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The bottleneck might be the air in the room

https://blog.mikebowler.ca/2026/07/03/co2-and-decision-making/
57•gslin•59m ago•14 comments

2026 Unslop AI-Written Fiction Contest Results

https://www.hyperstitionai.com/unslop-results
15•networked•1h ago•10 comments

Agentic coding notes from Galapagos Island

https://danluu.com/ai-coding/#appendix-agentic-loops-and-writing-this-post
60•gm678•2h ago•20 comments

Performance per dollar is getting faster and cheaper

https://www.wafer.ai/blog/glm52-amd
213•latchkey•9h ago•66 comments

Leanstral 1.5: Proof abundance for all

https://mistral.ai/news/leanstral-1-5/
192•programLyrique•8h ago•43 comments

Giant trees have no trouble pumping water to top branches: new research

https://news.exeter.ac.uk/faculty-of-environment-science-and-economy/giant-trees-have-no-trouble-...
175•hhs•8h ago•89 comments

Mir Books – Books from the Soviet Era

https://mirtitles.org
37•clmul•3d ago•13 comments

Synthesis is harder than analysis

https://surfingcomplexity.blog/2026/07/03/synthesis-is-harder-than-analysis/
59•azhenley•4h ago•11 comments

MSI Center – How to gain SYSTEM privileges in seconds

https://mrbruh.com/msicenter/
71•MrBruh•6h ago•17 comments

Steam Controller Auto-Charge – pilot to magnetic charging puck using CV

https://github.com/FossPrime/Steam-Controller-Auto-Charge
118•zdw•8h ago•25 comments

SearXNG: A free internet metasearch engine

https://github.com/searxng/searxng
194•theanonymousone•11h ago•51 comments

FreeBSD ate my RAM

https://crocidb.com/post/freebsd-ate-my-ram/
124•theanonymousone•12h ago•43 comments

David Beazley – Programming Courses

https://www.dabeaz.com/courses.html
51•gregsadetsky•1h ago•14 comments

The firefighting system of the Van der Heyden brothers in 17th century Amsterdam

https://worksinprogress.co/issue/how-amsterdam-invented-the-fire-department/
76•zdw•8h ago•13 comments

Jamesob's guide to running SOTA LLMs locally

https://github.com/jamesob/local-llm
324•livestyle•16h ago•146 comments

Odin, Wikipedia and engagement farming

https://katamari64.se/posts/2026/odin-wikipedia/
118•stock_toaster•8h ago•151 comments

Show HN: Classify mechanical faults using Contrastive Language-Audio Pretraining

https://github.com/adam-s/car-diagnosis
10•dataviz1000•2d ago•0 comments

Soatok's Informal Guide to Threat Models

https://soatok.blog/2026/06/30/soatoks-informal-guide-to-threat-models/
72•zdw•6h ago•9 comments

Applied Category Theory Course (2018)

https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/act_course/index.html
101•measurablefunc•10h ago•7 comments

New serious vulnerabilities spiked around release of Claude Mythos Preview

https://epoch.ai/data-insights/cve-severity-spike
90•cubefox•10h ago•30 comments

Gone but Not Forgotten: Recovering the Dead Web

https://blog.archive.org/2026/04/23/gone-but-not-forgotten-recovering-the-dead-web/
59•wslh•3d ago•13 comments

Maybe you should learn something

https://www.marginalia.nu/log/a_135_learn/
37•tylerdane•3h ago•18 comments

Study reveals what people see when they read lips

https://news.ku.edu/news/article/study-reveals-what-people-really-see-when-they-read-lips
6•giuliomagnifico•3d ago•0 comments

Costco is the anti-Amazon

https://phenomenalworld.org/analysis/the-anti-amazon/
386•bookofjoe•16h ago•366 comments

Show HN: A statically typed, cross-platform, easily bootstrappable build system

https://github.com/rochus-keller/BUSY/
29•Rochus•3d ago•10 comments

Infracost (YC W21) Is Hiring a Marketing Lead to Shift FinOps Left

https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/infracost/jobs/YTJcFwr-marketing-lead
1•akh•10h ago

Espionage Against the European Parliament

https://citizenlab.ca/research/member-of-committee-investigating-spyware-hacked-with-pegasus/
340•ledoge•10h ago•81 comments

Reverse-engineering Codemasters' BIGF archive format in Ruby

https://davidslv.uk/2026/06/30/reading-binary-in-ruby.html
10•davidslv•3d ago•3 comments

Hunting a 16-year-old SQLite WAL bug with TLA+

https://ubuntu.com/blog/hunting-a-16-year-old-sqlite-bug-with-tla-is-dqlite-affected
201•peterparker204•3d ago•22 comments

Factories are just rooms

https://interconnected.org/home/2026/07/03/factories
228•arbesman•16h ago•94 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.