Hacker News: hencq

New comment by hencq in "Backpacks got worse on purpose"

hencq — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 17:08:50 +0000

I bought Crumpler messenger bag about 15 years ago (in San Francisco when they still had a store there). Can confirm it’s indestructible. I’m glad to hear they’ve kept up their standards to this day!

New comment by hencq in "Haunting Photos Show the Aftermath of the Kursk Submarine Disaster in 2000"

hencq — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 18:10:52 +0000

I also remember how frustrating and depressing it was that they wouldn’t allow foreign teams to help with the rescue effort. At the time it was clear that the Russians lacked the capabilities to do it. I also think in hindsight it was a sign how little interest Russia had in being part of the West.

New comment by hencq in "Sopwith – 1984 Game (2000)"

hencq — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 22:07:42 +0000

Hmm, maybe my memory is betraying me. I remember our first family computer was an XT and then later we had a 386. Maybe I'm misremembering and it was the 386 that had the turbo button or maybe the earlier one was a clone. My first own PC was a 486 as well that I built together with my dad. Good memories.

New comment by hencq in "Sopwith – 1984 Game (2000)"

hencq — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 19:49:08 +0000

I think ours had a turbo button that would double/half the clock speed. Good times indeed :)

New comment by hencq in "Marc Andreessen is wrong about introspection"

hencq — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 15:33:51 +0000

I think there's something to this. And while America has always had this can-do attitude (just look at the number of self help books), it does seem to be in another gear recently. I don't know what caused it, but I think there have been a number of indicators: Trump ignoring Congress and introducing wild tariffs, Musk firing half of Twitter's staff and then later repeating this with DOGE, the quick roll-out of LLMs. There seems to be this prevailing attitude of "we can just do stuff, damn the consequences".

It appears to come with a lot of corruption and anti-intellectualism. Like you say there are also benefits to this. I think the break through of mRNA vaccines was an early indicator. I just hope we can steer this attitude back to a more optimistic world-view instead of the blatant self serving one that is currently prevailing.

New comment by hencq in "A dot a day keeps the clutter away"

hencq — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 05:41:40 +0000

A friend of mine used to once a year hang all his shirts with the open end of the cloth hangers' hooks facing forward. After wearing and washing them he'd hang them back with the hanger facing the other way. After a year he'd toss out any shirts that were still facing the original way and had thus not been worn.

New comment by hencq in "Generators in Lone Lisp"

hencq — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 15:03:43 +0000

Very cool stuff and great written article. Lone looks very interesting!

Are you planning to use your design to support things like exceptions as well? I think that's where that multi-prompt ability becomes important (yielding from a nested coroutine). Racket has prompts and aborts, which is essentially a 'yield to' primitive.

New comment by hencq in "Generators in Lone Lisp"

hencq — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 05:59:40 +0000

I like the overview given in this Stackoverflow answer [1] (based on an even earlier comment) which classifies different types of continuations:

- Asymmetric or symmetric

- Stackful or stackless

- Delimited or undelimited

- Multi-prompt or single prompt

- Reentrant or non-reentrant

- Clonable or not

Based on that these generators (or semi-coroutines as the article also calls them) seem to be asymmetric, stackful, delimited, single prompt(?), non-reentrant continuations.

[1] - https://stackoverflow.com/questions/62817878/what-are-the-sp...

New comment by hencq in "VitruvianOS – Desktop Linux Inspired by the BeOS"

hencq — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 15:16:07 +0000

Yes! I was racking my brain trying to remember what it was called. Back in the early 2000s I ran BeOS on my desktop and absolutely loved it. Then when they went under, I followed the effort to come up with an open source version with guest interest. There was one effort that wanted to build everything from scratch. That's what was later renamed into Haiku (I think initially openBeOS maybe?). There was also BlueEyedOS who thought you could get there faster by building on Linux and X11.

I think Haiku got more traction because at the time people felt that it should run BeOS software without recompiling. I have long wondered what would have happened if BlueEyedOS would have gotten most of the effort.

New comment by hencq in "Is it a pint?"

hencq — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 19:23:51 +0000

Yeah, in the Netherlands 2 finger widths is the norm. But if it's more than that, people will get upset that you're pouring them milk.

New comment by hencq in "A case against currying"

hencq — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 20:00:08 +0000

Clojure also has the anonymous function syntax with #(foo a b %) where you essentially get exactly this hole functionality (but with % instead of $). Additionally there’s partial that does partial application, so you could also do (partial foo a b).

New comment by hencq in "Java 26 is here"

hencq — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 19:46:43 +0000

J++ predates C#. It was Microsoft's version of Java that wasn't quite compatible.

New comment by hencq in "Racket v9.1"

hencq — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 20:33:17 +0000

I think that should work in racket-mode as well. You can easily send individual sexps to the repl and add to the live state. However, one thing that CL does that Racket doesn't do (afaik) is when you change a data type (e.g. alter a struct), it automatically ensures live code uses the new types. In Racket by contrast I have to either carefully go through all affected forms and send them to the repl, or send the whole buffer to the repl. This does make the whole experience feel more static than in CL.

New comment by hencq in "Douglas Adams on the English–American cultural divide over "heroes""

hencq — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 16:45:25 +0000

Exactly who I immediately had to think of.

New comment by hencq in "The super-slow conversion of the U.S. to metric (2025)"

hencq — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 15:56:53 +0000

> by the bushel

Well played

New comment by hencq in "The Tulip Creative Computer"

hencq — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 04:38:51 +0000

No, ASML was spun out of Philips (as was e.g. NXP)

New comment by hencq in "$5 whale listening hydrophone making workshop"

hencq — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 12:47:30 +0000

I remember at the time it felt a little bit suspicious to me. Only after everyone already knew it had imploded, the navy came out to say their hyper advanced detection system for enemy submarines had of course also detected it.

New comment by hencq in "Show HN: Tacopy – Tail Call Optimization for Python"

hencq — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 18:37:40 +0000

From the description, it doesn't really seem to be full Tail Call Optimization, but only optimizes tail recursion. At least all the examples are about tail recursion, where the function calls itself in tail position, which can indeed easily be changed to a loop. Tail Call Optimization would mean it optimizes any function call in tail position. Typically you'd implement that with a trampoline, but it doesn't seem like this does that.

Edit: It's actually called out under limitations "No mutual recursion: Only direct self-recursion is optimized"

New comment by hencq in "Racket v9.0"

hencq — Sun, 23 Nov 2025 19:27:56 +0000

Delimited continuations are quite similar to effect systems that seem to be getting a lot of interest lately. So who knows, maybe they will become more mainstream in the future.

New comment by hencq in "Three kinds of AI products work"

hencq — Sun, 16 Nov 2025 19:35:10 +0000

Yeah that one is surprisingly difficult even with a Human Intelligence in the passenger seat.