Hacker News: User23

New comment by User23 in "430k-year-old well-preserved wooden tools are the oldest ever found"

User23 — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 04:21:12 +0000

I've felt for a long time that the field relies rather a bit too hard on absence of evidence being evidence of absence.

New comment by User23 in "A list of fun destinations for telnet"

User23 — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 15:35:52 +0000

SillyMUD branches will always have a special place in my heart. Who doesn’t love leveling up in Sesame Street?!

How to Write a 21st Century Proof (2011) [pdf]

User23 — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 05:46:20 +0000

Article URL: https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/pubs/proof.pdf

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46285208

Points: 24

# Comments: 3

New comment by User23 in "Ruby Symbols"

User23 — Fri, 21 Nov 2025 07:05:38 +0000

I meant more that symbols are a data structure with function and value slots. Last I knew strings, interned (which is also a Lisp reference) or not don't have that.

New comment by User23 in "Ruby Symbols"

User23 — Tue, 18 Nov 2025 14:05:02 +0000

That’s really not true for Lisp.

Ruby, like its predecessor Perl, is one of the finer examples of Greenspunning and shows a lot of Lisp influence.

Unfortunately I can’t read the actual submission right now due to the cloudflare outage.

New comment by User23 in "They Thought They Were Free (1955)"

User23 — Sun, 21 Sep 2025 14:49:02 +0000

This has been true in the USA since approximately 1965, at least. Analysis has shown the general public has absolutely no say in policy making; literally everything is for this or that influential “special interest.”

This is borne out in the erosion of what we now euphemistically call the middle class along basically every dimension that matters.

Some of the heat here is on account of members of this community are, or at least are used to being, special interests that have had a powerful voice in previous administrations and less of one in the current one. But let’s not pretend this is some sort of creeping fascism, it’s just a different faction of elites making their own plays.

New comment by User23 in "Less is safer: Reducing the risk of supply chain attacks"

User23 — Sat, 20 Sep 2025 05:53:47 +0000

Has there been a supply chain attack with an LLM conduit yet? Because that would be spicy and is assuredly possible and plausible too.

New comment by User23 in "Asynchrony is not concurrency"

User23 — Sat, 19 Jul 2025 01:36:55 +0000

Asynchrony, parallelism, concurrency, and even deterministic execution (albeit as a degenerate case) are all just species of nondeterminism. Dijkstra and Scholten’s work on the subject is sadly under appreciated. And lest one thing this was ivory tower stuff, before he was a professor Dijkstra was a systems engineer writing operating systems on hilariously bad, by our standards, hardware.

New comment by User23 in "Show HN: Ten years of running every day, visualized"

User23 — Mon, 14 Jul 2025 12:30:28 +0000

Some people get literally high when running. Some don’t. The get high types invariably posture as if they have more dedication or willpower. Funny stuff.

New comment by User23 in "They tried Made in the USA – it was too expensive for their customers"

User23 — Wed, 02 Jul 2025 17:56:44 +0000

It took decades to gut American consumer manufacturing. Anyone who thinks it can be brought back without pain is deluded. But nevertheless, it’s worth that pain.

As the Chinese are well aware, every time in history a great financial power and a great industrial power have come into conflict, the industrial power wins.

New comment by User23 in "Central Park hits temp record last seen in 1888"

User23 — Tue, 24 Jun 2025 13:31:28 +0000

Given that we basically use the same technique for censuses today, the ancient ones probably weren’t especially less reliable.

New comment by User23 in "Scientists genetically engineer a lethal mosquito STD to combat malaria"

User23 — Mon, 16 Jun 2025 19:05:47 +0000

Next do ticks.

New comment by User23 in "The Art of Lisp and Writing (2003)"

User23 — Mon, 16 Jun 2025 13:34:09 +0000

> You can’t avoid parentheses

Well, you can with reader macros, assuming you’re willing to consider an init file that you only look at when you write sufficiently avoidant.

It’s not done though, because experience has shown it’s not really worth it.

New comment by User23 in "The Art of Lisp and Writing (2003)"

User23 — Mon, 16 Jun 2025 13:30:10 +0000

Have you seen LOOP[1]? That example barely scratches the surface too.

As for being able to make words mean different things and break grammatical strictures; that’s called poetry when we do it in English. And yes there is bad poetry, but some is superlative.

[1] https://www.lispworks.com/documentation/lw51/LWRM/html/lwref...

New comment by User23 in "Peano arithmetic is enough, because Peano arithmetic encodes computation"

User23 — Sat, 14 Jun 2025 18:02:45 +0000

Canonically indented Lisp reads an awful lot like Python. You don’t read the braces, you read the indentation.

New comment by User23 in "Cysteine depletion triggers adipose tissue thermogenesis and weight loss"

User23 — Thu, 05 Jun 2025 21:47:40 +0000

I would make a stronger statement and say that this belongs squarely on the effect and not the cause side.

I could be wrong, but I doubt it. Amino acid depletion sounds way more likely to be due to some kind of disruption in homeostasis rather than dietary intake.

The Natural Rate of Interest is Zero (2005) [pdf]

User23 — Wed, 04 Jun 2025 21:42:28 +0000

Article URL: https://moslereconomics.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/The-Natural-Rate-of-Interest-is-Zero.pdf

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44185875

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by User23 in "Machine Code Isn't Scary"

User23 — Wed, 04 Jun 2025 11:11:00 +0000

This is super cool!

Creating an assembler with Lisp syntax and then using that to bootstrap a Lisp compiler (with Lisp macros instead of standard assembler macros) is one of those otherwise pointless educational projects I’ve been wanting to do for years. One day perhaps.

New comment by User23 in "Why does the U.S. always run a trade deficit?"

User23 — Tue, 20 May 2025 12:33:05 +0000

More precisely it’s because the EU has no fiscal unified fiscal policy. Every member is a currency user of a foreign currency it must acquire from the ECB.

Wynne Godley explained this all nicely in Maastricht and All That.

New comment by User23 in "The effect of physical fitness on mortality is overestimated"

User23 — Mon, 19 May 2025 02:16:57 +0000

All else being equal a more fit person is more likely to avoid an otherwise fatal accident.