Microplastic particles found in human organs by US scientists - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/aug/17/microplastic-particles-discovered-in-human-organs <comment><USER2> Imagine all the micro-petrochemicals in human tissue from the _hundreds of thousands of years_ of inhaling volatile compounds in fire and coal smoke.

Could we not argue that we have evolved under consistent exposure to petrochemical volatiles?

Or are these microplastics different? They seem _extremely_ stable if they're so persistent in the environment, couldn't that suggests they do not react much at all (at least much much less than coal smoke) and are therefore pretty benign?

<comment><USER3> These are quite some assumptions. Low chemical reactivity could limit consequences, but it is speculation to say there aren't any.

And those micro-petrochemicals probably weren't really a health benefit either. Why so dismissive of this?

Everyone a bit interested knew that using a pet bottle introduces plastic into your body, but don't think using glass bodies has protected you from absorbing plastics.

<comment><USER2> Have they been absorbed, as in reacted to create novel compounds? If the plastic does not react with the organic molecules in our body, isn't this a little like worrying WiFi will cause cancer (non-ionizing EM)?

<comment><USER3> How do you think will it get out of your liver again? Strong transpiration?

<comment><USER2> I dont know but I'd like to. How does that work?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Should children have the right to vote? - <AUTHOR> http://scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=389 <comment><USER3> An argument you might make against juvenile suffrage is that the current system protects children from politics. It's not simply that they'd vote the way their parents wanted them to, thus slanting the outcome, it's that they'd be targeted by political pressure --- from their parents, teachers, peers, and the media --- in ways that they aren't today.

<comment><USER4> Generally speaking, when adults tried to protect me from myself as a kid, they did much more harm than good.

I believe this is true for most kids.

<comment><USER5> How is protection from politics protecting the kids from themselves?

Given how much it pisses me off, I kinda wish I were still protected from politics.

<comment><USER4> If I said "woman need to be protected from politics", I think you'd justifiably interpret that as suggesting that they be protected from themselves. Maybe you think they _should be_ protected from themselves, but that is what you're doing, essentially, when you try to shield someone from exposure to ideas and the capacity/responsibility to make judgments about those ideas.

Put another way: you're trying to deny them the opportunity to make a certain choice (that is, vote) for their own good. That is the definition of protecting someone from them-self.

<comment><USER3> Your logic doesn't work. There is no similarity between "protecting women" and "protecting children". Women don't need to be protected. Children obviously do, at least from some things.

<comment><USER4> You misunderstand me. I was not, in that comment, stating that women and children should be protected (or not) from the same things.

I was pointing out, simply, that (whether right or wrong), being "protected" from politics _is in fact_ protection from oneself.

Now, you may feel that children _should_ be protected from themselves, whereas women should not. That is a perfectly consistent position. The grandparent seemed to be unclear that that is what you were advocating, and that is the confusion I was clearing up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I have always believed that if you are forced to pay taxes then you must be given the right to vote. I thought it was incredulous that at 16 I was required to pay taxes yet unable to vote or influence where my money would go.

<comment><USER7> You pay rent to your landlord, should you have the right to tell the landlord how to spend it? What is a government but a very big landlord?

<comment><USER8> Your assertion hinges on the assumption that the government exists autonomously, apart from the people it represents. If my landlord claimed to represent me and my interests with the money I gave him, I would expect to have a say in how he spent it. This is the charter of any non-totalitarian government, and specifically that of all of the modern democracies.

<comment><USER7> You are confusing ownership with being a customer. Customers pay rent/taxes. Owners exercise control. The charter of modern democracies promise equal ownership based on birth or residency, not on whether or not you pay rent. Or rather, the preamble states the goal of equal ownership. The fine print in the thousands of pages of legal code give actual ownership to an oligarchy of the civil service, congressional committees, and organized factions. You may like to get an ownership share based on paying rent, but you have no legal or moral claim to it, just as you have no legal or moral claim on controlling your landlords' spending.

BTW, you are also confusing totalitarian with authoritarian. Authoritarians deals with the management structure of a government, totalitarian with the scope of its activities. The US government in 1800 was non-authoritarian, non- totalitarian. Stalin was authoritarian and totalitarian. USG in 2009 is non- authoritarian, totalitarian. Louis the XIV was authoritarian, non- totalitarian.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm not quite sure i agree with it, but it's worth at least thinking about the converse of this argument:

Perhaps we let too many people vote already? The average American isn't just a little uninformed, but is _provably wrong_ about a number of issues, like what the government spends its money on, who holds the power to do various things, and the resources and governments of our neighbors. Heck, I'd bet that a non- zero percentage of voters don't even understand how the marginal tax rate works.

We don't let unqualified people fix our cars, work in our hospitals, or teach our kids, so why should they have the ability to make our political decisions?

Society has plenty of ways to accredit people to be 'knowledgeable' about these subjects (Basic civics test -> high school diploma -> college degree -> Degree in econ/poli sci -> masters -> phd, or perhaps business owners, workers in gov't service, etc).

We already treat voting as a privilege, not a right, (It can be taken away, as with felons) why not weight votes based on your investment in learning??

Obviously this plan is harebrained in that it would massively disadvantage everyone other than upper class white people, and probably lead to a civil war, but it's interesting to think that voting is probably the one place in society where are an objectively recognized expert in the field (I'm thinking more on the Econ side than the Poli Sci side) has exactly the same say as someone who just picks one at random.

The whole idea that some privileged group has the ability to say whether I can vote makes me a little uneasy, so personally I think I'd give a firm no to the idea.

If you're interested in the idea, the economist Bryan Caplan wrote a book called 'The Myth of the Rational Voter' that discusses the common fallacies and provides hard evidence. [http://www.amazon.com/dp/0691138737?tag=bryacaplwebp-20&...](http://www.amazon.com/dp/0691138737?tag=bryacaplwebp-20&camp=0&creative=0&linkCode=as1&creativeASIN=0691129428&adid=15GADVSDGSTT9WGRE8F5&);

He also has the single ugliest web page that i've ever seen for an academic (a high bar indeed): <http://www.bcaplan.com/>

<comment><USER10> I like the idea of there being some sort of investment required for voting. Everybody interested in voting can, but there's a barrier to entry that helps people be informed voters or at least passionate about voting.

However, like you, I find it difficult to think of a non-corrupt test. You certainly don't want SAT scores to be a precondition for voting.

Perhaps in order to vote you have to get x (say 100) people to sign a petition for you? Of course, community leaders would quickly get a pool of 100 people to sign for whoever they wanted. You might be able to prevent that by limiting the number of petitions signed by a person in a given time span.

<comment><USER9> I'd think that you'd just be empowering big organizations (churches, unions, etc) that can just 'pass the sheet around' at a weekly meeting.

One way that I can think of to do it would be like so: Start a person at, say, 0.6 votes at 16. Voting in a state or national election = +.1/year, up to two times. Graduation High School or getting a GED = +.1.

So a motivated 18 year old has 1 vote, just like now, slackers are a little behind but not much.

Graduating College, OR 3 Years of Military Service, OR Passing a (Somewhat tough) Written Test of Govt/Econ/International Studies = +0.2

Graduate Degree OR 8 (total) Years of Military Service OR Passing a (LSAT Difficulty) Written Test = +0.2

Graduate Degree in Econ/<Whatever Gov't Applicable Majors> OR 2 Years Gov't Service = +0.1

So a college grad is worth +20% of a 'normal' adult, but twice a high-school dropout nonvoter who's put no effort into it. And someone with a PhD in Economics is only a third of a vote ahead of a college grad, but worth 1.5 18- year-olds, and 2.5 people who've never voted.

Hopefully by keeping the military/service side roughly equal, we could keep the ideological balance about the same.

Intelligent, Motivated non-traditional people, especially those too poor or busy for college could still get to the highest ranks without any cost other than proving that they understand the basics at rough parity.

You're going to get crackpots with degrees/credentials just like you do now, but I'd argue that as a whole, educated people make better decisions with respect to politics (even, I would go so far as to say, in a party agnostic way), so the bad eggs will cancel out.

I'm a voting, high-school educated college dropout myself, but I'd definitely go and learn whatever I would need for the highest level, even if it took a few hours a week for months/years, but I'm also unusually interested in the subject(s).

Once again, the idea is nuts and would never work in the current system, but there's nothing wrong with a little thought experiment =).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Heck, I don't think many adults should have the right to vote. Democracy is irrational enough as a decision-making mechanism as is.

There is tension between a hypothesized universal "right" of voting and the use of voting as a real-world method of choosing people to govern a country in a wise manner.

You see this tension when, for example, the ACLU advocates for restoring voting rights to violent felons. Personally I think violent felons have showed remarkably below-average decision making capabilities and I don't see why they should have a voice in running the country. However the ACLU seems to think that removing their voting rights is an affront to human dignity.

For many, democracy has become religion. It is no longer presented as a wise way to run a country. It is simply the unquestionable, universal, and only morally correct method of running a country. That's a dangerously inflexible stasis point for our thoughts to settle in, but that's where we are.

I prefer to avoid discussions that focus on the moral dimensions of voting. I would rather discuss how different government schemes are likely to effect society's well-being. I find these discussions to be much less predictable and more interesting.

Now, a voting test might be a good idea, and I would love to see it applied to adults too. Who knows, it might even elevate the level of political debate in this country to the point where candidates actually discuss substantive policy ideas. Of course, it would only last until an election cycle where women or a minority racial group had a lower than average pass rate, then it would be deemed "evil" and scrapped.

A disclaimer: I got halfway through and stopped when I ran into the giant pile of steaming kneejerk partisan assumptions (Oh look. A "George Bush is evil" quip. How original. Did it take a physicist to come up with that?). I'm bored and disgusted by this level of thinking, and I was somewhat surprised to see it from someone who argued so intelligently up to that point. So, if there is anything interesting after that segment, I missed it.

<comment><USER12> I agree that violent felons have shown below-average decision making capability, but as much as I don't necessarily want them having a voice in running the country, whether there are costs to not letting them do so seems to be at least an open question. There is a significant negative correlation between voting and recidivism ([http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p_mla_apa_research_citation/...](http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p_mla_apa_research_citation/1/0/4/6/4/p104644_index.html)), though it's easy to see how the causation could run mostly in the opposite direction.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I think a better question is how can we send our "kids" to die for our country when they can't drink or gamble.

<comment><USER14> That was the argument for lowering the voting age from 21 to 18. I wonder why drinking and gambling is still restricted to 21. From what I understand there is no federal law against it, but if states allow it then federal money is withheld from the states.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> in a word: no. Rights and responsibility are 2 sides of the same coin. Since there isn't really a good test for responsibility (unless you're willing to have marriage or land ownership be qualifications for voting), then age is all we've got as a marker for responsibility. Probably unfair to a great many responsible children, but better than the alternative.

</comment><comment><USER16> I wouldn't mind an 'earned franchise' for children several years younger than 18, perhaps as young as 12. It could also be partial: only on a subset of offices (such as lower houses, city councils, and school boards).

And any problems from early voters being especially shallow or manipulated by others would be offset, in the long run, by, these same voters in their 20s already having a deeper understanding of the process. A 20something voter with 10+ years of perspective would be better than today's 20something voters.

But I would worry about the combination of public schools and voting children. The school itself would likely be a polling place, and the pressure to both vote and vote in ways the school establishment prefers would be very strong.

So I'd slot the 'teen franchise' somewhere a decade after 'diverse and mostly- privatized K-12 education' on the reform priority queue.

</comment><comment><USER17> Interesting piece. It's been pretty clear to me that age doesn't maturity - having unique experiences in life causes maturity. The older you tend to get, the more unique experiences you tend to have. If you ever are fortunate enough to meet anyone who had to become a head of household at a young age, compare them against someone a few years older then them and see the results. When a boy or girl takes responsibility for younger siblings or a parent that can't function well as early as 14-16, they're a hell of a lot more mature at 18 than most people are at 25 when they're starting to get promoted out of entry level jobs. No doubt entrepreneurship, becoming a parent, traveling and/or immigrating, working, leading, managing, and so on add to maturity.

Regardless though, lowering the voting age won't make that much of a difference. The percent of young people that vote is already abysmal. Related note: Why don't we have a polling period that lasts at least a few days? Like Friday/Saturday/Sunday/Monday?

<comment><USER18> It would cost almost 4x as much (let's say 3x as much because you don't quite need to accommodate as much volume at any one time), and elections already are pretty expensive.

It also would mean that every polling place would have to keep all of the records, ballots, etc. safe for longer. Imagine if polling places lost the records of who had voted already overnight.

<comment><USER17> Good call Jack - kind of obvious now that you mention it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If you were running a company, would you give the same number of votes to newest hire in sales, as you would to the two founders? That would be insanity and would lead to a very dysfunctional company. No one would wish that management structure upon their worst competitor. But if you wouldn't run a company that way, why would you run a country that way?

<comment><USER19> hear hear. capitalism has been perverted by the mass media so that seeking profits is now considered a negative thing. but wait a minute, profit means that customers are buying what you're selling at the price you set. That means that your company is _producing things people want_. anti-capitalism is an impossible position. tantamount to saying you don't want people to produce things that you want.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is a well argued essay promoting that children should be allow to vote, not on the basis of age, but by demonstrating a grasp of civics and government by examination, for example. I was skeptical, but he convinced me. If a kid learns how our government works and what civic responsibility means, why not? The incentive and prestige of early voting might lead to a more responsible populace. As he says, with educated children voting we might not have had Bush the Younger.

<comment><USER21> It bothers me that someone trying to present evidence on whether or not children should vote needs to throw in political commentary on how voting minors would have averted the disaster that was George W. Bush. How can someone be scientifically or philosophically credible if he/she is too immature to resist political jabs when presenting an apolitical argument? On top of this, it puts off people who might otherwise be intrigued by the author's thoughts but aren't after reading unnecessary criticisms of their own.

<comment><USER22> I stopped reading at the Bush comment, not out of offense, but out of disappointment that I was spending my time reading something that lost its dignity (isn't this a perfect example of what he alluded to never doing early in the essay?)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> screw that, lets take away the ability to vote from adults who act like children. The founding fathers didn't limit voting to white male landowners purely for racist sexist reasons. Landowners have a vested interest in the long term productivity of their region, as well as having shown themselves to be productive enough to get the land in the first place. On top of that, who is most affected by taxes? Producers and landowners again.

</comment><comment><USER23> If the kid has a part-time job - they have taxation without any form of representation - which has always seemed wrong to me.

<comment><USER24> Anyone who's ever bought a Spiderman comic book as a child has been subject to sales tax without any form of representation. Should we therefore conclude that three-year-olds should be able to vote?

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Vaguely related: Newt Gingrich's ideas on 'ending adolescence':

[http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/08_45/b41070852...](http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/08_45/b4107085289974.htm)

I suppose if you're doing serious paid work -- even as an apprentice -- at age 13, you should also have a full civic franchise at the same time.

</comment><comment><USER3> Voted up for "merely politically impossible [...], rather than 2 to the politically impossible power."

</comment><comment><USER25> I know how this argument would go if only parents could decide!

Remember that the point is for "universal sufferage". While some youngsters may be responsible enough to vote, I wouldn't trust democracy to most of them.

<comment><USER26> Ok, would you trust democracy to those who could pass a civics test?

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> No, for the same reason children shouldn't have the right to enter legally binding contracts.

No pre-frontal cortex, no votey.

<comment><USER24> Apparently someone likes to downvote posts they disagree with without replying, so allow me to elaborate:

The prefrontal cortex is the section of the brain responsible for executive function, impulse control, and long-term decision making. Essentially, a fully-developed prefrontal cortex is what makes an adult an adult. The prefrontal cortex doesn't fully come online until your early to mid-twenties (this is why all of these rights are generally around the same age, 18-21...unless one wants to suggest that we picked those ages out of a hat).

Most children do not have a fully-developed prefrontal cortex. Therefore it is in their and society's best interest to prohibit them from making long-term decisions, since they really don't have the equipment to make lucid choices about the distant future.

So if you're looking for a criterion for voter eligibility, it should be the presence of a developed prefrontal cortex, not age, and certainly not a goddamn civics test (at 17, I would have gotten a hardon at the idea of being legally able to drink if I only had to pass a written exam testing my knowledge of alcohol). Since AFAIK we don't have any real, cost-effective test for whether a person has a prefrontal cortex, chronological age is a passable approximation.

I'm all for classical liberalism, but let's not be naive and throw common sense out the window - anyone who thinks 12-14 year olds should have the right to vote doesn't remember what it was like to be 12-14 years old. Christ, every single person who I respect and consider intelligent and knew when they were 12-14 would have voted for any candidate who promised that we would see boobies during their term in office.

<comment><USER27> What you wrote _sounds_ really good, and you got upvoted. The trouble is that it's not actually true.

The reason 12-14 years olds seem immature is a social one, and NOT a brain one. I come from a rather different social culture and in my social circle a 12-14 year old was more or less an adult - and we acted that way.

If you assume someone under 18 is a kid - they will act like a kid, if you assume they are an adult, they will act like an adult.

For every kid it was different, the range is about 12-15, but by then there were no longer any dramatic differences in maturity, and further changes are gradual and more importantly life long, i.e. the changes don't magically stop at 18.

By the traditional age of puberty (i.e. not todays accelerated age) all kids are mentally mature. But the social environment in the US isn't conducive to that, instead kids are told you are under 18 so act like a kid.

(And you got downvoted for saying kids don't have a pre-frontal cortex which is nonsense, if you had said less mature I would have let it go.)

And BTW my experience is supported by literature, at least based on an article I read about 2 years ago in 'scientific american mind' (which I tried to find but couldn't).

It's not accidental that the age of majority has crept up and up over the years. Basically people try to set the age so that everyone is mature by that point, but of course 95% of people are mature before that - but are told, don't bother. So they don't and the age creeps upward.

Repeat over the years and it keeps going up. In antiquity majority was 12, about 100 to 200 years ago it was 15. Today you find 25 years old living like teenagers used to.

<comment><USER24> "The reason 12-14 years olds seem immature is a social one, and NOT a brain one. I come from a rather different social culture and in my social circle a 12-14 year old was more or less an adult - and we acted that way.

If you assume someone under 18 is a kid - they will act like a kid, if you assume they are an adult, they will act like an adult."

That's idealistic, naive nonsense, for at least three reasons I can think of off the top of my head:

1) Take a six-year-old and start treating them as an adult and expecting them to act like one, and observe their behavior (my hypothesis: the child will behave like a slightly-more-mature-than-average six-year-old)

2) Do a survey of people who ran away or were kicked out of their houses at very early ages (let's say 15 or earlier) for traits and psychological health. (my hypothesis: you'll find significantly higher than average drug use, addiction, depression, and other psychological disorders than in a random population).

3) Take a forty-year-old male (who satisfies both of our criteria for maturity: my criterion that he has a fully-developed prefrontal cortex, and your criterion that society "assumes he is an adult" and treats him like one). Now remove his prefrontal cortex. Your argument hypothesizes that he will still be an adult, since the criterion that is important to you - <USER2> treating him like an adult - remains unchanged. However, this has actually happened many times. It's called a prefrontal lobotomy, and its effects are well-known - it basically turns an adult into a child. Therefore, the prefrontal cortex has much more to do with what we know as "maturity" than social treatment. (and if you want to be clever and say "well those who get a prefrontal lobotomy are usually severely retarded or mentally ill and thus not treated as adults before the operation," then just remember good old Phineas Gage. Treated as an adult right up until the railroad spike went through his head, and then basically became an impulsive child.)

"(And you got downvoted for saying kids don't have a pre-frontal cortex which is nonsense, if you had said less mature I would have let it go.)"

Wrong; it is a fact that children do not have a fully-developed prefrontal cortex. It can take as late as the mid-twenties to come online, and as late as the early thirties to fully myelinate.

Social expectations have very little to do with capacity for long-term decision-making. It's biological - you either have the equipment or you don't. My argument is based on what we know about the brain and on experiments already performed or whose results will be pretty damn obvious; yours is an argument by assertion based on blank-slate idealism and one article in Scientific American Mind which you can't find.

I know which way I'm betting, personally.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I've always thought they should lower suffrage to kids who can drive, but...it's not going to happen.

</comment><comment><USER29> This past election was the first election in Austria in which 16-year-olds could vote.

All hell did not break loose.

The conservative candidate who actually reached out to the teens got more of their vote (surprise).

Of course, everyone's been angry with the liberals and socialists who did nothing but bicker until the coalition fell apart, so that may have something to do with it, too.

<comment><USER30> But something that works for a multiparty system does not necessarily translate well to a system with less candidates (or viable candidates). To be honest it can be argued that obama would have won by a much larger margin in america given that 16/17 year olds could vote, and though this could probably show a good thing most people that age do not understand the government nor any policy action that would be put in place by there vote. At 18 there is already some trouble in my opinion especially seen by such ad campaigns as vote or die, or teenagers coming on tv saying I'm voting for so and so because they are more handsome etc.. you find this much less in older age groups.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Let's remember this is written by the same fellow who is convinced that Euclidean quantum gravity is a dead end because he feels there is some fundamental (rather than emergent) property about time that makes it unique. The vast majority of people who have thought about this believe time to be emergent, not fundamental. Hell, the Hamiltonian function doesn't even have time as we know it. So in my opinion this individual has some serious credibility issues.

That said, he does make some good point on this particular issue about minor's rights. Maybe lower the voting age to 16? Like if you are old enough to drive, you are old enough to vote. Of course this would be good for the GOP since children engaged enough to vote at that age would often be copying their parents, who could be Rush Limbaugh "ditto-heads" or the like. Nevertheless, I would be open to allowing the voting age to be 16.

Still though it is astounding to me that people who think time is a fundamental property are taken seriously in academia. That is sooo 19th century. I really don't have the _time_ for such folks.

<comment><USER32> (Downvoted for ad hominin argument)

<comment><USER33> I really couldn't tell if that ad hominem was a satire of ad hominem or not...</comment></comment></comment>


Shell startup scripts - <AUTHOR> http://blog.flowblok.id.au/2013-02/shell-startup-scripts.html

<comment><USER2> As much as I'm OCD about this sort of thing myself, I can't help thinking that this guy is trying to solve a problem that doesn't exist.

The biggest problem I have if just the effort of keeping all the environments unified on all the boxes I administrate. Because of this, these days I just don't bother with large and complicated custom shell environments - just a few aliases on my workstation and that's about it.

The crux of the matter is if time spent trying to keep your environment in sync across your infrastructure is greater than the time you save due to increased productivity - then it's really just a wasted exercise.

What I'd be more interested in is a way to have a .remote.bashrc running on my workstation that will then automatically set the environment for any servers I SSH into (thus removing the need for me to keep copies on each server).

Actually, that last idea should be pretty easy, I've just never thought about it until now....

<comment><USER3> With today's tools it's not that difficult to sync your shell environment. Keep your config files in a private git repo and add a few lines to your .bashrc that does the following in the background:

      - git (pull|rebase|reset --hard) from repo
      - recreate all symlinks

Any time you make changes, push it up to the repo. An alternative for some is to symlink against files stored in Dropbox.

<comment><USER4> and for the "recreate all symlinks" step, you can use your vcs to determine which symlinks need to be changed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This page is worth bookmarking just for the incredibly helpful diagrams, if nothing else.

</comment><comment><USER6> related: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4369485>

</comment><comment><USER7> _"If you're a regular shell user...I suspect that few people know when things like .bash_profile and .bashrc actually get executed."_

Really?

</comment><comment><USER8> This is way too complex. Just put everything in .bashrc and symlink .profile to .bashrc. Then if there's something you don't want executed in non- interactive mode in .bashrc, put it in an if statement.

Simple.</comment>


Has Western capitalism failed? - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-14972015 <comment><USER2> The answer depends on what is meant by "Western capitalism". There are fairly credible arguments that it, in the sense of the general structure created in the 19th and 20th centuries, is ending because of how firms are being operated and financed (end of the corporation thesis), for example. The free market pretty clearly hasn't failed yet, given that this severe a shock didn't actually bring about the downfall of civilization or the general system of exchange.

<comment><AUTHOR> Just so I can read up, what do you mean by _how firms are being operated and financed (end of the corporation thesis)_?

<comment><USER2> Undermining presence: lack of IPOs or desire to hold one, increasing prominence of partnerships, prominence of smaller businesses (technology seems to lead here), private equity shops, the almost complete elimination of vertical integration (great project of 19th/20th centuries), what looks (to me) like increasing transience of corporations.

Undermining norms: flattening of formal hierarchies, reduction of corporate- cum-personal identity in workers, reduction of same in founders (more businesses operated as "projects" rather than presumed perpetual institutions), slow abandonment of generic "managers".

A lot of this seems more prevalent in technology, but tech is also where we're creating lots of genuinely new companies and so the most likely place for shifting practices.

The "end of the corporation" idea has come up a lot since the 1990s but it may just be availability bias.</comment></comment></comment>


Coffee sold in California must carry cancer warning, judge rules - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-43594645 <comment><USER2> As a resident of California, these warnings are a joke. You learn to pay absolutely no attention to them, because they are _everywhere_. They are like the real-life equivalent of the "this site uses cookies" warnings the EU imposes.

Do the people behind this lawsuit truly in good-faith believe such warnings for coffee will make the world better? (It seems hard to imagine.) Or are there other motivation at play here?

<comment><USER3> I used to work for an eyeglass lens manufacturer. I remember having to set up a new label printing system to print labels that said "this product contains blah blah known to cause cancer blah blah". This was on _eyeglass lenses_. What's the exposure risk here? Eating them? Who eats their eyeglass lenses?

<comment><USER4> Maybe the exposure risk was from dust inhalation if the lenses were cut or ground to fit a pair frames. Though point taken - prop 65 warnings are on everything. I still choose to enter parking garages.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _The lawsuit was filed in 2010 and says coffee sellers should pay fines of up to $2,500 (£1,800) for every person exposed to acrylamide in California since 2002. The next phase of the trial will determine the exact penalties, but some companies have reportedly agreed to settle and post warnings about the chemical._

A great example of how much bad regulations can cost businesses, or even good regulations applied badly.

</comment><comment><USER6> At this point, there should probably just be a generic "THIS PRODUCT IS KNOWN TO THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA TO CAUSE CANCER" sticker that companies can stick on pretty much anything they sell there. <eyeroll>

<comment><USER7> I get the sarcasm, but would this be legal? It's satire if it's not actually known as a carcinogen, and a legal requirement if it is. It would dilute the warning in the public's perception, but companies might find it cheapest and easiest to just stick it on everything.

<comment><USER8> The "warning" is already as diluted as the coffee in question, and has been seen by many as a joke for years now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Interesting that no one thinks to blame the researchers for this predicament. The truth is that the way carcinogenesis is tested nearly everything will lead to cancer in some dose (the same way that drinking water will kill you if you drink enough at once). This isn't even news, eg 1990: [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC54830/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC54830/)

These goofy california signs are just a symptom of the underlying crappy research. It is what happens if you actually take these "discoveries" seriously.

</comment><comment><USER10> I'll never forget scrolling through google news a few years back. There were two articles that were grouped together but with slightly different headlines:

      Recent study shows that coffee extends life

      Recent study shows that coffee causes cancer

This is one of those debates that will never end. The solution is "everything in moderation". I enjoy a cup of coffee per day - and I limit it at that...

<comment><USER11> A daily habit does not strike me as moderation

<comment><USER12> I have been wondering about this for a while about coffee and energy drinks as well. Is one a day already addiction? I have a co-worker who has a Red Bull every day and he pointed to an article that said, one per day is fine. To me it seemed way too much. Maybe moderation is once a week?

<comment><USER13> >Is one a day already addiction?

Absolutely yes. I have only a cup of coffee (or the equivalent caffeine via tea) per day and get killer headaches if I skip a day. Whether this is okay or not, I'm not sure. I usually see articles saying three or four hundred milligrams is okay, but that seems like a lot to me (that's a few cups a day depending on how you measure your cups).

<comment><USER14> I have several cups of coffee per weekday morning and I don't even notice when I skip a day (I don't drink it on weekends since it's more of a work ritual.)

Am I addicted?

<comment><USER15> Same here. I also drink on week-ends but forgot once to bring coffee to the office for for days and did not care.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > Acrylamide is created when starchy foods are roasted

Does this mean that potatoes should come with a warning? And bread?

<comment><USER17> __Anecdote Alert! __A very knowledgeable Chinese doctor (acupuncturist, trained on the mainland)warned me of this decades ago.

She said that for my body type, coffee was extremely bad. She explained (in her broken English)that the coffee contained "fire" due to the way the beans were processed and that this could make me more susceptible to cancer. Grilled food was also a no-no (for me). Baked & fried foods? For most people, fuggedaboudit!

I can't help but notice the latest research is beginning to show exactly what she told me all those years ago.

<comment><USER15> My very knowledgeable statistics professor (my professor beats your doctor) told me that extraordinary claims ("fire" content from grilling causing cancer) require extraordinary evidence (say, some science behind)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> There is a certain point where safety warnings become meaningless.

Californian carcinogens are far past this point.

</comment><comment><USER19> I think they've set the bar so low that the warning is meaningless to consumers.

</comment><comment><USER12> Reading the comments here it strikes me that apparently noone agrees with this decision as apparently in California a lot of products seem to carry such cancer warnings. I'm not living in California, but is this true, do you have examples? Just curious.

<comment><USER20> Many building in California, including apartments, will carry the warning label if they were built before a certain year and if lead paint may have been used inside in the past. Even if the lead paint has been removed.

Many fast food drive thrus will have the sticker on the drive thru window due to the preservatives used in some of the food and the components used in the cooking process.

Disneyland has signs bearing the warning through out the park.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Wait till California finds out about the radioactivity of bananas.

<comment><USER22> Don't tell them rice contains arsenic.

<comment><USER23> As does wine.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I wonder how many people were drinking coffee in the court room during this trial.

</comment><comment><USER25> Comment section on The Hill's article: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16712820](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16712820)

</comment><comment><USER26> If I'm reading this right, 425 cups of coffee a day might cause cancer. But I've also read that 70 cups will immediately kill you.

</comment><comment><USER27> I get the impression that trial lawyers must have spent a lot of money on Prop 65 advertising during that election cycle.

</comment><comment><USER28> what about potatoes and toast?

</comment><comment><USER29> Another consequence of legislation by ballot initiative.

<comment><USER30> One of the downsides of ballot initiatives is not only you can pass silly laws via fear mongering, but it is also impossible to repeal them

</comment></comment><comment> cup-of-tea Soon companies will be trying to get these labels as a sign that their product is delicious. A bit like "Parental Advisory" stickers on CDs.</comment>


Lobster, a 'free bus travel' app is audience favorite at Over The Air hackathon - <AUTHOR> http://www.geek.com/articles/news/lobster-a-free-bus-travel-app-is-audience-favorite-at-over-the-air-hackathon-20100914/

<comment><USER2> Great article.

Another example of how to achieve mass appeal, keep it simple.</comment>


#WeAreTwitter - <AUTHOR> http://wearetwitter.global <comment><USER2> If you are concerned about the direction Twitter is going, I recommend checking out alternatives. There _is_ a community-owned "Twitter", it is called the fediverse and it consists of projects like GNU social and Mastodon [1] (My own project).

[1]: [https://github.com/Gargron/mastodon](https://github.com/Gargron/mastodon) [https://mastodon.social](https://mastodon.social)

</comment><comment><USER3> well this is certainly cute.</comment>


The Wholeness of Quantum Reality: An Interview with Physicist Basil Hiley - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/critical-opalescence/the-wholeness-of-quantum-reality-an-interview-with-physicist-basil-hiley/

<comment><USER2> "BH: ...suppose we start with something like process–no particles, just activity, just energy. Then the first battle was: what the hell do you mean? I started reading. I read Grassmann, for example, and Grassmann was saying that mathematics was not about things in space and time, but it was about thought–it was about the order of thought. And he obtained his Grassmann algebra from that kind of consideration. And I read Clifford's original books, original papers, and it was all about process. Two times three is equal to six–it's not two objects times three. It's the doubling of three objects. It's a process."

This is the key idea behind category theory, that equality is an arrow (a process). I think this neatly summarizes why I suck at algebra. I write code, my brain works in algorithms & processes. 1+1=2 just doesn't parse. If I can convert whatever mathematical concept into an algorithm then yeah I get it. Otherwise it's just a bunch of symbols.

</comment><comment><USER3> This article is quite interesting, certainly projects a different view of Bohmian theory than typically presented. At one point Hiley invokes the idea of "information" intrinsic to understanding quantum transformations, so it seems not coincidental that just a couple of days ago an article about Christopher Fuchs thoughts was an HN topic.

In that article Fuchs spoke about his view of the subjective components of quantum measurement and the informational nature of quantum phenomena. So it's no surprise that Fuchs critique of Bohm was mentioned by Hiley, though in the context of their disagreements. However I have a hunch Hiley's idea of "process" is not so remote from Fuchs' notions of subjectivity and what that means for quantum theory.

I'm sure genuinely knowledgeable people will have a far more refined exposition of these ideas than I could ever have, nonetheless these articles are engaging, enlightening and give much to ponder.

</comment><comment><USER4> I think it is generally useful for people to have a picture in their head about whats going on as work quite frequently gets lead by instinct and educated guesswork which can be made rigorous once you've decided its worth the time to do so. That said I really don't understand the appeal of Bohmian mechanics. The explicit non-locality puts me off it.

On a more positive note the stuff about category theory is very interesting and I think has a lot to offer physics in general and quantum mechanics in particular. I found a couple of papers by Bob Coecke made a good introduction to the use of categories for a physicist:

1) [http://arxiv.org/abs/0908.1787](http://arxiv.org/abs/0908.1787)

2) [http://arxiv.org/abs/0808.1032](http://arxiv.org/abs/0808.1032)</comment>


Ask HN: Which software do you use to encrypt your external hard drive? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> luks for external drives on Linux. I don't use external drives with other operating systems.

rclone to encrypt cloud storage. Can decrypt and mount on any OS.

</comment><comment><USER3> VeraCrypt because I use Windows.</comment>


Build a fully scalable application without code - <AUTHOR> http://www.appivo.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> I've had the pleasure of having the serviced demoed(?) for me and it's really an impressive product, complete with db models, controllers (Scratch like) and frontend. All though I have a hard time figuring out the use case. Will graphical interfaces ever replace pure code for a programmer? And if you're not a programmer, how will you ever understand things such as DB-modeling?</comment>


Sweet-expressions: A readable format for Lisp-like languages - <AUTHOR> http://www.dwheeler.com/readable/sweet-expressions.html <comment><USER3> Somebody has invented a more conventional-looking syntax for Lisp every couple years since John McCarthy first suggested M-expressions. Nobody[0] has ever cared enough to use any of them.

People who "get" Lisp get over any aversion to the syntax, and usually even come to appreciate it. People who can't get over the syntax never actually get Lisp.

[0] For large values of nobody

<comment><USER4> Because the people who "get" Lisp are almost always theoreticians who know what they want to code before they code it. They use Lisp as a write-only language. Meanwhile, working programmers avoid it, because it's very hard to step into someone else's Lisp codebase and understand it (and not just because of the fact that anything could mean anything due to macros—code is already visually indistinguishable from data without them.)

Languages, just like any other computer software, have a User Experience: the experience of programming in them. For example, the usual justification people give for why they like Ruby is that it has a good UX. There's no theoretical purity there, they just say it's "fun to code in."

Lisp, meanwhile, does not obey any of the principles of HCI that have been discovered in the last 30 years (how could it? It was invented before them!) There's a large gulf of evaluation stopping a programmer new to a Lisp codebase from understanding what their changes will do to it. UI design is about human psychology, not theoretical purity; solving this problem might seem like "papering over" the purity of the language from a theoretical perspective, but when doing actual comparative usability studies[1], it would be clear that the "papered-over" version would have something going for it that the theoretically-pure version does not.

[1] A comparative usability study on a language is very simple to perform: you basically print out some code samples, let people with no experience in the language (but general programming experience) read them for a set time period, and then evaluate their comprehension.

<comment><USER5> _A comparative usability study on a language is very simple to perform: you basically print out some code samples, let people with no experience in the language (but general programming experience) read them for a set time period, and then evaluate their comprehension._

That is just _one_ axis of usability, optimizing for comprehension by someone unfamiliar with the language. Usability is also optimizing for the experienced programmer. Some designs do a good job for both, some work well for one at the expense of the other.

Hef Raskin had some interesting things to say about this:

<http://www.asktog.com/papers/raskinintuit.html>

<comment><USER6> Also, people with 'no experience in the language', but with 'general programming experience' will be primed with the conventions of mainstream languages and biased against s-expressions.

(Btw, it's _J_ ef Raskin.)

<comment><USER4> By "general programming experience," I didn't mean " _mainstream_ programming experience," but rather "having been given a survey of techniques for programming in iterative, functional, OOP, declarative/constraint-based, concatenative, etc. languages, without having learned a single one." In other words, someone who was taught to program for the purposes of the test.

<comment><USER6> How do you learn to program without learning any programming languages?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think that, for those of us who like Lisp, one of the things that draws us is the elegant simplicity of it all. There are lots of other languages that distinguish between expressions and statements, function calls and primitive operations, and all the rest of it.

It is undeniable that there are certain readability advantages to conforming a little more closely to the conventions from arithmetic notation, or just looking like C, which is the course most languages take.

But I believe that there are also very different readability advantages to a very simple, elegant, and consistent notation for representing a computation. There are fewer things you need to remember and translate in your head to express the program you want to write, or to understand the program you want to read.

For the record, I favor the approach Clojure took of making access to the reader out of bounds for the Clojure programmer, and assigning distinct semantics to the various paired characters on the keyboard: [] {} (). This breaks up the visual monotony of traditional S-expressions and improves readability. But remains simple, elegant, and consistent, in my opinion.

</comment><comment><USER8> The parens are a cue so that the editor indents my code properly. How do you propose to make emacs auto-indent sweet expressions?

It seems that I would have to manually do that as indentation would convey meaning.

Whitespace is a notorious pain in the ass to get right, parens are visible, countable, and highlight-able.

Infix is stupidly ambiguous and is the cause of multitudes of errors; a 'natural' way to describe math or not. (There is a reason some prefer the reverse polish calculator).

Anyway, I don't 'get' the 'aversion' the syntax is trivial to explain and it keeps me from having to remember fiddly rules. Use a proper editor to indent/highlight/reformat, and it is as good as any other syntax.

(If you want Lisp to be popular, just get Justin Beiber to write a song about it).

<comment><USER9> I agree that sexpr are the best syntax out there for a language because it's consistent and simple. However, this expression thing is a good idea. I've been waiting for something like this for a while.

        Anyway, I don't 'get' the 'aversion' the syntax is trivial to explain [etc]

Although you mightn't get it, I'm sure you have run into it a bit and realise it's widespread. Perhaps nine in ten people who identify as programmers would dislike it. The practice of ignoring that hasn't done any favours for lisp takeup. It's still a fringe language.

Like the author says,

        But most software developers have abandoned Lisp precisely because of Lisp's hideous, inadequate notation

This syntax is a gateway that allows you to smuggle lisp into a workplace. It looks like python. When people ask about what you're doing you say "Oh, that's this cool language called Racket. As you can see, it reads a lot like python, but I've found it allows me to do xyz nicely. Here, let me show you how this script works." Then you would show them the script, perhaps show them a repl tool that appears to work just like python's and they'd be able to get around your your scripts as much as they can around your existing python code. Sweet!

        How do you propose to make emacs auto-indent sweet expressions?

You could have emacs auto-transform into sexpr when you loaded a file, and save to sweet expressions when you saved. Should be trivial. From your perspective, you could like in a sexpr world. Except when you were stepping your colleague through the code - remember to vi for that bit. Otherwise the game will be up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's a clever design, and Wheeler makes a good case for it. Certainly my first reaction is "you'll have to pry my parentheses from my cold, dead fingers", but it's unarguable that a lot of people are repulsed by the syntax, even if the enlightened among us know it's actually beautiful.

He's right about the requirements for such a syntax: it has to mix well with the existing syntax, meaning, among other things, it must impose no semantics and it must not be necessary to write the operands of an infix expression in infix. I don't recall CGOL etc. getting the latter right. I also agree with him about the lack of a precedence scheme.

I have to admit, I can see making light use of the curly infix syntax in my own programs. I'm less sure what I think about the modern-expressions; I'd have to try them to see. I guess I can see some advantages. But I'm afraid I draw the line at significant whitespace. I know it works for Python, but Python was designed for it from the ground up. Looking at Wheeler's example, I'm not persuaded that it works as well for Lisp, though I commend him for his effort in designing it.

<comment><USER10> Having the infix expression reader fall back to emitting calls to a user- provided `nfx' macro seems clever at first glance, but it's insufficient. Different programs/libraries are likely to likely to implement `nfx' in different ways, and thus step on each other. I think (for Common Lisp) it will be necessary to do something like this: create a generic function `translate- nfx' which uses `eql' dispatching on the first operator, and set up the `nfx' macro to call it:

      (defmacro nfx (&rest stuff) (translate-nfx (cadr stuff) stuff))
      (defmethod translate-nfx ((op (eql '+)) stuff) ...)

This creates an extensible framework where packages can supply `translate-nfx' methods for their operations. It would probably be worth predefining methods for CL arithmetic operations, so that users don't wind up doing that in incompatible ways. I'm afraid that means choosing a precedence scheme, which Wheeler was trying to avoid (for good reason); I don't see a way around it, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I've worked with programs in half a dozen Lisp dialects and everyone who claims Lisp is hard to understand because of the syntax is wrong. The only reason I could work with so many dialects and so many programs is because the syntax is uniform. If you think you have an idea for how to "improve" Lisp syntax that involves an ambiguous infix grammar, please stop trolling and go write some Python.

<comment><USER12> Some people seem to have a hard time with deeply nesting languages. Anecdotally, they seem to prefer "chaining" constructs, like "someObj.method(arg).otherMethod(arg2).om3(a4).om4(a5)". I'm fine with heavily nested Lisp-y code, but chaining code feels very awkward to me.

Self and Prolog both have well-designed, completely unambiguous grammars. People interested in syntax design (or "fixing" Lisp) would do well to look at those, rather than trying to force a pseudo-Python syntax on Lisp. Python's grammar has too many edge cases. (Lua's syntax is also quite simple, though not as much as Self's.)

In the end, clear semantics are at least as important as a good syntax. Lisp has very clear semantics. So do ML and Erlang, another language which has a bit of a quirky syntax.

<comment><USER11> "Anecdotally, they seem to prefer "chaining" constructs, like "someObj.method(arg).otherMethod(arg2).om3(a4).om4(a5)". "

The thing with fluent interfaces is they're identical to nested Lisp code, except they read left to right instead of right to left. I suspect writers of Hebrew and Arabic would find chaining to be more confusing than nested Lisp code for that reason.

Also worth noting is that a popular style of indenting chained fluent calls is by splitting them by lines, like:

      someObj.method(arg)
             .otherMethod(arg2)
             .om3(a4)
             .om4(a5);

That's not that different from formatting Lisp code.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The new and "readable" syntax looks truly ugly compared to the S-expression counterparts. Why is it that some people dread parentheses so badly and other people just never mind and choose to spend the time working with them?

The main reason I consider parentheses and S-expressions superior to other syntax is that it allows for flexible navigation in the source code. I can move forward and backward, upward and inward in the tree, unit-by-unit and the unit can be a literal or a compound S-expression or anything and it just works the same. (At least in Emacs.)

<comment><USER14> _Why is it that some people dread parentheses so badly_

Two tendencies combine to make "parentheses" the Lisp topic that in sheer quantity dwarfs all other Lisp topics added together: 1. the human brain craves familiarity; 2. people love bike sheds.

(Bike shed = something anybody can have an opinion and argue about irrespective of knowledge or effort. Since their purpose is to jump into the argument, these opinions tend to be strong ones, diminishing the likelihood of any resolution. Indeed, a feature of such discussions is that they are argument for argument's sake, and thus no resolution is possible or even desirable.)

<comment><AUTHOR> > _Two tendencies combine to make "parentheses" the Lisp topic that in sheer > quantity dwarfs all other Lisp topics added together_

Parentheses (and along with them s-expressions and macros) are one of the few characteristics still unique to Lisp. Most of the other features - <USER2> GC, dynamic typing, first-class functions and lexical scoping - are now shared with other programming languages as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I am not a big fan of lisp, but u can not really change the lisp syntax and have lisp anymore. (+ 1 2) has more features included then '1+2', because u can for example add 3 numbers easily like (+ 1 2 3) and you can treat all that as a list and parse it to whatever u need, recurse over it and so on. With a "better" syntax u just don't have these features anymore.

Someone who would use sweet-expressions actually has not understood lisp yet. But like the mouse mode in Vi, it might be a useful tool to make new lispers more comfortable. So I still like the idea!

<comment><USER16> I think you've misunderstood. This does not take away any of those issues. With this setup, you can write (+ 1 2 3) or +(1 2 3) or (1 + 2 + 3) and they would all translate into (+ 1 2 3). You can treat any of them as a list. You can still parse, transform, do anything with it. There is no loss of functionality here. Think of it as a macro that aliases "plus" to +. There is no difference between (plus 1 2 3) and (+ 1 2 3) in a macro defined in this way. They are S-expressions under an invisibility cloak. But they're still S-expressions within.

<comment><USER15> I understand your point and how this macro works. My point is, that you still have to think in this (+ 1 2 3) way to be able to write meaningful, recursive, 'code is data' like functions. If u think (func_name param_1 param_2 param_3) you will easily get a recursive solution for a recursive problem. And if you think that way anyway, what's the point in writing (1 + 2 + 3) in your code? It will just confuse the lisp mode in your brain.

I also think it is hard to get into this mode. But like this way of writing is not basically intuitive, so is recursive thinking and 'code is data' to me (and so I guess it will be the same for other people). It needs some time of meditating to get into lisp mode and it also needs some months of training. But when you are there, everything works together, because it works in the same way.

Or to say it like Bruce Lee: You must be water my friend. When you fill water into a bottle, it becomes the bottle. If you fill water in a cup, it becomes the cup. (And if u put it in braces it becomes a lisp expression: (begin (water) (q_e_d))).

<comment><USER16> Well, that does sound subjective. By far not all lisp code is actually being manipulated as data in any non-trivial way. And for situations where all you are doing really is adding a few numbers together, why not write it in a way that is intuitive in the problem domain, rather than intuitive in what you call lisp mode? To me, being able to separate the two is an advantage. Your internal martial arts argument is void, for you are frozen in the shape of s-expressions and refuse to adapt to any other container.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Isn't Lisp awesome? It's flexible enough that you can write an alternate syntax, develop your own semantics and grammar, and build the language you work best in on top of it.

I don't think I've come across another language that can actually do these sorts of things so well (or at all for that matter).

Viva Lisp!

</comment><comment><USER18> I liked the somewhat elegant heuristic for general infix-to-prefix conversion:

<quote> {...} contains an "infix list". If the enclosed infix list has (1) an odd number of parameters, (2) at least 3 parameters, and (3) all even parameters are the same symbol, then it is mapped to "(even-parameter odd- parameters)". Otherwise, it is mapped to "(nfx list)" — you'll need to have a macro named "nfx" to use it </quote>

That being said, (still-prefer 'I (using 'parentheses :in 'Scheme)).

Now, if someone added mix-fix syntax to Scheme...

</comment><comment><USER19> Almost like haml for Lisp. Cool.

<comment><USER20> Yea, though you know I'm still attracted to Scheme b/c of its sweet sweet parens.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Is it just me, or does that look like Python?

</comment><comment><USER22> "Ugly" s-expressions?

I find them to be quite beautiful, like matryoshka dolls. I am a bit disappointed when I have to work on code that doesn't manifest its own structure so explicity, looking like a tangle of words and punctuation down the page, like what becomes of balls of yarn after a kitten has gotten through with them.

</comment><comment><USER23> Well from the perspective of a programmer that doesn't know lisp, and has been put off in the past due to its syntax: I find this dialect much more appealing.

Nested round brackets are pretty horrible to read / parse.

Whether it destroys the essence of what lisp is all about is another matter, but I suspect it doesn't at all.

</comment><comment><USER24> Wow. Speaking as somebody who's bounced off Lisp more than once, I find this really attractive.

</comment><comment><USER25> once you "get" lisp anything beside s-expressions/prefix notation feels "inside out" and asymmetrical. I think [ ] and { } should be reserved for things like dicts, vectors or lambdas.

<comment><USER12> Mostly agreed, but I've used Lisps for years, and prefix for _arithmetic_ still feels weird. My personal preference is infix without operator precedence (like APL and Smalltalk) or postfix (like Forth). All-prefix, all-postfix, or all-infix _consistently_ make sense. Infix with arbitrary transposition due to historical "order of operation" doesn't, but it's the common convention, and minor changes to it (e.g. +. for floating-point-addition in OCaml) seem to really piss people off.

Most other function calls are _already_ in prefix notation, people just think (f x y) is totally weird, while f(x, y) is normal. Cognitive dissonance.

Also, I think it's cute that Prolog sticks all arithmetic under an "is" operator ("X is Y+Z*3"), rather than letting it dominate the language the way it usually tends to.

<comment><USER26> "Mostly agreed, but I've used Lisps for years, and prefix for arithmetic still feels weird."

But that is just because you learned the conventional notation from a very young age, right? We all did, hence the name "conventional". When we learned to add and subtract, we also learned that the notation was 2+3, not (+ 2 3). That's why any other notation feels "unnatural".

I do wonder if it would be possible to teach kids prefix notation instead, and whether such notation would seem completely natural to them. (I suspect the answer to both is yes.)

<comment><USER27> That is an interesting question. I see one possible argument (whose correctness I don't know enough to judge, I'm just making it up) why infix is more natural than prefix: A kid will start by seeing an object, and only once you have an object does it make sense to combine it (by addition or whatever) with another object. Also, note that a certain amount of English syntax is infix: "I went to the store", not "Went to I the store".

...However, I think that in some other languages, _postfix_ notation is common. I think my friend who studies Spanish told me that they say the equivalent of "I her it gave" (meaning "I gave it to her"), and I think I remember Shakespearean English using postfix. ...Looking at the text of Romeo and Juliet, I see both prefix and postfix.

      Prefix: "O, where is Romeo? saw you him to-day?"
      Postfix: "The which if you with patient ears attend"

On the one hand, we could say that, since these plays were apparently rather successful, people obviously didn't have too much trouble understanding them. On the other hand, since this sort of strange permutation has been mostly dropped from common usage (so that I recognize it as strange), that may be evidence that these things are just harder to use. On the _other_ hand, that could just be because "common usage" comes mostly from people who have been educated in schools, and schools have no reason to teach more than one method of speaking. On the _other_ hand, Shakespeare seems only to have done that in order to make lines fit into rhyming iambic pentameter; in no way was this natural to him.

I should probably note that a lot of speech deals with object method calls more than function calls ("I.saw(Bob.win(a_game))" or, as it would probably be expressed in Arc, "(I!saw (Bob!win a-game))"; function call would be like (saw I (win Bob a-game))). And adjectives and adverbs act kind of like keyword arguments: (I!drove :to (the store) :[qualifier] fast). From that perspective, the distinction might be "object method calls" vs "function calls", rather than "infix" vs "prefix".

Does someone who knows more than I about other human languages (or English, for that matter) know about the prevalence of postfix notation (and prefix, if it so happens)?

<comment><USER12> Turkish and Japanese both typically end sentences with verbs, IIRC. There are probably several others; I really should just buy a copy of Comrie's _The World's Major Languages_ already.

In German (which I'm at least a little familiar with, unlike those two), auxiliary verbs stack at the end of the sentence: "I have eaten my breakfast." -> "Ich habe mein Frühstück gegessen." (lit. "I have my breakfast eaten.") It's unusual to have more than a couple, though - human languages typically don't nest very deeply.

OTOH, comparing natural languages and programming languages may not be that useful - programming language design places a high priority on avoiding ambiguity, while natural languages assume have quite a bit of it. It may be better to consider programming languages as a kind of notation for math, logic, rules, instructions, declarations, etc. Kenneth Iverson had some interesting ideas about that.

Another issue with method calls is that many things don't have a clear primary actor. In single-dispatch OOP languages, this turns into ugly workarounds (e.g. the Visitor pattern), "who owns this method?" debates, and tedious rewriting. Multimethods avoid that issue entirely.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Update: The page at <http://www.dwheeler.com/readable/> appears to be the project's homepage.

</comment><comment><USER28> Sweet-expressions is for LISP as CoffeeScript is to Javascript :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> This touches on the core of my enthusiasm about sweet-expressions. I'd like to make a "SweetScript" that compiles to JavaScript (via some lightweight lisp) and could essentially serve as a CoffeeScript with macros.

Would you find such a tool useful? What challenges would you foresee facing such a project?

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> It's funny that Lisp's "syntax" draws so much attention when it is pretty much the simplest and most unambiguous syntax possible, and that messes like C++, Python and Perl don't seem to bother anyone enough to propose alternatives.

<comment><USER12> It's yet another case of people getting hung up on the first obviously different thing they notice about a language.

If somebody is still griping about the parens in Lisp, the significant whitespace in Python, the glyphs in APL, etc., they haven't gotten to the differences that actually make the language interesting - either they'll get used to it like the other X programmers (and realize it wasn't as big an issue as they thought), or they'll find deeper issues in the language design to complain about (and probably give up on it).</comment></comment>


A message to KevinHartz: Bring your money to Seattle - <AUTHOR> http://www.iseff.com/post/22794897064/a-message-to-kevinhartz-bring-your-money-to-seattle

<comment><USER2> Bring your money to Toronto! I'm currently living in Toronto, but looking to move to Seattle once I start at Microsoft. That being said, I'll be making about 70% more in Seattle than I could hope to make in Toronto.

Toronto has favourable taxes for small businesses, and is close to some top engineering / computer science schools in Canada and the world (University of Toronto, Waterloo, Queen's University, McMaster). All of my friends currently working on startups in Toronto (myself included) are all bootstrapped, as there's not a lot of VC money around here.

</comment><comment><USER3> This.

We just raised a seed round in both Seattle and the Valley, and the pricing difference here in Seattle is significant.

Whether SV pricing is fair, and there are steals to be had in Seattle, or Seattle pricing is sane, and the Valley is overheated I couldn't say. But, I will say that Seattle startup quality seems to be improving, and there's a very different startup-to-money ratio going on here.

Come on up Angels! The water's fine!

</comment><comment><USER4> Right! There's probably a lot of markets where there's talented people but no overheating economy. Until last year, I was living in Portland, and they've got some amazing hackers, but only a handful of funded startups.

<comment><USER5> True, but it's a market with less of a support structure which adds risk to any investment made. The question is if the cheaper startups offset the additional risk involved.

What's the track record for Seattle startups? In any given year, 97% of VC returns come from about 15 startups. In the past 5 years, how many of the ~75 startups responsible for most of the returns have come out of Seattle?

ref: <http://www.paulgraham.com/hubs.html>

<comment><USER6> I think the author would argue it's a chicken and egg problem and that there are not as many because there's not good funding here. Having lived in both the Bay Area and now in Seattle I think he's right--there's lots of talent here and much less funding.

<comment><USER5> True, but I would ask another question then: "Have the startups that have failed to be homeruns or have failed outright failed because they couldn't get the financial resources they need or have they failed for other reasons?"

And if funding is the primary limiting success factor, why don't they just move to where the funding is good?

Knowing what the ecosystem is like in a place like (1) Raleigh, NC; São Paulo, Brazil; and (3) Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; I would suspect that there are a lot more risk factors in Seattle than just lack of funding. Funding helps but it doesn't fix all the weaknesses in an ecosystem.

Good hackers alone does not make it a good ecosystem. How about good UI designers and good bizdev people? Are there plenty of them within the Seattle community? I'd expect that the quality of UI designers and bizdev people contribute more to distinguishing Seattle from Silicon Valley. I know that those were certainly the characteristics distinguishing the three startup ecosystems I am familiar with from Silicon Valley. The presence of UI designers and bizdev people have probably contributed more to the success of NYC as a startup hub than the presence of good hackers. AFAIK, NYC historically didn't have a strong hacker community or culture before it rose to prominence. What it did have is solid base of talented business and design professionals available.

All three markets of those markets had access to terrible funding, but if you were willing to accept the terrible terms, funding could be had.

Where I do agree is that an investor like Kevin helps is in providing _smart_ funding. You'd get access to his network and his experience/advice, however the efficacy of his Silicon Valley network would be of limited use to a startup in Seattle compared to a startup in Silicon Valley.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Or come to Michigan where you can find startups at 2003 era pricing and few angel investor competitors.</comment>


Prism, a new experiment from Mozilla Labs, lets users split web applications out of the browser - <AUTHOR> http://labs.mozilla.com/2007/10/prism/ <comment><USER2> Notice the cheek of the adobe guy for musing about supporting offline storage as being non standard, then pimping the very proprietary and platform limited AIR (let alone flash).

<comment><USER3> I think Mike's absolutely right. There's nothing inherently better about Mozilla's efforts simply because they're non-profit.

You gotta hand it to Mike Chambers though; if there's one thing he's good at, it's spending all day on the internet googling Adobe.

<comment><USER2> lol ! Yes some people are just everywhere.

Well its was more the use of words that offended me. There is something "better" in that mozilla is a non profit committed (and with a track record) of delivering free (in every sense) software. They would only go beyond a standard when they really really really had to (and only until standards caught up).

I do respect adobes chops in the user interface space though, I just think their attitudes to open source (rather, their current leaderships attitudes) are a little pre-historic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Well, I think we have something like that with the Apple Dashboard, it uses WebKit to run some HTML+CSS+JS code on the desktop. At the near future I believe WebKit, Prism and other "embeddable browsers" will be at any kind of place running our web applications.

</comment><comment><USER5> Great, we're getting closer and closer to reinventing the OS and the window manager.

</comment><comment><USER6> if you use a mac and gmail, check out mailplane. it's like this but better for gmail

</comment><comment><USER7> F11. There, done.

<comment><USER8> F11 also resizes the window to fullscreen. The aim of this project seems to be slightly different: Run Firefox without toolbars.

Still, it sounds crazy to have a dedicated project for this. I would think a commandline-option for firefox would be enough.

<comment><USER9> The reddit thread on this has a very insightful analysis of the project's importance.

<comment><USER10> Maybe I'll save someone a little searching:

<http://programming.reddit.com/info/5z4xs/comments/>

<comment><USER9> Yeah, sorry, I was pressed for time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> I like it. Very very cool. Kudos to Mozilla.

</comment><comment><USER11> This is a very disorienting idea.</comment>


Being collateral damage in the culture wars of the West - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@therealsexycyborg/shenzhen-tech-girl-naomi-wu-part-2-over-the-wall-and-into-the-fire-5e8efc5c1509 <comment><USER2> _In April of 2018, when Vice Magazine's lawyers pressured Patreon to drop my account, I had no other options that would enable me to keep my YouTube channel going._

ZOMG that's so evil! She complained that you didn't respect her desire to remain anonymous, so you destroy her livelihood? Why would any source trust Vice to safeguard her anonymity or indeed to do anything they promised after this saga of shitty behavior? Answer: they rely on sources not knowing anything about them, because after all the sources don't have the iron control of the social media "conversation" that Western journalists have.

[EDIT: removed speculation]

<comment><USER3> Well, ok, but why did Patreon agree to drop her account? That seems like important context.

<comment><USER2> Patreon's deplatforming policies are capricious and draconian because they have to keep financial partners happy, and the policies of those partners are capricious and draconian. Those with enough social media and commercial power can deal (in fact if TFA is believed it appears they can actually _steer_ the machine of injustice). The author of TFA cannot deal, which is the entire point of TFA. We always knew in our hearts that "twitter as help desk" was unjust at some level. This is a concrete example of that.

[EDIT:] Now that I've read to the end of TFA, she buried the lede! This woman has been subject to _so much_ shitty behavior! She was the third customer of a Patreon competitor, "SubscribeStar", and one of their largest customers, so the bastards just _shut down the entire site_. Now it appears that it's back up: [https://www.subscribestar.com/posts/7863](https://www.subscribestar.com/posts/7863)

<comment><USER3> Again, okay, but which specific deplatforming policy did they use in this case?

<comment><USER4> Covered here: [http://medium.com/@therealsexycyborg/shenzhen-tech-girl- naom...](http://medium.com/@therealsexycyborg/shenzhen-tech-girl-naomi-wu-my- experience-with-sarah-jeong-jason-koebler-and-vice-magazine-3f4a32fda9b5)

<comment><USER5> I have a solution to your Patreon issues, see my other comment below. I would be very interested in talking to you if collecting Ethereum is an alternative you are considering.

<comment> barry-cotter [https://www.subscribestar.com/naomi-wu](https://www.subscribestar.com/naomi- wu)

Here's another, better alternative, that actually works, right now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's sad that an organization like the NYT would engage in unbecoming behavior to protect one of their own's bad behavior (going against an agreement not to basically doxx someone) and going so far as character assassination because what Naomi Wu claimed went against the NYT's narrative.

<comment> barry-cotter This is the New York Times. This is not unusual. Journalists shit on people who can't hurt them all the time. The New York Times is different only insofar as it can shit on more people from a greater height. Journalistic ethics is a lie.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> There really should be a way to "roll your own Patreon" for individuals. Whatever your individual viewpoints on each of the de-platforming incidents in the recent past, having them all be lumped into one service makes it easier to take down and disrupt the users of said service. I don't think Bitcoin is necessary yet given the amount of additional complexity for the average creator and average patron, just a separate web page that allows for recurring subscriptions.

<comment><USER5> SexyCyborg (and others): I would love for you to check out [https://finneyfor.com](https://finneyfor.com). It is Ethereum based (not Bitcoin), but specifically designed to remove the problems that so many Patreon users have dealt with AND something that an average blog reader can use without understanding cryptocurrency at all (beyond getting some on an exchange like Coinbase).

"FinneyFor facilitates collecting Ethereum (ETH) from your customers (readers, fans, or otherwise). FinneyFor does not require your users have a special browser, nor browser plugins. Collection happens on your site, but requires no server side components."

FinneyFor works with Jekyll and WordPress. Would appreciate any feedback, positive or negative.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Sad story. And just one more stake in the heart of NYT's credibility.

</comment><comment><USER9> Jeong was already infamous for defending[0] the U. of Virginia rape hoaxer[1].

[0] [https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/11/04/report-jury- rules-...](https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/11/04/report-jury-rules- against-rolling-stone-in-fake-uva-rape-story-lawsuit/)

[1] [https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2018/08/03/flashback-new- york...](https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2018/08/03/flashback-new-york-times- bigot-sarah-jeong-defended-uva-rape-hoaxer)

</comment><comment><USER10> Found the story as written by SexyCyborg in the post very hard to follow, plus it felt a little too self serving to take 100% at face value.

I'll admit though, I saw her once on Hacker News the first time she went viral, later read that Reddit "expose" and then promptly never thought of her again. It took a while to walk back what I thought was happening so I could understand what was going on.

This video [1] helped me get the actual context of the article.

The West honestly doesn't come off well in this, but neither does China really. More of the same "are the people with power over others using it with decency and respect?"

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0dkwwV_iaw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0dkwwV_iaw)</comment>


Open offices are bad for us (2017) - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20170105-open-offices-are-damaging-our-memories <comment><USER2> When I worked at a place with taller cubes it was always nice to be able to sit down and clear my mind a bit. It didn't take a full on office with a door or anything, just enough space to be hidden a bit.

After they lowered the walls it was just not possible and going to some random breakout room just wasn't the same.</comment>


The end of clicks for free - <AUTHOR> http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/8215062.stm

<comment><USER2> It seems that the problem is with everybody expecting everything on the web to be free, is just that point, we always 'expect' it to be free. Maybe the key is in changing the mindset of users to expect to have to pay a little for things we need/want, rather than just starting to charge.

Just to contradict myself, if anyone wants to do about a weeks _free_ programming on a Google Maps/Calendar mash-up project that we're going to provide for free to users, we'll swap for a weeks _free_ arts/graphics 2D/3D work. Email in profile if you're interested, hope this isn't against the submission rules.</comment>


Ask HN: How to play the politics game at your company? - <AUTHOR> Inspired by the quitting google thread, I was curious how a new programmer can excel at a company. That is, on paper.
How can we better play by the rules and earn raises instead of having to switch companies? <comment><USER2> There are rules.

1\. Never ever, ever shit talk your coworkers - if you have something to say to someone, say it to their face, or don't say it at all.

2\. Do NOT contribute to the grapevine, only take from it - be a good listener and you will hear all the gossip, news and complaints.

3\. Be social - take time to go out to coffee, drinks, lunch with any and every one you can. This goes double for people in other departments. Accountants are a wellspring of useful information and having them as friends is only to your benefit.

4\. Know the difference between what is a priority (everything) and what is important. The latter is what makes your team/boss look good. All boats rise with the tide.

5\. Don't be afraid to question a decision that you think is terrible BUT make it a question, and have facts and data to back it up...

6\. Your only as good as your last success. Your own failures can be successes, if you screw something up OWN it and FIX IT.

7\. Watch out for people who put politics before their own job. If you HAVE to interact with these types of people getting everything in writing is to your benefit. If your given verbal instructions then follow up with an email that documents the item/issue/instruction - Lines like "I'll get started right away on XXX as soon as ... be creative, theres always a bottleneck, or roadblock you can call out or as for a link to.

</comment><comment><USER3> Be valuable to your team. Make everyone's life a little easier.

Try to sneak into an irreplaceable position, where you can ask for whatever salary you want. Tech is full of these opportunities. As a junior, you are often given unsexy, boring stuff that nobody wants to handle. That's a good place to get lots of leverage.

Be friends with everyone, especially other departments further away. Social ties are a mesh, and the more mutual friends you have with, say, a boss, the higher everyone's opinion of you. If three of someone's friends like you, chances are they'll think well of you too.

Learn to listen well. Listening is something that needs to be learned. This is the easiest way to make friends. It also unlocks most leverage. You'll learn surprising things. Like a subordinate might care more about being in the same department as a cute intern rather than being promoted and getting more pay.

My core rule when dealing with politics is just to know yourself and know your counterparts. Everything else is easy once you do.

<comment><USER4> How do I get leverage out of "unsexy, boring stuff"? Here are some scenarios that I'd like advice on:

\- In an analytics role, the junior is assigned the data cleaning work. It's boring, it requires a lot of dirty, ungeneralizable work. And they don't get to do the modeling work and delivering insights that appear more impressive.

\- A junior SWE is assigned to maintain some in-house software. They squash bugs, but don't get to design new products or present on new launches.

"Everyone agrees" that data cleaning / maintenance is important, but there's hardly visible credit for this kind of work. What's the best way to gain leverage here?

<comment><USER5> _> [data cleaning is] boring, it requires a lot of dirty, ungeneralizable work._

How sure are you that it really is ungeneralizable? Just because it appears that way at first glance doesn't mean you won't find opportunities for automation once you understand the domain and the typical dirt in the data better than anyone else (note: 'dirt' can often be modelled).

And well, once you're the developer and maintainer of the data-cleaning system that has become the company's competitive advantage...

Similarly, bug-squashing is often an opportunity to really understand some important but unglamorous system (eg. payments, or authentication), as managers will notice that bugs in system X are fixed much faster and more thoroughly when assigned to jr. developer Y, and this often leads to becoming the go-to person for implementing new features in that system.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The question worth asking is - how do you excel... at life...

That is the only career question worth asking.

You've placed constraints on it, such as 'new programmer', 'play by the rules', 'earn raises'.

How do you know excelling at life means playing by the rules? How do you know more money means a better life? How do you know you don't want to switch companies?

You don't. The way to find out is to just live your life, and not lose sight of what matters - excelling, at life, by rules YOU set. And they won't be the same rules, they'll change as you grow.

How do you set rules by the way? By following your gut, heart, and intuition, and sometimes what other people say. You so far have it backwards, where what others have said has left no space for following your own instincts, hence the question you're asking.

The biggest regret you can have - is living out somebody else's ideas and life, even if you 'excel'.

</comment><comment><USER7> A good manager will make it so that you don't have to worry about politics. They will be able to inform you what projects are widely agreed to be impactful. Then you can focus on performing well technically on those projects and get promoted.

Your manager should be able to helpfully answer direct questions like, "What do I have to do to get promoted?" If your manager doesn't have a good answer, and you care about getting promoted, you should find a new manager.

Once you become more experienced at the company, you may not need your manager's help at this as much. You'll develop connections within the company and be able to gather widespread support for your projects directly.

</comment><comment><USER8> Office politics change a lot depending on the company.

In general, do not work on what you think it is important. Work on what the management think it is important. If you don't understand why do they think something it is important, ask them.

It is okay to disagree with them, but try to frame it as a proposal and see how much they follow along with your idea. If they don't like it, then do not pursue that project. The job of upper-management is to set priorities.

</comment><comment><USER9> Since you're asking this question, don't try to outmaneuver anyone in office politics. You'll get eaten for lunch.

But since you asked, develop leverage and pick your battles.

It's fine to use a job offer from another company to get a promotion but don't expect it to keep working again and again.

<comment><USER10> Clarifying/amplifying on this:

You can't totally ignore politics. Those who don't do politics will still have politics done to them.

But don't try to "win" via politics. First, it's not your skill set, and it is other peoples' skill set. If you go head to head in politics with them, they'll wipe the floor with you.

Second, who do you want to be? A developer? Or a politician? I absolutely do not want to be a politician.

So do as little politics as possible. And when you do it, do it for defensive purposes - to keep yourself from being the victim of politics.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Switching companies _is_ how you earn yourself a raise.

<comment><USER12> You can sometimes get a raise in the same company, but it is usually harder.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> At my old company the key to advancing was: suck at you job, make big failing projects addressing the wrong issues and lead to bigger longer projects addressing the same issue until you get an entire department assigned to you adressig that issue. Also piss off the people in other departments work against the best intention of the company get in fights with department heads and experts and steal the work and ideas of others.

Not surprisingly a lot of talent fled that company, me included.

</comment><comment><USER14> You'll have to build reputation, which takes time.

Be there for your team and your boss, so you can expect the same in return.

Be blunt and don't sugar coat it with everyone, so as your time/reputation grows inside the company, people will know about you... essentially you would want your reputation to precedes you... this will help you avoid a lot of politics and BS...

</comment><comment><USER15> Work hard to justify the decisions of senior management. Outright refuse bad and low priority work

Discredit other teams through data analysis

</comment><comment><USER16> Hey OP, thanks for asking this question. I read Ask HN regularly and I thought reading some of these responses was beneficial. Now I just need to figure out how to internalize the behaviors. :-)

</comment><comment> alok-g 1\. Think Big. I have seen many people who aimed higher from the beginning and did manage their way up (e.g., becoming a VP in just ten years, that too in a large company).

2\. People skills is a must for the above. You should be thinking of people or organizational challenges all the time, or you'll miss the mindset to rise significantly up.

3\. Many people complain about their team leads, managers or senior leaders. This usually happens because these senior are working at a higher level of responsibility and ambiguity than you are. You should rather be thinking what would you have done if you were in their position. Understand the challenges they have, by directly asking if needed. This will not only help develop your relationship with them, but also position you to develop the skills needed faster, without yet being in the position of responsibility that they are in!

4\. There is a lot of entropy in any team/organization, and unfortunately also a lot of people who are increasing it. Be the one who reduces the risks and brings order to the chaos, whose judgment can be trusted. Keep in mind for this that the real challenges are often not on technology side (in other words, if you think technology challenges are more critical, you are perhaps missing the big picture).

5\. Try to become irreplaceable for the team/company in your project and beyond. In my experience, this will not come in your way as [6] suggests. You must however not get limited to the tools and technologies specific to the company, or else your market value will suffer within a few years.

6\. Never say (or even feel) anything bad about anyone ever, keeping Hanlon's razor in mind [1]. But then, how do you deal with the stupidity? Well, their stupidity is your opportunity. (I created this out of Jeff Bezos' famous quote, "Your margin is my opportunity." [4])

7\. Do not let yourself be masked from political issues around. A good manager would aim to mask you [5], but that can curb your growth since you won't develop the skills needed to master and survive corporate politics while being masked.

8\. There are books available today that teach you corporate politics [2-3], showing how easy it is for anyone to do it, and how difficult it is to counter. Reading these books should be a required reading for anyone aiming to go significantly high. And trust me, it's better to learn this from books or from other people's experience than learning this stuff the hard way. (The latter would be painful for one, and second, you may never actually learn.) I have read [2] and felt that I should have read it earlier.

9\. Ask questions whenever you do not understand something or if your own thoughts do not align with the decisions being made. Of course, be polite in this (e.g., "I was wondering if option X also has been considered" instead of "why are we not going for option X"). People around would be happy to explain to you while also developing trust in you, and often would take the suggestion if it will actually reduce their mental burden. The sooner the better in asking questions.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor)

[2] [https://www.amazon.com/dp/0743262549/](https://www.amazon.com/dp/0743262549/)

[3] [https://www.amazon.com/dp/0312332181/](https://www.amazon.com/dp/0312332181/)

[4] [https://www.inc.com/jessica-stillman/7-jeff-bezos-quotes- tha...](https://www.inc.com/jessica-stillman/7-jeff-bezos-quotes-that-will- make-you-rethink-success.html)

[5] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16488447](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16488447)

[6] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16489904](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16489904)</comment>


C-mera – Lisp syntax with C semantics - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/kiselgra/c-mera <comment><USER2> There's also xtlang by Andrew Sorensen [1], which layers s-exprs, macros and closures with static types on a low level machine model with C-like semantics (LLVM IR).

[1] [https://extemporelang.github.io/docs/reference/types/](https://extemporelang.github.io/docs/reference/types/)

</comment><comment><USER3> At a first glance seems similar to Carp [1] and Scopes [2].

[1] [https://github.com/carp-lang/Carp](https://github.com/carp-lang/Carp)

[2] [https://bitbucket.org/duangle/scopes/wiki/Home](https://bitbucket.org/duangle/scopes/wiki/Home)

<comment><AUTHOR> I see it as more similar to cl-cpp-generator ([https://github.com/plops/cl- cpp-generator](https://github.com/plops/cl-cpp-generator)). It's not a new programming language: it's a Lisp surface syntax for C that inherits Lisp metaprogramming capabilities.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Interesting! I see potencial here for using this as the last step in a x to C transpiler.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes. I see this as interesting if you want to generate human readable idiomatic C code as the backend of a transpiler for a DSL. That's different to most of the other links being posted on this thread.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The worst of both worlds

</comment><comment><USER6> Is there anybody that has experience with any of these? I have tried to play for a day or so both with xtlang and Scopes and was disappointed. At the time when I tried Scopes it was not even clear how to properly manage memory. In the case of xtlang I wasn't able to hot swap a function definition at runtime and I didn't understand whether it was me doing something wrong or rather this capability was completely missing from the language.

<comment><USER2> I'm no xtlang expert, but I've seen first hand Andrew and others hotswapping functions on the go, so it is definitely supported. Ben Swift [1] is the guy who has written a lot of the guides and documentation, and when I met him he was really friendly and approachable.

[1] [https://cecs.anu.edu.au/people/ben- swift](https://cecs.anu.edu.au/people/ben-swift)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> There's also Dale [1].

[1] [https://github.com/tomhrr/dale](https://github.com/tomhrr/dale)

</comment><comment><USER8> This reminds me of a macro language in CL that attempted to be a Turing complete replacement for the C pre-processor. It worked really well actually, but this project seems to be similar but better.</comment>