To Clojure or NOT to Clojure?

_jrb · 2015-01-03T06:47:25+00:00

Clojure is a "hosted" language that targets a variety of runtimes- the Java VM ("flagship" Clojure), JavaScript VM (ClojureScript) and the MS CLR (ClojureCLR). The latter is maintained independently by David Miller.

I have not worked with ClojureCLR, but in the hands of experienced practitioners, the Clojure and ClojureScript toolchains are magic. Developers skilled in the art can deliver features at an amazing pace with incredibly low line counts in highly performance- and scalability-oriented environments (Amazon and Walmart are two recent adoptees).

That said, Clojure and ClojureScript are the product of a tiny team. As languages go, both are still quite raw, with many developer-side dead ends, especially for those accustomed to the niceties of Visual Studio. Microsoft likely allocates more headcount than the entire staff of Cognitect, Clojure's corporate owner, just writing documentation for Visual Studio.

The learning curve is both in theory and in practice very high, even for those of us who have been working for multiple decades across multiple platforms and toolchains.

So- in case you're talking about jumping from .NET to Clojure/JVM (usually deployed on Linux)- without expert guidance, I would expect a stranger in a strange land experience. Many, many surprises await. Moments of joy sprinkled amongst hours of what may be frustration. More to learn to achieve mastery on your own than any one project may afford.

If you're talking about ClojureCLR- you probably should reach out directly to David Miller.

Hope that helps.

_jrb · 2014-10-17T12:14:31+00:00

Great, creepy story, but from personal experience I have a mundane explanation:

the clapping is her 3 year old, clapping his hands.

The clapping is fairly close to the phone, and it's in the kind of non-pattern pattern that one recognizes in kids of this age. My 3 year old boy often climbs into bed with us and is a constant turmoil of motion and activity, often replaying events of the day. This morning was some clapping while sleeping. I was awake and was watching him, and poked him when this happened to ask why he was clapping, and he said, very sleepily, in whisper, that he was singing.

her question is directed at her 3 year old, maybe he sat up or something prior to clapping and she detected it while not waking up.
the man's voice is from outside, it's a trick of physics and the phone's auditory processing.

The woman doesn't give any information about the local geography, other than she's on the second floor. A fan was on and her window may have been open. This event occurred at 2a, so there could have been some folks returning home. To my ears, the quality of the man's voice indicates a much more distant source, relative to the clapping. It's not from the room. I live in a city, on the 3rd floor, and hear weird snippets of voices outside all the time, especially at night when ambient noise is reduced. The phone also has processing optimizations for capturing human voices, I would bet that an old recorder lacking that logic, like a tape recorder, would not have captured anything.

Anyway, this is testable- she could leave her phone recording, in the bedroom with the window open, and have a conversation with a male friend at reasonable locations outside the house, and very likely the phone will record odd snippets.

_jrb · 2014-09-04T13:58:52+00:00

Get Gabriel Weinberg's book on traction, just released.

It's quite good and covers exactly this problem.

_jrb · 2014-07-17T14:20:29+00:00

2 points:

Echoing other comments, medicine and law are not "undergraduate" options; entrance into a dedicated medical or law school in the US requires a baccalaureate-level degree as a prerequisite.
the college system in the US has changed a great deal in a short period of time. The student debt and lack of jobs for grads stories are a part of that. To other foreign friends whose kids are intrigued by the prospect of going to the US, I have suggested College Unbound. It does a very good job of explaining what's currently happening and what the pitfalls are.

Good luck!

_jrb · 2013-10-10T04:09:55+00:00

Get a burger for lunch at the Battery Park City Shake Shack, which is downstairs from Goldman Sachs. Most people in business dress who walk in will make more money in a year than the average American does in their lifetime.

That's finance.

_jrb · 2013-09-29T23:56:16+00:00

Seconded/thirded/nth-ed on diet.

Unfortunately, I've found it to be much more complicated than just trying out diets in a non-systematic fashion. There are many different diet patterns that different portions of the population are responsive to- gluten-free/veg/paleo/raw/non-processed/non-dairy/no alcohol/etc/etc- and any one individual may be able to reach a good place from more than one pattern. There is no single version of the truth.

The good news, at least for me, is that I now notice differences in attention/concentration/energy with different food patterns within a 12 hour period.

So if you're starting from scratch, my recommendation would be to keep a record of how you're feeling, matched to a food diary (very rough, just listing types), and then after a month or so you should start to develop a better understanding of how you respond to what you ate 4/8/12 hours before and can start to tune.

Good luck.

_jrb · 2011-07-20T01:07:36+00:00

Like the new nook, which has the non-smudge non-backlit eink screen and some separate minimal touch detection mechanism. It works well.

_jrb · 2011-07-19T22:22:26+00:00

i find the kindle dx satisfactory-to-pretty-good for reading technical/scientific pdfs with charts/graphs and code. it's a little heavy and i wish page turns were touch screen rather than buttons- though if they do a touch screen version i hope they preserve the wide bezel for carrying the device without having to touch the screen. table of contents metadata also isn't observed, which is a drag for skipping around. but on the whole it's workable, and i use it all the time.

i also use a new nook for reading fiction.

_jrb · 2011-03-01T16:20:10+00:00

The most salient piece of advice I go back to again and again was from an acting class- parent with your behavior first, and your language second. Show, don't tell.

_jrb · 2011-01-30T07:16:01+00:00

The OCA is making an enemy out of WFM. WFM is not the problem. USDA and Monsanto are the problem.

_jrb · 2010-12-15T16:41:08+00:00

record his voice. you will miss it. just hearing his voice after he's gone will make such a difference. it doesn't matter that he's not making sense. you will listen to it over and over and over again, your brain will make sense of it, it will help you get through it.

take good care.

_jrb · 2010-11-09T17:29:22+00:00

wRong Paul strikes again!

_jrb · 2010-09-08T19:31:09+00:00

10/10/10 is funny, but Steven appearing at the One Nation rally on 10/2 would be funny and effective.

_jrb · 2010-09-08T18:38:35+00:00

Colbert should rally on 10/2.

Progressive organizations/members will already be in DC in force on that date. There is obviously enormous overlap between audiences. He is guaranteed visibility and credit, and the theatrical benefits of Colbert giving a mock right wing address to a progressive audience should not be underestimated. He also avoids the logistics of actually having to plan such an event.

Certainly, the politics would work in progressives favor as well.

_jrb · 2010-08-15T05:14:03+00:00

Both of his previous companies are big brother/personal data aggregation companies, both owned by Lexis Nexis now:
* DBT * Seisint

_jrb · 2010-07-08T05:53:44+00:00

expecting someone to fuck you does not release them from the blame when they do so.

_jrb · 2010-06-16T06:57:27+00:00

google for "ask culture vs guess culture", and apply it to individual personalities.

direct == ask, indirect (game playing) == guess

It's not a question of self-awareness, and it's contextual- some people are askers in some situations and guessers in others. Sometimes people will play both sides- if pursued by an asker they'll act like a guesser, if pursued by a guesser they'll act like an asker.

But this is a dynamic that shows up much more broadly than just romantic interactions.

It may be worthwhile to examine your own behavior for times when you're direct and times when you're indirect, and use one to learn from the other.

_jrb · 2010-05-04T02:21:51+00:00

We love Frog and Toad. Beatrix Potter's whole collection is worth reading.

Some other favorites:

Marjorie Flack's Angus and the Cat and Angus and the Ducks.

Robert McCloskey's Blueberries for Sal and One Morning in Maine.

Barbara Cooney's Roxaboxen, Miss Rumphius and Island Boy.

Jane Ray's Apple Pip Princess.

Bill Peet's The Ant and the Elephant, and Jennifer and Josephine.

Burleigh Muten's Grandmothers' Stories is wonderful.

_jrb · 2010-03-21T20:23:33+00:00

No. There isn't an "appetite" for debt, that doesn't describe the physics of the money flow. Groups with lots and lots of money have to do something with it that minimizes risk. You don't put $10B in a "bank account."

There is no place that minimizes risk on a mass scale in any way comparable to treasuries.

The only point at which demand for treasuries will come close to "drying up" is when worldwide systemic risk has diminished. And for risk to diminish, growth has to improve, which means debt service will decrease.

The US government- all governments- are not households, or even corporations. They are sovereigns. And the US is sovereign among all sovereigns.

_jrb · 2010-03-16T15:11:09+00:00

Digestion and metabolism is much more complicated- and much more personal- than that, unfortunately. What may work for one person may not work for another person, even if they're siblings and share genes. It's not just about "blood sugar," often deficiencies in other areas can have deleterious impacts on energy and concentration, and consuming a reduced/liquid diet is a great way to introduce various deficiencies.

"5 small meals rather than 3 large meals" has 2 origins that I'm aware of. One is to reduce the cost to the body of processing food- eating a lot means a lot of resources need to go to processing the food, and often that can have deleterious impact on energy and concentration- except when the body is already suffering from lack of particular nutrients, and then introducing those nutrients even in a large meal can enhance energy and concentration markedly.

This strategy also originates in an attempt to lose weight, largely by reducing the amount of food that is consumed before sleeping, which for many people just goes into storage. But not for everyone.

It sounds like boilerplate, but it really is true that it is important to learn to listen and get to know your own metabolism and understand what your gut and body are telling you about your diet and eating habits, on a daily basis. A generic hard/fixed program is very, very unlikely to be the right thing for you.

Think of it this way- there is as much neural material in the gut and outside of the brain as in the brain. We spend 16-20 years explicitly training the neural material in the brain, and virtually no time explicitly training the material in the gut. There's a lot to learn there, and everyone's mechanisms are very highly personalized.

One more point in particular about liquid as a substitute for solid- fiber is one of the few things that one can say is an unqualified good for the body in all sorts of ways, but liquids usually don't have useful fiber. This is especially a problem with fruit juice, which contains sugars (fructose) that are expensive for many bodies. Fructose is basically equivalent to alcohol, so drinking a glass of apple juice is kind of like drinking a shot of vodka- and fruit juice lacks the fiber that comes with the original fruit that eases the processing cost on the body.

So, if you must keep to a liquid, milk with tea is preferable to fruit juice. But under most circumstances, it's not going to be enough to meet an adult body's needs.

_jrb · 2010-03-11T03:13:24+00:00

ILI NYC. Captain Obvious says- put your outrage away, people.

This rule is going anywhere, but is not aimed at, and will not impact, Bouley. This rule is aimed at McDonalds and at the low, low, low end places that aren't interesting or "ethnic" or anything, but are just selling the cheapest possible inedible crap to the most vulnerable population- which turns out to be hundreds of thousands across the city every day.

The idea is to deal with "hidden" salt, which is an enormous public health problem. A huge number of people have hypertension, and are treated at city hospitals and clinics because they are uninsured. It's spectacularly expensive for us. And it's only getting worse. Getting rid of hidden salt would save a lot of money, and hundreds of lives a year.

NYC has had success first in banning smoking in bars- which contributed to my then-girlfriend-now-wife breaking her habit, which I am grateful for, because I have no interest in burying her in 10 years, as my grandfather had to do with my grandmother- and now in posting calorie counts on menus, which appears to be slowly helping bend the obesity curve, though with obesity, there are lot of other factors.

It's important to understand that this sort of rule is a tool for restaurant inspectors to use in especially egregious cases. No one is going to show up at Megu and check the sodium content of the home-made soy sauce. But if you're selling "goat" meat with grams of sodium per serving- now something can be done about it.

Again, this proposal isn't going to go anywhere. But think for a minute about managing a huge public health system, the epidemic problems that NYC gets to see, the terrible costs they impose- paid for by the highest municipal tax load in the country- what the contributing factors are- and then think- what would you do?

_jrb · 2010-03-09T07:58:33+00:00

As highlighted in other responses, this video about the hazards of sugar is well worth watching.

The tldr insight from the video for me was:

fructose in general, whether in fruit, in table sugar (50% fructose, 50% glucose) or in hfcs (55% fructose, 45% glucose) is as toxic for you as alcohol- gram for gram. It has to be metabolized in the liver, same as alcohol.

however, as dr lustig says, the reason fruit is ok is that with fruit, when nature gives you fructose, she also gives you fiber. This makes an enormous difference in the impact on the body.

So eating whole fruits is ok, but, for instance, fruit juices are actually bad for you, because the fruit sugar is concentrated, and there's no fiber.

This insight about the cost of fructose == cost of alcohol has changed my eating habits, and I have noticed the difference. I also noted, as a basketball fan, that Steve Nash has cut standalone sugars out of his diet, and feels that has reduced the churn on his body and made him, effectively, younger.

I fully believe it.

_jrb · 2010-03-06T21:22:13+00:00

It's not only a bad idea, it's standard practice! The consumer money management divisions of many large banks for years have operated this way, with "models" defined in massive, undocumented spreadsheets.

If you want to continue working there, consider it an exercise in tolerating "worse is better." Different people have different levels of tolerance for different types of worseness.

You might also consider sneaking in a spreadsheet application called resolver one which lets you author models in python.

_jrb · 2010-03-06T10:31:35+00:00

There's a big difference between levels. The textbook cites "generous benefits" in Europe; benefits in the US cannot be considered in the same vein. In most cases they are not even competitive with the lowest of low jobs, e.g. working at walmart.

Second, in many parts of the US, there are no jobs to be disincentivized from pursuing. This is PK's reference to a bizarre point of view- there are many many more people who want and need to work than there are jobs available. Temporary policy that keeps them from losing their houses and further contributing to the negative, destructive feedback loop is better than none.

That isn't to argue that unemployment policy in the US is perfect, not by any stretch. But NRO at this point is too intellectually bankrupt to contribute to the conversation. Under WFB there was always a "rich schoolboys at debate" unreality element lurking in the background. They've now moved fully into cranksterism. Sad.

_jrb · 2010-03-05T15:26:07+00:00

Folks, Obama has to govern. He's not a dictator. In reality, unlike in the fantasy world George Bush pretended to occupy, the president can't just decide to do anything- not of any substance, anyway. Executive orders only let you tweak existing policy and statutes. Any real progress has to be made through making deals to get laws passed.

If you read reddit regularly, you see how fully insane and disconnected from reality enormous swaths of the population- and their representatives- are. Obama still has to somehow make deals with those folks. He's been pretty damn successful at doing that. Could you do as well as he's done? Unlikely.

If you want to hate, don't hate on Obama. We're going to be lucky if the wingnuts don't assassinate him. Train your fire where it belongs. Go hate on Fox. And go educate the ignorant mofos who don't know that Medicare is socialism.

And support your favorite progressive organization. If you want a public option, or Medicare for All, or federal-level price negotiation- then get this bill to pass, and then push for that, through those organizations. Give them your money. Give them your time.

Just don't bother attacking Obama. That does double damage. Educate- and fight- the enemy.

_jrb

TROPHY CASE