Hacker News: MycroftJones

New comment by MycroftJones in "Claude.ai unavailable and elevated errors on the API"

MycroftJones — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 18:55:32 +0000

And claude is back up.

New comment by MycroftJones in "Getting Started in Common Lisp"

MycroftJones — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 08:27:58 +0000

Claude has been doing a pretty good job at writing newlisp code, reasonably idiomatic too. newlisp is a niche language.

New comment by MycroftJones in "An Algebraic Language for the Manipulation of Symbolic Expressions (1958) [pdf]"

MycroftJones — Sat, 08 Nov 2025 17:36:48 +0000

I like how the McCarthy's paper maps the fundamental operations to machine instructions and memory model. It's like something you can actually implement.

New comment by MycroftJones in "Jacobi Ellipsoid"

MycroftJones — Mon, 30 Jun 2025 22:38:27 +0000

That page didn't have a formula, in either cartesian or polar coordinates, for the shape of the object. Lots of formulas, but I didn't see anything I could use to create a 3d mesh and print one of these things out on my printer.

New comment by MycroftJones in "Genesis: an interpreted, Turing-complete Paleo-Hebrew programming language"

MycroftJones — Sun, 07 Aug 2022 10:17:23 +0000

Gematria number system is a comparatively modern invention. Researching the old weights, measures, and coins of Israel show good evidence that the Egyptian number system was used, which is a somewhat decimal numbering system. Would be very cool if this language used the ancient Egyptian number system instead of this new-fangled gematria stuff. Then the numbers would be visually very distinct as well.

New comment by MycroftJones in "Cakelisp: A Programming Language for Games"

MycroftJones — Mon, 21 Dec 2020 04:24:54 +0000

Have you looked at newlisp? It has pretty seamless interop with C pointers.

New comment by MycroftJones in "Definitely not Windows 95: What operating systems keep things running in space?"

MycroftJones — Mon, 05 Oct 2020 07:08:39 +0000

Short answer, to save you reading the article: VxWorks. But there may be more interesting info on pages 2 or 3 of the article. I am curious how VxWorks manages the update procedure. How does it do what it does. How is remote debugging in space using VxWorks; is it anything like the Lisp stuff that JPL used to do?

New comment by MycroftJones in "Haskell language features and standard libraries in pure Python"

MycroftJones — Wed, 23 Sep 2020 07:17:59 +0000

Glad to hear he said that. He is right.

New comment by MycroftJones in "The Common Lisp Condition System – Upcoming Book"

MycroftJones — Thu, 16 Jul 2020 21:55:15 +0000

Amazon generally has a "pre-order" option. If there was a pre-order option, I also would order your book. By the time your book is in print, I will have forgotten about it. Fascinating topic; nice to see good coverage. I always felt that callbacks and exception handling left a little something to be desired. It looks like you've addressed that.

When your book is in print and available for sale I hope you post again here as a reminder.

New comment by MycroftJones in "Static Type Checking in Common Lisp"

MycroftJones — Mon, 26 Aug 2019 18:12:52 +0000

A fexpr (funny expression) is a runtime macro. It is a funcall where the arguments are evaluated at runtime not compile time. picolisp, newlisp, and I think lisp 1.5 had fexprs.

New comment by MycroftJones in "Insect 'apocalypse' in U.S. driven by 50x increase in toxic pesticides: study"

MycroftJones — Sun, 11 Aug 2019 18:24:14 +0000

Where is this 1k/acre land in Canada? Is it in a place where you can do these following things? a) build a house b) buy it an acre at a time c) grow a reasonable crop d) be within reasonable distance to a city and the markets thereof

In Canada particularly, climate is an issue for growing crops. Wheat takes 100 days to mature. The growing season in the prairies is 110 days. If the climate drops 1 degree Celcius you lose 10 days off your growing season. If your growing season is delayed by cold or flooding, you don't get a crop that year. In the prairies it takes about 10 acres to sustain 1 cow year round. Throughout Canada there are all kinds of restrictions about how many houses and people you can have on your land. The concept of "starter house" and "starter farm" doesn't exist anymore. There is the nobility, and there are the serfs. We just don't call them that.

New comment by MycroftJones in "Swedish Couple Builds Greenhouse Around Home"

MycroftJones — Sat, 22 Jun 2019 18:03:27 +0000

I define "winter" as the time honeybees don't fly. Summer bees don't fly below 13 Celsius, and winter bees don't fly below 8 Celcius. Winter bees are the first ones out of the hive in spring, raising up the summer bees for the big harvest.

New comment by MycroftJones in "9front (Plan9 fork) man pages in print form"

MycroftJones — Sat, 25 May 2019 04:59:57 +0000

Thank you Stanley. Been wanting this for a long time.

New comment by MycroftJones in "Running a Bakery on Emacs and PostgreSQL"

MycroftJones — Tue, 26 Feb 2019 16:45:52 +0000

I notice recently that the hipsters over on Metafilter are trying to smear bread bakers as "brogrammers" and "neckbeards". What is wrong with them.

And you are right about the rising time. I do an 8 hour rise. Doctor Carrie Reams said that the rising time breaks down the phytates which in turn releases the calcium into a form that the body can digest. 2 hour rise doesn't do that.

New comment by MycroftJones in "The Discoveries of Continuations (1993) [pdf]"

MycroftJones — Fri, 16 Nov 2018 08:50:21 +0000

page 6 of the PDF, a continuation is essentially the return address of a subroutine call. But then there are scoping rules that interact with that simplicity.

New comment by MycroftJones in "The Discoveries of Continuations (1993) [pdf]"

MycroftJones — Fri, 16 Nov 2018 07:11:29 +0000

I've read the first few pages. Looks like an interesting paper and I'll read it further. Only flaw is that it doesn't cover Steve Russell being the first to discover/invent continuations. Steve Russell was the first implementor of LISP, and gave it its final syntax after McCarthy did his design work on it.

New comment by MycroftJones in "How Lisp Became God's Own Programming Language"

MycroftJones — Tue, 16 Oct 2018 19:04:02 +0000

Yep. And back in the 1970's Chuck Moore wrote a book describing the implementation and design of FORTH, and it is pretty close to LISP. And I asked Chuck Moore directly, in person, if there was a connection to LISP, and he said "yes".

New comment by MycroftJones in "The Eternal Life of the Instant Noodle"

MycroftJones — Sun, 30 Sep 2018 01:53:24 +0000

Thank you, I'll take a look. I thought they were cooked in oil, how would I find out if they were air or oil fried?

New comment by MycroftJones in "The Eternal Life of the Instant Noodle"

MycroftJones — Sun, 30 Sep 2018 01:46:23 +0000

This DanBC has poor comprehension, I specified that IN CANADA, whole wheat flour is free of enrichments. By law. Any grain product that isn't whole grain, is enriched. By law. I reached out to CFIA (Canada Food Inspection Agency) which is in charge of such things, and they told me what the regulations are.

New comment by MycroftJones in "The Eternal Life of the Instant Noodle"

MycroftJones — Sun, 30 Sep 2018 01:39:32 +0000

In Canada, whole wheat flour doesn't contain these additives. I spoke to the CFIA (Canada Food Inspection Agency) and they told me their rules and regulations. Whole wheat doesn't have additives, anything else does. America may be a different story, but I don't live there.