51–60 of 153 posts
(where "advanced" means: a paradigm that results in greater economy of code per unit of work done, easier debugging, easier testing, complete elimination of entire classes of bug (such as in an immutable language), easier maintenance etc...)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Phillips head screws are pretty standard in the US, but pretty much any other non-slot screw head is technically superior (including at least two other plus shaped drivers I'm aware of). Most woodworkers I've known prefer a square shaped driver. Unless the costs of the screw significantly impact your margins, Phillips screws suck.
>Phillips screws suck. I felt this way through my entire engineering life until I bought a sailboat. Everything on marine stuff tends to be flat-head or similar design -- engaging a flat driver into a slot in a bumpy/roll-y ocean is hell . The self-centering engagement aspect of a cross-socket style drive is absolutely fantastic after a long day of trying to tighten flat-slot fastened tube-clamps and the like at sea…
Everything on marine stuff tends to be flat-head or similar design
-- engaging a flat driver into a slot in a bumpy/roll-y ocean is
*hell*.
Was Lisp actually ever risen at JPL, or was it just used on these handful of projects by a single or small group of developers? > At one point an attempt was made to port one part of the system (the planner) to C++. This attempt had to be abandoned after a year. Based on this experience I think it's safe to say that if not for Lisp the Remote Agent would have failed. I like Lisp and am certainly no fan of the complex…
I'm going to straw man a bit, but it feels like lisp enthusiasts are desperate to find stories of commercial software being written in lisp. I'm sure there's many examples I haven't heard of that are legitimate (using lisp for almost all of a specific domain at scale and having a mature codebase, tho that's arguable) but I've yet to see any example that has meat on it's bones, besides the company that did crash bandi…
I’m intrigued by the distinction between best practice and standard practice. Isn’t it standard because it’s the best? I can understand that non-standard practices might be best in niche situations, but this sounds like a discussion of “traditions are solutions to problems so old we’ve forgotten what they were”.
Americans overeat and don't exercise, as a standard practice. Do you think that's best?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The basic premise of MBA programs is arguably to create interchangeable managers. One size fits all is less efficient at both the managerial and employee levels, the advantage is largely risk minimization.
Yup Except that it is only local or small risk minimization; the catastrophic existential risks end up maximized to the point of becoming inevitable. With companies, the MBAs happily optimize away anything that isn't immediate revenue. So manufacturing gets offshored, along with all the deep knowledge of how to make things. R&D gets shrunk and minimized because it is a quarterly expense with returns not immediately s…
This seems a little simplistic? "China" isn't a monolith, and I'm pretty sure Chinese companies are just as interested in quarterly profits as Western ones. It's not like they're all state enterprises. And they didn't "steal" know-how - they earned it, by doing stuff (aside from the odd case of corporate espionage, which certainly cuts both ways). Nor is the United States any less interested in global hegemony than China.
I suggest that the reason for manufacturing moving to China is simply because labor is cheaper there (large population and weak labor laws). The Chinese government has played its hand well, but it doesn't represent some grand asymmetry in strategic planning - it's just the hand of the market as always.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yup Except that it is only local or small risk minimization; the catastrophic existential risks end up maximized to the point of becoming inevitable. With companies, the MBAs happily optimize away anything that isn't immediate revenue. So manufacturing gets offshored, along with all the deep knowledge of how to make things. R&D gets shrunk and minimized because it is a quarterly expense with returns not immediately s…
The main thing that gives me hope is that the type of knowledge generation environment in the western world still hasn’t been acquired by dictatorial powers like China. Given the exponentially increasing technological change we’re experiencing, the knowledge transferred via the method you described will likely be surpassed and rendered obsolete relatively quickly (hopefully) and make that transferred knowledge less l…
Updated last year (edit: no it wasn't), so I've left the date off this one (edit: no I haven't). Previously: Lisping at JPL (2020) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28113434 - Aug 2021 (9 comments) Lisping at JPL (2002) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22087419 - Jan 2020 (307 comments) Lisping at JPL (2002) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13626074 - Feb 2017 (37 comments) Lisping at JPL (2002) - ht…
I don't think so. What gave you that idea?
This is blogspam, the original is still hosted here by the author himself: https://flownet.com/gat/jpl-lisp.html
Ok, so the update from Aug 2022 is not by Ron? geez. Changed from https://mecrisp-stellaris-folkdoc.sourceforge.io/lisp.html now. Thanks!
Nope. Just a blatant copyright violation.
(They even copied the copyright notice. That's cheeky.)