Hacker News: kscarlet

New comment by kscarlet in "A better SQL in 11 lines of code"

kscarlet — Sat, 29 Aug 2026 20:04:04 +0000

Thanks! Kudos for the great work!

New comment by kscarlet in "A better SQL in 11 lines of code"

kscarlet — Sat, 29 Aug 2026 19:16:24 +0000

On second thought, some skepticism on performance comparison:

1. do both systems access everything from memory?

2. do both systems have the same kind of indices?

3. do either system tradeoff scan performance for faster/acceptably fast updates?

New comment by kscarlet in "A better SQL in 11 lines of code"

kscarlet — Sat, 29 Aug 2026 19:07:36 +0000

Cool language! I thought dplyr and datalog are both local optima (forget about the three-letter abomination) but I now declare this language the global optimum of query language.

> In contrast, Prela can be implemented extremely close to the metal. The Rust implementation inlines operators and compiles them into tight fused loops over raw arrays, running several times faster than DuckDB even without a query optimizer.

This will be true in Common Lisp as well. Now someone just have to implement it.

Or maybe I should steal the syntax and compile to SQL first, just so people can use existing DBMS.

The Story of Mac: A Just-So Story

kscarlet — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 05:24:14 +0000

Article URL: https://gigamonkeys.com/book/macros-defining-your-own

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49178868

Points: 30

# Comments: 6

New comment by kscarlet in "Steel Bank Common Lisp version 2.6.7"

kscarlet — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 22:14:59 +0000

So does the community of every other dialect (Common Lisp, at least). Write a function if you don't have to write a macro, and maybe declaim the function to be inlined.

The "Lisp Curse" is a ridiculous and tired myth that can only be invented by people who have looked at the language for 5 seconds and went straight to finding an excuse to not learn it.

New comment by kscarlet in "A Road to Lisp: Which Lisp"

kscarlet — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 10:09:05 +0000

VSCode: https://github.com/kchanqvq/olive

New comment by kscarlet in "A Road to Lisp: Which Lisp"

kscarlet — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 17:20:04 +0000

PSA: VSCode users deserve to use the OLIVE plugin (https://github.com/kchanqvq/olive).

New comment by kscarlet in "Markets are competitive if and only if P != NP"

kscarlet — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 05:01:44 +0000

Honestly I think the author misunderstood and misused P != NP. They should have said something like "collusion is NP-hard". P = NP doesn't imply NP-hard problem is efficiently solvable in practice, but the author assumes so.

I was expecting some tight convergence analysis that rely exactly on some superpolynomial behavior. No, yet another fallacy about P = NP vs NP can be solved in practice. We have too many of these.

Markets are competitive if and only if P != NP

kscarlet — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 15:41:44 +0000

Article URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.20415

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48776345

Points: 231

# Comments: 164

New comment by kscarlet in "Elixir v1.20: Now a gradually typed language"

kscarlet — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 23:29:14 +0000

These mean nothing. The C/C++ implementations use SIMD intrinsic while Lisp doesn't (it should have used sb-simd).

New comment by kscarlet in "Don't Build Your Own Lisp"

kscarlet — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 04:22:37 +0000

That's what the author means. She know what she's talking about.

New comment by kscarlet in "Why Janet? (2023)"

kscarlet — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 21:47:44 +0000

> A small but illustrative example: given a live running clisp program, I can click on a UI element to inspect both the live object and the underlying code in the IDE. I can even copy and paste UI elements!

I agree GUI is awkward in Emacs/SLIME. I think the reason is there isn't a standardized GUI framework across the Lisp world. Otherwise people can make SLIME support it.

> If I wanted to use slime-fancy to inspect a class, what I get is a dead list of raw text that I have to awkwardly interact with.

This part I do not agree. Nowadays "text" in Emacs/SLIME is far from "raw text", there's button that respond to hover, with right click context menu, and can be copy and pasted. I recall some small quirks (like objects in inspector are not presentations) but the only reason they aren't fixed (yet) is nobody get bothered enough. There's rarely any fundamental limitation. After all, it wouldn't be fare to call LispWorks UI "dead pixels".

BTW I once wrote yet another over ambitious project < https://github.com/neomacs-project/neomacs > but it doesn't go anywhere either. People do not care enough, Emacs is good enough.

New comment by kscarlet in "Why Janet? (2023)"

kscarlet — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 07:27:59 +0000

Can you tell a bit more about what is missing from Emacs SLIME when compared to LispWorks?

New comment by kscarlet in "Don't Build Your Own Lisp"

kscarlet — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 07:19:32 +0000

I don't see any comments on Kernel in the post. I didn't waste my time reading the book, but the post criticizes unhygiene F-expr, which is known to be awful and is exactly what Kernel aims to solve and supersede (via hygiene F-expr).

New comment by kscarlet in "C extensions, portability, and alternative compilers"

kscarlet — Tue, 26 May 2026 18:16:19 +0000

Not directly. Every "extensions" listed above cannot be implemented as user libraries, that's why these back and forth process between implementation extensions and portability user libraries need to happen to reach a de-facto standard. Otherwise the user libraries become de-facto standard themselves, like ASDF the build system, Trivia the pattern matcher...

But I think the power dynamics is crucial. In the Lisp ecosystem the users have great power, (and there are dozens of implementations,) so it's not like one or two implementation decides what everyone is gonna use and everyone just lives with it.

New comment by kscarlet in "C extensions, portability, and alternative compilers"

kscarlet — Mon, 25 May 2026 22:17:26 +0000

I think the Common Lisp ecosystem sets a good example of how a dozen of implementations move ahead together. Implementations experiment with extensions, the really useful ones get implemented multiple times, and some portability library emerges as de-facto standard if it's good enough. You can watch the result in https://portability.cl/, the language is evolving like never before even if the standard committee has dissolved nearly 40 years ago!

New comment by kscarlet in "Hyperpolyglot Lisp: Common Lisp, Racket, Clojure, Emacs Lisp"

kscarlet — Tue, 19 May 2026 06:10:53 +0000

  (defparameter *a* '(1 2 3))
  (setf (car *a*) 3)

And this is undefined behavior because it mutates literal constant. I stopped reading further. The CL column is so bad.

New comment by kscarlet in "The Emacsification of Software"

kscarlet — Sat, 16 May 2026 01:10:52 +0000

"Lisp Curse" is really a myth, or at least, it completely fails to apply to the Common Lisp community. https://applied-langua.ge/posts/lisp-curse-redemption-arc.ht...

New comment by kscarlet in "Show HN: Zuckerman – minimalist personal AI agent that self-edits its own code"

kscarlet — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 03:40:10 +0000

Why? Many Lisp systems and Common Lisp in particular have great hot reloading capability, from redefining functions to UPDATE-INSTANCE-FOR-REDEFINED-CLASS to update the states.

New comment by kscarlet in "Serious Lisp Written in Go"

kscarlet — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 00:17:53 +0000

Very nice.

p.s. (I hate to point this out), there seems to be a name collision with https://lisperator.net/slip/