Hacker News: frollogaston

New comment by frollogaston in "Find the flattest route between any two points in SF"

frollogaston — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 23:39:58 +0000

That's some of it too, but in a way legs aren't all that different from wheels in how they work. Most of it is the gearing. Like there's a gear on every mountain bike that will make your feet go down at the same intervals as walking. That sucks on flat terrain. Legs are also not perfectly designed to push pedals, especially for people who don't bike often.

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

frollogaston — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 23:34:17 +0000

Like asn1, relational DB drivers, Redis, protobuf, XML/YAML/JSON parsing, web client/server, and SDKs for stuff like AWS. Not saying Common Lisp lacks well-maintained versions of those, cause I don't know, just that those are the foundational things I wouldn't want LLM-coded.

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

frollogaston — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 20:14:03 +0000

But every language lets you do this in development. Doing it in prod and hot reloading is Common Lisp's special feature.

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

frollogaston — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 15:55:46 +0000

Maybe beside the point, but I'd hope it's neither connection per process or per thread. Modern webservers tend to rely on either an event loop or greenthreading. Looks like such a thing exists in Common Lisp, not sure how the debugger would interact with it though.

Anyway it sounds like this isn't really the target use case for the debugger since restarting a webserver is supposed to be easy. Maybe there's a different use case in mind?

New comment by frollogaston in "Find the flattest route between any two points in SF"

frollogaston — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 07:11:35 +0000

I think that too favors walking the bike up the incline. Anyone able-bodied should be able to do it, some faster than others, but biking up an SF incline is more hit or miss, especially when considering different bikes.

My reasoning for the bike-hike being faster is that legs are designed for it. Legs are only inefficient on flatter ground because you have no equivalent of high gear (like extendible legs), so all that torque is going to waste.

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

frollogaston — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 07:07:38 +0000

Erm, sounds niche. Like you can normally do all that minus resuming the program in other languages. If this is a webserver, it should be fine to restart it for an update, it's not like I'm going to catch some user's failed request and patch it before it times out.

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

frollogaston — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 04:48:43 +0000

Yeah, I'll use LLMs to write all application code, but not so sure about libraries. Especially more foundational ones.

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

frollogaston — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 04:44:04 +0000

This looks like a good debugger, but it's similar to ones I've used in other languages. What's special about this one? I thought the idea was you use the debugger in prod, but now I don't think that's what the article meant.

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

frollogaston — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 04:39:11 +0000

Was assuming it was a backend. I still don't understand the advantage though. It'd help to have an example.

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

frollogaston — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 04:27:51 +0000

Yeah but what happens to your server then? The connection it was handling times out I guess, then is the rest of it frozen or what?

New comment by frollogaston in "Why Common Lisp Is Now the Best Programming Language"

frollogaston — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 04:24:04 +0000

IF you're running a debug build. I guess Common Lisp can do this in prod?

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

frollogaston — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 04:19:41 +0000

  Also, in most languages an error will crash your program. So if you’re writing code with an LLM it will have to read your crash logs to make some changes and run your program again. In Common Lisp your program won’t crash, it’ll stop and open a debugger with the whole stack and all the variables. You can just point your LLM at the debugger, and it’ll make its fix and resume the program.

What does this look like in a real example system that you're maintaining? I can't imagine you'd always be able to resume like that if it's something like a webserver.

New comment by frollogaston in "Find the flattest route between any two points in SF"

frollogaston — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 00:39:52 +0000

I feel like even if the distances are equal, it's faster to walk a bike up a steep grade and bike the rest flat than it is to bike up a moderate grade the whole way. This topic has probably been discussed somewhere else.

New comment by frollogaston in "Plain text is still one of the best technologies we have"

frollogaston — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 20:59:56 +0000

Yeah the multi-unicode-char grapheme clusters are basically only for emojis once they started adding stuff like every ethnicity/gender combo of 4-person family. And that one historical Korean script.

New comment by frollogaston in "Plain text is still one of the best technologies we have"

frollogaston — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 20:56:42 +0000

I greatly prefer plaintext in most cases where Markdown ends up being used. WYSIWYG is more useful than formatting in these cases. Most of the formatting makes it harder to read anyway. Some say you can ignore MD and treat it like plaintext... not so when you use a newline.

Oh and now you could have LLMs write the Markdown, but chances are no human reads that, or even if you do, the formatting is going to be insane. I have to keep telling Claude to give me a .txt instead of .md when asking for a context dump. Maybe .md is popular for agent readmes because they optimize around its headings.

New comment by frollogaston in "Turn off Apple Intelligence on macOS 27 and get its disk space back"

frollogaston — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 19:39:55 +0000

lol seriously, this is a solved problem

New comment by frollogaston in "Turn off Apple Intelligence on macOS 27 and get its disk space back"

frollogaston — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 19:37:23 +0000

People should really know how to delete sims, but there's a ton of obscure Xcode nonsense that in the "old days" people would blindly trust Stackoverflow answers or even blogs to fix. If Xcode is a tractor, it's the old thing you whack with a wrench and say "come on Bessie" to make it temporarily work again, not something most devs really understand.

New comment by frollogaston in "Turn off Apple Intelligence on macOS 27 and get its disk space back"

frollogaston — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 19:33:16 +0000

This is how I always did it. Why would the alternative involve going into safe mode? Pretty sure I've manually deleted those files before too.

New comment by frollogaston in "Turn off Apple Intelligence on macOS 27 and get its disk space back"

frollogaston — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 18:53:56 +0000

I mean the side with options corroded over time too. Ubuntu is free and still betrayed its users. If the answer is you're supposed to switch distros at that point, why don't I just use a Mac now and switch to Linux if it ever gets bad?

And Windows is an even bigger boat where everyone had ample time to jump ship if they wanted, like Win10 is still de facto supported and Win7 had support for a very long time.

New comment by frollogaston in "Turn off Apple Intelligence on macOS 27 and get its disk space back"

frollogaston — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 06:29:26 +0000

We need macOS 28 Snow Golden Gate