frontpage.
newsnewestaskshowjobs

Open Source @Github

fp.

HackerTube: YouTube built from videos recommended by HN

https://karpathy.bearblog.dev/hacker-tube/
690•karpathy•5h ago•235 comments

An Italian farmer found some unknown seeds in his attic and planted them

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/italian-farmer-found-unknown-seeds-attic-with-nothi...
125•ecares•2h ago•42 comments

TCP Use-After-Free: CVE-2026-98432 / CVSS 9.8

https://atlasum.net/blog/cve-2026-98432-linux-ipv4-tcp-uaf
330•oger•6h ago•158 comments

Memdoor: A team of 5 Qwen3.8-27B models beats Fable 5 on LiveCodeBench Hard

https://github.com/guregodevo/memdoor/tree/main/examples/workflows/team-solve
66•guregodevo•2h ago•36 comments

Altoids Project

https://uvdn7.github.io/altoids-project/
31•uvdn7•2h ago•0 comments

When electric cars were for women

https://spectrum.ieee.org/early-electric-vehicles
29•dverlaeckt80•2h ago•6 comments

It's the memory latency, stupid

https://pivotlake.io/blog/its-the-memory-latency-stupid/
121•ntur1337•6h ago•38 comments

First response from the Project Suncatcher prototype satellite

https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/models-and-research/google-research/project-suncatcher-sate...
30•praccu•21h ago•20 comments

Molly (Signal fork) has not been updated since 3 months and is vulnerable

https://piefed.world/post/1503394
301•DeepLogin•15h ago•176 comments

Jepsen: ParticleDB 1.1.4

https://jepsen.io/analyses/particledb-1.1.4
196•aphyr•11h ago•103 comments

Surviving "The Graduate"

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-weekend-essay/dustin-hoffman-on-surviving-the-graduate
59•samizdis•5h ago•15 comments

The Duty of a Scholar

https://www.daemonology.net/blog/2026-10-31-The-Duty-of-a-Scholar.html
88•gslin•6h ago•28 comments

Show HN: NES Contra (1987) port (ASM –> C and then C –> WebAssembly)

https://epoyraz.github.io/nes-contra-us/
48•tevlon•6h ago•30 comments

AI text watermarking and quality loss

https://blog.keyvan.net/p/ai-text-watermarking-and-quality
17•danielfoster•3h ago•2 comments

Sculpture re-creates odd optical effects of famed Lycurgus Cup

https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/10/scientists-recreate-the-1600-year-old-recipe-of-lycurgus-...
17•dverlaeckt80•1d ago•0 comments

Zinc creep in cable spelter sockets brought down the Arecibo telescope in 2020

https://maketecheasier.com/arecibo-zinc-creep-collapse/
18•ohjeez•1d ago•6 comments

Do the math: How we took over ChatGPT accounts

https://www.parameter.ai/labs/we-found-a-gap-at-openai
302•armcat•14h ago•149 comments

Much Ado About None: Sentinel Values in Python

https://florianwilhelm.info/2026/10/sentinel_values/
50•sebg•2d ago•28 comments

With 86% of the words, you might understand only 38% of an anime's lines

https://learnfromx.com/research/anime-word-coverage-vs-lines-understood
66•lakesare•4h ago•41 comments

Simple circuits can create complex behaviors

https://aatishb.com/myriad/lets-build-a-brain/
215•aatish•4d ago•68 comments

Anthropic blocks users for anything touching training larger models

https://twitter.com/jiahaoshao1/status/2116475922190922088
183•pretext•5h ago•95 comments

Show HN: A language model that lives in a boot sector

https://github.com/kerlenton/bootgpt
58•kerlenton•12h ago•1 comments

Distributed Proofreaders

https://www.pgdp.net/c/
26•gone35•4h ago•1 comments

Switch Lowering in GCC

https://xoranth.net/gcc-switch/
198•signa11•17h ago•39 comments

Reading and writing are less symmetric than you (probably) think

https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2015/10/25/reading-and-writing-are-less-symmetric-than-you-probably...
78•luu•3d ago•22 comments

5 years of OqtaDrive: Microdrive emulation to Sinclair Network over the internet

https://oqtadrive.org/10.other/5-years/
17•xelalex•1d ago•3 comments

William Nordhaus has died

https://news.yale.edu/2026/10/31/william-nordhaus-nobel-laureate-who-integrated-economics-and-cli...
53•ilreb•7h ago•21 comments

Redox: Ring Buffers Project Summary

https://www.redox-os.org/news/nlnet-rb-summary/
59•g0xA52A2A•3d ago•12 comments

Rhind Mathematical Papyrus

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhind_Mathematical_Papyrus
16•sweetdingoes•1d ago•1 comments

Serbia just elected the world's brainiest parliament

https://www.science.org/content/article/serbia-just-elected-world-s-brainiest-parliament
809•input_sh•15h ago•462 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.