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Additionally, "to cons" more broadly means "to allocate memory".
And remember, that's "CONS" not "CON"! Don't confuse CONS ARTISTS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Lisp_people With CON ARTISTS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_con_artists
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My account was reset. I've been around since day two. :) You're right, it has some downfalls. But a lot of the time it simply doesn't matter. All the links at https://www.tensorfork.com/tpus are dynamic, and the speed you gain by being able to whip up a feature in 10 minutes is worth the pain of an occasional dead link. On the other hand, I did some work for "deduplicating fnids": http://arclanguage.com/item?id=20996…
(Darn, I linked to the wrong comment. http://arclanguage.com/item?id=20996 has the writeup about the function deduplication in Arc.)
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HN still uses it extensively for its more obscure operations—the ones that don't need to scale. We switched all the most common handlers to regular links years ago. It's hard to remember now that the most common complaint here (by far) used to be about those "Unknown or expired link" messages. In fact, you can tell from the histogram of https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... when it was that…
Sligtly related: how many servers is HN scaled to?
this Johnny Cash song Cash made it popular in the USA, but it was composed by Australian Geoff Mack.
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A while ago I was arguing with someone online about the best way to structure a matrix library. Then around four years later I realized he was completely right and I just didn't know enough to realize why. I'm sure this is a universal experience.
One of the founders at my work was really good at designing production software. After working with him for a long while, I picked up some of his insights. After a design meeting where I saw him shaking his head (and I knew why), I asked why he didn’t speak up. He said that you can’t always tell someone the solution; sometimes they have to figure it out on their own. Not sure yet if I fully agree, but there is someth…
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> Lisp isn’t really a functional language — it’s a usual language that also has some functional ideas inside. The idea that "functional language" means "purity" is something that was retconned onto functional programming in the 90s decades after Lisp had defined functional programming to mean programming in terms of expressions that produce values. I like the ML/Miranda/Haskell lineage of languages a lot, but it real…
Lisp is "Functiony"! ;) But it took JavaScript to invent the concept of "Truthy". https://www.sitepoint.com/javascript-truthy-falsy/
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One of the founders at my work was really good at designing production software. After working with him for a long while, I picked up some of his insights. After a design meeting where I saw him shaking his head (and I knew why), I asked why he didn’t speak up. He said that you can’t always tell someone the solution; sometimes they have to figure it out on their own. Not sure yet if I fully agree, but there is someth…
What was it that he was shaking his head at?