Hacker News: bjoli

New comment by bjoli in "Bijou64: A variable-length integer encoding"

bjoli — Fri, 29 May 2026 16:05:17 +0000

Having all numbers be valid in only one way is a great idea. So much that I believe webassembly enforced canonical leb128, at the cost of decoding speed.

And say you have it as part of some other data. If you want to be able to hash it by the raw memory bytes, many different ways to represent a number becomes a problem.

New comment by bjoli in "Migrating from Go to Rust"

bjoli — Tue, 26 May 2026 05:44:54 +0000

> if left unattended for 5 min.

Is THAT how people use AI? I thought _I_ was vibe coding by telling it to write one function at a time and making sure I understand every line it outputs.

New comment by bjoli in "Didgeridoo playing as alternative treatment for obstructive sleep apnoea (2006)"

bjoli — Tue, 26 May 2026 03:59:31 +0000

I remember a violin player back in my youth Orchestra days who always wanted to sleep in the same room as woodwond players (3 people in every room) because "string players snore".

New comment by bjoli in "Lisp in Web-Based Applications (2001)"

bjoli — Fri, 22 May 2026 11:15:34 +0000

Using delimited continuations in a web framework is magic. In remember the first time I saw things like pharo and wodered how it was even possible. Doing that stuff in Python is still hard. Doing it in racket is easy peasy.

New comment by bjoli in "Haskell Foundation 2026 Update"

bjoli — Thu, 21 May 2026 06:03:15 +0000

It is just a runtime, no? I have only ever heard about it as something to run their own bend programming language.

Are people targeting it as a runtime for Haskell as well?

New comment by bjoli in "Gemini 3.5 Flash"

bjoli — Wed, 20 May 2026 13:49:24 +0000

I let it loose on a f# codebase that I know was pretty optimized but with a few low hanging fruit changes that would have a big impact.

3.1 Pro did NOT find them. 3.5 flash did. Plus one I hadn't thought of that may or may not work (which it also pointed out).

I'm pretty impressed.

New comment by bjoli in "7 lines of code, 3 minutes: Implement a programming language (2010)"

bjoli — Mon, 11 May 2026 06:00:05 +0000

I think it is a lovely experience just because it forces you to think about which abstractions are the correct ones. I think many people have had the feeling that they would love to change one (or many) aspects of a programming language.

I have been playing with an s-expr based language that compiles to f sharp, and it has made me realize how much I think Rich Hickey made some very lovely choices for clojure. I have never written clojure more than just for fun, but the more in think about my own toy language, the more highly I think of Rich Hickey. Many times because of the choices he made, but even more because of how he compromised to be able to interop with java.

New comment by bjoli in "Wi is Fi: Understanding Wi-Fi 4/5/6/6E/7/8 (802.11 n/AC/ax/be/bn)"

bjoli — Mon, 11 May 2026 04:16:15 +0000

Slim to none, I would guess.

New comment by bjoli in "Wi is Fi: Understanding Wi-Fi 4/5/6/6E/7/8 (802.11 n/AC/ax/be/bn)"

bjoli — Sat, 09 May 2026 06:49:33 +0000

Inwas about to buy a pair of those, but then I saw the new mikrotik wifi 7 router (and probably upcoming access point) with thread radio.

Now every other brand is dead to me.

New comment by bjoli in "Harvard doctor believes we've been getting cholesterol all wrong"

bjoli — Tue, 05 May 2026 09:22:53 +0000

I folllowed him on YouTube for a while until he presented one of those new meta analysis on cholesterol (half a year ago maybe?) studies in a way that was highly uncritical. He forgot to mention that the meta analysis mentioned the Minnesota coronary experiment, which is a pretty blatant omission.

New comment by bjoli in "A more efficient implementation of Shor's algorithm"

bjoli — Sun, 03 May 2026 06:56:15 +0000

Quite the contrary. Shor's algorithm actually works better for the shorter keys of ECC. The rule of thumb is 2n qbits for RSA keys and 6n qbits for ecc. I believe it has something to do with hownit applies to the hidden subgroup problem of finite abelian groups rather than factorisation, but I am really not a cryptographer not especially mathsy. I just asked the same question you did, and someone in the know pointed me to that.

New comment by bjoli in "Kimi K2.6 just beat Claude, GPT-5.5, and Gemini in a coding challenge"

bjoli — Sun, 03 May 2026 06:43:17 +0000

As a musician, I find the butchering of musical notation on Kimis pricing page extremely off-putting.

New comment by bjoli in "Why I still reach for Lisp and Scheme instead of Haskell"

bjoli — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 07:40:11 +0000

I think most people misunderstood syntax rules. It was not meant as the macro system for scheme. It was meant as the template macro system everyone could agree on, while leaving the more powerful low level macro systems to the implementations. Syntax case, or explicit/implicit renaming or syntactic closures or what have you.

New comment by bjoli in "Why I still reach for Lisp and Scheme instead of Haskell"

bjoli — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 05:54:28 +0000

You don't need syntax case to do advanced things though. Alex shinn's match.scm uses all the dirty syntax-rules trick.

It is pretty awful to write things like that.

New comment by bjoli in "Quarkdown – Markdown with Superpowers"

bjoli — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 05:30:21 +0000

Org mode uses / as well.

New comment by bjoli in "Clojure: Transducers"

bjoli — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 14:20:23 +0000

As I said, it is a protocol for iteration or data access. You cant take an iterator and hand it as a filter to a file reader. If I make a rot13 transducer I can hand it to a transduce function that transforms a collection. I can give it to a file reader as a transformer on any char.

Transducers are way to express transformations.

New comment by bjoli in "Clojure: Transducers"

bjoli — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 20:23:52 +0000

They compose. And can be passed around and be completely oblivious to how they will be reduced. With conj or sum or whatever they want. And you can extend them at any point at any end.

They are like map, filter and friends, but they compose. I think of iterators as an iterator protocol and transducers as a streaming protocol. An iterator just describes how to iterate over a collection. Transducers are transformations that can be plugged into any point where data goes in one direction.

New comment by bjoli in "Clojure: Transducers"

bjoli — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 16:13:14 +0000

I made srfi-171 [0], transducers for scheme. If you have any questions about them in general I can probably answer them. My version is pretty similar to the clojure version judging by the talks Rich Hickey gave on them.

I know a lot of people find them confusing.

0: https://srfi.schemers.org/srfi-171/srfi-171.html

New comment by bjoli in "Nanopass Framework: Clean Compiler Creation Language"

bjoli — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 19:23:31 +0000

Optimization level 2 in chez scheme does about 100 KLOC/s in my pretty modest machine, while also producing code that is pretty darn fast.

New comment by bjoli in "SI Units for Request Rate (2024)"

bjoli — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 12:15:31 +0000

Yes. But treating in a strict division isn't really what people expect. Then 12mi/h in km/h becomes "19.3xyz" not "19.3xyz km/h".

The least surprising thing would be to enforce unit output. If I say I want "in km/h" the output should be in km/h or show an error. It is however less fun. Getting becquerel when you forget a unit along the way is the kind of spice that makes life fun.

Treating "in" as strict division also doesnt solve the surprise of getting Bq or Hz when you accidentally end up with something that is N/s