Best of 2025

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2025. 602 posts.

Life, Learning & Writing
181

Why I Chose Common Lisp

After ~7 years, I was done with Clojure . I was writing a some CLI apps , and I hated how long they took to start up. The community at large seemed not to care about this problem, except for the babashka folks. However, I spent long, hard hours banging my head against native-image and it just wasn't working out. It…

197

Playing in the Creek

When I was a really small kid, one of my favorite activities was to try and dam up the creek in my backyard. I would carefully move rocks into high walls, pile up leaves, or try patching the holes with sand. The goal was just to see how high I could get the lake, knowing that if I plugged every hole, eventually the…

203

Minimum effective dose

I am still recovering from my failed root canal (and still have one visit to complete the procedure), so I have been hesitant in taking up my regular exercise again because I don't want to distract my immune system from my tooth's healing. So when I went to the gym today for the first time...