Hacker News: nobleach

New comment by nobleach in "AWS Acquires DuckDB"

nobleach — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 14:32:19 +0000

It can go different ways. Redis, Elastic Search, MySQL, and Java all have different stories with some common threads.

New comment by nobleach in "A curmudgeon tries a language server"

nobleach — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 14:27:18 +0000

I have other reasons - mostly hiring competent engineers that deeply undertand the language. I can hire a competent SpringBoot engineer who can "fill out the form" and have a fast-enough API ready in a few days. Will it be beautiful and elegant? Probably not. Will it take traffic and get the data from the producer into a database reliably? Most likely.

From my time with Haskell, I learned to REALLY think about types. Like, REALLY. Having a type doc above every function that describes a curried path, is really cool. It made OCaml documentation (which I consider among the worst) make sense. (No shade at OCaml as a language. I LOVE it. But their docs aren't gonna win any awards)

New comment by nobleach in "Nitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices"

nobleach — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 12:26:13 +0000

You just made me realize how much I miss IRC. Pre-911, one could go for months and months without hearing a single thing about politics. And this is with lots of folks from Berkley in the chats!! (again, not saying Berkley politics are a "problem" - just that I prefer to talk about tech)

New comment by nobleach in "Windows 95 released August 24, 1995"

nobleach — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 17:54:01 +0000

Heard it in my mind before I even had the pointer over the link! This and Buddy Holly got played pretty often.

New comment by nobleach in "Nitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices"

nobleach — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 17:49:04 +0000

I really can't deal with BlueSky. I wanted to because I had a lot of good "starter packs" for NeoVim and OCaml development. Nerd stuff is the reason I visit these sites. The problem is, I start following people and it almost always turns into politics. I may even AGREE with the person's politics but I hate reading and talking about it. God forbid I ever disagree.

Funny thing though. I've heard the claims of "CSAM on Twitter" and now "CSAM on BlueSky". I've never had any of that ransomly show up. I do still have 2 or so random follows from clip-art female avatars with no tweets - per week. I've never quite figured out how that scam is supposed to work. I used to block 'em, now I ignore 'em.

New comment by nobleach in "HTML Can Do That"

nobleach — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 17:21:16 +0000

With the exception of using divs for things that have a more appropriate element. Buttons for example - for the love of all that is holy - when I see an onclick handler and aria attributes on divs, I think, "couldn't you have restyled the button??"

New comment by nobleach in "Why does Opus 5 feel worse to work with?"

nobleach — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 13:11:54 +0000

This just mimics what I call BusinessBro™ speech. It also goes the other way, they use verbs as nouns. "I know this is a big ask". "The solve for that is that we can...." When it was just my product owner in tech meetings, I'd mock him relentlessly "There's already a word for that, it's 'request'" or "Are you sure you didn't mean 'SOLUTION'?? words are hard man". (This was all in good fun, I still love the guy to pieces).

New comment by nobleach in "Why Target Common Lisp for Code Generation?"

nobleach — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 14:46:06 +0000

CL was recommended to me here. I had only played with Scheme over the years (SICP and Little Schemer - which, I used to recommend to every engineer that answered to me). I quickly bought Practical Common Lisp in hardcover (used). The language has a LOT to love. But it's caused me to go back and revisit Scheme(s). I put down my CL book to look at The Scheme Programming language and Chez Scheme. Going through all of this without an LLM has restored some joy. But I can understand reluctance to use this unless I could assemble a team with a ton of knowledge. Prompting for Lisp sounds like fun. But not having the deep understanding means I'd be blindly accepting its suggestions. I can't say what Lisp would be better. Clojure maybe?

New comment by nobleach in "Delphi 13 Community Edition Is Now Available"

nobleach — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 15:12:57 +0000

Yeah, it literally hearkens back to an era where "programs" were literally well-thought-out programs like you'd receive at a play - the cast list, the acts, the music, etc. COBOL on punchcards springs to mind here. Lots of organization. I don't hate it... but kinda like Java, it can be annoying to have to dot all the i's and cross all the t's to do such simple things.

New comment by nobleach in "Squeak 6.1"

nobleach — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 11:33:11 +0000

SBCL does this.

New comment by nobleach in "“Gravity is worth asking about”"

nobleach — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 13:56:57 +0000

I can tell you that Apple grows closer and closer to Microsoft-level annoying every year. The update situation is just stupid at this point. 10:30am and "hey, we'd like to take your computer offline for 45 minutes? Want to defer until this evening? Yeah? put your password in anyway.

iOS has gotten gross as well. You see that email notification on your lock screen? Wanna see what it says? Tap it. HAHA, that just expands the stack. Tap it again... that reveals a bit.... TAP IT AGAIN - ah, now we're unlocking and revealing it in the app....

New comment by nobleach in "Bonsai: Janestreet's UI Library"

nobleach — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 12:34:36 +0000

Yup, and Clojure/ClojureScript!

New comment by nobleach in "The day Steve Jobs dissed me in a keynote (2010)"

nobleach — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 12:24:15 +0000

Apple's playbook has always been to knock technology they don't have as "worthless" (Video Messaging, Copy/Paste on iPhone, ability to play multiple video formats on AppleTV, ability to encode WAV files into Apple AAC/M4P). I get that sitting in the meeting room, one would not want to piss off Steve Jobs. Real money/opportunities are sitting there on the table. But it sure would have been nice to say, "Man, this seems like the type of place that might employ a smart engineer or two.... How about you let me know when they figure out how to convert my dataset into something you can handle". Slide the paperwork back across the table, stand, button my top button of my suit jacket, say, "good day". The outcome would have been the same - Steve still would have changed his story into "we didn't want them". But in your mind, it would have been, "wow, I can't believe converting one format to another was such an arduous task".

New comment by nobleach in "So Reddit has decided that plain HTML is unsafe"

nobleach — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 13:12:54 +0000

I always considered the massive digg.com revolt to be the "beginning of the end". It was between Reddit and Kuro5hin in those days. Who was going be the next "Slashdot"? It's the same story over and over though. Site reaches critical mass, it needs to afford hosting, infra, salaries.... what do they do? Monetize.

New comment by nobleach in "Judge approves $1.5B Anthropic settlement for pirated books used to train Claude"

nobleach — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 12:30:16 +0000

I agree. If I pirate a book and share it on the web, and I get busted for doing so, and subsequently pay a fine, I don't get to KEEP sharing it on the web.

Now, if I license the book, I might be able to come to an agreement with the author/publisher whereby I can share some of it.

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

nobleach — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 20:46:27 +0000

Yeah, guile has a library that looks close to what I want. The worry is that railway programming is an entire shift in error handling. Since it's not the standard that I've seen in the Lisp/Scheme world, I'd be forcing a paradigm that no one wants.

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

nobleach — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 17:43:07 +0000

That's just crazy! (in a good way) I've been in software since 1998 and it's like I've just uncovered a whole new world.

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

nobleach — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 16:38:20 +0000

I particpated in a Clojure reading group for "Getting Clojure" back around 2017. Having the entire JVM ecosystem available, is absolutely a great benefit. I even fooled around with ClojureScript a bit. David Nolen is great at making the case for both.

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

nobleach — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 16:01:00 +0000

Perhaps, but Chicken? Guile? Chez? They're all pretty cool.

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

nobleach — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 16:00:05 +0000

Since a few folks here recommended Common Lisp to me as the language that would "tick all my boxes", I've been doing a deep dive. Right now, I'm working through SICP again with DrRacket. The first time I worked through it with MIT Scheme MANY years ago. It's shocking how much I've forgotten.

What I like about this article is that it walks through the different "camps" of Lisp. Scheme is so intriguing to me because of how small it can actually be. I can build nearly any paradigm I want to exist. The problem is, if I were to actually go find a job where they were using a Lisp, (I hear those actually exist) they wouldn't want to use my "Result monad + match statement - railway pattern" that I've used from OCaml and Rust. So learning something that is truly "common" can make more sense.

As far as learning though, Scheme feels "just right". I've imposed a "no AI until I've found a working solution" rule that keeps my mind engaged. Couple that with a willingness to say, "I don't know that right now... I'll think about it throughout the day and maybe by this evening I'll have an answer".