Hacker News: acdw

New comment by acdw in "My thoughts after using Clojure for about a month"

acdw — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 03:29:01 +0000

In CL and Scheme, it's (let ((var1 val) (var2 val)) body...). So parentheses are used for grouping and function/macro application. In Clojure, parens are just used for application, so you have e.g. (let [var1 val var2 val] body...), or (defn foo [x] ..) or (cond testa 1 testb 2 ...).

It takes some getting used to, and I do wish Clojure would do something more like (let [[var1 val] [var2 val]] ... .. though of course then you'd have to figure something else out for destructuring.

New comment by acdw in "My thoughts after using Clojure for about a month"

acdw — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 03:25:53 +0000

I have heard of Smalltalk and it is intriguing but honestly I don't even know how to get started with it lol

New comment by acdw in "My thoughts after using Clojure for about a month"

acdw — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 03:25:30 +0000

It's ok because I'm a hobbyist programmer!

New comment by acdw in "My thoughts after using Clojure for about a month"

acdw — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 03:25:04 +0000

I use Emacs's built-in structural editing bindings, which doesn't have the auto-move-past any kind of paren/bracket thing. Maybe I could add that in.

But I was talking about like, when refactoring, I'll maybe change something from a list to a vector, and I have to change the delimiters at front and back. Or, where electric-pair does do the move-past-all-parens thing when I just spam ), it doesn't do that with ]}]}]]}}]})).

New comment by acdw in "My thoughts after using Clojure for about a month"

acdw — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 03:21:48 +0000

This is very much what I meant in the post (hi, I'm the author :P)! CL has maps, but they're a pain to use - not just because of the syntax, but because of the relative dearth of standard library functions to work with them compared to say, lists or even vectors.

New comment by acdw in "My thoughts after using Clojure for about a month"

acdw — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 03:19:33 +0000

Oh I've written an SSG in multiple variations of lisp, as well as sh, make, and most other languages I toy around with. It's been a good "kick the tires" project but I think I need a new one.

New comment by acdw in "Brave overhauled its Rust adblock engine with FlatBuffers, cutting memory 75%"

acdw — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 16:52:40 +0000

HAHAHAH Hell yeah that's praxis baby die mad about it

New comment by acdw in "Meow: Yet another modal editing on Emacs"

acdw — Sat, 13 Sep 2025 03:47:06 +0000

> What works best for me is no modal editing at all.

I used vim for 8 years and after switching to Emacs, realized that I'm the same. I was spending way more time (in vim) thinking about (to borrow another commenter's metaphor) how I was going to play the notes than what notes I was going to write.

New comment by acdw in "AI crawlers haven't learned to play nice with websites"

acdw — Tue, 18 Mar 2025 14:13:09 +0000

could you share the code for that? thinking I could set up a fail2ban rule for these ips

New comment by acdw in "I am rich and have no idea what to do"

acdw — Thu, 02 Jan 2025 23:34:31 +0000

seriously, study after study shows that just giving people money is the most effective form of altruism. just give it away. go to your city's homeless shelter and give money away. write a check for your local school board. keep everything anonymous. give it all away.

New comment by acdw in "Ask HN: Why isn't having two or three careers the norm?"

acdw — Wed, 27 Nov 2024 01:24:58 +0000

I remember reading long ago that the average person changes careers 6 times. So that means that half of everyone changes more than 6 times.

New comment by acdw in "Smallest Typeface"

acdw — Fri, 29 Dec 2023 04:06:50 +0000

> Please do not post this article to Hacker News.

oop!

New comment by acdw in "Americans Are Pulling Cash from Their Retirement Savings to Pay Bills"

acdw — Wed, 29 Nov 2023 15:15:40 +0000

honestly I'm so sick of this attitude. it's the same as the recycling push...when like a dozen companies are creating the vast majority of pollution, there's not a lot us little people can do. HSAs are a symptom of an extremely broken system. we should fix the system, not max out on our HSAs (if we even can...see the other replies to this post)

New comment by acdw in "Tell HN: We should start to add “ai.txt” as we do for “robots.txt”"

acdw — Wed, 10 May 2023 19:01:04 +0000

$ cat ai.txt no $

New comment by acdw in "Tell HN: We should start to add “ai.txt” as we do for “robots.txt”"

acdw — Wed, 10 May 2023 19:00:50 +0000

$ cat ai.txt no

New comment by acdw in "Why Lisp?"

acdw — Sun, 07 May 2023 17:43:26 +0000

so Lisp is actually not a pure language, like, at all. Emacs is often written about as a big hairy ball of state and Lisp itself can be as imperative or statefule as you want. So while I don't know much about what you're designing, Lisp wouldn't be necessarily a bad choice.

New comment by acdw in "Speak English to me: The secret world of programmers"

acdw — Fri, 17 Mar 2023 13:27:46 +0000

I agree, and I've seen more "blogs" on GitHub lately. it's very annoying.

New comment by acdw in "Speak English to me: The secret world of programmers"

acdw — Fri, 17 Mar 2023 13:26:06 +0000

I really wish people would stop writing blogs in naked GitHub repos.

New comment by acdw in "Show HN: boxxy – Control where Linux programs put files, without symlinks"

acdw — Thu, 09 Feb 2023 23:21:26 +0000

I humbly submit either bash, sh, or zsh --- they all put dotfiles in $HOME that you can't move (zsh technically /can/, but they're still dotfiles and you have to set them in ~/.zshenv). Very annoying IMO.

Course, might not work so well with the way boxxy is run ... unless you chsh to boxxy bash or something.

New comment by acdw in "Ask HN: Would You Work for Elon?"

acdw — Wed, 16 Nov 2022 16:26:09 +0000

God no LMAO