Hacker News: shawn_w

New comment by shawn_w in "Prolog Coding Horror"

shawn_w — Mon, 18 May 2026 06:40:14 +0000

New comment by shawn_w in "Magical Realism: “Northern Exposure” 25 Years Later (2015)"

shawn_w — Sun, 17 May 2026 22:04:45 +0000

Roslyn and Cle Elum are next to each other.

New comment by shawn_w in "Accelerate – Embedded language for high-performance array computations"

shawn_w — Sun, 17 May 2026 06:03:01 +0000

I'm sure you can define enough new infix operators that the Haskell ends up resembling APL if you miss that style enough.

New comment by shawn_w in "My Favorite Bugs: Invalid Surrogate Pairs"

shawn_w — Sun, 17 May 2026 04:22:05 +0000

If you use the string methods that work with code points instead of chars, you rarely if ever have to deal with surrogate pairs in Java.

New comment by shawn_w in "We've made the world too complicated"

shawn_w — Sun, 17 May 2026 02:37:32 +0000

That reminds me of James Morrow's This Is The Way The World Ends.

After a nuclear apocalypse wipes out most of humanity, the ghosts of now-will-never-be-born future people hold the survivors to trial because they're ticked off at losing their opportunity to live.

New comment by shawn_w in "Accelerando (2005)"

shawn_w — Sat, 16 May 2026 23:57:57 +0000

It was one of Stross's first books, a fixup of older short stories. He gets better.

New comment by shawn_w in "We accidentally recreated old Facebook"

shawn_w — Wed, 13 May 2026 05:29:04 +0000

I don't even see most of my friends posts until a few weeks later. It completely kills any way to meaningfully keep up with them via Facebook.

Lots and lots of thinly disguised ads, though.

New comment by shawn_w in "Riding the D in Los Angeles: city hopes new subway stations will be game changer"

shawn_w — Tue, 12 May 2026 22:45:39 +0000

South Lake Union Trolley.

You can get t-shirts.

New comment by shawn_w in "Show HN: Rust but Lisp"

shawn_w — Sat, 09 May 2026 23:38:10 +0000

A let that defines variables that have a lifetime beyond the scope of the expression? Yeah, that's really unusual. And it's not even the oddest looking thing from the first example block of code.

New comment by shawn_w in "First Tesla Semi Rolls Off High-Volume Production Line"

shawn_w — Mon, 04 May 2026 04:39:33 +0000

I don't know about exact rates, but diesel pumps in banks intended for semis have a larger diameter nozzle that flows faster than the normal sized ones, yeah. They won't fit diesel cars/vans/light trucks.

New comment by shawn_w in "Tar Files Created on macOS Display Errors When Extracting on Linux (2024)"

shawn_w — Mon, 04 May 2026 04:31:31 +0000

That might be an overly optimistic assumption for the typical user, to be fair.

New comment by shawn_w in "Dotcl: Common Lisp Implementation on .NET"

shawn_w — Sat, 02 May 2026 17:52:51 +0000

Common Lisp does not require implementations preform tail call optimization in general, or even in just the limited case of tail recursion.

New comment by shawn_w in "Spirit Airlines Is Winding Down All Operations"

shawn_w — Sat, 02 May 2026 07:23:35 +0000

It was a very quick wind down.

New comment by shawn_w in "The smelly baby problem"

shawn_w — Sat, 02 May 2026 02:41:07 +0000

My parents used cloth diapers for me, and then later reused them for years around the house as rags.

New comment by shawn_w in "The smelly baby problem"

shawn_w — Sat, 02 May 2026 01:48:53 +0000

Checking to see if you're able to fit two fingers underneath a dressing to make sure it's not too tight and won't cut off circulation is standard practice in health care; not just diapers.

New comment by shawn_w in "Why I still reach for Lisp and Scheme instead of Haskell"

shawn_w — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 21:18:22 +0000

Yes, I was thinking of lexical scope; as in redefining the function shadows the existing one and doesn't change the function already defined uses of call.

New comment by shawn_w in "Why I still reach for Lisp and Scheme instead of Haskell"

shawn_w — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 08:48:31 +0000

You know, after some testing with a bunch of different scheme implementations, I take back what I said, at least for working in a REPL.

    (define (displayln msg) (display msg) (newline))
    (define (inner x) (+ x 1))
    (define (outer x) (inner x))
    (displayln (outer 5))
    (define (inner x) (+ x 2))
    (displayln (outer 5))

outputs 6 and 7 in every one I tried, not the 6 and 6 I expected.

New comment by shawn_w in "Why I still reach for Lisp and Scheme instead of Haskell"

shawn_w — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 03:43:22 +0000

That sort of hotfix workflow isn't really a thing in Racket or Scheme in general. Changing the definition of a function doesn't update everything else that calls that function like it does in CL.

Maybe emacs lisp works that way?

New comment by shawn_w in "DeepSeek v4"

shawn_w — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 05:38:31 +0000

>Generate an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle

at the top of the linked pages.

New comment by shawn_w in "Bodega cats of New York"

shawn_w — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 01:10:37 +0000

There are areas of the city where instead of dumpsters, businesses and apartment complexes just put trash bags out in the alley/sidewalk for daily collection.

https://www.seattle.gov/utilities/your-services/collection-a...