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How Hacker News ranking works: scoring, controversy, and penalties (2013)

https://www.righto.com/2013/11/how-hacker-news-ranking-really-works.html
73•theanonymousone•2h ago•33 comments

I built non-autoregressive decision models with RL a year ago

https://laya.convaiinnovations.com/
1051•nandakishor_ml•12h ago•243 comments

AI-generated posters don’t have to be horrible

https://john.hartnup.uk/2026/06/07/ai-event-posters.html
1312•ereiamjh•14h ago•726 comments

Measure internet censorship. Contribute to the largest open dataset

https://ooni.org/install
73•Bluestein•3h ago•39 comments

Mayday Mysteries

http://www.maydaymystery.org/mayday/
19•Eridanus2•2h ago•3 comments

Brood War Bench

https://bw.swerdlow.dev/report
115•benswerd•9h ago•62 comments

Compiler-style optimization for drawing via Skia

https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.23696
47•PaulDavisThe1st•2d ago•12 comments

Two parallel neural ectoderm progenitors contribute to the developing brain

https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2026/09/two-separate-brains.html
603•emigre•17h ago•234 comments

Deodands put a price on objects that caused death

https://daily.jstor.org/how-the-railways-killed-a-medieval-law/
33•samizdis•3d ago•12 comments

English: A vs. An

https://www.redblobgames.com/blog/2026-09-16-english-a-vs-an/
97•azhenley•3h ago•107 comments

Show HN: CUA-S1 – A System One Model for Computer Use

https://github.com/trycua/cua
55•frabonacci•7h ago•7 comments

ZK-JPEG: Zero-Knowledge Image Editing and Compression

https://eprint.iacr.org/2026/2039
46•gslin•4h ago•6 comments

UFO Series Home Page: "UFO" TV Series from 1970

https://ufoseries.com/
44•DropDead•1d ago•28 comments

You can defeat the Dream Devourer from Chrono Trigger using an int overflow

https://chrono.fandom.com/wiki/Dream_Devourer
19•ronreiter•2h ago•9 comments

The Lamentable Later Life of Lemmings

https://www.filfre.net/2026/09/the-lamentable-later-life-of-lemmings/
4•zdw•8h ago•1 comments

Android 17 is the first since 3.x to add new APIs without releasing to the AOSP

https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/117282080803799576
1106•theanonymousone•1d ago•645 comments

Suzanne Ciani's Buchla Cookbook

https://echo.orpheusinstituut.be/article/suzannes-buchla-cookbook
54•stuart78•2d ago•21 comments

Tin: full-text search for Postgres

https://planetscale.com/blog/introducing-tin
179•ksec•9h ago•70 comments

Supabase (YC S20) Is Hiring for OrioleDB

https://supabase.link/orioledbjob
1•awalias•6h ago

The Secret Life of Circuits

https://blog.coredump.cx/p/the-secret-life-of-circuits-is-here
278•surprisetalk•4d ago•71 comments

New evidence for hidden chambers beyond Tutankhamun's tomb

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-02621-2
94•rndsignals•2d ago•38 comments

Black Holes or Black Hole Stars? Astronomers Spar over 'Little Red Dots'

https://www.quantamagazine.org/black-holes-or-black-hole-stars-astronomers-spar-over-webb-telesco...
85•jandrewrogers•1d ago•44 comments

GPT-6 Astra Solves a WWI German Radio Cipher

https://www.prinzai.com/p/gpt-6-astra-solves-a-wwi-german-radio
360•nsoonhui•17h ago•166 comments

San Francisco Onion Futures Company

https://onionfutures.com/
367•z-mach9•19h ago•153 comments

I think you should almost never use AI to write

https://erichgrunewald.substack.com/p/why-you-should-almost-never-use-ai
196•erwald•7h ago•109 comments

How to Write with an LLM

https://sockpuppet.org/blog/2026/09/17/how-to-write-with-an-llm/
618•joeriddles•2d ago•372 comments

Cloudflare Quick Tunnels

https://try.cloudflare.com/
809•jcbhmr•1d ago•308 comments

Adventures in Microcontroller Circuit Debugging

https://www.bigmessowires.com/2026/08/30/adventures-in-microcontroller-circuit-debugging/
31•lateatdesk•2d ago•8 comments

Microsoft director: AI scraping 'the largest theft of labor in human history'

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/microsoft-director-called-ai-s...
96•jonbaer•5h ago•27 comments

If math is more than proof, we need to better celebrate the rest of it

https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2026/09/18/if-math-is-more-than-proof-we-need-to-better-celebrate-...
297•num42•17h ago•231 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.