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What on Earth Is Dekton?

https://www.worksinprogress.news/p/porcelain
55•wawayanda•2h ago•9 comments

Apple ML Research: Muse Spark Open with MLX on Mac Studio

https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/mlx-distributed-inference
92•antipaul•2h ago•42 comments

Big Fish: Exploiting a 37-Year-Old Kernel Bug in OpenBSD

https://calif.io/research/big-fish
70•rs_rs_rs_rs_rs•1h ago•9 comments

America's Wumao: Inside Polymarket's Paid Quote-Retweet Esports Program

https://www.readergrev.com/p/polymarket-paid-quote-retweet-esports-investigation
20•paimapi•40m ago•5 comments

I Love Software Rendering

https://www.jamesfmackenzie.com/2026/10/13/i-love-software-rendering/
189•speckx•3h ago•134 comments

How to Formalize All of Mathematics

https://xenaproject.wordpress.com/2026/10/16/how-to-formalize-all-of-mathematics/
41•practal•2h ago•29 comments

Stolen Renoir paintings found hidden, and damaged, behind cinder block wall

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/stolen-renoir-paintings-found-behind-wall-france/
27•ohjeez•3d ago•12 comments

Is Liquid Metal Killing Our PCs? Scientific Analysis and a 2-Year Test [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eF6bMSjPepM
44•zdw•17h ago•29 comments

Show HN: OneDeploy – Managed open-source apps with nightly backups and TLS

https://onedeploy.co
10•relatedcode•57m ago•6 comments

RFC8950: Announce IPv4 with an IPv6 next-hop

https://anuragbhatia.com/post/2026/06/rfc8950-announce-ipv4-with-ipv6-next-hop/
39•porridgeraisin•2h ago•9 comments

Gyroscopes Got So Small [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Zc_6xB5W3Y
54•surprisetalk•1d ago•24 comments

Woman who rescued injured crow keeps getting 'thank-you gifts' from birds [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjNpfz4UzqU
682•johnnyApplePRNG•3d ago•216 comments

Yet another way to invoke functions without parentheses

https://blog.ikaes.de/yet-another-way-to-invoke-functions-without-parentheses/
204•aragonite•2d ago•90 comments

How to make System 1 LLMs show System 2 competencies?

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/aaai.70113
14•porridgeraisin•2h ago•6 comments

My old job feels distant now

https://www.pinecoder.dev/blog/2026-10-15/my-old-job-is-distant/
25•speckx•3h ago•20 comments

The Economic Complexity of the Western Roman Empire

https://www.michelecoscia.com/?p=2613
115•mikk14•2d ago•23 comments

JPEG XL vs. AVIF for web use-cases

https://jakearchibald.com/2026/jpeg-xl-vs-avif/
5•farlight•24m ago•0 comments

Meta’s new commercial terms will allow the scraping of news sites: experts

https://www.niemanlab.org/2026/10/metas-new-commercial-terms-will-allow-the-scraping-of-news-site...
429•0in•16h ago•154 comments

What was a Token Ring network?

https://dfarq.homeip.net/what-was-a-token-ring-network/
24•ibobev•2h ago•11 comments

AI-assisted PCB design for KiCad 10

https://github.com/mixelpixx/Konnect
92•ofrzeta•2d ago•31 comments

MS Paint Adds Freeform Rotation (2026)

https://blogs.windows.com/windows-insider/2026/02/20/announcing-windows-11-insider-preview-build-...
35•telestew•2d ago•27 comments

Show HN: rStation – A shared research lab for your AI agents

https://rstation.ai/
15•stephenchung•2h ago•5 comments

US Rep Announces Congressional Legislation to Protect Video Game Ownership

https://ritchietorres.house.gov/posts/rep-torres-announces-power-to-the-players-act-legislation-t...
23•DeepLogin•33m ago•5 comments

Show HN: Wonderhop – A daily game: guess what most people say, or what none do

https://wonderhop.io/en/
11•mtlduo•2d ago•15 comments

Show HN: Gemini 4 Argon plays StarCraft

https://starskirmish.com/bench/v0-2/
60•__cayenne__•2h ago•42 comments

Bark: The Toll-Free BBS for 90s Teens

https://blog.bityard.net/articles/2026/October/bark-the-toll-free-bbs-for-90s-teens
24•bityard•4h ago•7 comments

The Folders Programming Language

https://danieltemkin.com/esolangs/folders
172•gurst•11h ago•30 comments

Show HN: Grimoire for Biology

https://grimoire.bio
7•levmiseri•1h ago•2 comments

Two-Stack Sliding-Window Aggregation

https://orlp.net/blog/two-stack-sliding-window-aggregation/
110•surprisetalk•3d ago•21 comments

Postgres 19 delayed after AI reviewers find more bugs than humans can fix

https://www.theregister.com/databases/2026/10/16/postgres-19-delayed-after-ai-reviewers-find-more...
10•magoghm•40m ago•0 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.