eggsyntax's comments

Many people have been misled by LLMs into believing they have an important breakthrough when they don't. If you think you have a breakthrough, please try the reality checks in this post (the first is fast and easy). If you're wrong, now is the best time to figure that out.

Yeah, that's it exactly. For me there's a power and an ease of flow that comes from having the REPL in the context of your running software, with access to program state and the easy ability to modify your code as it runs without having to restart anything or lose state, that's really unbeatable.

So far: complex data visualization, transportation logistics, voting-related nonprofit, medical research, and augmented analytics. I like to explore new domains :)

> It's just incredible what a surplus value this dude alone provides to the ecosystem)

Seconded; it's pretty jaw-dropping!

> The tight feedback loop you have while molding a running program in your editor and the constant dopamine drip feed it causes are just too addictive.

Well-said -- I've been needing to write some Python recently, and it's only redoubled my preference for Clojure; the Python shell is a poor substitute at best for the Clojure REPL :(

> read an article about how niche languages can be lucrative. (I want to say that article was here on HN but too lazy right now to search for it)

I'm not having any luck finding it -- if you find yourself more eager (heh) I'd love to get a link.

I can say that I (like many others) have built a thriving career on Clojure. I like to change jobs every couple of years, and I've never yet had any trouble finding a Clojure job I'm excited about (and I only consider well-paid remote jobs with friendly teams with companies doing something I feel good about). The community is mostly active on the Clojurians slack (currently ~24,000 users) and clojureverse.org.

So -- it's a niche for sure, but a very successful niche, and one that many people are very happy in. There aren't a ton of jobs out there relative to, say, Python, but there are also fewer people competing for those jobs, so it works out fine for individuals. It can be tricky to find your first Clojure job, but I think that's true in most languages.

I plan to stick with it for the foreseeable future, because there's no other language that I like nearly as much, or can be nearly as productive in.

I switched a few years ago from MBP to ThinkPads running Ubuntu (with Gnome). It's been an overall improvement for sure, and there are very few things I miss (iTerm2 is the big one; there's no Linux terminal emulator that has all the advanced features I loved in iTerm2 like incremental search/highlight/copy. Gnome terminal with tmux is...acceptable). And of course it's much cheaper; on both computers (P51 and X1 Extreme) I paid about 2/3 what I would have paid for a MBP.

The big downside is battery life. On both the ThinkPads I've had, the battery life has been roughly 4-6 hours, despite my attempts to improve it with Powertop and/or TLP, and despite keeping the external graphics card shut down. I find that pretty painful; I like to work outside most of the day when the weather's decent, and now I have to be meticulous about plugging in whenever I go inside for a bit. If it weren't for having it charge up over lunch, there's no way it would make it through my day.

Some folks seem to get better battery life with some ThinkPads running Linux, but I haven't been able to pull it off. In fairness, I do a fair amount of CPU-heavy work -- but I was doing the same kind of work on MBP, and the battery life was much better.

Thanks, that clarifies it completely!

There are two things I found confusing in the first part of the guide (ie the part up to "Reading the Source"). The first is 'where', which is addressed in another thread on this page. The second is this:

  This is a proper list:
  
  (a b c)
  
  and this is not:
  
  (a b . c)

Could someone clarify how to interpret '(a b . c)'? How would it be represented in the non-abbreviated dot notation for pairs? It's not '(a . (b . (c . nil))' -- is it '((a . b) . c)'? The only Lisp I'm fluent in is Clojure, so I'm not used to the dot notation; otherwise this might be obvious.

May not qualify as cheap, but I believe 23andMe will tell you about the genes you've got which control your CYP1A2 levels, and predict your coffee intake accordingly.

Will you point out where it says that? I really did find this paper unusually cryptic about concrete takeaways.

Table 2 suggests that to match the performance of studies 3 and 4 (done by other researchers), which each gave 600 mg of caffeine, they were able to cut the dosage down to 500 mg and 400 mg respectively. But it's not clear to me that they're recommending that as the overall optimum, and that's the only place I'm finding "600" in the paper.

"It's alertness effects go away after repeated use and subsequent tolerance building"

Link to evidence? I don't remember seeing anywhere in the literature that caffeine stops being effective when used daily and long-term, nor does it match my own experience.

Thanks!

"even Rich himself has been converted"

I'd love to know where you learned this, or why you believe this. I'd be very interested to hear what he had to say about the change of heart.

My company's also been using 1.9 alphas for months, have maybe encountered a minor bug or two, but very few & nothing major.

Thanks so much for the post -- I've been wrestling painfully with some of these exact issues off and on for the last six months (particularly getting the vim/fireplace/cljs toolchain working properly). It's actually really heartening to hear that it's not just me ;P

National Climatic Data Center - http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov - Asheville, North Carolina

Scientific software developer, full-time

NCDC is the world's largest active archive of weather and climate data, and a leading source of climate research. I'm part of a new project that aims to take some of the key software here and bring it in line with modern software standards (a lot of it has grown organically over many years, and has been mostly written by scientists, not professional developers). In some cases that means rewriting it; in others it may mean surrounding it with better infrastructure: automated tests, better configuration management, better deployment practices, thorough documentation etc. It's a small team (you'd be the fourth dev), and a really strong one. We care a lot about bringing better software practices to our day to day work (for the sake of our own sanity and morale) and to NCDC as a whole (because the global climate record deserves nothing less).

We're looking for someone who's smart, passionate, and likes making important things better. You've got to be comfortable picking up new languages on the fly, and new domain knowledge as well. Good (English-language) communication skills are a must. Some background in the physical sciences or scientific software would serve you well, as would experience with large refactoring and rewriting projects. Decisions about languages and tools are being made on a project-by-project basis, and you'd be a big part of those decisions (all else being equal, we have a fondness for Python, but performance and user community buy-in have a big effect on language choice for these projects). You should be able to get behind the idea of using best-practice approaches for projects where reliability and long-term viability matter a lot.

Asheville (http://www.exploreasheville.com/) is an amazing little mountain city nestled in the Blue Ridge Mountains. It's a fantastic place to live. You could think of it as a smaller version of Portland, OR and not get it too wrong, although it's definitely got a character all its own.

Please feel free to contact me with questions (eggdavisjs(at)novonon(dot)com), or you can apply for the position at http://gst.iapplicants.com/ViewJob-624553.html . No H1B or remote.

Here's the pricing, which took a little while to find: https://vuo.org/subscription

Relevant new Wondermark comic: http://wondermark.com/969/

I've had really good luck with certain kinds of minimalist music. In particular, Simeon Ten Holt's "Canto Ostinato" seems to actively help me focus: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDCsOL2vBJc Most performances are well over an hour, so a nice little side benefit is that you don't have to spend much time picking and changing music.