitting on the curb drinking gatorade is what it's all about. you, or I, just sort of accept that it's miserable. but survivable. It's a thing we can do.

my experience anyway. your milage may vary.

It's absolutely lovely that you looked up the spec.

First, you could screenshot each page, and print that. That's a lift.

Second, It's not that hard to extract text from pdf file formats. That's also a lift.

but like, it's not that complicated. yes, text flow, font selection, on and on, but it's just postscript. Pull the text and print it. It's signed not encrypted. It's challenging to implement pdf. javascript support is nuts, for example.

But if you just want to pull the text? there's not much to it.

Pay the author. It's not much. But like, it's not locked down.

I've run a few marathons. I'm not fast. I haven't done it in a while. But I think I'd like to do it again. You're not wrong, I'm going to quibble a bit because I have a slightly different perspective that might be helpful. First, a little context. For me a marathon is all about training. That first day it might only be 50 steps. A few weeks or months in, I can go a mile or 3. Then it's just awful. Every little weak tendon and muscle is crying out. Walk for a bit then get back to running. After the early bit, I get 3-4 miles into a run, then have to decide, 3-4 miles back home or 6 to just finish the run. I think that's the critical point. am I just going to walk home? That's an option. but I've gone so far. Walk a lot and just finish the damn route. And that's kind of the point. A lot of comments are arguing about semantics, and I get that. But the point is just get through the bullshit however you can. It's ok to kind of hobble along. Stop by the bar and have a beer or three and make it home. There's no shame in that. Finishing the loop, however you can, is still finishing the loop.

Me, personally, getting past that critical point, embracing the suck. That's kinda the point. I hit that miserable point. I keep moving forward however I can. Whatever stupid bullshit comes up, you (I) just get through it. Somehow. it doesn't matter how. And then there's a bit of a release. Maybe just glide through the last few miles. Maybe rub some dirt on it and walk home. It doesn't really matter because I complete the loop. I sort of shed the vision of what it might be, and learn what it really is. And that's super helpful.

Mark Twain wrote life on the Mississippi, and wrote a lot about how cool it would be to be a riverboat pilot. The beautiful pink sky, the ripples on the water. And there's sort of a heartbreaking transition when he learns the pink sky means a storm is coming. the ripples mean there's a sandbar. In his unknowing dream, everything he loved about it was a disaster waiting to strike. He learned in his own way.

For me, there's a joy and romance to running a marathon that was completely unlike what I thought it was before I started.

So anyway, maybe the subtle shift from goal to quest is enough to help some people embrace the suck. Nothing is what you think it is without doing it. there are parts that are awful. if you can get through it, you'll get nothing you hoped for. but maybe the change of perspective is enough.