Hacker News: ludston

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

ludston — Mon, 18 May 2026 23:09:47 +0000

They are as different from one another as Java is from C# is from JavaScript.

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

ludston — Mon, 18 May 2026 23:06:28 +0000

Worse: Using recursion in Common Lisp isn't idiomatic, given that CL doesn't guarantee tail-call optimisation in the specification.

New comment by ludston in "Scientists “bottle the sun” with a liquid battery that stores solar energy"

ludston — Sun, 17 May 2026 21:32:15 +0000

A small amount of heat is a lot harder to isolate from than water though.

New comment by ludston in "I caught the car"

ludston — Sat, 09 May 2026 23:16:19 +0000

Senior Engineer means many different things, even within the same company. It could mean, "This person is more productive than everybody else around them" or it could mean, "This person isn't that great at software development but they know some product area so deeply that it would be too expensive to replace them."

New comment by ludston in "I caught the car"

ludston — Sat, 09 May 2026 21:37:08 +0000

First of all, congratulations. As somebody that also achieved the senior developer title within the first three years of being hired out of University, mostly by luck: Yay money, but I wasn't a senior engineer really for another five years. For me, I needed to see the long term effects of the changes that I'd made and the software I had written to really understand the difference between cargo cult behaviour and what really mattered for the business I was working for.

New comment by ludston in "Laws of Software Engineering"

ludston — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 03:56:41 +0000

If you don't have personal examples of using a profiler to diagnose an issue like "too many round trips" and identify where those round trips are coming from, then you've never inherited a complex performance problem before.

New comment by ludston in "You are not your job"

ludston — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 07:32:15 +0000

I agree with this article fully, but there is a problem that most blog posts about identity don't talk about before telling you what do with your own. What is identity actually for? This is the only article I know of that talks about this:

https://danielkeogh.com/blog/post/On%20not%20being%20miserab...

New comment by ludston in "Ubuntu 26.04 Ends 46 Years of Silent sudo Passwords"

ludston — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 08:59:19 +0000

If you are brute forcing passwords, knowing the length only reduces the number of passwords to try by like 1 hundredth.

New comment by ludston in "Bombarding gamblers with offers greatly increases betting and gambling harm"

ludston — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 23:46:50 +0000

I mean if it didn't make the gambling organizations more money they wouldn't do it. Gambling industry has always been about how much wealth it can extract from the punters without being regulated for it.

Hopefully this research ends up being used to justify more gambling regulations, but governments are addicted to the gambling lobby donations so who knows what will happen.

New comment by ludston in "ATMs didn’t kill bank teller jobs, but the iPhone did"

ludston — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 00:44:51 +0000

I don't think we can know whether or not this is the case in our own lifetimes, because we are so immersed in popular culture that we can't be objective about it. Enough of our historical great composers weren't venerated until after their deaths, and to describe composers as "hiding" within the most popular media of our era is a great disservice to the many composers that don't have the fame, connections and reputation to be hired to write for these.

I would also point out that composing for a medium like a game or a movie places a great deal of constraints upon the composer, in terms of theme, cost of instrumentation, duration and most importantly: what is safe and palatable for an executive to approve of.

New comment by ludston in "Create value for others and don’t worry about the returns"

ludston — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 20:17:06 +0000

The distinction does matter, because by not wearing a mask, instead of indicating that you don't care about your own safety, you're indicating that you don't care about anybody else's.

New comment by ludston in "Create value for others and don’t worry about the returns"

ludston — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 12:25:35 +0000

They didn't. The point is that they stop you from giving covid to other people.

New comment by ludston in "GPT‑5.3 Instant"

ludston — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 04:21:46 +0000

I predict that this will not exist, given the existence of lying.

New comment by ludston in "Australia's WiseTech to cut 2k jobs as AI renders manual coding obsolete"

ludston — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 09:26:21 +0000

Looking at their ASX release though, seems like they've made record profits again.

New comment by ludston in "“Car Wash” test with 53 models"

ludston — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 07:20:48 +0000

For all we know 30 percent of users on that site are now bots.

New comment by ludston in "No Skill. No Taste"

ludston — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 01:46:43 +0000

It probably depends on who likes it and why.

New comment by ludston in "Vocal Guide – belt sing without killing yourself"

ludston — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 00:56:18 +0000

Some people can't tell if the note they're singing is the same as the note they just heard. This is also learnable but it's not as simple as just muscle control

New comment by ludston in "Y Combinator will let founders receive funds in stablecoins"

ludston — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 11:52:16 +0000

Yeah all of that sounds way more convenient than your grandma irrecoverably losing her life savings because somebody kid fished her for her crypto authentication.

New comment by ludston in "Y Combinator will let founders receive funds in stablecoins"

ludston — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 07:01:13 +0000

I bet you can. And I bet that raising the limit takes you a few minutes at most. Or you need a better bank.

New comment by ludston in "UK consulting on bringing in social media ban for under 16s"

ludston — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 11:05:24 +0000

> What is it about this 16 y/o cutoff that seems to be the focus everywhere? Why not 18?

Some studies have found that puberty is the peak problematic age for people to be on social media and 16 is the rough point by which mostly this is finished. There is a book, "The Anxious Generation" that covers this pretty well.