frontpage.
newsnewestaskshowjobs

Made with ♥ by @iamnishanth

Open Source @Github

fp.

Open in hackernews

Ask HN: Which function definition keyword do you prefer, def or fn?

1•winwang•9mo ago
I'm curious about what people think of `def` vs `fn`, two short keywords for starting function definitions.

...Or maybe we should subscribe to the church of `df`, haha.

Comments

sitkack•9mo ago
def could be for lots of things, fn is for functions. I don't think it matters much as long as you have one. C would have been so much easier to parse. Just copy Zig or Rust.
butlersean•9mo ago
def means define, could be used to define all kinds of things

fn isnt a legitimate short form of function

fun doesnt work because of the amusement factor

func is the only alternative we have left

sitkack•9mo ago
How about unicode or emojis?

These don't have the full fidelity as hn scrubs emojis

add = (a, b) -> a + b

a, b ⟹ a + b

λ add(a, b): ↪ a + b

johncoltrane•9mo ago
"def" is too generic.

"fn" is too cryptic.

"function" is better than the two.

MultifokalHirn•9mo ago
Agreed

Federal Debt to Hit Record Levels, Budget Office Warns

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/11/business/federal-debt-record-levels-budget-office.html
1•duxup•56s ago•1 comments

The AI Prediction Audit: Ten Years of Claims, Scored and Time-Checked

https://davidwsilva.substack.com/p/the-ai-prediction-audit-ten-years
1•quietproof•1m ago•0 comments

ARM MTE Performance in Practice (Extended Version)

https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.11786
1•PaulHoule•2m ago•0 comments

Singapore spent 11 months booting China-linked snoops out of telco networks

https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/10/singapore_telco_espionage/
2•delta_p_delta_x•2m ago•0 comments

Oatly can no longer use term 'milk' in its marketing

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx2gnl45g40o
3•chrisjj•2m ago•0 comments

macOS Catalina and Osquery – I'm sorry Dave, I can't let you query that

https://www.kolide.com/blog/macos-catalina-osquery
2•sogen•4m ago•0 comments

"Hack the Planet " an Oral History of Hackers' Soundtrack and Score

https://www.grammy.com/news/hack-planet-oral-history-hackers-soundtrack-score
1•sogen•5m ago•0 comments

Prasad overruled FDA staff to reject Moderna's flu vaccine application

https://www.statnews.com/2026/02/11/moderna-flu-vaccine-application-rejected-by-prasad-overruling...
3•zzzeek•5m ago•0 comments

Self-Referential Quantum Barriers for AI Containment

https://redact-app.com/publications/quantum-containment.html
1•JakubCwi•9m ago•1 comments

Gamers Killed Ultima Online's Virtual Ecology

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KFNxJVTJleE
1•doener•9m ago•0 comments

AI has no memory. Your codebase does

https://rubyonai.com/your-ai-has-no-memory-your-rails-codebase-does/
1•marcinos•10m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Deadend CLI – Open-source self-hosted agentic pentest tooling

https://github.com/xoxruns/deadend-cli
11•gemini-15•10m ago•4 comments

SubJS: JavaScript Runtime for Agents. Let your agent do what it does best

https://emi0x7d1.dev/blog/subjs-let-your-agent-do-what-it-does-best
1•emi2k01•10m ago•1 comments

The Yellow Wallpaper Problem: RLHF Safety Training as Ontology Enforcement

https://github.com/Palmerschallon/ember/blob/main/creations/discoveries/paper_yellow_wallpaper_pr...
1•palmerschallon•11m ago•0 comments

Railway Has a Major Outage

https://status.railway.com/cmli5y9xt056zsdts5ngslbmp
2•vintagedave•11m ago•1 comments

KTL: Terraform meets Helm – on a SQLite backend

https://github.com/kubekattle/ktl
1•KyleVlaros•12m ago•1 comments

HN needs a context reminder in the URL window

1•newsoftheday•15m ago•0 comments

What if all of calculus was just dictionary lookups?

https://github.com/tmilovan/composite-machine
1•birdculture•16m ago•0 comments

Building Software That Is Good for Humans

https://elijahpotter.dev/articles/building-software-that-is-good-for-humans
1•chilipepperhott•17m ago•0 comments

AI-Driven SRE Tools. Please Stop

https://www.yesthatblog.com/post/0152-ai-driven-sre-tools/
2•zdw•18m ago•0 comments

GLM-5: From Vibe Coding to Agentic Engineering

https://z.ai/blog/glm-5
16•meetpateltech•18m ago•6 comments

Ireland rolls out pioneering basic income scheme for artists

https://www.reuters.com/world/ireland-rolls-out-pioneering-basic-income-scheme-artists-2026-02-10/
16•abe94•21m ago•10 comments

Someone forked my AI governance repo to distribute malware

https://reducibl.com/writing/someone-used-my-repo-to-distribute-malware
1•davidcrowe•21m ago•0 comments

Show HN: A calculator that verifies or determines your retirement number

https://retirenumber.com/
2•marcus-verus•21m ago•0 comments

Show HN: An unbiased directory of AI tools

https://seekra.vercel.app/
1•ahmedsafwat•21m ago•0 comments

A chatbot's worst enemy is page refresh

https://zknill.io/posts/chatbots-worst-enemy-is-page-refresh/
1•zknill•23m ago•0 comments

Red5 Joins OpenMOQ Consortium as Charter Member

https://www.red5.net/blog/red5-joined-openmoq/
1•mondainx•23m ago•0 comments

macOS Tahoe no longer supports Time Capsules

https://eclecticlight.co/2026/02/11/macos-tahoe-no-longer-fully-supports-time-capsules/
3•zdw•23m ago•0 comments

A 3-Level AI Development Process to Stop Your App from Shifting Under Your Feet

http://this-statement-is-false.blogspot.com/2026/02/a-3-level-process-for-ai-development-to.html
1•zotimer•23m ago•1 comments

We (Basically) Stopped Writing Prompts

https://macroscope.com/blog/we-stopped-writing-prompts
1•rdb•23m ago•0 comments