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Switzerland. Block by block. At 1:1 scale

https://blocks.manifold3d.ch/
78•theanonymousone•1h ago•18 comments

Show HN: TitleArt – Make text like it's 1997

https://titleart.dvy.io/
237•davidbarker•6h ago•37 comments

PaperPilot – Zero-Cloud, Pure-Rust PDF Engine with WASM and MCP

https://github.com/KrushnaVardhanReddy/PaperPilot
136•vardhan1237•6h ago•30 comments

Behind the scenes at the NeXT Computer office

https://exhibits.stanford.edu/menuez/browse/next-computer-inc?per_page=96&sort=pub_year_isi+asc%2...
112•Austin_Conlon•6h ago•54 comments

Growing Trees

https://brashandplucky.com/2026/10/15/growing-trees.html
56•ibobev•2d ago•5 comments

Dolly Parton's Imagination Library

https://imaginationlibrary.com/
543•jumploops•15h ago•94 comments

Show HN: A Truly Modular Keyboard

https://github.com/notaroomba/keybytes
159•NotARoomba•1d ago•48 comments

Overgrown, when plants invade your abandoned tabs

https://charliegerard.dev/blog/overgrown-extension/
276•speckx•3d ago•97 comments

Attention Is Not What You Need (2025)

https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.19428
111•westurner•10h ago•38 comments

Iron Age salt-mining complex found beneath Hallstatt in Austria

https://archaeologymag.com/2026/09/iron-age-salt-mining-complex-beneath-hallstatt/
75•janandonly•3d ago•19 comments

IBM CEO says open weight models are now good and cheap on-prem

https://www.theregister.com/systems/2026/10/22/ibm-ceo-says-open-weight-models-are-now-irresistib...
251•Betelbuddy•8h ago•144 comments

Birdwatching rewires the brain and slows cognitive decline

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20261019-birdwatching-rewires-the-brain-and-slows-cognitive-de...
19•cisc•2d ago•8 comments

Superhuman Hardware Design Is the Easy Part

https://www.a16z.news/p/superhuman-hardware-design-is-the
18•gmays•2d ago•2 comments

Why I Am a Programmer

https://www.alfie.wtf/programming/why-i-am-a-programmer.html
227•jruohonen•14h ago•70 comments

F-Zero X on Nintendo 3DS

https://hypnotize.works/gdx-3ds/postmortem/index.html
118•bpierre•10h ago•58 comments

Steal My Bitcoin CTF PoC

https://github.com/KillaBoi/StealMyBitcoin-PoC
114•davikr•9h ago•24 comments

Microsoft Decision-1: 9B Qwen Model Launch Explained

https://shattered.io/microsoft-decision-1-qwen3-5-9b-model-2026/
59•gmays•6h ago•23 comments

The State of Context Engineering

https://www.dbreunig.com/2026/10/24/the-state-of-context-engineering.html
185•pchristensen•13h ago•42 comments

We should be more ambitious with the software we build

https://danluu.com/ambitious/
804•ltratt•1d ago•713 comments

Show HN: ADRs for AI – Deliberation records for human–AI work, versioned in Git

https://adrs.systems
44•lumbroso•1d ago•24 comments

Amazon’s “digital pacifier” for toddlers

https://oligarchwatch.substack.com/p/amazons-digital-pacifier-for-toddlers
194•jumploops•4d ago•272 comments

A 10-year-old CNN outperforms frontier LLMs for skin cancer diagnosis

https://lynchlab.net/llm-skin-cancer
558•sungam•16h ago•237 comments

The result of the C++26 DIS ballot

https://train-it.eu/blog/cpp26-contracts-the-ballot-result/
46•uasi•3h ago•47 comments

Removing Next.js Got My Blog to 100 on Every Lighthouse Category

https://korindiehacker.bloffy.blog/en/removing-nextjs-got-my-blog-to-100-on-every-lighthouse-cate...
137•textlanes33•8h ago•76 comments

OpenAI and Anthropic cut their LLM prices by up to 80% within a few months. Why?

https://minimaxir.com/2026/10/cheap-llms/
313•minimaxir•12h ago•309 comments

Where the Romans Fought (interactive map)

https://iosiflazaridis.github.io/battles-of-the-romans/
99•endorphine•15h ago•37 comments

Making the Buddha Head from Merv Whole Again

https://www.getty.edu/news/buddha-head-of-merv-turkmenistan-conservation/
46•laybak•2d ago•0 comments

Active incident at Dreamhost forcing password reset

https://www.dreamhoststatus.com/
152•greenchair•20h ago•59 comments

What goes into making an animated film?

https://www.disneyanimation.com/process/
141•embedding-shape•13h ago•62 comments

Show HN: Proc-CLI – An agent-friendly CLI tool for process and port management

https://proc-cli.com/
12•yazeedaloyoun•5h ago•1 comments
Open in hackernews

Extending a Language – Writing Powerful Macros in Scheme

https://mnieper.github.io/scheme-macros/README.html
92•textread•1y ago

Comments

neilv•1y ago
A few formatting changes might make this advanced example easier to understand:

    (define-syntax trace-let
      (syntax-rules ()
        [(trace-let name ([var expr] ...) body1 ... body2)
         (let f ([depth 0] [var expr] ...)
           (define name
             (lambda (var ...)
               (f (+ depth 1) var ...)))
           (indent depth)
           (display "(")
           (display 'name)
           (begin
             (display " ")
             (display var))
           ...
           (display ")")
           (newline)
           (call-with-values
               (lambda ()
                 body1 ... body2)
             (lambda val*
               (indent depth)
               (fold-left
                (lambda (sep val)
                  (display sep)
                  (display val)
                  " ")
                "" val*)
               (newline)
               (apply values val*))))]))
The biggest one is to make the rule template pattern variables all-uppercase. I also made a few other tweaks, including using indentation a little more, and naming the named-`let` variable as "loop" (I usually name it `loop` or prefix the name with `loop-` if there's more than one):

    (define-syntax trace-let
      (syntax-rules ()
        ((trace-let NAME ((VAR EXPR) ...) BODY1 ... BODY2)
         (let loop ((depth 0)
                    (VAR   EXPR) ...)
           (define NAME
             (lambda (VAR ...)
               (loop (+ depth 1) VAR ...)))
           (indent depth)
           (display "(")
           (display (quote NAME))
           (begin (display " ")
                  (display VAR)) ...
           (display ")")
           (newline)
           (call-with-values (lambda ()
                               BODY1 ... BODY2)
             (lambda val*
               (indent depth)
               (fold-left (lambda (sep val)
                            (display sep)
                            (display val)
                            " ")
                          ""
                          val*)
               (newline)
               (apply values val*)))))))
Incidentally, all-uppercase Scheme pattern variables is one of the all-time best uses of all-uppercase in any language. Second only to all-uppercase for the C preprocessor, where a preprocessor macro can introduce almost arbitrary text. Using all-uppercase for constants in some language that has constants, however, is an abomination.

(My suspicion of why Java did all-caps is that they were developing a language for embedded systems developers who were currently using C and C++, and they wanted to make it superficially look similar, even though it was an entirely different language. And then, ironically, the language ended up being used mostly by the analogue of a very different developer of the time: corporate internal information systems developers, who, as a field, didn't use anything like C. It's too late to save Java, but to all other language and API developers, please stop the insanity of all-caps constants, enum values, etc. It's not the most important thing that needs to jump out from the code above all other things.)

Y_Y•1y ago
FWIW, all-caps makes this look much worse to me. I understand that people like things like Hungarian notation, arrows over vector names, and shouting Common Lisp symbols. I understand the argument that it can make reading easier. I just can't appreciate that benefit, and it seems to me an ugly hack which obscures the abstract and general symbolic manipulation going on.

This is all highly subjective of course, de gustibus non disputandem.

neilv•1y ago
You mean aesthetically, in that interspersed all-caps makes the code visually less soothingly sensual?

I can sympathize, but let me make a non-aesthetic argument...

In large blocks of code, with all-caps, you can see at a glance where all the template substitutions are happening, and also instantly know as you're reading code what are variables and what are template substitutions?

I'm asking because one of my realizations in recent years is that not everyone reads or sees code the same way.

For example, maybe some people are stronger "visual" and some people are stronger "verbal".

For another example of a different in how people perceive and think, some people can visualize an object in their mind almost as if they're looking at it, but other people can only know and describe what it looks like without bringing a visual of it into their head.

With the benefit of the all-caps, I can glance at this and immediately see much of the structure of the template. Without all-caps, I'd have to work harder to find all the pattern variables, and the structure would be obscured.

For a bit kludgy practical matter, as I'm quickly looking at pieces of code in a template, with all-caps, I can look at a fragment of code in isolation and know what are and aren't pattern variables. Without that, I have to go read the top of the template clause (and read through any syntactic scopes of `let-syntax`) and get that in my head, until I get to the fragment of code I originally wanted to look at.

IDE support can make this unnecessary, with a hypothetical great IDE, with familiar syntax coloring. But still, if there is one thing that all-caps should be reserved for, it's something like this.

With all-caps, your code can be sensual, and the jolting all-caps bits are look out, potentially arbitrary code gets pasted into here.

mnemenaut•1y ago
https://github.com/rogerturner/scheme-macros/blob/main/examp... shows stepwise development of a trace-let [the `(example: (fn arg) => result)` forms are tests - see check-examples library]
Y_Y
•
1y ago
Since you asked, my objection is both aesthetic and semantic, though I was really referring to the semantic part above.

I think you've hit the nail on the head with this visual vs. verbal distinction.

I can add a few clarifying details. I don't use IDEs as much as basic text editors maybe with highlighting, and I try not to rely on any fancy features. It does worry me that the allcaps use you describe is (afaik) not known to the editor or interpreter, so if you make a mistake or the symbol gets out of sync with its meaning (re: pattern variables) you may have a false signal. Finally I'll say that in the end I can't suggest a good way to treat these special variables, and so maybe I don't get it, or tastes like mine would be better served by a different formalism for macros.