Hacker News: armitron

New comment by armitron in "Food processing influences metabolism and brain activity"

armitron — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 08:59:21 +0000

Zero calories doesn’t mean it’s healthy, as all those drinks are loaded with artificial sweeteners some of which have a strong insulin response and are also associated with cancer.

New comment by armitron in "Why Common Lisp is now the best programming language"

armitron — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 17:00:19 +0000

Yes I’m sure. Take a careful look at Symbolics Genera or even Emacs and you will realize that functional has nothing to do with it.

New comment by armitron in "Why Common Lisp is now the best programming language"

armitron — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 09:56:06 +0000

Almost nobody programs in functional style in Common Lisp, even though it’s possible. In the vast majority of CL programs there’s tons of global state and yet one learns quickly how to architect and structure the program in order to make image based development and runtime code modification a breeze.

So no, the magic sauce is not “functional”, it’s that CL stemming from the Lisp Machine paradigm is designed for that sort of experience whereas something like Python very much isn’t. And it shows (there’s no image based development in Python that doesn’t end up creating more problems than it solves but image based development is not only the norm in CL but also tremendously empowering).

New comment by armitron in "Blindsight (Watts Novel)"

armitron — Sun, 04 Oct 2026 19:40:06 +0000

The book is layered with ideas and meta-ideas some of which are allusions and need to be deciphered rather than spelled out. Which is also I guess why the “smart idiots” don’t like it or think it’s pretentious and boring. It’s a work that rewards attention and deep contemplation.

New comment by armitron in "Amazon introduces a redesigned Kindle family"

armitron — Sun, 04 Oct 2026 09:56:00 +0000

I am surprised that Kindle isn’t dead yet just based on Amazon horrible business practices and the fact their product is a DRM hell fest that shoves anti-consumer behavior down your throat. People are either too lazy or love being sheep I guess.

I’ve had a Kobo for many years, with calibre sideloading and managing my DRM-free library of ePUBs fully owned by me, and never looked back.

New comment by armitron in "Amiga Screens: A Primer"

armitron — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 21:57:28 +0000

Productivity modes were used a lot with the AGA machines. By that time, VGA monitors were cheap and plentiful.

New comment by armitron in "Amiga Screens: A Primer"

armitron — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 21:53:50 +0000

That's one reason why adding fast ram (= exclusive access by the CPU) to an Amiga 1200 doubled the speed of the machine for most workloads without changing the CPU.

New comment by armitron in "We Should Be Able to Change Our Languages"

armitron — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 11:08:26 +0000

I spent years programming in Objective-C and loved it, it became one of my favorite languages. Swift has been a colossal letdown, as in "what were they thinking?!" but unsurprising if one pays attention to how macOS has (re|pro)gressed in the last decade.

New comment by armitron in "The disjointed Prague of Deus Ex: Mankind Divided"

armitron — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 16:16:24 +0000

If you can look past the dated graphics, the OG Deus EX is by far the better game and one of the best games of all time. The writing and philosophy alone elevates the game to masterpiece status. They dumbed down down these core elements in sequels to focus on better graphics and simpler mechanics and these games are far worse for it.

New comment by armitron in "Three important steps in my maturation process"

armitron — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 05:01:54 +0000

Your particular interpretation of the author's choice in words tells us more about your psychological makeup than the author.

Take the "meta-cognition" advice to heart and perform some self-debugging in order to determine what exactly in your psyche made you react in this way.

New comment by armitron in "Autolith: A programming agent with a live runtime"

armitron — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 04:43:52 +0000

This is not just false but egregiously wrong. The regular syntax of Lisp is a tremendous asset when it comes to LLMs being able to work directly in the image. If I had to score languages by how well they work with current LLMs, Common Lisp and Emacs Lisp would be at the very top.

New comment by armitron in "U.S. Debt Hits $40T as America's Borrowing Binge Continues"

armitron — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 03:39:15 +0000

The Department of Defense has never received a clean opinion on a full financial audit. Since starting comprehensive yearly reviews in 2018, the Pentagon has failed eight consecutive enterprise-wide audits due to scale, missing records, and untrackable assets.

Federal Government Made $236 billion “Improper Payments” Last Fiscal Year: https://www.gao.gov/blog/federal-government-made-236-billion...

The only propaganda I see here is coming from those who are so out of touch of reality that they firmly believe there's a chunk of the uniparty that doesn't increase the deficit.

New comment by armitron in "Clamiga: Common Lisp for the Amiga"

armitron — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 03:53:00 +0000

I suggest author renames to AmigaCL.

New comment by armitron in "Reticulum – Decentralized Mesh Network"

armitron — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 03:43:33 +0000

No published specification, single Python implementation. Shame, as this solves a problem that badly needs to be solved well.

New comment by armitron in "FDA Admitted in Print That Nothing It Knows of Will Wash Cyclospora Off Lettuce"

armitron — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 19:17:09 +0000

It wasn't fine for decades. Both democrats and republicans allowed regulatory capture to take place.

New comment by armitron in "Eight Myths on Software Engineering and GenAI"

armitron — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 02:11:08 +0000

This reads like a critique of 2023 tooling published in 2026. Their Amdahl-style arithmetic (speed up a 14% slice, cap your gains at 14%) holds only if "AI" means autocomplete. Current frontier models do far more than that: research, code comprehension, review, test authoring, debugging, exploratory prototyping, ideation. That's most of the rest of the working day or "86%".

The only point that still holds is that organizational policies and procedures that automate AI use and lower the barrier to entry are more efficient than leaving it up to each individual. Every other point they make is either stale or was never true to begin with.

New comment by armitron in "In Memory of My Wife, Elise Cawley, with Thanks for 36 Wonderful Years"

armitron — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 01:49:11 +0000

Wolfram is obviously a genius but, like a lot of geniuses, so ahead of his time that he'll be recognized, maybe, decades after his own death.

New comment by armitron in "Samsung demonstrates 3D stacked FETs with triple nanosheet channels at 42nm"

armitron — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 16:52:59 +0000

This seems like it could accelerate the transition to sub-1nm nodes (previously projected to mid 2030s), maybe by the end of this decade.

New comment by armitron in "15-minute at-home Lyme disease tick test"

armitron — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 13:23:04 +0000

That must do wonders for antibiotic resistance.

New comment by armitron in "How memory safety CVEs differ between Rust and C/C++"

armitron — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 03:27:57 +0000

Experts know that copy/pasting and/or reimplementing code is not an issue in practice regardless of how often it comes up as an anti-pattern in freshman CS courses. The (amalgamated) software system can still be audited in reasonable time as long as the number of third party dependencies is kept low.

Rust has thrown the baby out with the bathwater in that regard resulting in software that is practically impossible to audit without putting in enormous effort.