Hacker News: hencq

New comment by hencq in "Ink and Switch Interactive Homepage"

hencq — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 18:07:19 +0000

I really love this one on dynamic documents as well:

Potluck: Dynamic documents as personal software https://www.inkandswitch.com/potluck/

New comment by hencq in "Rails World 2026 Opening Keynote [video]"

hencq — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 18:35:52 +0000

I think you're confusing Spotify and Shopify.

New comment by hencq in "Google’s Project Suncatcher to put ML infrastructure in space"

hencq — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 18:29:55 +0000

Haha, yes. I think Silicon Valley (the show ), made fun of the same thing. "Not so long ago, people called the idea of sending a man to the moon a moonshot"

New comment by hencq in "Claude Opus 5.5"

hencq — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 17:31:10 +0000

Right, except they mean the exact opposite in this case: they're actually advocating for slowing down the pace. Hence the criticism of the language, because your interpretation would be completely valid.

New comment by hencq in "UEFA's Champions League draw creates unfair clusters; a Cayley graph fixes it"

hencq — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 20:47:54 +0000

Yes, same. Initially this seemed like an article I should love, but it was basically impossible to get through, so I stopped reading.

New comment by hencq in "Why the Ocean Cleanup hasn't solved the plastic pollution crisis"

hencq — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 15:12:42 +0000

Spot on. Another thing these experts fail to mention is that a lot of the data on the Pacific Garbage patch actually comes from the Ocean Cleanup, since, you know, they actually went out there to look.

New comment by hencq in "Gödel, Escher, Elisp: The Beauty of Macros"

hencq — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 06:08:57 +0000

I know, but the point is that in Clojure there's a bit of a culture of not writing macros unless you have to, while in Racket there's no such thing. Agreed that you can write macros just fine in other lisps.

New comment by hencq in "Gödel, Escher, Elisp: The Beauty of Macros"

hencq — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 17:34:40 +0000

Meh, that seems to be a bit of a clojure thing. In the Racket world, with hygienic macros and phase separation, they'll routinely write macros returning macros, etc.

New comment by hencq in "Show HN: 18 Words"

hencq — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 15:57:07 +0000

Yeah, when you fail, maybe it could offer a "continue playing" option? Then you can still finish the words, but it doesn't add to your score.

New comment by hencq in "I Made the "Next-Level" Camera and I love it"

hencq — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 16:40:06 +0000

What a great writeup! I really enjoyed reading the whole process and problem solving approach. This is why I come to Hacker news.

New comment by hencq in "Brunost: The Nynorsk Programming Language"

hencq — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 15:55:11 +0000

I studied in Trondheim for a semester and learned some Norwegian. Whenever I didn't know a word, I just pronounced the Dutch or English word in a 'Norwegian way'. Most of the time people didn't even blink. So much so that I'd then ask them if the word I just used existed and invariably the answer was that that was the correct word.

New comment by hencq in "Retrofitting JIT Compilers into C Interpreters"

hencq — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:37:03 +0000

I think the website does an amazing job explaining it, but it basically takes an interpreter written in C and turns it into a JIT with minimal changes to the code of the interpreter (i.e. not to the code of the program you're running in the interpreter). For example they took the Lua interpreter and with minimal changes were able to turn it into a JIT, which runs Lua programs about 2x faster.

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...