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Kobo can run apps now

https://bandarlabs.github.io/Cobalt/
356•thepoet•6h ago•122 comments

Felony Bench

https://www.felonybench.com/
432•colinprince•7h ago•193 comments

Felony charges for citizen deleting phone data at US Border

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/21/us/politics/samuel-tunick-deleted-phone-felony.html
411•floathub•10h ago•530 comments

Scientists release biggest 2D map of the universe

https://newscenter.lbl.gov/2026/08/10/scientists-release-biggest-2d-map-of-the-universe/
110•NKosmatos•4h ago•34 comments

Kagi added a setting for removing paywalled links from search results

https://kagi.com/changelog#11296
936•speckx•8h ago•322 comments

AI boosted homework scores, then exam scores dropped: study

https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2026/08/18/does-ai-stop-children-from-learning
194•dash2•2d ago•253 comments

I accidentally logged hundreds of thousands of phone calls to military bases

https://lina.sh/blog/hijacking-e164-arpa
389•gavide•9h ago•44 comments

DeepSeek-v4-flash-vision-exp

https://api-docs.deepseek.com/guides/vision/
439•dares2573•12h ago•141 comments

How we made a text-to-speech model respond in sub-50 ms

https://nari-labs.com/blog/qwen3-tts-speed-cost-frontier/
85•toebee•7h ago•13 comments

SalesPatriot (YC W25) Is Hiring Forward Deployed Engineers

https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/salespatriot/jobs/M46X6YX-forward-deployed-engineer
1•maciejSz•1h ago

I ran Photoshop on a £0.60 computer chip

https://pointinthecloud.com/2026-08-19-144600.html
98•colinprince•7h ago•25 comments

People of ACM – Russ Cox

https://www.acm.org/articles/people-of-acm/2026/russ-cox
68•signa11•4d ago•10 comments

A look under our trunk: what's in our compute

https://waymo.com/blog/2026/08/look-under-our-trunk/
73•ra7•1d ago•22 comments

Claudette: Make Claude stop talking like a BuzzFeed article

https://github.com/adnanakil/nobuzz/blob/main/README.md
162•aakil•8h ago•114 comments

What happens when a GPU reads memory

https://blog.doubleword.ai/what-happens-when-a-gpu-reads-memory
86•ibobev•6h ago•15 comments

Tumble Forth – from assembly to OS with C compiler

https://tumbleforth.hardcoded.net/
35•vicek22•3h ago•3 comments

The coolest anti-surveillance tools at Defcon [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-2uAsJ5EPAw
126•neom•3d ago•8 comments

Using an old Android phone as a music player

https://monocyte.blog/using-an-old-android-phone-as-a-music-player/
30•surprisetalk•4d ago•14 comments

I'm becoming AI-blind

https://cymerys.com/w/im-becoming-ai-blind
217•rcymerys•11h ago•223 comments

Remotely Unlocking Electric Scooters

https://henriemategui.com/post/remotely-unlocking-electric-scooters
8•henriemategui•1h ago•0 comments

The Size of the World Wide Web

https://www.worldwidewebsize.com/
19•1970-01-01•4d ago•6 comments

Building an (almost) fully self-hosted, sandboxed, agentic software factory

https://blog.jakesaunders.dev/building-an-almost-fully-self-hosted-sandboxed-agentic-software-fac...
68•jakelsaunders94•6h ago•48 comments

AI companies destroy physical books – let's scan rare books before it's too late

https://annas-archive.gl/blog/physical-destruction.html
487•Cider9986•20h ago•825 comments

Decayfmt – a file format that corrupts itself a little every time you open it

https://github.com/aravpanwar/decayfmt
44•unprovable•6h ago•15 comments

Kodak's "pre-invented" lunar orbiter camera; or, the fate of SAMOS readout

https://invertingvision.com/2026/08/10/kodaks-pre-invented-lunar-orbiter-camera-or-the-fate-of-sa...
48•cainxinth•8h ago•2 comments

The road to ACID transactions in Cassandra 6

https://theconsensus.dev/p/2026/08/16/transactions-in-cassandra.html
59•eatonphil•10h ago•6 comments

Quantifying the honey bee dance floor

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0341456
23•Ariarule•1w ago•1 comments

Show HN: Shoehorn – Quantize any model down to run on your machine

https://notactuallytreyanastasio.github.io/shoehorn/
69•rhgraysonii•3d ago•17 comments

New Worlds: We are living in the future of J.G. Ballard or William Gibson

https://precastreinforced.co.uk/2026/08/16/new-worlds/
194•speckx•9h ago•140 comments

Quick impressions: A week of using Codex more than Claude

https://allaboutcoding.ghinda.com/a-week-of-using-codex-more-than-claude/
65•speckx•3h ago•73 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.