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My favourite PowerMac is a Nintendo Wii

https://virtuallyfun.com/2026/10/29/my-favourite-powermac-is-a-nintendo-wii/
176•DHowett•4h ago•49 comments

Bunny CDN Security Incident

https://status.bunny.net/incidents/p6gf1by9kr7m
125•SondreDag•3h ago•28 comments

Northflank Breached

https://status.northflank.com
303•js4ever•6h ago•227 comments

Backdoor in Claude Code for VS Code extension on the Cursor Marketplace

https://phorion.io/blog/offical-claude-code-vsx-compromise/
678•_chall•15h ago•433 comments

Jules Verne's Lost Novel

https://blue-continuum.com/verne-paris
42•dnetesn•2h ago•11 comments

Show HN: A working Nintendo in ~1GB of Qwen weights

https://github.com/dbreunig/nesformer
154•dbreunig•5h ago•100 comments

Infinite Mac: BeOS

https://blog.persistent.info/2026/10/infinite-mac-beos.html
54•ecliptik•2h ago•7 comments

Breaking the open web won't stop the bad bots

https://www.techpolicy.press/breaking-the-open-web-wont-stop-the-bad-bots/
137•raybb•3d ago•63 comments

The federated code forge

https://tangled.org/blog/forge/
191•zlliang•6h ago•66 comments

Florilegium: Procedural Flowers in LaTeX

https://github.com/kevinraymond/florilegium
170•nanna•6h ago•32 comments

The oldest ice disappears and the Stone Age emerges from it

https://www.sciencenorway.no/archaeology-climate-culture/the-oldest-ice-is-disappearing-the-stone...
35•dxs•2h ago•10 comments

Show HN: Automatic deduction of FlashAttention kernel from ~25 lines of SQL

https://github.com/xqlsystems/xarray-sql/blob/6debe2495dcb4e8fac20ab97df5b89baae2a31a6/benchmarks...
12•alxmrs•2h ago•1 comments

A Pickpocket's Guide to New York

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/11/02/a-pickpockets-guide-to-new-york
29•prismatic•2h ago•5 comments

Anthropic may not secure investment-grade rating after IPO, Blackstone says

https://www.ft.com/content/59383c7f-8d82-493f-bf01-d2e862a1018f
243•petethomas•4h ago•179 comments

Building an AI-native engineering org

https://twitter.com/sgondala2/status/2115832070274723875
82•sgondala_ycapp•1d ago•103 comments

Through Captain Jean-Luc Picard, Patrick Stewart taught us the measure of a man

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2026/10/29/metro/patrick-stewart-picard-star-trek-the-next-generation/
77•apress•1h ago•25 comments

Archive of our own (AO3) hacked

https://www.otwstatus.org
5•idlewords•52m ago•0 comments

Azure's Weakest Link – Five Full Cross-Tenant Compromises

https://www.binarysecurity.no/posts/2026/10/one-root-case
246•swq115•12h ago•46 comments

An Arrogant Way of Killing (2016)

https://magazine.atavist.com/2016/an-arrogant-way-of-killing
13•firefax•2h ago•4 comments

Tree-mounted machines connect to web app to let users knock on wood remotely

https://www.designboom.com/technology/tree-mounted-machines-web-app-users-knock-on-wood-remotely/
41•surprisetalk•3d ago•21 comments

Sanstun: A sans-IO, parallel-friendly WireGuard implementation in Rust

https://www.firezone.dev/blog/introducing-sanstun
5•wh33zle•40m ago•0 comments

AI isn't replacing SREs, it's deskilling them

https://newsletter.signoz.io/p/ai-isnt-replacing-sres-its-deskilling
437•dorianniemiec•6h ago•324 comments

Turning a solar power system into its own backup

https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/10/turning-a-solar-power-system-into-its-own-backup/
11•PaulHoule•1d ago•5 comments

Embraer's Atech aims to double in size by 2030 with drone traffic control

https://www.bloomberglinea.com.br/negocios/atech-da-embraer-quer-dobrar-de-tamanho-ate-2030-com-c...
14•dvaplima•1h ago•2 comments

Show HN: Sketch Stadium – watch your agent play Pictionary

https://sketch.wakeshift.ai/games/q5ucru
15•ericlevine•6h ago•6 comments

Sleep framework: A new way for LLMs to retain knowledge in continual learning

https://research.google/blog/the-sleep-framework-a-new-way-for-llms-to-retain-knowledge-in-contin...
127•acossta•2d ago•12 comments

GitHub Incident with Actions, Pages, and Webhooks

https://www.githubstatus.com/incidents/pwxsjgnvrk6b
128•damontal•4h ago•48 comments

How do you take a picture of a black hole?

https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-do-you-take-a-picture-of-a-black-hole-20261029/
72•dverlaeckt80•12h ago•55 comments

Blockchain intelligence firms link North Korea to $6.3B hack on Binance

https://www.npr.org/2026/10/30/g-s1-150902/blockchain-intelligence-firms-link-north-korea-to-6-3b...
178•paulpauper•6h ago•113 comments

Tracks along the longest drive on another world

https://science.nasa.gov/blog/tracks-along-the-longest-drive-on-another-world/
49•shcallaway•20h ago•4 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.