artyomkazak

Do notice how the answer to “Are the Yankees the best team in baseball?” has changed from “Yes.” to “We used to think so.”

Doesn't really matter what it's written in as long as its logic is easily extendable by someone who doesn't know Ruby. Preferably without having to code at all.

Why yes, I agree that the vast majority of people aren't very high in the Humanity Table of Records (to put it mildly). However, I think that if you're trying to set the world ahead purely to appear higher in the record table, you're misguided.

I'm not saying I can't understand the human desire to be liked, or adored, or remembered after your death, or considered to be the Best Human to Ever Live on This Planet. I can. But what I can't understand is why so many people try to justify such feelings.

> Each generation that goes by, your relative contribution is halved.

I prefer a different way of measuring contribution: suppose that (for simplicity) the checkpoints on the progress of humanity are fixed and the only difference you can make is to delay or accelerate reaching the next checkpoint. Your contribution is how much time you've won or lost for humanity. Then contribution stops being relative – if you've made future happen five years earlier, this is permanent, period. Your children and grand-children will arrive into their respective futures five years earlier, too, because of you.

> that too is usually a rounding error.

There are no rounding errors! Why do you think that just because you can see how much you've influenced one person thru parenting, but can't see how you influenced the entire world thru your actions, the first influence is somehow “bigger”? Yes, it's epsilon, but it's epsilon × world. And the world is big.

(By the by, the same logic applies to voting – yes, your contribution to the final decision is small, but since the decision itself is so important, in the end your contribution doesn't turn out to be less than contributions from your other decisions.)

Only if you base your evaluation of “outcome” on what will happen to you, completely ignoring the effect you've had on this world.

Which is why I am disappointed with this game and utterly false “wisdom” it's trying to convey.

Thanks for telling! (I've written a bit of a response here: http://artyom.me/learning-racket-2#gus_massa-from-hn .)

Which is exactly why I was very surprised when it got posted to Reddit and wasn't immediately downvoted.

Pascal is strict, but it still has stuff like “move(var1, var2)”, out parameters, etc., so it's also call-by-reference.

I didn't know at the time that Racket was call-by-value.

Quote was confusing at first, yes.

I think this was a cached thought – a year ago I was reading a bit about Lisp and probably had stumbled upon what is known as the Lisp Curse.

Of course I couldn't summarize Racket in a page – I don't know it! And there's so much to learn about it that I could probably write half a hundred posts of this length and still consider myself a beginner.

There are lots of tools which allow sending typo reports instantly to the author, e.g. http://orphus.ru/en.