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Phyllotaxis: An audio-reactive LED display

https://jagi.studio/posts/phyllotaxis/
119•evakhoury•15h ago•12 comments

The systems that no one will test

https://blog.christianperone.com/2026/09/the-systems-that-no-one-will-test/
35•perone•21h ago•8 comments

Pirating the Pirates

https://mubi.com/en/notebook/posts/pirating-the-pirates
552•piotrgrabowski•16h ago•271 comments

California farmers are struggling to sell grapes as demand for wine drops

https://www.kqed.org/news/12101534/california-farmers-are-struggling-to-sell-grapes-as-demand-for...
196•randycupertino•12h ago•424 comments

Booted up in 1993, this server still runs – but not for much longer (2017)

https://www.computerworld.com/article/1673071/booted-up-in-1993-this-server-still-runs-but-not-fo...
14•doener•1d ago•2 comments

MicroLLM Lab – Try 7 tiny LLM's in the browser

https://stateofutopia.com/experiments/microllmlab/
225•logicallee•13h ago•81 comments

Jeff – Jev-compatible 0.8B decision models, trained at home, ~30 ms

https://github.com/firelex/jeff
477•firelex•11h ago•179 comments

Tank Body Problem

http://www.jimsitu.com
89•jimbooonooo•7h ago•21 comments

OpenAI: Tomorrow we are re-opening the Pro $200 subscription

https://twitter.com/thsottiaux/status/2104823812042940713
37•tosh•1h ago•27 comments

ESP32S3 cluster running 1.58-bit (BitNet) Language model

https://github.com/Low-Zi-Hong/ESP32s3-LLM-Cluster
88•nkko•10h ago•18 comments

12,000-year-old Göbeklitepe burials explain scattered bones

https://archaeologymag.com/2026/09/gobeklitepe-burials-hundreds-of-scattered-bones/
130•yusufaytas•2d ago•30 comments

Show HN: Pac-Bench – How well can models one-shot a Pac-Man game?

https://jonclegg.github.io/pacman-bakeoff/
47•thefourthchime•9h ago•34 comments

Sonnet 5.5

https://www.anthropic.com/claude-sonnet-5-5
758•D2OQZG8l5BI1S06•14h ago•503 comments

Hijacking the PS5's RTMP stream

https://yashgarg.dev/posts/hijacking-ps5-rtmp-stream/
248•ibobev•16h ago•79 comments

Scientists solve 1840s space weather mystery

https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/09/scientists-solve-1840s-space-weather-mystery/
102•gumby•12h ago•46 comments

Who Killed Paulina Borsook's Career?

https://www.wired.com/story/paulina-borsook-profile/
47•danielmorozoff•1d ago•16 comments

Kids turned low-traffic NPR Spotify comments into a secret group chat

https://www.thisamericanlife.org/897/transcript
382•simonpure•16h ago•213 comments

Updated Google Maps shows destruction of the city of Rafah

https://twitter.com/AliAbunimah/status/2103890594137309425
491•slowin•16h ago•301 comments

Nvidia wants to put a watchdog chip next to every AI agent

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/09/28/nvidia-releases.html
159•jonbaer•16h ago•199 comments

1996 chat room simulator connected to Win95 and System 7 web desktops

https://lolchat.rip/
106•henrychannel•8h ago•44 comments

World Labs Is Joining AMD

https://www.worldlabs.ai/blog/amd-announcement
268•mfiguiere•11h ago•110 comments

Show HN: Museum of Numbers

https://numbermuseum.com/2147483647
21•rhl314•2d ago•8 comments

Simulating Airband AM Radios

https://bitbashing.io/am-radio.html
29•shellpipe•2d ago•3 comments

It's Time to Investigate the AI Labs

https://calnewport.com/its-time-to-investigate-the-ai-labs/
459•ibobev•12h ago•180 comments

How to win a beer with high-dimensional statistics

https://jamiesimon.io/blog/how-to-win-a-beer-with-high-dimensional-statistics/
66•jamie-simon•2d ago•8 comments

Show HN: HN.watch – Videos of all Hacker News posts

https://hn.watch/
165•mrborgen•17h ago•90 comments

Does Reddit have an astroturfing problem? What the data suggests

https://www.petervijeh.com/projects/reddit-astroturf
201•p-s-v•18h ago•251 comments

What is the best shape of a city? Modelling effect of urban form on distance

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/23998083261458842
34•rustoo•2d ago•18 comments

What reversing, modernising old games tells us about the economic impact of AI

https://this.os.isfine.org/blog/posts/what-reverse-engineering-and-modernising-an-old-war-game-te...
114•keeda•2d ago•61 comments

The art forger who became a national hero

https://priceonomics.com/the-art-forger-who-became-a-national-hero/
40•bookofjoe•2d ago•9 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.