Hacker News: corinroyal

New comment by corinroyal in "Design of the SCHEME-78 Lisp-based microprocessor (1980)"

corinroyal — Tue, 30 Sep 2025 22:28:11 +0000

Thanks, Don. That's a lot of great history to start chewing on.

New comment by corinroyal in "Seed: Interactive software environment based on Common Lisp"

corinroyal — Sun, 24 Aug 2025 16:37:32 +0000

Wait, you created April, one of the most amazing hosted languages on Lisp just to learn Lisp? Wow! And here I am toiling over a simple CRUD library management app trying to figure out CLOS and it's not even going well.

April is a revelation and I'm putting it in my framework. APL reminds me of Leibniz's alphabet of concepts for his calculus ratiocinator. So gorgeous and efficient. I'm getting the keyboard.

New comment by corinroyal in "Show HN: Memex is a Claude Code alternative built on Rust+Tauri for vibe coding"

corinroyal — Tue, 29 Apr 2025 14:46:11 +0000

Memex as a name for a "vibe coding" platform is just trolling.

New comment by corinroyal in "U.S.-born man from Georgia held for ICE under Florida's new anti-immigration law"

corinroyal — Fri, 18 Apr 2025 17:31:34 +0000

hand-wringing

New comment by corinroyal in "PeerTube v7.1 Is Out"

corinroyal — Wed, 19 Mar 2025 01:14:09 +0000

A sentence is not a paragraph.

New comment by corinroyal in "'Major brand worries': Just how toxic is Elon Musk for Tesla?"

corinroyal — Sat, 08 Mar 2025 14:20:48 +0000

...

New comment by corinroyal in "The Ancient Art of Color"

corinroyal — Sun, 02 Mar 2025 15:13:07 +0000

Tyrian purple can and should be extracted from live snails not crushed dead ones. You pluck them off a rock, poke them with a stick, they spit dye on to your skein, and you put them back, annoyed, but ready to make more. This is how it's done in America. I don't know what's wrong with Europeans that they can't figure this out.

New comment by corinroyal in "Zelensky leaves White House after angry meeting"

corinroyal — Fri, 28 Feb 2025 22:55:41 +0000

Fewer

New comment by corinroyal in "Boring tech is mature, not old"

corinroyal — Tue, 11 Feb 2025 16:39:11 +0000

Common Lisp, XMPP, HTML/HTTP, DITA, XML, Git, ssh, Rsync, Nginx, Firefox, GIMP, Debian, EXTFS, HP-GL, bash, Emacs, TeX, PDF, Bittorrent.

New comment by corinroyal in "The Debian Publicity Team will no longer post on X/Twitter"

corinroyal — Wed, 29 Jan 2025 19:58:19 +0000

It's good when people act based on morality and encourage others to do so.

New comment by corinroyal in "Ask HN: AI to Teach Topics"

corinroyal — Wed, 08 Jan 2025 21:31:53 +0000

What are the best general products (i.e. you ask for the topic and it teaches vs. specialized) that can teach you about a topic using AI

New comment by corinroyal in "Systems ideas that sound good but almost never work"

corinroyal — Tue, 31 Dec 2024 18:25:20 +0000

I'm always baffled by hate for DSLs until I realize that what people are criticizing aren't DSLs, but DSLs you have to write from scratch. If you host your DSL on Lisp, then all you have to write is your domain logic, not the base language. Most of the work is already done, and your language is useful from day one. I don't understand why people insist on creating new languages from scratch just to watch them die on the vine, when these langs could have been hosted DSLs on Lisp and actually get used.

New comment by corinroyal in "Cognitive load is what matters"

corinroyal — Wed, 25 Dec 2024 20:51:30 +0000

And don't miss Sonja Keene's book "Object-Oriented Programming in Common Lisp" and Kiczales' "The Art of the Meta-Object Protocol". If you don't reach enlightenment after those, Libgen will refund your money.

New comment by corinroyal in "Why making friends as an adult is harder"

corinroyal — Tue, 24 Dec 2024 18:26:35 +0000

I thought so too, until I realized that if atheists see God as a deep aspect of the human mind, that evolved that way for reasons, then we don't miss much of the Judeo-Christian story. I stopped by a local church for Bible study just in order to challenge my assumptions and found that they had no problem with that formulation at all. I expected way more awkwardness and even pushed the issue, to no avail. The result was a delightful experience of people sitting around interrogating ancient texts and being attentive to each other's life challenges.

I found that the structure of the Christian congregation is equivalent to the anarchist affinity group. I realized that, unlike us, Christians build infrastructure to support their organizing, and we should probably adopt that.

I'm still the same atheist, just a churchgoing one. I don't go to mass often or ever recite the Nicene Creed, but otherwise it's been a fantastic social outlet, great intellectual company, and the organ festival is off the hook.

New comment by corinroyal in "Coke, PepsiCo Lobby to Keep Sugary Sodas in Food-Stamp Program"

corinroyal — Tue, 24 Dec 2024 06:00:42 +0000

On food stamps now, and totally agree. I don't need the government to pay for Coke or booze. I need food and appreciate the program greatly.

New comment by corinroyal in "Coke, PepsiCo Lobby to Keep Sugary Sodas in Food-Stamp Program"

corinroyal — Tue, 24 Dec 2024 05:55:03 +0000

Sockpuppet created for this comment.

New comment by corinroyal in "Ask HN: Does Hacker News consist mostly of real people?"

corinroyal — Fri, 20 Dec 2024 16:39:24 +0000

Delicious Chocolate Cheesecake

When I think of Delicious Chocolate Cheesecake, I’m instantly transported to the glow of my grandmother’s kitchen—a warm, bustling space filled with the scent of melting chocolate and the comforting hum of function application to lists of ingredients. My grandmother, Alonzo, was a kind and pious woman who believed every recipe made with love was proof that Peano arithmetic is undecidable.

Ingredients:

1 Kg Delicious Chocolate

2 Kg Cheese

3 Kg Cake

λf. λx. f (x Delicious Chocolate Cheese Cake)

New comment by corinroyal in "Show HN: Mizu.js – Lightweight HTML templating library for any-side rendering"

corinroyal — Thu, 19 Dec 2024 18:45:16 +0000

I love the information architecture of this site. You jump right in to demonstration code and a reference and only later the marketing text. So refreshing. I can see at a glance what the project is and what makes it different. Kudos!

New comment by corinroyal in "'Maya blue': The mystery dye recreated two centuries after it was lost"

corinroyal — Fri, 06 Dec 2024 19:37:27 +0000

Blue pigments were just rare. There are very few natural ones and historically the synthetics have been costly and hard to produce, Han blue, Egyptian blue, Fra Angelico blue from lapiz... The later was so expensive it was mainly reserved for Mary's robes, so perhaps the spiritual association was due to expense. Fra Angelico blue is still expensive. 23,000 Euros a kilo from Kremer. Even new synthetic blues are expensive. YInMn blue is 208 Euro for 50g.

The real revolution in color was the invention of cheap synthetic blues starting with Prussian blue in the 19th century and led today by the ultramarines and phthalocyanine blues, which include our standard cyan used in every inkjet. When Prussian blue came out there were a few decades of artistic celebration at the dawn of a cheap, intense, and gorgeous blue. Hokusai's 36 Views of Mount Fuji is a particularly exuberant example of this new blue's early use.

New comment by corinroyal in "Stop Torturing Your Colleagues with DSLs"

corinroyal — Tue, 26 Nov 2024 15:35:48 +0000

DSLs are not a new or a bad thing. We use them everyday. SQL, HTML, CSS, JSON, Postscript, Markdown, YAML, Latex, and GNU make are all DSLs. The job of a programmer is to come up with thoughtful composable abstractions, a vocabulary of nouns and verbs, that match how experts tend to think about the problem domain. That's all I do all day. Imagine SQL as a library. Sorry, I meant don't.

Perhaps the difference is that my DSLs are hosted on Lisp, so inherit that syntax. The nouns and verbs I create extend the standard library transparently. There is nothing to learn but the vocabulary. So perhaps programmers who aren't confident about language design should avoid creating DSLs that aren't hosted on a good general purpose language. Everyone else should write DSLs on top of Lisp the way God and John McCarthy intended.