Hacker News: samth

Rackup, a Toolchain Manager for Racket

samth — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 03:34:17 +0000

Article URL: https://samth.github.io/rackup/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47360394

Points: 7

# Comments: 1

New comment by samth in "Rivian's TM-B electric bike"

samth — Thu, 23 Oct 2025 14:07:21 +0000

You don't need 3000W, 1kW is plenty. I have a Yuba Mundo (one of the biggest long-tail cargo bikes) and my Bafang motor tops out around 1kW and it's plenty even for the biggest hills here in Bloomington (which is quite hilly).

New comment by samth in "Gemini 2.5 Computer Use model"

samth — Wed, 08 Oct 2025 15:59:30 +0000

I tried this also, and it was totally garbage for me too (with a similar refusal as well as other failures).

New comment by samth in "Is sound gradual typing dead? Performance problems in Typed Racket (2016)"

samth — Mon, 29 Sep 2025 14:54:58 +0000

No, this is exactly what is meant by soundness. Using the `Any` type in TypeScript can result in values that have type `integer` being actually strings, which is unsoundness.

New comment by samth in "Advanced Scheme Techniques (2004) [pdf]"

samth — Thu, 25 Sep 2025 18:56:28 +0000

The main implementation of Racket today is built on top of Chez Scheme, which uses the techniques described by Dybvig that I linked to.

In the earlier implementation of Racket, indeed it doesn't convert to CPS but does use something like A-normal form. There, continuations are implemented by actually copying the C stack.

New comment by samth in "Thoughts on Racket and Chez Scheme (2021)"

samth — Tue, 23 Sep 2025 14:11:35 +0000

The predictions from this post have almost entirely turned out to be wrong. Chez Scheme upstream decided to merge in Racket's changes entirely, and to make the lead developer of Racket (Matthew Flatt) a core Chez developer. These days Matthew is the most active Chez developer. Over the past few years, half of the serious Chez committers are people who come from Racket.

New comment by samth in "Advanced Scheme Techniques (2004) [pdf]"

samth — Fri, 12 Sep 2025 20:41:31 +0000

It's not true that you need to use CPS to implemented first-class continuations. There are plenty of slow ways to do it, and even if you want to be fast you can do multiple different things. Dybvig describes a number of options in his thesis: https://www.cs.unc.edu/xcms/wpfiles/dissertations/dybvig.pdf

New comment by samth in "Ex-Waymo engineers launch Bedrock Robotics to automate construction"

samth — Thu, 17 Jul 2025 03:49:54 +0000

The post doesn't mean there are 20 unemployed people, but that there are 20 interchangable pest control contractors who all do an adequate job, and so the one they fired was easy to replace.

New comment by samth in "On eval in dynamic languages generally and in Racket specifically (2011)"

samth — Fri, 30 May 2025 14:05:08 +0000

No, macros and eval are quite different. You can see this for example in Python or JavaScript, which have eval but not macros.

New comment by samth in "Hacker News now runs on top of Common Lisp"

samth — Tue, 27 May 2025 16:38:54 +0000

The big difference between SBCL and Racket today is support for parallelism, and that's about decisions made by both projects a very long time ago. Racket has incrementally added significantly more parallelism over the years, but supporting lightweight parallel tasks that do IO (as in a web server) is still not something Racket's great at.

(Source: I'm one of Racket's core developers.)

New comment by samth in "Reversing the fossilization of computer science conferences"

samth — Mon, 28 Apr 2025 20:58:18 +0000

This article is mostly whining that evidence-free speculation about how to write good software is no longer publishable in top conferences. And the major evidence cited is that there's a specific citation style required, a standard feature of every kind of publishing since forever. I promise (having reviewed many times for the specific conference under discussion) that no one's paper is rejected (or even denigrated) for failing to use appropriate citation style, people comment on it the same way they would comment on any other style issue.

New comment by samth in "AI 2027"

samth — Thu, 03 Apr 2025 20:38:16 +0000

I think it's not holding up that well outside of predictions about AI research itself. In particular, he makes a lot of predictions about AI impact on persuasion, propaganda, the information environment, etc that have not happened.

New comment by samth in "The Alpha Myth: How captive wolves led us astray"

samth — Tue, 28 Jan 2025 17:02:39 +0000

Just to be clear, the word "alpha" does not appear in the text of "Call of the Wild".

New comment by samth in "Bicameral, Not Homoiconic"

samth — Tue, 03 Dec 2024 17:21:04 +0000

Perhaps in that case you should supply the definition that the author ought to have known.

New comment by samth in "Bicameral, Not Homoiconic"

samth — Mon, 02 Dec 2024 21:05:26 +0000

Indeed, the Rust macro system was designed by people who had worked on the Racket macro system previously.

New comment by samth in "Bicameral, Not Homoiconic"

samth — Mon, 02 Dec 2024 21:03:44 +0000

Notably, the definition given in the Wikipedia entry referencing TRAC means that "homoiconic" is a property of an _implementation_, not of a language. This would mean that Lisp, a programming language, could not properly be described as homoiconic, since it admits multiple implementations including those that do not have this property (eg, SBCL rather clearly doesn't).

New comment by samth in "Concrete clickbait: next time you share a spomenik photo (2016)"

samth — Sun, 08 Sep 2024 15:47:39 +0000

History is of course valuable to learn, but as a criticism of the work this is almost precisely the "turn to the camera and say that he's the same kind of communist I am" tweet made flesh.

New comment by samth in "NPM and NodeJS should do more to make ES Modules easy to use"

samth — Thu, 20 Jun 2024 18:46:14 +0000

We considered that syntax, but `from` was not a reserved keyword already, whereas `import` was, so the parsing situation with the actual syntax was much better.

New comment by samth in "The Moral Economy of the Shire"

samth — Mon, 03 Jun 2024 21:54:28 +0000

This is just entirely false. As a counterpoint, I recommend this passage about the washing in the Texas Hill County. https://x.com/trainallday247/status/1796732464838160650

New comment by samth in "Racket Language"

samth — Wed, 24 Apr 2024 12:27:05 +0000

Very few people I know doing real work in Racket have a SLIME-like workflow. In general, Racket discouraging this style is related to us being a bunch of professors, but not really in the way you say. Instead, it's because it's not possible to give a sensible semantics to the top-level, especially in the presence of macros. We care a lot about macros, and we also care a lot about sensible semantics, and thus the attitude towards the REPL. The slogan in the Racket community that "the top level is hopeless" expresses this sentiment.