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Dustycloud Brainstorms
Personal blog · dustycloud.org/blogprogrammingphilosophy
Dustycloud Brainstorms is a personal blog at dustycloud.org about programming and philosophy. Since 2012, 74 different Hacker News readers have linked it 132 times, most often “How decentralized is Bluesky really?”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-09-13, and you can follow it by feed.
Rarely recommended · 4 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link this blog mainly for its analysis of Bluesky's decentralisation and for WISP, a Lisp without parentheses. Commenters also cite its posts on ActivityPub, Sussman on AI and copyleft.
- Recommended for · 4 comments
- Commenters recommend its Bluesky decentralisation analysis as a deep dive and praise its reasoning as good.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- How decentralized is Bluesky really?12 people · 12 mentions · first linked 2024-11-22
- Wisp: Lisp syntax, minus the parentheses8 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2015-09-24
- Re: Re: Bluesky and Decentralization8 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2024-12-16
- A conversation with Sussman on AI and asynchronous programming5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2015-10-14
- Let's Package JQuery: A JavaScript Packaging Dystopian Novella (2015)4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2019-01-15
- Beyond the shouting match: what is a blockchain, really?4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2021-04-24
- Racket Is an Acceptable Python4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2019-07-09
- What Happened to the Fight for the Internet?4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2026-07-01
- A conversation with Sussman on AI and asynchronous programming (2015)3 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2021-10-29
- Let's Package JQuery: A JavaScript Packaging Dystopian Novella3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2015-05-02
What Hacker News says?
Here's a Lisp that's whitespace sensitive to avoid parens: http://dustycloud.org/blog/wisp-lisp-alternative/ Other techniques to make them less prominent is to use a text face or syntax highlighting to make them less prominent, e.g: https://github.com/tarsius/paren-face/ It's not that Lisp has many more parens as that it's simplicity mandates only 1 block structure is used to define s-expressions (lisp's AST), where…
Comment linking /blog/wisp-lisp-alternative/
on “Show HN: Bel”Submitted Why I am pro-GPL as a story · 286 points
HN discussionI wouldn't say "dumb down" but it definitely needs to explain why it took some lines of reasoning. With deep learning, you need to rebuild the whole system with different test-cases to change a minor behavior.. but imagine if we could just say "Why did you do that? XYZ. And adjust it: "Oh, gotcha. You can't because of ABC", and then the AI has that problem solved. I guess that would be the next step in AI. I think i…
Comment linking /blog/sussman-on-ai/
on “AlphaGo beats the world champion Lee Sedol in first of five matches”Submitted Racket Is an Acceptable Python as a story · 280 points
HN discussionBluesky is neither decentralised nor federated. I wouldn't let that stop you from signing up for bluesky -- in my experience it is definitely the best of the options for a twitter alternative -- but you should know exactly what it is you're getting into before you get into it. And if you want to know exactly what you're getting into with bluesky, you should read this, which tells you more than you really want to kno…
Comment linking /blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/
on “X users are unable to post “Signal.me” links”Submitted Show HN: Terminal Phase – Terminal-based space shooter as a story · 217 points
HN discussionhttps://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/
Comment linking /blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/
on “When imperfect systems are good: Bluesky's lossy timelines”Submitted Racket Is an Acceptable Python (2019) as a story · 181 points
HN discussionI think this is a mischaracterization. I've read Webber's writing on OcapPub[0], and his more recent writing on ActivityPub[1]. I'm not getting the impression that Webber thinks ActivityPub is broken, or that he's stopped advocating for it, or that he's trying to replace it. In his own words: > "OcapPub" sounds like a new protocol, whereas it's really just a way-to-use ActivityPub mostly as it already exists. Maybe…
Comment linking /blog/2019-10-01-updates/
on “Twitter funding a team to develop an open standard for social media”Submitted A conversation with Sussman on AI and asynchronous programming as a story · 181 points
HN discussionSure, Mastodon doesn't implement the full ActivityPub spec [0]. They're still very much behind the effort though, it seems [1] (or at least they were in 2018). Not only this, but they go against it in multiple places. How they've implemented 'summary' and the bizarre things they've done to create compatibility with Misskey (but not in an actually-compatible way, Misskey's had to patch their own solution every time)…
Comment linking /blog/on-standards-divisions-collaboration/
on “Twitter funding a team to develop an open standard for social media”Submitted How Hy backported “yield from” to Python 2 as a story · 120 points
HN discussionSince parenthesis are just an arbritary sign, it's possible to replace it with something different that fulfills the same role in Lisp. An example for Lisp without parenthesis: https://dustycloud.org/blog/wisp-lisp-alternative/
Comment linking /blog/wisp-lisp-alternative/
on “An Intuition for Lisp Syntax”Submitted Guile Steel: a proposal for a systems Lisp as a story · 104 points
HN discussionAs I understand it, there's an argument that while in theory you can, in practice you cannot so easily, e.g. you needed 5 terabyte of storage for a relay already some months ago. I think this[0] was on HN some time ago with good reasoning about bluesky offering a "potentially decentralized enough" while not actually being so. 0: https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/
Comment linking /blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/
on “Show HN: I made a tool to port tweets to Bluesky mantaining their original date”Submitted The lack of proper “alter table” support in SQLite as a story · 90 points
HN discussionHi jordigh! (Historically) lead developer and co-founder of MediaGoblin here (and ActivityPub spec co-author/editor, so I have more than a bit of insight/bias I think). You're not wrong. And neither is the parent post! MediaGoblin is in "unofficial retirement", but that's because we made progress unexpectedly in other ways, which is good , but not where we realized we were going. Allow me to lay out what happened an…
Comment linking /contact/
on “Apache Software Foundation joins GitHub open source community”Submitted How decentralized is Bluesky really? as a story · 87 points
HN discussionSome AI pioneers seem to feel that rule-based symbolic solutions still have a place, e.g. http://dustycloud.org/blog/sussman-on-ai/ If we are depending on AI systems to make important decisions, possibly life-or-death decisions, shouldn't we understand how they come to the conclusions that they do? I cannot deny the tremendous advances in neural networks recently, but I find Sussman's point compelling.
Comment linking /blog/sussman-on-ai/
on “Machine learning works spectacularly well, but mathematicians aren’t sure why”Submitted Possible routes for distributed anti-abuse systems as a story · 66 points
HN discussionhttp://dustycloud.org/blog/field-guide-to-copyleft/ Just read it. If you want total abolition of copyright and proprietary software, fine. If you think proprietary software is ok, you are a total hypocrite to criticize copyleft. Period.
Comment linking /blog/field-guide-to-copyleft/
on “Why Free Software Is More Important Now Than Ever Before”Submitted Let's Package JQuery: A JavaScript Packaging Dystopian Novella as a story · 44 points
HN discussionhttps://pluralistic.net/2024/11/02/ulysses-pact/#tie-yoursel... https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/
Comment linking /blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/
on “Building Bluesky comments for my blog”Submitted Re: Re: Bluesky and Decentralization as a story · 11 points
HN discussionPython: sure. JS: ... it's complicated. See this article for an introduction to the problems of attempting to match npm with principled package management: https://dustycloud.org/blog/javascript-packaging-dystopia/
Comment linking /blog/javascript-packaging-dystopia/
on “Guix: An advanced operating system”Submitted Racket Is an Acceptable Python as a story · 7 points
HN discussionYes, thats where the power of lisp is. Say we want to implement do/while. In Python you would have to go into the compiler. In a Lisp, like Hy. We can just write it as a macro. We implement yield-from on Python2 using a macro. http://dustycloud.org/blog/how-hy-backported-yield-from-to-p...
Comment linking /blog/how-hy-backported-yield-from-to-python2/
on “Hy – A dialect of Lisp that’s embedded in Python”Submitted Thank you for your contribution to the model as a story · 5 points
HN discussionI know several: Guix, Nix, dpkg, yum, brew, pip, gem/Bundler, composer, package.el, and probably others that I'm forgetting. Most of those I listed are bad (the exceptions being Nix and Guix that actually do it right), but npm takes the cake. It somehow manages to create situations where applications are using many different versions of the same library, and where the same packages are duplicated in the hilarious me…
Comment linking /blog/javascript-packaging-dystopia/
on “The microservices cargo cult”Submitted Re: Re: Bluesky and Decentralization as a story · 5 points
HN discussion
