Hacker News lacks a few distinguishing features that are characteristic of modern corporate social media: in particular, algorithmically driven feeds based on engagement metrics optimized for an advertising business model. The closest you get to that on here is the main page featuring YC companies from time to time (which is a far cry from a Tik Tok rabbit hole).
That being said, voting mechanisms which change the order of user-contributed content is hallmark of social media shared by Hacker News. I like to think, though, that this place has a strong enough community to prevent the voting dynamics from devolving to what you see on the most politicized subreddits. (I'll mention that the quality on here is in no small part the result of dang's diligent moderation, btw!)
An interesting message board to compare Hacker News with in this regard is actually 4chan. The former is maybe less social media like inasmuch as we have no inline images here, so there is no room for the sort of meme culture you see on the latter. On the other hand, 4chan is entirely bereft of voting (and even accounts to assign karma to, although reusable tripcodes come the closest), and as such is in some ways even more egalitarian (in contrast to non-anonymous social media).
> My feed is about 30% content I've asked to see or would want to see, the rest junk (AI crap, far right rage, far left rage).
Since we both seem to use Facebook in the same way, I'll just point out that you can reduce the junk to 0% by skipping your timeline, and going to Feeds: https://www.facebook.com/?filter=all&sk=h_chr
That will give you a feed of pages you've followed, and doesn't have any algorithmic or suggested content. I think the only pitfall is that it only shows you recently posted content.
I wouldn't recommend Land of Lisp for beginners. It assumes a lot of basic Lisp knowledge and diverges from a lot of convention. If you're just starting out on your Lisp journey I'd recommend Touretzky Common Lisp: A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation, which the author has a PDF of online for free.
I worked through the first 9 chapters of the Touretzky book as a preparation for PAIP recently. It's very thorough. If you work through the exercises in the book, you'll learn a lot.
there's a reason why people on forums and chans consistently recommend land of lisp over other books, it's deliberately imperfect in a way which appeals to a certain kind of young hacker's mind. it doesn't assume basic lisp knowledge, it assumes you're going to type the program in without understanding and then figure it out from exploration. it also assumes that you won't understand the whole program immediately or even after reading the whole book. it's a different didactic approach, and is modeled after author's personal experience of learning how to program by typing BASIC programs from magazines. as such the programs are deliberately "misarchitected", they are somewhere between scripts and hacks that present a variety of ways in which common lisp the standard allows you to solve this or that problem. they are also designed to be "tasty", compact and quirky, as opposed to well structured, plodding and dogmatic. they are lifted directly from a wizard's laboratory and they invite play.
by comparison touretzky is a college level slog, solid, dependable coursework, that takes you over all the proper subject matter in a way that's certain to be approved by any computer science department committee, but that fails to create any sort of motivation to engage.
The phrase was made famous in an influential essay[0] by Richard P. Gabriel, where he laments Lisp's relative failure to compete with Unix.
In Gabriel's opinion, Unix proved to follow the more adaptive design strategy in certain ways (in spite of his involvement with and admiration for Lisp), and the phrase "Worse is better" is meant to capture the essence of that advantageous strategy (as outlined in the essay).
The essay is worth reading and is a bit more elaborate than just saying "less is more", or "keep it simple, stupid".
Pardon me, but can we clarify what you mean by saying that "masks aren't helping much"? Do you mean that masks are not effective in stopping the spread of COVID on an individual basis? Or do you simply mean that as a matter of policy, mask mandates have failed to stop the spread of the virus throughout the population in general?
What would be particularly nice is if it became the norm for LLM users to be expected to not only supply the log of prompts that produced a given output, but also the specific LLM, making the entire process reproducible and verifiable.
Of course this would possibly exclude using SaaS-based LLMs like ChatGPT in places like schools, and as such it might make sense to require students to only utilize open ones. Or maybe, if OpenAI provided a verification service whereby a prompt could be checked against the output it supposedly produced in the past at some point (even if the behavior of the chatbot had since changed).
> They're busy thinking about much more important things.
Generally I agree (because the content of modern mathematics is largely abstract), but to nitpick a bit, number theory is part of mathematics too!
Ramanujan and Euler, for example, certainly cared a lot about 'arithmetic', and historically, many parts of mathematics have been just as 'empirical' in terms of calculating things as they've been based on abstract proof.
That being said, voting mechanisms which change the order of user-contributed content is hallmark of social media shared by Hacker News. I like to think, though, that this place has a strong enough community to prevent the voting dynamics from devolving to what you see on the most politicized subreddits. (I'll mention that the quality on here is in no small part the result of dang's diligent moderation, btw!)
An interesting message board to compare Hacker News with in this regard is actually 4chan. The former is maybe less social media like inasmuch as we have no inline images here, so there is no room for the sort of meme culture you see on the latter. On the other hand, 4chan is entirely bereft of voting (and even accounts to assign karma to, although reusable tripcodes come the closest), and as such is in some ways even more egalitarian (in contrast to non-anonymous social media).
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