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The Middle Binomial Coefficient

https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2026/01/12/the-middle-binomial-coefficient/
1•ibobev•38s ago•0 comments

Combining In-Shuffles and Out-Shuffles

https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2026/01/12/in-out-shuffle/
1•ibobev•50s ago•0 comments

Resilience vs. Fault Tolerance

https://www.ufried.com/blog/resilience_vs_fault_tolerance/
1•sylvainkalache•1m ago•0 comments

Toward single-cell control: noise-robust perfect biomolecular adaptation

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-67736-y
1•PaulHoule•2m ago•0 comments

Windows 2000 still earning its keep running a rail ticket machine in Portugal

https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/12/windows_2000_portugal_rail/
2•pjmlp•3m ago•0 comments

A sign-off review checklist for PCB designs

https://github.com/azonenberg/pcb-checklist
2•fanf2•4m ago•1 comments

Show HN: Intelligent search and analysis for your browsing history

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/sutra/dpkmikhdmnphoglanaaioifoaognlhdp
1•fiveleavesleft•4m ago•0 comments

Malaysia and Indonesia become the first to block Grok over sexualized AI images

https://apnews.com/article/grok-malaysia-indonesia-block-c7cb320327f259c4da35908e1269c225
2•erhuve•6m ago•0 comments

Rearchitecting the Thread Model of In-Memory Key-Value Stores with μTPS

https://danglingpointers.substack.com/p/rearchitecting-the-thread-model-of
1•blakepelton•6m ago•0 comments

Swote: Swipe (or drag) Up Quotes form Books

https://swote.vercel.app/
1•_bramses•7m ago•0 comments

The Death of Software Development

https://mike.tech/blog/death-of-software-development
3•ezekg•8m ago•0 comments

Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) – immediate retirement notice

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/mem/configmgr/mdt/mdt-retirement
3•taubek•9m ago•0 comments

Show HN: SubTrack – A SaaS tracker for devs that finds unused tools

https://subtrack.pulseguard.in
2•hrshw•9m ago•0 comments

How technocracy made us doubt progress

https://www.freethink.com/the-material-world/techno-humanist-manifesto-chapter-9-section-2
2•Brajeshwar•9m ago•0 comments

Open-Meteo is a free and open-source weather API for non-commercial use

https://open-meteo.com/
2•Brajeshwar•10m ago•1 comments

Show HN: StatefulSet Backup Operator v0.0.2 – Added tests and hooks improvements

https://github.com/federicolepera/statefulset-backup-operator
1•lep_qq•10m ago•0 comments

Why We Built Our Own Background Agent

https://builders.ramp.com/post/why-we-built-our-background-agent
1•jrsj•10m ago•0 comments

Astronomers Spot Barred Spiral Galaxy That Existed Just 2B Years After Big Bang

https://www.universetoday.com/articles/student-finds-familiar-structure-just-2-billion-years-afte...
2•Brajeshwar•10m ago•0 comments

I Designed a Custom Protocol for My App

https://blog.roj.dev/how-i-designed-a-custom-protocol-for-my-app
1•_roj•13m ago•0 comments

Show HN: I built a robot to win at Mario Party minigames

https://joshmosier.com/posts/deep-boo
1•photonboom•14m ago•0 comments

Discussion paper: Driving effective carbon markets in Canada

https://www.canada.ca/en/environment-climate-change/corporate/transparency/consultations/comment-...
1•debo_•15m ago•0 comments

The End of the Orbital Index

https://orbitalindex.com/archive/2026-01-07-Issue-350/
3•debo_•16m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Two Rust books for developers who use AI coding assistants

https://fullstackrustapp.com
1•troelsfr•16m ago•0 comments

Alternatives to Terragon Labs

1•gekkostate•18m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Cloud Memory for Claude Code / Only for Code Reviews / Local ver OTW

1•vinkupa•21m ago•0 comments

I Was Anti-Imperialist Until I Wasn't

https://elimbi.com/fr/journal/civilization-organized-power/
3•sepiropht•21m ago•1 comments

Apple picks Google's Gemini to power Siri

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/12/apple-google-ai-siri-gemini.html
18•stygiansonic•24m ago•8 comments

The things I miss from the world

https://thehumansource.com/
3•salbertengo•25m ago•0 comments

Instagram breaks silence on mysterious password reset emails

https://www.indy100.com/viral/instagram-password-reset-emails-explained
1•iamben•26m ago•0 comments

Date is out, Temporal is in

https://piccalil.li/blog/date-is-out-and-temporal-is-in/
2•alexanderameye•26m ago•0 comments
Open in hackernews

Zen-C: Write like a high-level language, run like C

https://github.com/z-libs/Zen-C
53•simonpure•2h ago

Comments

ethin•1h ago
Am I the only one who saw this syntax and immediately though "Man, this looks almost identical to Rust with a few slight variations"?
CupricTea•1h ago
It seems to just be Rust for people who are allergic to using Rust.

It looks like a fun project, but I'm not sure what this adds to the point where people would actually use it over C or just going to Rust.

nnevatie•1h ago
> what this adds

I guess the point is what is subtracts, instead - answer being the borrow-checker.

Ygg2•1h ago
So it re-adds manual lifetime checking. Got it.
petcat•58m ago
> answer being the borrow-checker

There is an entire world in Rust where you never have to touch the borrow-checker or lifetimes at all. You can just clone or move everything, or put everything in an Arc (which is what most other languages are doing anyway). It's very easy to not fight the compiler if you don't want to.

Maybe the real fix for Rust (for people that don't want to care), is just a compiler mode where everything is Arc-by-default?

the__alchemist•36m ago
Maybe take the parts of rust the author likes, but still encourages pointers in high level operations?
suioir•1h ago
I thought the same and felt it looked really out of place to have I8 and F32 instead of i8 and f32 when so much else looks just like Rust. Especially when the rest of the types are all lower case.
unwind•1h ago
Agreed, that really stood out as a ... questionable design decision, and felt extremely un-ergonomic which seems to go against the stated goals of the language.
hyperhello•26m ago
Every language is apparently required to make one specific version of these totally arbitrary choices, like whether to call the keyword function, func, fun, fn, or def. Once they do, it’s a foolish inconsistency with everything else. What if the language supported every syntax?
turbotim•58m ago
My immediate thought was it looked a lot like Swift
Gys•1h ago
Initial commit was 24h ago, 363 stars, 20 forks already. Man, this goes fast.
worldsavior•1h ago
Could be bots.
directmusic•1h ago
Definitely could be, but the dev has been posting updates on Twitter for a while now. It could be just some amount of hype they have built.
alexpadula•49m ago
It’s not, it’s just how hackernews works. You’ll see new projects hit 1k-10k stars in a matter of a day. You can have the best project, best article to you but if everyone else doesn’t think so it’ll always be at the bottom. Some luck involved too. Bots upvoting a post not organically I doubt is gonna live long on first page.
saidnooneever•15m ago
man has been posting a lot before the initial commit about his library. following the guy on linkedin.
giancarlostoro•1h ago
Syntax aside, how does this compare to Nim? Nim does similar, I think Crystal does as well? Not entirely sure about Crystal tbh. I guess Nim and Vala, since I believe both transpile to C, so you really get "like C" output from both.
GrowingSideways•1h ago
Why not compile to rust or assembly? C seems like an odd choice.

In fact why not simply write rust to begin with?

ndr•1h ago
At times people think C is better. See recent discussion about https://sqlite.org/whyc.html
alexpadula•46m ago
C is best
xnacly•1h ago
Assembly requires way more work than compiling to, say C. Clang and gcc do a lot of the heavy lifting regarding optimisation, spilling values to the stack, etc
GrowingSideways•46m ago
Then you're stuck with the C stack, though, and no way to collect garbage.
saidnooneever•11m ago
really? you cant track and count your pointers in C? why not?
kuttel2•1h ago
We don't all wear programming socks and fantasise about our anime profile pics. C is the patrician's choice.
GrowingSideways•47m ago
> C is the patrician's choice.

Is this suppose to be a positive thing? I thought we all wanted to violently murder the patricians.

Regardless, C might be a valid IR. I apologize for being bigoted.

dfox•20m ago
If I understand the history correctly then it started as a set of C preprocessor macros.
morcus•1h ago
An interesting bit to me is that it compiles to (apparently) readable C, I'm not sure how one would use that to their advantage

I am not too familiar with C - is the idea that it's easier to incrementally have some parts of your codebase in this language, with other parts being in regular C?

zbendefy•55m ago
i think so. The biggest hurdle with new languages is that you are cut off from a 3rdparty library ecosystem. Being compatible with C 3rd party libraries is a big win.
actionfromafar•17m ago
Makes it easy to "try before you buy", too. If you decide it's not for you, you can "step out" and keep the generated C code and go from there.
saidnooneever•16m ago
one benefit is that a lot of tooling e.g. for verification etc. is built around C.

another is that it only has C runtime requirement, so no weird runtime stuff to impelement if youd say want to run on bare metal..you could output the C code and compile it to your target.

v_iter•59m ago
So, the point of this language is to be able to write code with high productivity, but with the benefit of compiling it to a low level language? Overall it seems like the language repeats what ZIG does, including the C ABI support, manual memory management with additional ergonomics, comptime feature. The biggest difference that comes to mind quickly is that the creator of Zen-C states that it can allow for the productivity of a high level language.
johnisgood•54m ago
Nim is a high-level language as well and compiles to C.
the__alchemist•22m ago
Odin and Jai are others.
Voycawojka•12m ago
Does Odin compile to C? I thought it only uses LLVM as a backend
echelon•30m ago
There are going to be lots of languages competing with Rust and Zig. It's a popular, underserved market. They'll all have their unique angle.
messe•14m ago
It has stringly typed macros. It's not comparable to Zig's comptime, even if it calls it comptime:

    fn main() {
        comptime {
            var N = 20;
            var fib: long[20];
            fib[0] = (long)0;
            fib[1] = (long)1;
            for var i=2; i<N; i+=1 {
                fib[i] = fib[i-1] + fib[i-2];
            }

            printf("// Generated Fibonacci Sequence\n");
            printf("var fibs: int[%d] = [", N);
            for var i=0; i<N; i+=1 {
                printf("%ld", fib[i]);
                if (i < N-1) printf(", ");
            }
            printf("];\n");
        }

        print "Compile-time generated Fibonacci sequence:\n";
        for i in 0..20 {
            print f"fib[{i}] = {fibs[i]}\n";
        }
    }
It just literally outputs characters, not even tokens like rust's macros, into the compiler's view of the current source file. It has no access to type information, as Zig's does, and can't really be used for any sort of reflection as far as I can tell.

The Zig equivalent of the above comptime block just be:

    const fibs = comptime blk: {
        var f: [20]u64 = undefined;
        f[0] = 0;
        f[1] = 1;
        for (2..f.len) |i| {
            f[i] = f[i-1] + f[i-2];
        }
        break :blk f; 
    };
Notice that there's no code generation step, the value is passed seamlessly from compile time to runtime code.
kuon•2m ago
I am working on mine as well. I think it is very sane to have some activity in this field. I hope we will have high level easy to write code that is fully optimized with very little effort.
alexpadula•51m ago
18 commits! I hope you keep up with the project, it’s really cool, great work.
kreco•51m ago
That's a very nice project.

List of remarks:

> var ints: int[5] = {1, 2, 3, 4, 5};

> var zeros: [int; 5]; // Zero-initialized

The zero initialized array is not intuitive IMO.

> // Bitfields

If it's deterministically packed.

> Tagged unions

Same, is the memory layout deterministic (and optimized)?

> 2 | 3 => print("Two or Three")

Any reason not to use "2 || 3"?

> Traits

What if I want to remove or override the "trait Drawing for Circle" because the original implementation doesn't fit my constraints? As long as traits are not required to be in a totally different module than the struct I will likely never welcome them in a programming language.

alfonsodev•50m ago
Is this the Typescript of C ?
ramses0•26m ago
The whole language examples seem pretty rational, and I'm especially pleased / shocked by the `loop / repeat 5` examples. I love the idea of having syntax support for "maximum number of iterations", eg:

    repeat 3 {
       try { curl(...) && break }
       except { continue }
    }
...obviously not trying to start any holy wars around exceptions (which don't seem supported) or exponential backoff (or whatever), but I guess I'm kindof shocked that I haven't seen any other languages support what seems like an obvious syntax feature.

I guess you could easily emulate it with `for x in range(3): ...break`, but `repeat 3: ...break` feels a bit more like that `print("-"*80)` feature but for loops.

blacksqr•22m ago
What's the performance hit?
Lucasoato•16m ago
> Mutability

> By default, variables are mutable. You can enable Immutable by Default mode using a directive.

> //> immutable-by-default

> var x = 10; > // x = 20; // Error: x is immutable

> var mut y = 10; > y = 20; // OK

Wait, but this means that if I’m reading somebody’s code, I won’t know if variables are mutable or not unless I read the whole file looking for such directive. Imagine if someone even defined custom directives, that doesn’t make it readable.