Hacker News: disconnection

Show HN: Toy Python Lisp interpreters based on the 1960 McCarthy paper

disconnection — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 10:01:42 +0000

I wrote this set of Python files to try to help programmers understand the original LISP paper, assuming zero mathematical or Lisp knowledge. The original paper is a mind-blowing piece of computer science history for many reasons - I'd recommend anyone to try and get their head around it.

I found plenty of fantastic LISP implementations which stay close to the original paper. But they are all fully-functional, practical implementations. The original paper builds from deeper fundamentals which it would be possible to write code in, albeit very impractical.

I implemented these earlier iterations, so programmers can follow the paper step-by-step in a more familiar language than 50s mathematical notation.

I am no expert in Lisp or mathematics, and intentionally went into this with no knowledge of Lisp beyond the original paper. I did not write it in the most elegant way, but in the simplest way for me to understand. So please don't take this code as a definitive statement on the language.

However, this code really helped me to understand the original paper better, and to begin using Lisp with a better grasp of the spirit of the language.

I'd welcome any thoughts from those who have more experience with Lisp or comp sci history.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47737872

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by disconnection in "Incident March 30th, 2026 – Accidental CDN Caching"

disconnection — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 07:51:10 +0000

Still waiting on a reply and the logs so I can do forensics on this incident. IMO the response from Railway should have been: "all hands on deck, red alert, worst imaginable security breach for a PaaS". Not a small yellow alert popup about a CDN misconfiguration, and saying that all affected customers have been emailed, which is demonstrably not correct.

New comment by disconnection in "Cloudflare Global Network experiencing issues"

disconnection — Tue, 18 Nov 2025 12:29:42 +0000

Good that he worked it out so quick. I recently spent a day debugging email problems on Railway PaaS, because they silently closed an SMTP port without telling anyone.

New comment by disconnection in "Three senior researchers have resigned from OpenAI"

disconnection — Sat, 18 Nov 2023 08:50:11 +0000

I have a hierarchy of templates, where I can automatically swap out parts of the prompt based on which LLM I am using. And also have a set of benchmarking tests to compare relative performance. I treat LLMs like a commodity and keep switching between them to compare performance.

New comment by disconnection in "Show HN: Stories for Kids Using AI"

disconnection — Tue, 14 Nov 2023 10:12:10 +0000

It seems you have good intentions with this system and want to do something positive for children, but I am currently listening to this podcast. I think it would be wise to explicitly distance yourself from the scams around AI children's books: https://omny.fm/shows/behind-the-bastards/part-one-ai-is-com...

New comment by disconnection in "Major outages across ChatGPT and API"

disconnection — Wed, 08 Nov 2023 17:20:22 +0000

Lol, don't care; I run my own models locally .

New comment by disconnection in "Show HN: I recorded nature sounds for a year, then released an ambient sound app"

disconnection — Thu, 28 Sep 2023 08:43:10 +0000

Yup - SwiftUI is pretty immature still, so I use the latest iOS17 to get the latest features to make development simpler. For example, handling in-app purchases is hugely easier in iOS17.

New comment by disconnection in "Show HN: I recorded nature sounds for a year, then released an ambient sound app"

disconnection — Wed, 27 Sep 2023 17:20:23 +0000

oops, high-pass filter.

New comment by disconnection in "Show HN: MyGPT a toy LLM which can be trained on Project Gutenberg and dad jokes"

disconnection — Wed, 27 Sep 2023 11:25:30 +0000

Cheers! Yes, I recommend it - it's a lot of fun.

There are probably easier to install and better LLM models than mine for home use. But my project should work if you have enough Python knowledge to install all the libraries. Just throw a bunch of text files into the "data" folder and uncomment "train()" in main.py, and it will save checkpoints of the model parameters into the "models" folder.

New comment by disconnection in "Show HN: MyGPT a toy LLM which can be trained on Project Gutenberg and dad jokes"

disconnection — Wed, 27 Sep 2023 11:19:57 +0000

Q: What is a dog? A: To get a frog.

Q: Why did the chicken cross the road? A: Because it was Sunday.

With "Q: " as a prompt, it will make its own jokes:

Q: How do you cross a race with no cold birds? A: Because they did the toothache entirely.

Q: Why did a figureur hit a like? A: Because a joke.

Pure comic genius!

---

The prompt format is:

Q: {user question}

Here is part of the fine-tuning set (real dad jokes from the internet - not what was generated):

Q: What do you call a fake noodle? A: An impasta

Q: How do you organise a space party? A: You planet!

New comment by disconnection in "Show HN: I recorded nature sounds for a year, then released an ambient sound app"

disconnection — Wed, 27 Sep 2023 11:00:27 +0000

Awesome! I didn't want to go for 100% sleep-inducing sounds; hopefully it works as general background ambience.

New comment by disconnection in "Show HN: I recorded nature sounds for a year, then released an ambient sound app"

disconnection — Wed, 27 Sep 2023 10:58:39 +0000

I just went really far into the nature, away from main roads or human habitation.

I use wind muffs to cut wind noise, and sometimes a low-pass filter to cut out any very distant traffic rumble.

Show HN: MyGPT a toy LLM which can be trained on Project Gutenberg and dad jokes

disconnection — Tue, 26 Sep 2023 14:51:17 +0000

My puny version of ChatGPT.

This was based on the excellent LLM lecture series by Andrej Karpathy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCc8FmEb1nY

The main points of differentiation are that my version is token-based (tiktoken) with code to load up multiple text files as a trining set. Plus, it has a minimal server which is a drop-in replacement for the OpenAI REST API.

So you can train the default tiny 15M parameter model, and use that in your projects instead of ChatGPT.

I trained it on 20Mb of Project Gutenberg encyclopaedias, then fine-tuned it on 120 dad jokes, to get a Q: A: prompt format.

This model + training set is so small that the results are basically a joke; it's for entertainment purposes only. The code is also very rough, and the server only has the minimum functionality filled in.

I embodied this model in my talking LLM-driven hexapod robot, and it could give very silly answers to spoken questions.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37660262

Points: 25

# Comments: 4

Show HN: I recorded nature sounds for a year, then released an ambient sound app

disconnection — Tue, 26 Sep 2023 14:35:08 +0000

There are lots of ambient sound apps on the App Store, but they all seem to be paywalled. I thought I should make one where all the content was free.

I bought a secondhand professional audio recorder, then took it to national parks in Australia and Germany, in case I heard anything interesting. It was a bit of a learning experience, but I now have a library of half a dozen passable recordings.

The biggest problem was noise pollution: humans are noisy and everywhere; I never noticed until I started listening carefully for background noise. Traffic and building noise carries for huge distances.

I wrapped all the sounds up in a swiftUI interface, built around a curved video carousel.

I wanted to pay special attention to vision impaired users, so it all has VoiceOver support, and extra UI elements that can be turned on for vision impaired users.

It's free on the App Store if you want to take a look.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37659997

Points: 11

# Comments: 8