That little bit of trivia makes this extra funny. For me anyway.

Pro gamblers simulate problem gamblers, so they can bet more.

I said, "Casino's can't survive off casual players. They need the addicts to make payroll"

> To what degree is this true?

I don't know the ROI. It's hyperbolic, I'll freely admit that.

But I think there is an important point. We let problem gamblers gamble more, and it's not fair pros take advantage of that dark pattern.

1) casual players

2) problem players

3) professional gamblers.

so basically casual players gamble something like 50 bucks a year. Problem gamblers get money however they can (and although it's unstated and I have no evidence, I think this is where the actual money comes from). And finally, people that can snipe the mispriced bets, and make a lot of money.

Feels sort of submarine-ish. Casino's can't survive off casual players. They need the addicts to make payroll. The pros eat up casino margins.

I dunno. Feels like a "I run a business, but I'm not really good at it so we need laws to force the pros out". Please don't regulate me, but regulate who can play.

Interesting that it's in Bloomberg. Interesting that the casinos are so bad at laying odd they lose. I have no sympathy for anyone but the addicts. Those folks are sick and need help.

IMHO, it's a lot easier to write compilers in Haskell or ocaml, for a bunch of reasons. you might take a look at https://wespiser.com/writings/wyas/00_overview.html which walks through writing a scheme implementation in Haskell.

Do what's fun. I think both of those are worth poking at.

If I had to put scheme in production, I think I'd pick racket. I think that would give me the best chance at helping other dev's get set up, explain the problem, and show the solution. anta40 asked about packages, and racket has the db interaction as part of the normal distribution, I see there's a mongo client in the package manager, but no idea about firebase. I guess wrap the cli?

Racket has been ported over to the chez backend, and got a big performance pop. And they've done stuff with arrays instead of lists, immutable lists. Pointer chasing is always going to have certain tradeoffs.

As much as I love scheme, it's going to be a fringe language. Small shop, that can be ok. You need to hire 50 people? yeah, that's not really going to work out I think.

anta40 also mentiond stuff like Haskell and Ocaml. I feel like those are much easier to refactor, the compiler helps so much, you just chase errors and feel good about code staying correct. scheme, I feel like I just throw it away and start over.

For personal stuff, language doesn't matter, think harder, you'll find a way out.

For "team" stuff. Ugh. That really depends on how dysfunctional the team is. I think go is a pretty solid default. But everything is very textured and nuanced. Just you? go with what you know. Wasting time ramping up on a shiny new thing won't ship. You have a mostly working team? Keep doing that. add linters or whatever to improve code quality.

Screwing around with a weekend project that might turn into something big? Racket seems like the path of least resistance. it's a hard question to answer optimally.

If you can be relaxed and think of the interaction as play, they're very good. If you're feeling more of a "serious business" mindset, it can be hard to get in the groove of his style.

There are a lot of jokes about food and encouragement to take breaks. If you can get into the learning as play mindset, I'd strongly encourage taking the recommended breaks. maybe grab a snack, but spend some time noodling around with the ideas in each section. I think that's the real point, food is a good excuse to pause and get your hands off the keyboard.

Racket should be easy to install. Big download button for a ton of platforms here - https://racket-lang.org

I believe HN still runs on the racket runtime. it may appear to be a toy, but thoughtful design can take you a long long way. it's well supported and a great way to get started.

If Friedman doesn't work out for you, the racket docs link to how to design programs - https://htdp.org/2024-8-20/Book/index.html Which is also pretty darn good.

The other classic is the wizard book - https://sarabander.github.io/sicp/html/index.xhtml the structure and interpretation of computer programs. This'll walk you up to and somewhat through compilation.

There are a ton of programming languages all with amazing assortments of features.

Scheme is much more "there's nothing left to take away". I think it's very much the undisputed champion in that regard. While still being able to ship software. Scheme may not be the optimal choice for all people in all situations (obviously). It's a spectacular place to start though. It may not turn out to be the language for you. That's totally fine! But it'll get you deep enough to figure out what you like and don't like. And, when it comes down to it, you can shape it into pretty much anything.

Yeah, I hope you enjoy the little schemer.

Look past the "loading the whole book in memory" the author gets to the point soon enough.

The ip address example is ok. It's true, and highlights some important points. But keep in mind pointers are 64 bit. If you're not ipv6, and you're shuffling a lot of them, you're probably better off just keeping the uint64 and converting to string and allocating the struct as needed. interning doesn't appear to be much of a win in that narrow case. but if you do care about ipv6, and you're connecting to millions of upstreams, it's not unreasonable.

It's neat it's available. it's good to be aware of interning, but it's generally not a huge win. For a few special cases, it can be really awesome.

** edit uint32 for ipv4. bit counting is hard.

Real engineering is expensive. And hard. moving atoms around is tough. I've never cut stone, but I've melted and cast copper and aluminum. That's real and dangerous work.

Computation is cheap and plentiful. And I kinda like having full control of "stuff". But maybe we do need licensing or personal liability. If I could wave a magic wand, and make that exist, I don't really know what rules I'd put in place.

How do you think people should get skilled up?

I've got some mild tinnitus. I always wonder if it's my brain listening to itself. That little recursive loop is enough to distract me, even if it's not true.

There may be some long repeats, but not all sequences repeat. Thanks!

    01000100

If I buy a $1000 dollars worth of stock, and use that to secure a $1000 loan. ok, fine, I don't see why that should be taxed at all. But if the lender believes the stock is worth lots more, and offers a $2000 secured loan, something's going on there.

I don't think it should be as much as actual capital gains, because it's not actually turned into cold hard cash. And there's still risk of the underlying asset price falling.

But if the lender says my $1000 is worth $2000, I'm getting some benefit of the higher value. And I can see why that would be taxed. I'd really want to see the details. probably that tax should be deducted from capital gains when finally realized.

I dunno. it's complicated.

She primarily worked with sexual abuse victims, but spent a lot of time veterans as well. Her focus was PTSD, and talk therapy is really effective for PTSD.

Her opinion was, in world war 1, They didn't really have the psychologic or physical frameworks to really distinguish. Certainly, some people had mechanical damage, like football players. Certainly, some people really had a hard time experiencing the horrors of war. They just didn't really know.

Calling it shell shock, that helped some of the veterans. Helped them sorta get that they're not alone. People have dealt with this for a long time.

Rape victims, shell shock isn't a great name. For a lot of reasons.

It's kinda about recognizing that this trauma is a real thing, there's nothing wrong with you. This is a normal reaction, everyone goes through it. Some people need a little help finding their way back to normal.