corinroyal

Thanks, Don. That's a lot of great history to start chewing on.

Wait, you created April, one of the most amazing hosted languages on Lisp just to learn Lisp? Wow! And here I am toiling over a simple CRUD library management app trying to figure out CLOS and it's not even going well.

April is a revelation and I'm putting it in my framework. APL reminds me of Leibniz's alphabet of concepts for his calculus ratiocinator. So gorgeous and efficient. I'm getting the keyboard.

Memex as a name for a "vibe coding" platform is just trolling.

hand-wringing

A sentence is not a paragraph.

...

Tyrian purple can and should be extracted from live snails not crushed dead ones. You pluck them off a rock, poke them with a stick, they spit dye on to your skein, and you put them back, annoyed, but ready to make more. This is how it's done in America. I don't know what's wrong with Europeans that they can't figure this out.

Fewer

Common Lisp, XMPP, HTML/HTTP, DITA, XML, Git, ssh, Rsync, Nginx, Firefox, GIMP, Debian, EXTFS, HP-GL, bash, Emacs, TeX, PDF, Bittorrent.

It's good when people act based on morality and encourage others to do so.

What are the best general products (i.e. you ask for the topic and it teaches vs. specialized) that can teach you about a topic using AI

I'm always baffled by hate for DSLs until I realize that what people are criticizing aren't DSLs, but DSLs you have to write from scratch. If you host your DSL on Lisp, then all you have to write is your domain logic, not the base language. Most of the work is already done, and your language is useful from day one. I don't understand why people insist on creating new languages from scratch just to watch them die on the vine, when these langs could have been hosted DSLs on Lisp and actually get used.

And don't miss Sonja Keene's book "Object-Oriented Programming in Common Lisp" and Kiczales' "The Art of the Meta-Object Protocol". If you don't reach enlightenment after those, Libgen will refund your money.

I thought so too, until I realized that if atheists see God as a deep aspect of the human mind, that evolved that way for reasons, then we don't miss much of the Judeo-Christian story. I stopped by a local church for Bible study just in order to challenge my assumptions and found that they had no problem with that formulation at all. I expected way more awkwardness and even pushed the issue, to no avail. The result was a delightful experience of people sitting around interrogating ancient texts and being attentive to each other's life challenges.

I found that the structure of the Christian congregation is equivalent to the anarchist affinity group. I realized that, unlike us, Christians build infrastructure to support their organizing, and we should probably adopt that.

I'm still the same atheist, just a churchgoing one. I don't go to mass often or ever recite the Nicene Creed, but otherwise it's been a fantastic social outlet, great intellectual company, and the organ festival is off the hook.

On food stamps now, and totally agree. I don't need the government to pay for Coke or booze. I need food and appreciate the program greatly.

Sockpuppet created for this comment.

Delicious Chocolate Cheesecake

When I think of Delicious Chocolate Cheesecake, I’m instantly transported to the glow of my grandmother’s kitchen—a warm, bustling space filled with the scent of melting chocolate and the comforting hum of function application to lists of ingredients. My grandmother, Alonzo, was a kind and pious woman who believed every recipe made with love was proof that Peano arithmetic is undecidable.

Ingredients:

1 Kg Delicious Chocolate

2 Kg Cheese

3 Kg Cake

λf. λx. f (x Delicious Chocolate Cheese Cake)

I love the information architecture of this site. You jump right in to demonstration code and a reference and only later the marketing text. So refreshing. I can see at a glance what the project is and what makes it different. Kudos!

Blue pigments were just rare. There are very few natural ones and historically the synthetics have been costly and hard to produce, Han blue, Egyptian blue, Fra Angelico blue from lapiz... The later was so expensive it was mainly reserved for Mary's robes, so perhaps the spiritual association was due to expense. Fra Angelico blue is still expensive. 23,000 Euros a kilo from Kremer. Even new synthetic blues are expensive. YInMn blue is 208 Euro for 50g.

The real revolution in color was the invention of cheap synthetic blues starting with Prussian blue in the 19th century and led today by the ultramarines and phthalocyanine blues, which include our standard cyan used in every inkjet. When Prussian blue came out there were a few decades of artistic celebration at the dawn of a cheap, intense, and gorgeous blue. Hokusai's 36 Views of Mount Fuji is a particularly exuberant example of this new blue's early use.

DSLs are not a new or a bad thing. We use them everyday. SQL, HTML, CSS, JSON, Postscript, Markdown, YAML, Latex, and GNU make are all DSLs. The job of a programmer is to come up with thoughtful composable abstractions, a vocabulary of nouns and verbs, that match how experts tend to think about the problem domain. That's all I do all day. Imagine SQL as a library. Sorry, I meant don't.

Perhaps the difference is that my DSLs are hosted on Lisp, so inherit that syntax. The nouns and verbs I create extend the standard library transparently. There is nothing to learn but the vocabulary. So perhaps programmers who aren't confident about language design should avoid creating DSLs that aren't hosted on a good general purpose language. Everyone else should write DSLs on top of Lisp the way God and John McCarthy intended.

It's not that hard to stop most bad actors on social networks. The key is wanting to. When volume of engagement matters more than quality, then you get what we have. Strong moderation and terms of service enforcement are a prerequisite for productive conversation. If you want to be a member of the Rotary Club in good standing, there are rules to follow, and you will be judged by leadership and your peers. But the worst anti-social behavior is, not just tolerated, but encouraged on most mainstream sites. People act as though all speech is equally valid and are unwilling to make basic moral or intellectual judgements. Until someone has the backbone to define what is acceptable, we'll remain in the woods.

For example, today on HN there was another long thread about homelessness. We had people claiming that Gavin Newsom gave out cash in the 90's. We had people claiming that most homeless people have given up looking for work due to mental illness. We had people claiming that people come from all over to San Francisco because of how much better it is to be homeless there. None remotely true.

Should these opinions be permitted in public forums? This is not a hard question. It's never acceptable to pollute the infosphere with disinformation, either intentional or inadvert. It's never acceptable to pontificate about things one has never bothered to understand. If you censor such hot takes, you open space for people who know something about the topic to weigh in.

What disturbs me is how obvious this conclusion is. We all control our friend circles to avoid problematic people, yet new social media initiatives are still free-for-alls in which nefarious actors and hidden hierarchies call the shots. We build sewers, then complain about the smell.

Seriously. This thread is a bunch of people who have never been homeless, who never bothered once to learn anything about the mechanics of homelessness, yet feel compelled to share their utterly wrong opinions anyway. It's still a sin to tell a lie.

The overwhelming majority of homeless people in CA are homeless near where they were last housed. The program you're remembering was called Care NOT Cash. Nothing you said was true. Why not?

I pray you get the healing you need there.

But you already learned the web stack--school kids haven't. Your mental model is what prepared you to use LLMs well to solve a problem. So if they're going to do as you did, they need to learn the subject first and then learn how to extend their reach with LLMs. Otherwise, they're just cheating in school.

Right? Or a domain specific language for law: https://github.com/CatalaLang/catala

I get that dislodging docx is an impossible job, but since docx is a terrible format for anything, it needs to be done for all the reasons the author mentions. The codes that run society should not be locked up in bad proprietary formats.

No.

This excites me. Imagine someone not overcomplicating web tech. I've been thinking of having web sites render as epubs so we don't have to have a sysadmin on call 24/7 just so I can read.

Here's a link to their website with the book: https://shenlanguage.org/TBoS/tbos.html

Admirer, not user. So ambitious and gorgeous. Hosted on Common Lisp with full integration, so useful now. I hope more people check it out. The new Shen book is awesome.