Hacker News: aidenn0

New comment by aidenn0 in "Why Target Common Lisp for Code Generation?"

aidenn0 — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 22:04:41 +0000

Can python properly reload an import yet? I complained about the lack of ability to do that about a decade ago, and was told that people were "working on it."

New comment by aidenn0 in "Why Target Common Lisp for Code Generation?"

aidenn0 — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 18:37:37 +0000

JavaScript has many (most?) of the language features that were cited as making Lisp "for the elite" when I was first learning programming. It also has a few that would have been considered esoteric (prototypal inheritence and async come to mind)

New comment by aidenn0 in "Why Target Common Lisp for Code Generation?"

aidenn0 — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 18:35:52 +0000

Some thoughts in no particular order:

1. FWIW, the older I get the larger a fraction of EWDs I disagree with.

2. If you take something wrong and reverse it you are usually left with something wrong.

3. Many of the language features that were cited as making lisp "elite" when I was a kid exist in Javascript. Lexical closures were treated like some mysterious thing that you need to study on a mountaintop and become enlightened to get are now used daily by workady front-end programmers.

4. Democratization isn't necessarily about deskilling, it's about making skills accessible to more people.

5. Having and celebrating those who are elite is good. "X is only for elites" is bad.

6. Literally nobody in my 3rd grade class had any issue programming in a dialect of lisp in the computer lab. Certainly some were better than others, but I wouldn't call something that even half the population can do as "for elites only"

New comment by aidenn0 in "License plate reader searches should require a warrant"

aidenn0 — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 00:05:49 +0000

FWIW, several states already offer electronic plates (targeted at companies with fleets to manage).

New comment by aidenn0 in "Why Target Common Lisp for Code Generation?"

aidenn0 — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 23:49:46 +0000

And people who do so have been a punchline for a long time:

https://megatokyo.com/strip/70

New comment by aidenn0 in "Why Target Common Lisp for Code Generation?"

aidenn0 — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 23:47:16 +0000

I've been programming in Common Lisp for a quarter century and that list item made me cringe.

New comment by aidenn0 in "Why tiny JPEGs look different in Chrome"

aidenn0 — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 15:03:50 +0000

I've noticed that a lot of objective measures of image quality prefer blur to ringing, but many subjective measurements tilt the other way.

New comment by aidenn0 in "Everything you do is being recorded"

aidenn0 — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 13:56:01 +0000

Car keys usually use a wavelength of 1 meter; networking on your phone is going to be typically shorter than 15cm (though varies widely based on geographic region and carrier). A faraday box for your phone might not work for your car keys.

New comment by aidenn0 in "Unitree As2-W"

aidenn0 — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 00:08:31 +0000

Seems like that would significantly raise the center-of-gravity making it less stable?

New comment by aidenn0 in "Unitree As2-W"

aidenn0 — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 00:07:49 +0000

Maybe a Multiple Use Labor Element?

New comment by aidenn0 in "NixOS is more complicated than you think but OpenCode fixed it"

aidenn0 — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 23:51:31 +0000

Did you see the 26 minute long video?

New comment by aidenn0 in "NixOS is more complicated than you think but OpenCode fixed it"

aidenn0 — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 03:39:04 +0000

It took several hours to do the first time, and it will take several hours to do the next time. Sounds repeatable to me :)

New comment by aidenn0 in "John C. Dvorak has died"

aidenn0 — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 03:31:11 +0000

More likely they wrote the obit several years ago. That's not uncommon.

New comment by aidenn0 in "John C. Dvorak has died"

aidenn0 — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 03:29:43 +0000

Had he acted in real life the way he did on c.l.l, I strongly suspect he would have been punched a lot more often. Certainly one eulogy I read of him led with the sentence: "Erik Naggum was the first person I killfiled in GNUS." On the other hand, I have heard only good things from people who interacted with him one-on-one though (whether in-person or electronically).

His technical content was almost always high-quality, but one would often need to first don one's Nomex suit to get to said content.

New comment by aidenn0 in "NixOS is more complicated than you think but OpenCode fixed it"

aidenn0 — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 02:39:45 +0000

I'm not sure how much of this is complicated because of NixOS; going this far off the beaten path would be rather complicated in any distro.

I'd be a lot more sure if the author had posted their nixos configuration somewhere...

New comment by aidenn0 in "LEDs’ potential to save our night skies"

aidenn0 — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 19:00:11 +0000

Yes, I was wondering if they really last longer than sodium-vapor lamps, which last about 5 years at a 50% duty cycle.

New comment by aidenn0 in "That post never existed. Stop listening to that thing"

aidenn0 — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 18:50:19 +0000

New comment by aidenn0 in "That post never existed. Stop listening to that thing"

aidenn0 — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 18:49:05 +0000

I have never lived in SF but I have failed similar Chinatown-during-lunar-new-year tests in all 3 places I lived for more than a year. I have no doubt that an AI, particularly one that continually gets traffic update from some external source, would do better than I in predicting such hiccups. OTOH, an unconstrained LLM seems very likely to route me down streets that don't exist at least some of the time. If only we had some sort of database of actual streets and routes that were capable of checking the work of an LLM...

I see the same thing with LLMs in software development. If you say "find a bug in this code" it will regularly confabulate bugs. If you ask it for a test-case, run the output through some deterministic thing that tries the test-cases, and tells the LLM it's wrong, the output of that system will mostly be legitimate bugs[1].

For now, transformer-based generative AIs seem at a minimum like a very useful tool for dealing with "squishy" problems when you have some way to validate their output. Many of the 404's to the blog are probably people validating the output of generative AI, which is the opposite of the inference made in TFA.

1: It will also occasionally hack your test-runner; I suppose that's also finding bugs, just not in the software you wanted to find bugs for.

New comment by aidenn0 in "Show HN: I replaced a $120k bowling center system with $1,600 in ESP32s"

aidenn0 — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 15:57:07 +0000

Is Troup bowling without using the thumbhole? That was a no-no when I learned bowling, with conventional wisdom being it would put a ceiling on your performance.

New comment by aidenn0 in "ECC and DDR5"

aidenn0 — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 15:44:39 +0000

Besides electrical noise, there are mechanical issues as well. I've seen systems fail memtest86+ after being moved, and the issue being fixed after reseating the DIMMs. ECC can catch mis-seated DIMMs very quickly.