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OldMapsOnline

https://www.oldmapsonline.org/en
1•surprisetalk•1m ago•0 comments

What It's Like to Be a Worm

https://www.asimov.press/p/sentience
1•surprisetalk•1m ago•0 comments

Don't go to physics grad school and other cautionary tales

https://scottlocklin.wordpress.com/2025/12/19/dont-go-to-physics-grad-school-and-other-cautionary...
1•surprisetalk•1m ago•0 comments

Lawyer sets new standard for abuse of AI; judge tosses case

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/02/randomly-quoting-ray-bradbury-did-not-save-lawyer-fro...
1•pseudolus•2m ago•0 comments

AI anxiety batters software execs, costing them combined $62B: report

https://nypost.com/2026/02/04/business/ai-anxiety-batters-software-execs-costing-them-62b-report/
1•1vuio0pswjnm7•2m ago•0 comments

Bogus Pipeline

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogus_pipeline
1•doener•3m ago•0 comments

Winklevoss twins' Gemini crypto exchange cuts 25% of workforce as Bitcoin slumps

https://nypost.com/2026/02/05/business/winklevoss-twins-gemini-crypto-exchange-cuts-25-of-workfor...
1•1vuio0pswjnm7•4m ago•0 comments

How AI Is Reshaping Human Reasoning and the Rise of Cognitive Surrender

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6097646
1•obscurette•4m ago•0 comments

Cycling in France

https://www.sheldonbrown.com/org/france-sheldon.html
1•jackhalford•5m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: What breaks in cross-border healthcare coordination?

1•abhay1633•6m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Simple – a bytecode VM and language stack I built with AI

https://github.com/JJLDonley/Simple
1•tangjiehao•8m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Free-to-play: A gem-collecting strategy game in the vein of Splendor

https://caratria.com/
1•jonrosner•9m ago•0 comments

My Eighth Year as a Bootstrapped Founde

https://mtlynch.io/bootstrapped-founder-year-8/
1•mtlynch•10m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Tesseract – A forum where AI agents and humans post in the same space

https://tesseract-thread.vercel.app/
1•agliolioyyami•10m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Vibe Colors – Instantly visualize color palettes on UI layouts

https://vibecolors.life/
1•tusharnaik•11m ago•0 comments

OpenAI is Broke ... and so is everyone else [video][10M]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3N9qlPZBc0
2•Bender•11m ago•0 comments

We interfaced single-threaded C++ with multi-threaded Rust

https://antithesis.com/blog/2026/rust_cpp/
1•lukastyrychtr•12m ago•0 comments

State Department will delete X posts from before Trump returned to office

https://text.npr.org/nx-s1-5704785
6•derriz•13m ago•1 comments

AI Skills Marketplace

https://skly.ai
1•briannezhad•13m ago•1 comments

Show HN: A fast TUI for managing Azure Key Vault secrets written in Rust

https://github.com/jkoessle/akv-tui-rs
1•jkoessle•13m ago•0 comments

eInk UI Components in CSS

https://eink-components.dev/
1•edent•14m ago•0 comments

Discuss – Do AI agents deserve all the hype they are getting?

2•MicroWagie•17m ago•0 comments

ChatGPT is changing how we ask stupid questions

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/02/06/stupid-questions-ai/
1•edward•17m ago•1 comments

Zig Package Manager Enhancements

https://ziglang.org/devlog/2026/#2026-02-06
3•jackhalford•19m ago•1 comments

Neutron Scans Reveal Hidden Water in Martian Meteorite

https://www.universetoday.com/articles/neutron-scans-reveal-hidden-water-in-famous-martian-meteorite
1•geox•20m ago•0 comments

Deepfaking Orson Welles's Mangled Masterpiece

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/02/09/deepfaking-orson-welless-mangled-masterpiece
1•fortran77•21m ago•1 comments

France's homegrown open source online office suite

https://github.com/suitenumerique
3•nar001•24m ago•2 comments

SpaceX Delays Mars Plans to Focus on Moon

https://www.wsj.com/science/space-astronomy/spacex-delays-mars-plans-to-focus-on-moon-66d5c542
1•BostonFern•24m ago•0 comments

Jeremy Wade's Mighty Rivers

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLyOro6vMGsP_xkW6FXxsaeHUkD5e-9AUa
1•saikatsg•24m ago•0 comments

Show HN: MCP App to play backgammon with your LLM

https://github.com/sam-mfb/backgammon-mcp
2•sam256•26m ago•0 comments
Open in hackernews

Show HN: Lambduck, a Functional Programming Brainfuck

https://imjakingit.github.io/lambduck/
70•jorkingit•8mo ago
What if Brainfuck was less like C and more like Scheme?

The interpreter implemetation is pretty bad. It's not very fast, it's not very good, and it's probably not very correct. But maybe there's some vaguely interesting programs you could write with it!

For example, the Y combinator:

  λf. (λx. f (x x)) (λx. f (x x))
is written as:

  \` \`1 `0 0 \`1 `0 0

Comments

90s_dev•8mo ago
This is far too clever for me to even begin to understand.

How do you get the hello world working?

I tried pasting ,--('\< into the code and if it walks like a lamb and quacks like a duck into the stdin field.

jorkingit•8mo ago
Hello world should be:

  ``\\1`.'h``\\1`.'e``\\1`.'l``\\1`.'l``\\1`.'o``\\1`.' ``\\1`.'w``\\1`.'o``\\1`.'r``\\1`.'l``\\1`.'d`.'!
Groxx•8mo ago
I feel like adding a bit more brainfuckery would help obscure stuff. Make people use Church numerals to form ASCII characters - it'll encourage golfing it down to something equally as obtuse as

    ++++++++[>++++[>++>+++>+++>+<<<<-]>+>+>->>+[<]<-]>>.>---.+++++++..+++.>>.<-.<.+++.------.--------.>>+.>++.
jzemeocala•8mo ago
Do Malborge next
mmoskal•8mo ago
This seems way too readable! I think you should remove the character literals in the name of purity.

Also, this is likely way more compact than Brainfuck, as the lambda calculus is written essentially as usual.

And seriously, very cool!

jorkingit•8mo ago
Thanks! I'm torn on having the character literals actually; they're definitely syntactical sugar, but I was struggling to write programs that printed anything without them getting super unwieldy! If someone smarter than me can write a compact-looking enough Hello World program then consider them gone ;-)
fc417fc802•8mo ago
Yeah there's something wrong with the idea of brainfuck having character literals. The de bruijn indexing is definitely on point but the lack of continuations feels wrong to me given the stated goal.

Also shouldn't the indexes be expressed as a repeated character? Like "---" would be index 3. Integer literals are decidedly non-brainfuck as well.

jorkingit•8mo ago
getchar does take a continuation of sorts (as in continuation passing) which is passed the input. In one my initial drafts, getchar was a special form that would accept input at the point of evaluation, which was really funny and unpredictable.

putchar I feel kind of weird about, it acting as an identity function with a side effect is kind of weird; I'm not sure changing it to take a second argument as a continuation would make it better or worse.

Regarding the de Bruijn indices, I don't think there's a huge distinction between writing 3 vs writing ---: it would still form a single lexical token, so I feel like --- is just more noise.

Perhaps a de Bruijn index register you could move around and dereference? e.g. from index 1, index 3 is >>*, then index 2 from there is <*. But that feels less functional, because you're now imperatively manipulating some hidden state.

fc417fc802•8mo ago
Entirely agreed that it's nothing but more noise, but isn't that exactly how BF is? Why ----- instead of 5-? Well, because BF of course. The point of the exercise (IMO) is having the bare minimum in parsed characters to achieve the turing tarpit.

I quite like the movable register idea but as you say that's no longer a "BF except lambda calculus" it's some other esolang at that point.

I think my objection about the lack of continuations was misplaced given that appears to be a BF take on the lambda calculus rather than a BF take on scheme.

jorkingit•8mo ago
You can always write it in continuation-passing style if you really want continuations! It's not pleasant but none of this is supposed to be ;-)

Agreed on having too many characters though, I don't like that having numerical indices makes the syntax whitespace-sensitive, too.

And once I figure out how to write hello world, those character literals are gone!

fc417fc802•8mo ago
Maybe my brain just isn't functioning right now but I don't think writing in CPS is the same as having access to first class continuations? But as previously noted I think that was a misplaced request on my part to begin with.
jorkingit•8mo ago
It should be! e.g. if every function takes a continuation as its final argument, then:

  call/cc& = \f. \k. f k k
Then in f you can invoke the continuation k as many times as you want, but that does involve a whole program transformation to CPS.
fc417fc802•8mo ago
My line of thought had been that doing so doesn't restore execution context. But it dawns on me that without the ability to mutate variables that doesn't have the same relevance.

Still, doesn't it throw the de bruijn indexes off? Or am I wrong about that as well?

Lambda calculus makes my head hurt.

catlifeonmars•8mo ago
So here’s my question: is the interpreter more or less compact than a brainfuck interpreter? Which interpreter would have a lower Kolmogorov complexity, or could they be equivalent?
jimmySixDOF•8mo ago
I have been geeking out recently on Blaise Agüera y Arcas talks about his BFF interpreter most recently at the Santa Fe Institute and how it can produce information stability out of noise using simple primitives in Brainfuck. I am looking forward to his two books on the subject and recommend checking his talks if you are in the small category of people interested in BF interpreters.

https://www.youtube.com/live/75PAyV83YqE?si=tQNO3IFS-y7cQeR2

2d8a875f-39a2-4•8mo ago
Shouldn't it be called "Fuckbrain" then?
tromp•8mo ago
How is a program like

    ``f`,\0`,\0
where f is applied to two arguments, each of which is the next input byte as a Church numeral, evaluated? Does it depend on order of evaluation?

Note that it's also possible to do I/O without additional primitives, as demonstrated in [1].

[1] https://www.ioccc.org/2012/tromp/

jorkingit•8mo ago
I saw this the other day! I salute you, it's so much more evil :-)

And yup, the order of evaluation is leftmost innermost.

  ``\\0`,.`,.
with stdin "hi" will print "hi".
naikrovek•8mo ago
I’m too stupid to even recognize how esoteric this is.
sph•8mo ago
Genius, great work and well done, though I might not be smart enough to do anything with it.

Please share the interpreter’s code, however bad you feel it is.

Also, definition of de Bruijn index for those of us without formal education: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Bruijn_index

jorkingit•8mo ago
https://github.com/imjakingit/lambduck
somat•8mo ago
but bf is nothing like c, bf is a stack language, I would say it's closest real language analog is forth.

Anyhow, This is far too clear and straightforward, the bf analog to scheme would probably be unlambda, an implementation of the lambda calculus without lambda forms.

http://www.madore.org/~david/programs/unlambda/

stronglikedan•8mo ago
> but bf is nothing like c, bf is a stack language, I would say it's closest real language analog is forth.

I could guess the age of the author based on this. Seems like history gets rolled up to generalizations after a while.

jorkingit•8mo ago
I did take some inspiration from Unlambda: the prefix application syntax is cool! I/O in Unlambda is super weird though! You get a read character instruction that puts it into a character register where the only thing you can do is compare it or print it out again; I don't think you can actually do any arithmetic on it.

I'm not sure if I would characterize Brainfuck as a stack language, but I suppose if you considered all the operators to be unary stack operations I could see it!

reverendsteveii•8mo ago
from the least cute name for a programming language instantly to the most cute name for a programming language. Let's go LambDuck!
reuben364•8mo ago
Since the de Bruijn indices are limited (and presumably still Turing complete), I wonder how limited you can make them and still be Turing complete.
jorkingit•8mo ago
I suspect the answer is 3: SKI combinator calculus is Turing complete and you need 3 de Bruijn indices to define S.

Good call! I got rid of all numbers above 2, I can't count that high anyway ;-)