cultofmetatron (u/cultofmetatron)

cultofmetatron commented on Show HN: Using Common Lisp from Inside the Browser turtleware.eu/posts/Using... · Posted by u/jackdaniel

behnamoh · 5 days ago

I love the restarts system but the fact that the industry as a whole chose other approaches makes me wonder if there's something the "wisdom of the crowds" knows that I'm not aware of.

> you can literally pause on an exception, rewind, fix your code and continue from where you left off.

Does it only work on source codes or can I distribute a binary and let my users debug the code like this? Should I distribute the 'image' for it to work?

And is the fix temporary (until the program dies) or permanant?

cultofmetatron · 5 days ago

> makes me wonder if there's something the "wisdom of the crowds" knows that I'm not aware of.

As I alluded to earlier, its really hard to scale a dev team when the language does nothing to keep you on the rails. As an engineer, I hate go for its lack of abstractions and verbosity. As a CTO, I can appreciate that its trying to reduce the friction in making sure all code looks familiar and that any engineer can be rotated into it. TLDR: the things that make common lisp so good for a lone dev are what make it hard for larger projects and most projects nowadays have multiple contributors. I wouldn't start a startup on common lisp today unless you were trying to do something truly novel and your team was all seasoned and experienced devs. throwing a bunch of vibe coding juniors on common lisp is a recipe for disaster while you might make it to a series A using a language like go.

Personally, I love elixir as I think it strikes a really good balance. My team is all older programmers. Our youngest guy is 32 and we have all developed a pretty good intuition for maintaining a descent code base.

> Does it only work on source codes or can I distribute a binary and let my users debug the code like this? Should I distribute the 'image' for it to work?

I wouldn't hand it to the end user but paul grahm famously did cowboy debugging on live servers. A user would cal complaining of a error and paul could go in and patch it in real time while observing the runtime of the system the user was on.

I think it goes without saying that that was a different time and we def can't do that kind of thing today.

> And is the fix temporary (until the program dies) or permanant?

you patch teh code and reload it into your running vm. so its permanent.

cultofmetatron commented on Show HN: Using Common Lisp from Inside the Browser turtleware.eu/posts/Using... · Posted by u/jackdaniel

behnamoh · 5 days ago

> It commits to nothing and does everything better than you'd expect.

Idk man, every time someone makes that claim my immediate reaction is: "what's the catch?". I much rather use 5 tools designed for specific purposes than general-purpose tools that are 50% good at 5 tasks.

cultofmetatron · 5 days ago

the catch is that the langauge is so maleable that no two lisp codebases look the same. Makes it very difficult to establish broader idioms. But in terms of what it cando, its got ridiculously good runtime speed for how dymanic it is and the debugger is one of the best around. you can literally pause on an exception, rewind, fix your code and continue from where you left off.

cultofmetatron commented on Show HN: Using Common Lisp from Inside the Browser turtleware.eu/posts/Using... · Posted by u/jackdaniel

umanwizard · 5 days ago

Is CL really particularly more “functional” than JavaScript? I don’t know CL but I know it bears some passing similarity to Emacs Lisp, which is usually written in a pretty imperative style. Sure, it has first-class closures but so does JS.

cultofmetatron · 5 days ago

CL is the Ditto (pokemon) of programming langauges. It commits to nothing and does everything better than you'd expect. The problem is its very much a lone warrior type of language. you can attain great productivity due to macros and just how maleable it is but it makes it near impossible to get a team to work together on it without very extensive styling and conventions strictly adhered to by the team. In a way, you could say its a direct influence to go, in that the go team saw everything common lisp did and decided to do the opposite.

cultofmetatron commented on Sequoia backs Zed zed.dev/blog/sequoia-back... · Posted by u/vquemener

cultofmetatron · 6 days ago

I think a lot of people are missing the sarcasm here. that said, I agree that its absolutely horrific. yesterday I saw a video where a girl who couldn't have been more than 9 or 10 years old carrying water was hit by an idf strike. Poor kid was basically rendered into chum. The fact taht this stuff is going on right in front of our eyes and our government is complicit in is horrific.

cultofmetatron commented on Zedless: Zed fork focused on privacy and being local-first github.com/zedless-editor... · Posted by u/homebrewer

cultofmetatron · 6 days ago

I've been using AI extensivly the last few weeks but not as a coding agent. I really don't trust it for that. Its really helpful for generating example code for a library I might not be familiar with. a month ago, I was interested in using rabbitmq but he docs were limited. chatgpt was able to give me a fairly good amount of starter code to see how these things are wired together. I used some of it and added to it by hand to finally come up with what is running in production. It certainly has value in that regard. Letting it write and modify code directly? I'm not ready for that. other things its useful for is finding the source of an error when the error message isnt' so great. I'll usually copy paste code that I know is causing the error along with the error message and it'll point out the issues in a way that I can immediatly address. My method is cheaper too, I can get by just fine on the $20/month chatgpt sub doing that.

cultofmetatron commented on Sequoia backs Zed zed.dev/blog/sequoia-back... · Posted by u/vquemener

ksherlock · 6 days ago

I hate to break it to you, but emacs was a product of the MIT AI lab.(prep.ai.mit.edu anyone?).

cultofmetatron · 6 days ago

classical AI and modern generative AI are VERY different beasts. also, there isn't any AI in emacs itself. It was a tool built to make a job easier.

cultofmetatron commented on Injectable 'skin in a syringe' could heal burns without scars sciencedaily.com/releases... · Posted by u/acossta

acossta · 7 days ago

Researchers at Sweden’s Linköping University just published a method where they literally inject a gel full of living cells that can be printed into skin. It’s basically a mix of fibroblasts on gelatin beads and hyaluronic acid that flows through a syringe then solidifies on a wound, letting the body build a real dermis instead of scar tissue. In mice it seems to integrate well and even grows its own blood vessels. The whole idea of 3D printing skin or squeezing it out of a tube like toothpaste is both weird and incredibly promising for burn victims.

cultofmetatron · 7 days ago

> incredibly promising for burn victims.

I could see this being super popular for getting rid of acne scars. they could use laser to burn away the dermis and apply this stuff to have it heal with minimal scarring.

cultofmetatron commented on Nvidia Tilus: A Tile-Level GPU Kernel Programming Language github.com/NVIDIA/tilus... · Posted by u/ashvardanian

socalgal2 · 8 days ago

Maybe this is my dad speaking through me when he got tired of answering questions and said "look it up" and pointed to our bookshelf but....

Copying and pasting your exact words above into an LLM (gemini/chatgpt) provided an answer arguably better than any of the human answers at the time of this post.

cultofmetatron · 8 days ago

while thats true, it sets a dangerous precedent. llms get their answers from being trained on a corpus of human knowledge created by humans. what is going to happen when we all collectively tell each other to copy paste into chatgpt and no one is actually answering any questions?

cultofmetatron commented on Left to Right Programming graic.net/p/left-to-right... · Posted by u/graic

juancn · 8 days ago

SQL shows it's age by having exactly the same problem.

Queries should start by the `FROM` clause, that way which entities are involved can be quickly resolved and a smart editor can aid you in writing a sensible query faster.

The order should be FROM -> SELECT -> WHERE, since SELECT commonly gives names to columns, which WHERE will reference.

You could even avoid crap like `SELECT * FROM table`, and just write `FROM table` and have the select clause implied.

Never mind me, I'm just an old man with a grudge, I'll go back to my cave...

cultofmetatron · 8 days ago

ecto's sql dsl basicly fixes this. here's one I just wrote in my codebase

  from(l in Blinq.Reservations.OrderCycleLinks)
    |> join(:left, [l], r in Blinq.Reservations.Reservation, on: l.reservation_id == r.id)
    |> select([l, r], %{
      order_cycle_id: l.order_cycle_id,
      customer_id: r.customer_id
    })
    |> where([l, r], l.order_cycle_id in ^order_cycle_ids and r.assignment_type == :TABLE)
    |> Repo.all()