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Show HN: Simple algorithm and color space to generate diverse skin tones

https://toneyalexander.github.io/inclusive-color-space/
309•automatoney•4h ago•68 comments

Why some people mow a lawn better than others

https://pudding.cool/2026/06/mow/
76•carlos-menezes•1h ago•61 comments

Waymo – Dallas Open to All

https://waymo.com/blog/shorts/dallas-open-to-all/
35•xnx•1h ago•19 comments

Investors in Situational Awareness deserved to lose their shirts

https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2026/08/04/investors-in-situational-awareness-des...
23•Anon84•24m ago•13 comments

Mistral's Shieldstral: 3B open-weights model for multimodal moderation

https://mistral.ai/news/shieldstral/
61•riadsila•3h ago•16 comments

Hop.earth – OpenStreetMap based car racing game

https://hop.earth/?server=lkhr7&route=fQ5nuu9R
36•faebi•1h ago•22 comments

The Warp Agent CLI

https://www.warp.dev/blog/introducing-the-warp-agent-cli-coding-agent
54•emschwartz•2h ago•27 comments

DeepSeek V4 Flash on a Single AMD MI300X

https://github.com/ryanzhou/deepseek-v4-flash-mi300x
320•zhoutong•9h ago•76 comments

Launch HN: EdotEnv (YC S26) – Quant Trading RL Envs to Teach LLMs Research

https://edotenv.com/
11•Mzzzzz•1h ago•3 comments

U.S. used 'virtually all' of its long-range precision missiles during Iran war

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/08/04/us-has-used-virtually-all-of-its-long-range-precision-missiles-re...
205•tcp_handshaker•8h ago•296 comments

Truemetrics (YC S23) Is Hiring in Berlin – GTM Lead

https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/truemetrics/jobs/bIQQ7tP-founding-gtm-lead
1•truemetricsIngo•2h ago

When AI Benchmarks Plateau: A Systematic Study of Benchmark Saturation

https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.16763
42•doppp•3h ago•53 comments

Stephen Wolfram's Wife Has Died

https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2026/08/in-memory-of-my-wife-elise-cawley-1961-2026-with-than...
61•jdcampolargo•51m ago•3 comments

Vlt 1.0 and Hosted Package Registries

https://www.vlt.io/blog/1-0
36•patrikcsak•1h ago•7 comments

Web security is too hard

https://textslashplain.com/2026/08/04/security-is-hard-yall/
100•kevincox•1h ago•35 comments

Keyv and friends compromised in active Shai-Hulud supply chain attack

https://www.aikido.dev/blog/keyv-and-friends-compromised-in-npm-supply-chain-attack
195•cimi_•8h ago•98 comments

Apple says more ex-employees may have taken confidential data to OpenAI

https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/04/apple-says-more-ex-employees-may-have-taken-confidential-data-t...
222•thewebguyd•4h ago•167 comments

Xbox goes down. You can't play games you own on disc

https://birchtree.me/blog/xbox-goes-down-you-cant-play-games-you-own-on-disc/
465•surprisetalk•7h ago•521 comments

The Red Strings Club

https://www.vegard.net/the-red-strings-club-review/
5•meysamazad•1d ago•0 comments

Perspec 1.0

https://adriansieber.com/announcing-perspec-1-0/
29•surprisetalk•4h ago•8 comments

Blackmail Fail (2013)

https://gwern.net/blackmail
10•simonebrunozzi•1h ago•0 comments

Dates That Don't Exist (2015)

https://blog.yossarian.net/2015/06/09/Dates-That-Dont-Exist
89•EndXA•3d ago•60 comments

Online ad giant Adform was hacked, proving once again why ad blockers are needed

https://this.weekinsecurity.com/online-advertising-giant-adform-was-hacked-proving-once-again-why...
168•speckx•4h ago•58 comments

Everything I Know (1975)

https://www.bfi.org/about-fuller/everything-i-know/
107•simonebrunozzi•8h ago•31 comments

Harness engineering for self-improvement

https://lilianweng.github.io/posts/2026-07-04-harness/
261•tosh•13h ago•56 comments

There Will Come Soft Rains (1950) [pdf]

https://users.wpi.edu/~zrbutzke/Docs/BradburyStories(1).pdf
301•pmg101•20h ago•335 comments

What's Behind the Sharp Drop in Labor Force Participation?

https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2026/aug/what-is-behind-sharp-drop-labor-force-particip...
14•toomuchtodo•2h ago•15 comments

Where .env Went Wrong

https://secretspec.dev/blog/where-env-went-wrong/
79•domenkozar•4d ago•58 comments

Nobel Disease

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_disease
72•num42•8h ago•71 comments

The Pedagogy Behind the Studio

https://gail.wharton.upenn.edu/gen-ai-studio/the-generative-ai-studio-pedagogy/
7•ray__•5d 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.