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funkaster

1,768 karma · joined November 3, 2011

www.rolando.cl

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/rolandoam; my proof: https://keybase.io/rolandoam/sigs/Q8SNg1xUA0lrAKRtgdrKCDYNy7zPOLcWOygRHiWc0hE ]

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funkaster··on Show HN: Ledge.sh – Runnable Markdown Notes
I like what the other commenter said: "org-mode for muggles" XD - pretty cool project nonetheless!
funkaster··on Ask HN: What's a good "semi-dumb" phone/watch for kids?
wow... I was not aware of this. Brain hurts from trying to process commodore building a phone lol. Will def take a look. I specially like the fact that it has messaging apps in it.
funkaster··on Ask HN: What's a good "semi-dumb" phone/watch for kids?
that's not a bad idea, thanks! I'll take a look at it
funkaster··on Astrophysicists Puzzle over Webb’s New Universe
It doesn't answer your question, but I would love to read an updated version of Asimov's guide to science: https://archive.org/details/asimovsguidetosc00unse/mode/2up
funkaster··on I keep bouncing off the Scheme language
If I was new to programming, I would stick to just scheme for a while. I've been doing this for 20+ years professionally. Right now I'm treating claude as my junior engs, and I carefully review what it builds. If you treat them as your E3/E4 engs and you play the role of a TL *AND* assuming you know what you want to build, then things can move pretty fast.
funkaster··on I keep bouncing off the Scheme language
I've been forcing myself to stay within the CHICKEN ecosystem for the past 6 months. So far, the whole ecosystem moves really slow, but CHICKEN is such a good design that adding/rolling your own library for whatever you need is so simple. I ended up creating a bunch of eggs (CHICKEN libs) and even rolling my own web framework with its own ORM and background job processing that I rolled out to prod (1000+ users for the past 6 months or so, not a huge demo but it proved that it can scale/be good enough for my projects).

Best of all, is that the syntax grammar is so simple, that a simple CLAUDE.md + a few review agents lets me move super fast using AI. I spend most of my time anchoring on the design/plan and let AI write the implementation for most of the code.

funkaster··on Ghostty is leaving GitHub
It's just a PITA to contribute, compared to platforms with wider adoption like github/gitlab.
funkaster··on Ghostty is leaving GitHub
I really like forgejo, but for OSS it's a complete no-no unless they want to manage PRs by email. Maintaining a forgejo instance and allowing anyone to join is a recipe for headaches. Until forgejo figures out the federation aspect (allow to send PRs from other forgejo instances, or some other distributed way), it will be hard for OSS to adopt them and keep the collaboration aspect.
funkaster··on Writing Lisp is AI resistant and I'm sad
I have found it to be the complete opposite tbh. Not lisp but I've been generating Scheme with claude for about 5 months and it's a pleasure. What I did was to make sure CLAUDE.md had clear examples and also I added a skill that leverages ast-grep for ast-safe replacement (the biggest pain is that some times claude will mess up the parens, but even lately it came up with its own python scripts to count the parens and balance the expressions on its own).

I created Schematra[1] and also a schematra-starter-kit[2] that can be spun from claude and create a project and get you ready in less than 5 minutes. I've created 10+ side projects this way and it's been a great joy. I even added a scheme reviewer agent that is extremely strict and focus on scheme best practices (it's all in the starter kit, btw)

I don't think the lack of training material makes LLMs poor at writing lisp. I think it's the lack of guidelines, and if you add enough of them, the fact that lisp has inherently such a simple pattern & grammar that it makes it a prime candidate (IMO) for code generation.

[1]: https://schematra.com/

[2]: https://forgejo.rolando.cl/cpm/schematra-starter-kit

funkaster··on NanoClaw moved from Apple Containers to Docker
apple containers also run on OCI images: https://github.com/apple/container?tab=readme-ov-file#contai...

> The tool consumes and produces OCI-compatible container images...

funkaster··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (January 2026)
* A kart data analysis & video synchronizer, that helps you actually understand the ton of data that data loggers like Mychron and UniGo generate https://kartinsightspro.app - written in CHICKEN scheme with tons of FFI bindings

* Schematra https://schematra.com/ - a web "framework" written in CHICKEN scheme

* Lots of (unpublished, but will try to do so soon) eggs that spawned from building schematra & KartInsightsPro

  * llm.scm (inspired by ruby's llm gem)

  * imgui.scm

  * aws.scm (support for core AWS services like SSM, S3, other APIs)

  * umami.scm
You get the idea. I started playing with CHICKEN to scratch the itch of building something in Scheme and I couldn't stop. Using ast-grep as a skill in claude code makes it a lot easier to edit code as well.

Edit: format

funkaster··on Lisp: Notes on its Past and Future (1980)
I would recommend taking a look at some of the schemes. In particular I've been having tons of fun with CHICKEN: https://call-cc.org/ - the fact that it compiles to C and can generate binaries is a great plus.
funkaster··on Making web testing pleasant in Scheme: Schematra 0.4
All of it? probably not a small effort. Parts of it like chiccup html generation, maybe a couple of days, assuming there's something similar to sxml in the target scheme.

But for Guile in particular there's https://artanis.dev/ that's a pretty close cousin.

funkaster··on Making web testing pleasant in Scheme: Schematra 0.4
thanks for creating it! I'm really impressed by how easy was to use for dev and prod.
funkaster··on Making web testing pleasant in Scheme: Schematra 0.4
I just shipped Schematra 0.4 with some updates based on some usage and feedback.

Testing ergonomics: Went from 15+ lines of boilerplate to a one-liner by introducing structural testing. Routes can now return S-expressions (chiccup) instead of rendered HTML, so you test against data structures, not string parsing.

  ;; Assert against structure, not HTML strings
  (test "returns greeting"
    '(ccup [h1 "Hello"])
    (test-route-body app 'GET "/hello"))
Structural middleware: Since routes return S-expressions and rendering happens at the framework boundary, middleware can inspect and transform the DOM structure before it becomes HTML. Want to inject CSRF tokens into every form? It's just an S-expression transform with sxml-transforms. No template engine plugins needed. (see the post for a complete example)

Performance notes: I benchmarked chiccup rendering at 145k ops/sec average (339k for simple elements, 2k for 50-row tables). Even worst case is 0.5ms - way below database/network latency, so no caching layer needed, at least not for now.

What's next: Besides the Redis-backed job queue and rqlite-based ORM mentioned in the full post, I'm working on improving route handling with automatic path parameter extraction:

  (get "/posts/:id/comments"
    ;; :id automatically becomes a local variable
    (display id))  ; just works, no (alist-ref 'id params) needed
Schematra is a Sinatra-inspired web framework for CHICKEN Scheme. Still pre-1.0, API is evolving based on real-world use.

Full post: https://schematra.com/blog/whats-new-in-schematra-0-4

Source: https://github.com/schematra/schematra

Benchmarks: https://github.com/schematra/schematra/tree/main/benchmarks

funkaster··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (October 2025)
this is super cool. congrats and best of luck with it! Love the mother & son backstory to the product. The scarves look like they could make a great gift as well. I'll bookmark your website.
funkaster··on Robots move Shanghai city block [video]
lower tech/scale but in Chile (in the island of Chiloe) they have been doing this for centuries for individual houses: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/moving-houses-of-chilo... - although no smart jacks, only bulls and people.
funkaster··on How X-Plane Works
for software, I'm very happy with X-Plane, specially if you own a mac. For hardware, you could use an xbox joystic, but I would highly recommend this: https://yawmanflight.com/ - it's perfect for on-the-go and tbh much more convenient than a full yoke + pedals. I sold my yoke and pedals and now just use the yawman.
funkaster··on Stop using zip codes for geospatial analysis (2019)
If you want to learn a bit more, there was a recent, really good Planet Money episode[1] about this exact same topic. They focus on the problems that you might face when using zip code for demographic analysis.

[1]: https://www.npr.org/2025/01/08/1223466587/zip-code-history

funkaster··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (January 2025)
quick question: Your name is Marius and you're hiring for this startup and archiehub? (a few posts up). What's your relationship to both of these companies?
funkaster··on Reweb: Visual website builder for Next.js and Tailwind
as others have mentioned, this would be great if it would spit html fragments instead of react components. It would be really useful for quickly building htmx apps.
funkaster··on Using AirPods as a Morse Transmitter
all (RF) navigational aids in aviation have a more code associated. It's actually required to identify them (by listening to the morse code/looking at the decoded morse code in your panel) to be able to use them for instrument navigation. So that means a big part of all GA flights and pretty much any commercial flight at any point in time in the world are using morse code.
funkaster··on El Paquete Semanal
If you know Spanish and want to learn more about a similar topic, The Street Network[0] is a great episode about SNET[1], how it was formed, interview to key players in it and how it crashed. Really good journalism and a great insight into how people tried to stay connected inside Cuba without internet.

[0]: https://radioambulante.org/en/audio-en/the-street-network

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_Cuba#SNET

funkaster··on React, but in Python
from all the react clones I've seen there, this is the one that I'm mostly impressed by: https://yew.rs/ (React clone written in Rust, targeting webasm)
funkaster··on Enhancements to the Kagi Search Experience
Pre-google internet was way more structured because it had to be (since there were no good organic search engines). Google got in there and had a great algorithm that worked in that world. It got gamed and now content is being produced to make sure you appear on top of searches that might not even be what you were looking for.
funkaster··on Show HN: Alpaca.cpp – Run an Instruction-Tuned Chat-Style LLM on a MacBook
You can also download the weights with ipfs cli:

    ipfs get -o ggml-alpaca-7b-q4.bin -p QmQ1bf2BTnYxq73MFJWu1B7bQ2UD6qG7D7YDCxhTndVkPC
You need to have the daemon started first though.
funkaster··on 43 Hours on the Amtrak Southwest Chief
I did the SF - Truckee train with my son during the summer. We got a roomette type of accommodation. The food was OK, the trip overall was pretty nice. But for the price, I'm not sure I would do it again. The train was "not clean" (there was a dirty used towel inside the bathroom), the room had some crumbles and overall it was not dirty, but it was clearly not properly cleaned. At least not to the level that I would've expected for the cost.

I might try other route just to give trains a shot again. I like the concept and the space and how comfortable is the ride, but SF - Truckee, I'm not sure I would do it again.

funkaster··on Sile: A Modern Rewrite of TeX
I always had the hope that Lout[0] would take over LaTeX: very clean & reasonably small implementation, functional programming instead of macros. I guess it's just hard to move against the inertia that (La)TeX carries.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lout_(software)

funkaster··on Electric scooter ban increased congestion by 10% in Atlanta
Just came back from Austin (way smaller than Dallas) and it was during a large event weekend (F1 weekend). We used the electric scooters pretty much the entire weekend to get around the city, it was really good, much faster and efficient than taking an Uber/Lyft or driving. Most of the larger streets had a bike only lane and we never felt unsafe (my 70yo dad was riding with me on another scooter). Overall, I think that when combined with a good planning strategy from the city these types of micro transport could be something really good. I still think that good public transportation should be the goal here, but that requires way more infrastructure investment, and electric scooters or bikes could be the next best trade off.
funkaster··on DARPA wants to combine traditional sealift and airlift
inflatable surfaces already exist today, although not for control surfaces. De-icing boots are common in GA and some larger aircraft.

Were you thinking to change the shape of an airfoil to affect the aerodynamics? that seems really risky and potentially unnecessary. For control surfaces, hard to picture something else than moving parts over a hinge, except maybe flaps that already change the shape of the wing.

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