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Claude: System Prompts

https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/release-notes/system-prompts
302•tosh•4h ago•132 comments

The AI Credit Resale Economy

https://vectoral.com/blog/who-are-the-token-brokers
104•mlenhard•2h ago•40 comments

St Lucie Nuclear Reactor Unit 1 manually shutdown, 3 control rods drop into core

https://www.wptv.com/news/treasure-coast/region-st-lucie-county/saint-lucie-nuclear-power-plant-u...
59•toomuchtodo•2h ago•29 comments

Anton Chekhov played at love most of his life

https://commonreader.wustl.edu/winning-and-losing-at-the-great-game-of-intimacy/
12•lermontov•1d ago•1 comments

NIH is ending a key grant for budding clinical researchers

https://www.science.org/content/article/nih-ending-key-grant-budding-clinical-researchers
10•brandonb•1h ago•1 comments

Archie G. Norcross' Maine Forest Fire Maps (1918–22)

https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/maine-forest-fire-maps/
11•samclemens•3d ago•1 comments

GPS and the Lost Art of Getting Lost

https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-inquiry/gps-and-the-lost-art-of-getting-lost
26•karakoram•2h ago•11 comments

Clamiga: Common Lisp for the Amiga

https://nnamgreb.de/blog/Clamiga+-+Common+Lisp+for+the+Amiga
29•emptybits•3d ago•1 comments

Firefox for iOS now has a native adblocker

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/block-ads-firefox-ios
273•pentagrama•4h ago•109 comments

The weekend is 100 years old

https://www.theguardian.com/money/2026/aug/16/the-weekend-is-100-years-old-skiveday-fridays-and-h...
65•lentil_soup•1h ago•27 comments

Before Rightmove, there was the Cosmorama

https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/articles/before-rightmove-there-was-the-cosmorama-londons-forgotten-p...
5•brod_ie•5d ago•0 comments

Show HN: A public AI whose memory is shared across all users

https://wildstatic.com/
37•adjohu•4h ago•24 comments

A True Telnet BBS on a Casio Calculator

https://ei3lh.eu/2026/08/16/a-true-telnet-bbs-on-a-casio-calculator/
52•austinallegro•5h ago•6 comments

Tasklet (YC P26) Is Hiring a Head of Design Engineering

https://tasklet.ai/careers/head-of-design-engineering
1•mayop100•3h ago

A SAT Attack on Tarski's High School Algebra Problem

https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.08421
54•matt_d•4d ago•17 comments

Kimi Work attaches raw agent sessions to feedback reports

18•ryanmerket•21h ago•3 comments

Research papers using "kidney disappointment" instead of "kidney failure"

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=%22kidney+disappointment%22
222•Alifatisk•4h ago•87 comments

Does anyone run Postgres without PgBouncer?

https://brandur.org/fragments/postgres-without-pgbouncer
100•abelanger•3d ago•60 comments

Chestnut – eGPU dock with open-source firmware

https://hwbusters.com/news/comma-ai-egpu-dock-runs-open-source-firmware-249-bare-799-with-an-rx-9...
100•txrx0000•2d ago•25 comments

Asus Bike Booster

https://www.asus.com/accessories/bike-booster/asus-oxiis/oxiis-intelligent-bike-booster/
556•wiradikusuma•4d ago•384 comments

Superconducting monolayer cuprate with a single CuO2 plane

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10857-1
49•sbulaev•3d ago•14 comments

Asynchronous I/O in DuckDB: Work, Thread, Work

https://duckdb.org/2026/07/31/asynchronous-io
243•pdet•6d ago•27 comments

AI Coding Without the Vibes

https://peterbloem.nl/blog/craft-coding
35•riskone•6h ago•11 comments

A U.S. Strategy to Prevent the Creation of Mirror Life

https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA4335-1.html
76•thunderbong•4h ago•47 comments

Cultivating a state of mind where new ideas are born (2023)

https://www.henrikkarlsson.xyz/p/good-ideas
240•felixbraun•20h ago•58 comments

Software Engineering fundamentals matter more

https://rhonabwy.com/2026/08/15/software-engineering-fundamentals-matter-more-than-ever/
266•ingve•18h ago•171 comments

Super El Niño Keeps Growing as New Forecasts Reach Record Territory Ahead Winter

https://www.severe-weather.eu/long-range-2/super-el-nino-growth-accelerating-to-record-strength-f...
369•dgellow•22h ago•254 comments

Guiding Ships with Moire Patterns (2018)

https://tinkerings.org/2018/03/28/guiding-ships-with-moire-patterns/
101•Eridanus2•15h ago•24 comments

What I Learned Securing Sniffnet with the GitHub Secure Open Source Fund

https://sniffnet.app/news/github-secure-open-source-fund/
13•dmit•3d ago•2 comments

Semaglutide linked to lower predicted dementia risk

https://alz-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/dad2.70432
462•randycupertino•1d ago•363 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.