Hacker News: offlineguy

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

offlineguy — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 21:02:18 +0000

I was fortunate enough to use lisp professionally for nearly 20 years. The only reason that gig ended was the unfortunate demise of the majority owner and founder, and his heirs selling the shop to a competitor that only wanted the customer database imported. Lisp was never the problem, nor particularily messy.

On the contrary, we considered it a major reason we were able to build a quite successful stock broker and bank from scratch with a team of 4-6 people, who doubled as datacenter ops (we ran on-prem), internal tech support for the rest of the firm (~20 people) and 2.line customer support.

We quite naturally converged on a set of internal libraries for various tasks. Understanding and fixing each other’s code was not a big deal.

Coincidentally, our frontend was php. That was messier, and we conciously kept that layer as lean as possible.

New comment by offlineguy in "DNS alias mode (2020)"

offlineguy — Sun, 22 Aug 2021 08:33:43 +0000

I like this one, written by a former colleague: https://www.amazon.com/Concise-Guide-DNS-BIND/dp/0789722739/

New comment by offlineguy in "1M Cell Minesweeper"

offlineguy — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 11:01:35 +0000

Original minesweeper ensures that the first move is never a mine.

New comment by offlineguy in "Show HN: Trade stocks from the command line with no commission"

offlineguy — Sun, 17 May 2020 20:51:41 +0000

I wrote a FIX engine in Common Lisp once, working for a Norwegian retail broker. Worked like a charm for many years, connected to multiple market places and brokerages. Adapting to new counterparties was certainly a bit of work, but generally far less than implementing their binary protocols. (We tried that too from time to time, usually if FIX was not an option from the exchange. Admittedly rare i later years.)

Unfortunately I wasn’t allowed to open source it, and it’s now lost in the void after a takeover. :(

Good luck to you. It’s not an impossible project. :)

New comment by offlineguy in "Just what does “code as data” mean anyway? (2014)"

offlineguy — Fri, 16 Feb 2018 17:57:53 +0000

If you don’t know what you’re doing, you can introduce bugs regardless of programming language.