Top all-time · #7095
Matheus Moreira
Personal blog · matheusmoreira.com/articles · on HN as matheusmoreiraprogrammingsystems
Matheus Moreira's personal blog at matheusmoreira.com covers programming and systems. Since 2023, 11 different Hacker News readers have linked it 76 times, most often “Linux System Calls”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-09-02, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (3) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Matheus Moreira's articles on Lisp internals, delimited continuations, Linux system calls and writing for one person. Comments mostly cite them as background for a point or project.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 3 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Stuff I think about and don't want to forget.
Most-linked posts?
- Linux System Calls4 people · 20 mentions · first linked 2023-09-06
- Self-contained Linux applications with lone Lisp4 people · 18 mentions · first linked 2023-11-25
- Managing dotfiles with Make3 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2023-12-27
- Baby's Second Garbage Collector3 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2026-04-02
- The Lone Lisp Heap2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2026-05-28
What Hacker News says?
Anthropic has a separate meter for Fable. I used to get like five Fable sessions per week and that's it. OpenAI has no such nonsense. No separate meter. No five hour limits. I get to use Astra at max effort on literally every task if I want to, and even this somehow lasts me several days. Anthropic got caught playing stupid "20x refers to the 5h limit" word games with their customers. Meanwhile, I have statistically…
Comment linking /articles/code-reviewing-lone-lisp-with-sol-and-fable
on “GPT-6 Sol and Luna”Submitted Delimited continuations in lone Lisp as a story · 118 points
HN discussionMy code review benchmark put Sol 5.6 on the same performance tier as Fable 5. https://www.matheusmoreira.com/articles/code-reviewing-lone-...
Comment linking /articles/code-reviewing-lone-lisp-with-sol-and-fable
on “GPT-6 Sol and Luna”Submitted Self-contained Linux applications with lone Lisp as a story · 114 points
HN discussionPart of the reason is wanting to make cool stuff . I'm not even half as brilliant as guys like Fabrice Bellard but I certainly would like to be. My strongest reason to start a project though is very much along the "self-soothing" lines described in TFA. I do it to prove to myself I'm not insane for thinking that something is possible and that things could be different. If I can think of something, surely people much…
Comment linking /articles/self-contained-lone-lisp-applications
on “The curse of knowing how, or; fixing everything”Submitted Managing dotfiles with Make as a story · 74 points
HN discussion> But without firm support from the OSes involved, it is inevitably a hack with questionable long-term stability prospects. Case in point: https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan/blob/master/libc/sysv/s... The system call numbers of all the unixlikes are bitwise packed into a single number. There is exactly one of those columns which is stable: the Linux one. Everything else is not part of the binary interface of their…
Comment linking /articles/linux-system-calls
on “The Fastest Mutexes”Submitted Linux System Calls as a story · 6 points
HN discussionModifying existing ELFs can also be extremely educational and fun. It's a bit frustrating at first because it's more or less impossible to debug this stuff when it doesn't work but when things finally start working it's awesome. Turns out it's possible to patch ELFs in all sorts of interesting ways. With the auxiliary vector you can even have introspection at runtime: Linux gives us the address of the program header…
Comment linking /articles/self-contained-lone-lisp-applications
on “How is a binary executable organized? Let's explore it (2014)”Submitted Dotfiles with Make as a story · 4 points
HN discussionMakefiles are an eerily lisplike turing tarpit. I hand wrote the makefiles for my projects, they generate wonderfully organized build trees. Hell I use makefiles to manage my dotfiles repository, even blogged about it. https://www.matheusmoreira.com/articles/managing-dotfiles-wi... The sanest way I've found to write makefiles is to think of it as a tool that maps input paths to output paths. When compiling a program…
Comment linking /articles/managing-dotfiles-with-make
on “I Like Makefiles”Submitted Code reviewing lone Lisp with Sol and Fable as a story · 3 points
HN discussion> By that I mean, I want "prog.ext" to create the executable "prog". An interpreted lisp could fulfill this requirement. I created one such lisp. I came up with an ELF code embedding method that lets me add lisp code to the interpreter executable itself. I can add lisp modules and they become loadable. I can add a main function and it gets executed automatically. I wrote about it here: https://www.matheusmoreira.com…
Comment linking /articles/self-contained-lone-lisp-applications
on “A Tour of the Lisps”Submitted The Lone Lisp Heap as a story · 3 points
HN discussion> That's not something that can be expressed in C. I've often made the argument that compilers should add builtins for Linux system calls. Just emit code in the right calling convention and the system call instruction, and return the result. Even high level dynamic languages could have their JIT compilers generate this code. I actually tried to hack a linux_system_call builtin into GCC at some point. Lost that work…
Comment linking /articles/linux-system-calls
on “The Journey Before main()”Submitted Self-contained Linux applications with lone Lisp as a story · 2 points
HN discussionYeah it turns out the kernel doesn't care about sections at all. It only ever cares about the PT_LOAD segments in the program header table, which is essentially a table of arguments for the mmap system call. Sections are just dynamic linker metadata and are never covered by PT_LOAD segments. This seems to be a common misconception. I too suffered from it once... Tried to embed arbitrary files into ELF files using ob…
Comment linking /articles/self-contained-lone-lisp-applications
on “The Journey Before main()”Submitted Generators in Lone Lisp as a story · 2 points
HN discussionHacking this stuff is so fun!! > Depending on your program, _start may be the only thing between the entrypoint and your main function I once developed a liblinux project entirely built around this idea. I wanted to get rid of libc and all of its initialization, complexity and global state. The C library is so complex it has a primitive form of package management built into it: https://blogs.oracle.com/solaris/post/…
Comment linking /articles/linux-system-calls
on “The Journey Before main()”Submitted Show HN: Self-contained Linux apps in Lisp as a story · 2 points
HN discussion> For one, the FreeBSD kernel specifically has a compatibility layer for Linux binaries to use their familiar syscalls [0]. I believe this strengthens my argument. Linux kernel-userspace interface is so stable other projects are implementing it. I remember Justine Tunney mentioning this before, the idea that the x86_64 Linux system call ABI is turning into some kind of lingua franca of systems programming. https://j…
Comment linking /articles/self-contained-lone-lisp-applications
on “A Simple ELF”Submitted The Lone Lisp Heap as a story · 1 points
HN discussionI would like to note that Linux is the only kernel which will allow you to do this! The Linux system call interface is stable and defined at the instruction set level. Linking against some system library is absolutely required on every other system. I've written an article about this idea: https://www.matheusmoreira.com/articles/linux-system-calls You can get incredibly far with just this. I wrote a freestanding lis…
Comment linking /articles/linux-system-calls
on “A Simple ELF”Submitted Baby's Second Garbage Collector as a story · 1 points
HN discussionI used a similar methodology. Code review is my most requested action, so I used blind code review results to compare the frontier AIs. Even posted an article about it: https://www.matheusmoreira.com/articles/code-reviewing-lone-... Unlike TFA, the lone lisp code is public. I suppose the models could have been trained on my codebase. Still, I think it produced some interesting results. Took months and loads and load…
Comment linking /articles/code-reviewing-lone-lisp-with-sol-and-fable
on “Real-SWE: Benchmarking AI models on private, real-world, enterprise codebases”Submitted Baby's Second Garbage Collector as a story · 1 points
HN discussionI think I'm the only person insane enough to use a makefile for this. https://github.com/matheusmoreira/.files/blob/master/GNUmake... https://www.matheusmoreira.com/articles/managing-dotfiles-wi... It even supports the XDG stuff as well as variables like GNUPGHOME.
Comment linking /articles/managing-dotfiles-with-make
on “Dotfiles: Unofficial Guide to Dotfiles on GitHub”Submitted Linux System Calls as a story · 1 points
HN discussionI (ab)use make to manage my dotfiles. https://github.com/matheusmoreira/.files/blob/master/GNUmake... I'm surprised at how well this thing works every time I use it. I even blogged about it. https://www.matheusmoreira.com/articles/managing-dotfiles-wi... Recently made a tool that processes the make database and prints the phony targets and their dependencies: https://github.com/matheusmoreira/.files/blob/master/~/.l…
Comment linking /articles/managing-dotfiles-with-make
on “How I stopped worrying and loved Makefiles”> But make is widespread, ancient and eternal. Yeah. The GNU Make is literally everywhere, it's too useful and it's got too many good features. GNU Make is worth learning and using just because of this. Having to deal with non-make systems is seriously annoying. > It does many jobs relatively well. I wonder if anyone else other than me was insane enough to try and use GNU Make to manage dotfiles? I even blogged abou…
Comment linking /articles/managing-dotfiles-with-make
on “Using Make – writing less Makefile”
