Top all-time · #13370
J
Jach's Recent Posts
Personal blog · thejach.com/view · on HN as Jachprogrammingsystems
Jach's Recent Posts is a personal blog at thejach.com about programming and systems. Since 2012, 6 different Hacker News readers have linked it 27 times. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-05-02, and you can follow it by feed.
27mentions?
6HN people?
2012–2025first – last linked?
Too few sampled comments (4) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN commenters link Jach's blog for a Lisp parentheses meme image, a Vim learning-curve image, and the author's about page stating transhumanist, Singularitarian views. Its posts are cited as illustrations, not praised.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 4 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- /imgs/lisp_parens.png2 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2017-09-06
- /imgs/vim_learning.jpg2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2014-05-27
What Hacker News says?
Not OP, but I used Google's Long.js (among other things) in a project[0] to get around the limitation of not being able to do as in Python: import fractions print str(fractions.Fraction.from_float(0.3333).limit_denominator(10)) Almost anything that compiles to JS would be better than by-hand JS; I'd love to use ClojureScript with re-frame at work... [0] http://www.thejach.com/pseudo-public/webgl_coursera/assignme...
Comment linking /pseudo-public/webgl_coursera/assignments/week2/approx_fraction.js
on “NPM and Left-Pad: Have We Forgotten How to Program?”Submitted Clojure Tip: defstruct, deftype, defrecord as a story · 1 points
HN discussion> Does the compose key work on different keyboard layouts? Yup, switching to Dvorak and the sequence is the same (. then [ on qwerty). There also seems to be an ibus mode for it in ibus-table-others, along with a mode that tries to map LaTeX to unicode symbols, but I haven't tried either. As for your other remark, I remember back in the day using the Gaim-LaTeX plugin to communicate LaTeX with people over MSN/AIM/IR…
Comment linking /view/2011/9/playing_with_morton_numbers
on “Students are failing AP tests because the College Board can’t handle HEIC images”Don't knock it til you try it? I mean, already in recent years people have made some very low fidelity 'resurrections' and gotten some measure of comfort from it, never mind the many years of history of people who visit gravestones to 'chat' (some even believing they get replies to some extent or another). When markov chains were hip, "talk with Charles Dickens!" (play with a markov model trained on his works) was a…
Comment linking /view/2017/6/how_you_might_see_some_of_the_dead_again
on “Nvidia Research Turns 2D Photos into 3D Scenes”If you're in the Java ecosystem, the CacheBuilder in Guava is pretty good: https://google.github.io/guava/releases/19.0/api/docs/com/go... By default it handles the case of concurrent retrieval on the same key (the second one will just wait for the first one to finish and use that value rather than starting a duplicate computation). It also lets you configure more interesting things like eviction strategies, removal…
Comment linking /view/2017/6/caches_are_evil
on “How not to structure database-backed web apps: performance bugs in the wild”I appreciate the feedback. Maybe my approach could have left out the claim of Lisp == Common Lisp, though I still am amused (as I mention near the end of my later comment) and slightly bothered that such a diverse set of languages (Python too, it's sometimes called an acceptable Lisp) can get called "Lisps" or "dialects of" or "members of the family" rather than an explicitly vague "Lisp-like". The main direction I…
Comment linking /imgs/lisp_parens.png
on “How knowing Lisp destroyed my programming career (2006)”You really just have to dive into it. This image is of Scheme, but the sentiment holds for Common Lisp too: https://www.thejach.com/imgs/lisp_parens.png
Comment linking /imgs/lisp_parens.png
on “Not Lisp again (2009)”I think he's being sincere. From http://www.thejach.com/about#sum "Can you sum up your core views in a short package so I don't completely misrepresent you when reporting second-hand? My real view is simple. I'm a transhumanist Singularitarian in the Good sense, or the Yudkowsky sense if you prefer. Anything that gets in the way of a positive Singularity is bad. [snip] Even though I'm an Anarchist you'll see me supp…
Comment linking /about
on “I Hope Yahoo Crushes Facebook ”I've collected a few links I've given out before on this subject if you'd like to read more into it: https://www.thejach.com/view/2022/1/thoughts_on_writings_on_... To reiterate some of my thoughts (which are far less interesting or important than the links) I think it's a very old and tiresome and largely pointless debate, even if it can be a fun waste of time to ponder, but in any case it's mostly been lost. #lisp…
Comment linking /view/2022/1/thoughts_on_writings_on_lisp
on “Running Lisp in Production (2020)”In baseball and other sports, pros and cons of different styles are readily and honestly talked about, even when coaches have a bias. See e.g. https://blog.paddlepalace.com/2014/01/coaching-tip-playing-t... for table tennis. Few comparable articles in programming exist; either people can't conceive of other styles or contexts, or just want to talk about the superiority of their bias regardless of context. If downsid…
Comment linking /public/symbolics-books-EugyAAEXUAUG_id.jpg
on “The Rise of Worse Is Better (1991)”This is a good explanation, though like the Dr. Dobbs article linked on this page I prefer the exposition of logs. (Looks like the author updated for it.) I also have a personal displeasure of Venn diagram and set-based and event-based versions of probability, and non-conditional probabilities rearing their heads, but that attitude comes largely from reading Jaynes... I wrote my own Naive Bayes function for helping…
Comment linking /view/2012/1/an_explanation_and_example_of_naive_bayes
on “How To Build a Naive Bayes Classifier”I don't think that's a great example, as I never heard of "range anxiety" until EVs started to become popular, and it was applied to and admitted by exclusively owners of EVs and also E-bikes. But it's 2025, it was enough to downvote and ignore the GP comment... Even responding with a dismissive https://www.thejach.com/imgs/lisp_parens.png is too much in current year. Another comment mentions paredit/parinfer, I'm n…
Comment linking /imgs/lisp_parens.png
on “I made a multiplayer shooter game in Lisp, here is my journey”A bit late, but why not.. https://www.thejach.com I write mostly to myself, it's kinda fun to go back 10 years and think "huh, that's totally wrong" or "yup, still think that..."
Comment linking /
on “Into the Personal-Website-Verse (2019)”That's what I think too, and I definitely don't own millions of domains. Be careful about trusting privacy protection plans. A spam email came to me recently showing the unmasked info and I still have no idea how it acquired its data... https://www.thejach.com/view/2017/10/google_whois_protection...
Comment linking /view/2017/10/google_whois_protection_doesnt_protect
on “Find every domain someone owns automatically”Yup. Time to refer to this image again I guess: https://www.thejach.com/imgs/lisp_parens.png (Though that's technically Scheme -- I find Common Lisp more readable and encouraging of smaller functions and modularity. The clean code culture of tiny functions and unit tested everything is not there, though, and a lot of stuff is done by individuals so the benefits of code review aren't often captured.)
Comment linking /imgs/lisp_parens.png
on “Mezzano: Operating system written in Common Lisp”You should quote your vars in the if check, otherwise it doesn't handle spaces very well. (And really the master key should be a master passphrase.) A few years ago I whipped this up: http://www.thejach.com/public/pw2 (I don't recommend other people use it but it works for me.) I type in something along the lines of "my secret passphrase ycombinator.com". It doesn't do hash iteration and uses the hash as a seed to P…
Comment linking /public/pw2
on “Hack of Cupid Media dating website exposes 42 million plaintext passwords”Location: Seattle, WA. Willing to relocate or explore working remotely. Ideally full time, though willing to consider contract / part time. Primary Domains / Languages / Platforms / Misc. Other Keywords: Web application development (front and back end, preference for back end), some database internals, some 2D game programming with PyGame, academic experience with hardware and image processing. / Python, PHP, Java,…
Comment linking /portfolio
on “Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (June 2014)”Yup, as I type ( and { and [ and " and manually close them in every other language and inevitably turn that stuff off if the IDE has it enabled. vim default has enough support -- when I type ) et al., it highlights the matching opening. Typing '%' in command mode jumps to the corresponding open/close bracket. Occasionally if I know I'm done with a function, and have a bunch of closing parens to insert, I'll use slim…
Comment linking /imgs/lisp_parens.png
on “Lisp as an Alternative to Java (2000)”Lacking infix syntax out of the box is a problem, though not hard to add as a sibling mentioned; for those curious I like linking to this gem dating back to '93 since it's part of quicklisp now https://github.com/rigetticomputing/cmu-infix The rest of the syntax being somewhat alien-ish is also a problem, but it goes away with practice. ( https://www.thejach.com/imgs/lisp_parens.png ) But I don't think syntax alone…
Comment linking /imgs/lisp_parens.png
on “Lisp Machine Manual (1984)”This may be a meme, but it's also very true (like all good comedy). It's truly represents how you start to look at Lisp code after a while: https://www.thejach.com/imgs/lisp_parens.png
Comment linking /imgs/lisp_parens.png
on “The Roots of Lisp (2001)”I was going to challenge you, since I thought that was going to be the older http://theory.stanford.edu/~amitp/GameProgramming/AStarCompa... reference which I never found very helpful. The best intro I had to these was in a Game AI course and we basically implemented all these visualizations and more (bad screenshot: http://www.thejach.com/imgs/visibility_with_astar.png ) to fully understand it. But the newer refere…
Comment linking /imgs/visibility_with_astar.png
on “Dijkstra's Algorithm”I like this author's work on fast game structures for Lisp, shows what you can do if you're willing to do a bit of work on explicit types and so on. It's not obvious from the readme but the trivial-benchmark code includes details like time spent in the garbage collector (0 for this) and memory allocated, not just wall clock time. If he wants to do more interesting benchmarks, a standard set to use includes https://m…
Comment linking /imgs/visibility_with_astar.png
on “A* search: optimized implementation in Lisp”I just find Vim so much faster. There is a learning curve ( http://www.thejach.com/imgs/vim_learning.jpg ), but once you're over that curve, you can't stand regular text-editors anymore! Fewer key-presses and your hands not needing to leave the keyboard (or at least, infrequently) = fast. I should add, I don't just use Vim, I use the IdeaVIM plugin for PHPStorm and Webstorm, for development zen. :-)
Comment linking /imgs/vim_learning.jpg
on “Can someone :help me?”I don't think they would be confused or get very many misconceptions, especially if they know how to mimic OOP in C. http://www.thejach.com/view/2010/1/oop_in_c_with_function_po... shows one way to do OOP in C (Zed's great C book shows another way for OOP that's prototypes-based like Javascript), one line of code is: `first_tank->fire_at(first_tank, second_tank);` Is it confusing that the second_tank object's health…
Comment linking /view/2010/1/oop_in_c_with_function_pointers_and_structs
on “Is Python call-by-value or call-by-reference? Neither.”I went cold turkey sometime in about 2011 or 2012. The only reason I did it was because I was finishing college at the time, and I was afraid that I was losing the ability to rewire my brain on a muscle-memory level. It was a pain in the ass; writing papers on a deadline using a keyboard with which you are not familiar can be incredibly frustrating. I tried to mimic the programs we used when I was in elementary scho…
Comment linking /imgs/vim_learning.jpg
on “Ask HN: What is your experience switching away from QWERTY keyboard?”Heh, if you thought this post had very strong comments about LispWorks and Franz, wait till you read my rant from last year: https://www.thejach.com/view/2022/1/thoughts_on_writings_on_... It doesn't bother me as much as maybe it seems from the rant, I don't think about them hardly at all. But when I do, it's frustrating, because just about every other ecosystem out there is better. The rant highlights IntelliJ from…
Comment linking /view/2022/1/thoughts_on_writings_on_lisp
on “Common Lisp Implementations in 2023”
