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US vs. Google amicus curiae brief of Y Combinator in support of plaintiffs [pdf]

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.223205/gov.uscourts.dcd.223205.1300.1.pdf
265•dave1629•6h ago•388 comments

A Critical Look at MCP

https://raz.sh/blog/2025-05-02_a_critical_look_at_mcp
210•ablekh•6h ago•123 comments

Reverse engineering the 386 processor's prefetch queue circuitry

http://www.righto.com/2025/05/386-prefetch-circuitry-reverse-engineered.html
79•todsacerdoti•4h ago•28 comments

For $595, you get what nobody else can give you for twice the price (1982) [pdf]

https://s3data.computerhistory.org/brochures/commodore.commodore64.1982.102646264.pdf
26•indigodaddy•2h ago•0 comments

The Price of Remission

https://www.propublica.org/article/revlimid-price-cancer-celgene-drugs-fda-multiple-myeloma
45•danso•2d ago•23 comments

Adventures in Imbalanced Learning and Class Weight

http://andersource.dev/2025/05/05/imbalanced-learning.html
9•andersource•2d ago•0 comments

Show HN: Code Claude Code

https://github.com/RVCA212/codesys
70•sean_•6h ago•17 comments

Comparison of C/POSIX standard library implementations for Linux

https://www.etalabs.net/compare_libcs.html
57•smartmic•6h ago•21 comments

Embracer Games Archive is preserving 75000 video games and needs contributions

https://embracergamesarchive.com/
111•draugadrotten•9h ago•53 comments

Vision Now Available in Llama.cpp

https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp/blob/master/docs/multimodal.md
465•redman25•17h ago•102 comments

Building Local-First Flutter Apps with Riverpod, Drift, and PowerSync

https://dinkomarinac.dev/building-local-first-flutter-apps-with-riverpod-drift-and-powersync
20•kobieps•4d ago•9 comments

Prolog's Eternal September (2017)

https://storytotell.org/prologs-eternal-september
58•Tomte•2d ago•45 comments

Weave (YC W25) is hiring a founding engineer

https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/weave-3/jobs
1•adchurch•4h ago

A simple 16x16 dot animation from simple math rules

https://tixy.land
298•andrewrn•18h ago•65 comments

Private Japanese lunar lander enters orbit around moon ahead of a June touchdown

https://phys.org/news/2025-05-private-japanese-lunar-lander-orbit.html
180•pseudolus•3d ago•55 comments

Microsoft Teams will soon block screen capture during meetings

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/microsoft-teams-will-soon-block-screen-capture-during-meetings/
28•josephcsible•1h ago•42 comments

React Three Ecosystem

https://www.react-three.org/
89•bpierre•8h ago•29 comments

Gmail to SQLite

https://github.com/marcboeker/gmail-to-sqlite
275•tehlike•16h ago•86 comments

'It cannot provide nuance': UK experts warn AI therapy chatbots are not safe

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/may/07/experts-warn-therapy-ai-chatbots-are-not-safe-to-use
74•distalx•5h ago•74 comments

Unique Games Conjecture

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unique_games_conjecture
17•surprisetalk•4h ago•1 comments

Intel: Winning and Losing

https://www.abortretry.fail/p/intel-winning-and-losing
69•rbanffy•9h ago•34 comments

Not a three-year-old chimney sweep (2022)

https://fakehistoryhunter.net/2022/07/26/not-a-3-year-old-chimney-sweep/
87•nixass•14h ago•54 comments

Radxa Orion O6 brings Arm to the midrange PC (with caveats)

https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/radxa-orion-o6-brings-arm-midrange-pc
75•goranmoomin•8h ago•56 comments

The Deathbed Fallacy (2018)

https://www.hjorthjort.xyz/2018/02/21/the-deathbed-fallacy.html
215•mefengl•10h ago•101 comments

Email Forwarding for Your Domain

https://mailwip.com
8•codazoda•1h ago•4 comments

Lead Bullets (2011)

https://a16z.com/lead-bullets/
12•msukkarieh•5h ago•0 comments

Show HN: Sprigman – Pac-Man Recreated in a Limited Tile Based JavaScript Engine

https://sprig.hackclub.com/share/X4EGvOFk1q8FroEPCj1G
12•kuberwastaken•3d ago•4 comments

AI is draining water from areas that need it most

https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-ai-impacts-data-centers-water-data
33•mraniki•1h ago•24 comments

Detect and crash Chromium bots

https://blog.castle.io/detect-and-crash-chromium-bots-with-one-weird-trick-bots-hate-it/
105•avastel•3d ago•34 comments

Loss of dance and infant-directed song among the Northern Aché

https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(25)00447-6
62•PaulHoule•3d ago•9 comments
Open in hackernews

Prolog's Eternal September (2017)

https://storytotell.org/prologs-eternal-september
58•Tomte•2d ago

Comments

JadeNB•4h ago
It seems strange to make "let's make it easier for people to teach Prolog who don't understand it." At very best, this'll lead to students with a minimal factually correct knowledge of Prolog, and no idea why it matters. If we're imagining changing teachers' practice, why not aim a little higher and try to convince faculty that Prolog is interesting, at which point anyone qualified to teach computer science can learn about it themselves, and teach it better than from material designed around their ignorance?
passivegains•4h ago
the author is pretty up front about this: I would like to live in a world where professors consider Prolog worth knowing and put in the effort. That probably isn’t realistic. He clearly wishes he's wrong, which makes three of us.
JadeNB•2h ago
Right, but thinking you can change how people teach a subject without their believing it's worth knowing seems unrealistic, too!
Arch-TK•4h ago
"I think the underlying problem is that Prolog is part of a mandatory curriculum, but the professor doesn’t understand it. How do you teach something you don’t understand?"

Same problem with C and probably other languages.

Although by far the most annoying is that lots of people who also get paid to write C don't know it and have no interest in actually learning it. (Worst of all, they don't realise how little they know about C and think they know it very well.)

Bootvis•4h ago
What is something such a person should know but doesn’t? I don’t write C but the language is fairly small so I can imagine a professional keeping 99% of it in their head at all time.
remexre•4h ago
Idiomatic design would be a big one; there are a lot of ways to design a program in a higher-level OO language that, if followed in C, will lead to a program with lots of bugs around error handling and resource cleanup.

This kind of ties into the argument made by some in the Rust community that "the ownership was there the whole time" -- in a language without automatic memory management, you really do need to be aware of the life-cycle of an object in memory. Rust's specific rules aren't fundamental, but "even when an error occurs, I know what cleans up this object / this state" is.

layer8•3h ago
They should know what the C abstract machine does and doesn’t guarantee, for one.
anthk•53m ago
C it's highly machine dependant. Something like Scheme, CL or even Forth would be preferable.

At least with some bare metal Forth you can inspect the machine from high level to ASM levels.

codr7•34m ago
I agree Forth could make a more optimal first language to learn.

I often recommend beginners to learn all of Forth, C, Lisp & SmallTalk. Because they're all conceptually clean local maximums in the language design space.

anthk•6m ago
With Forth (Starting Forth and Thinking Forth) and Lisp (especially CLOS or Scheme with SICP) you cover them all.
codr7•36m ago
As others said, just because you know the syntax that doesn't mean you understand how to use it effectively.

C is very different from most other languages, I would say the closest one is actually Assembly.

I've been working on a book for a while now to try and share some of the ideas I've picked up over the years:

https://github.com/codr7/hacktical-c

ggerules•4h ago
I agree with you!

Having spent decades writing C and sometimes teaching C at the university level, to really understand the "why" of things in C you have to spend some time,separately, writing / studying some assembly language. In many universities teaching assembly language has fallen out of favor.

cbarrick•4h ago
One of my many probably-going-nowhere hobby projects is a modern Prolog. I think the module system especially is a place where we need innovation.

I'd like to see someone do for Prolog what Clojure did for Lisp.

brudgers•4h ago
what Clojure did for Lisp

Hickey’s goal was improving JVM programming ergonomics. It was not changing Common Lisp (or Scheme).

Sure, Clojure exposed some programmers to lisp, but lisp shops didn’t convert to Clojure. JVM shops did adopt it in part because Clojure “is just a Java library.”

tyre•3h ago
Yep. The parallel here would be taking logic programming and opening it to new users. Prolog or systems like CLIPS are super powerful and map to common problems better than other tools, but are Scary and Niche and Unknown.
pjmlp•42m ago
Which is why the Clojure community is the coolest from guest languages on the JVM, as they embrace the platform, instead of dissing the platform like the other one used to bootstrap a mobile SDK ecosystem.
zbentley•6m ago
Not entirely wrong, but … only one of Clojure and Kotlin is close enough to Java that it’s inspiring meaningful improvements in the upstream ecosystem. If the “dissing” hypothesis were true I’d expect Clojure to be the one influencing the most change, but it’s not.
ww520•2h ago
20 years ago I had the same thought. I actually started implementing the Rete algorithm. Midway through I realized, “hey, this is just relational algebra. May be I can integrate it in a relational DB engine. Use rows in tables as facts and materialized views as generated facts.” It soon spin out of scope and I lost interest. Later I did use what I learned to build a rule based event processing engine.
crustycoder•2h ago
I still have a fanfold printout somewhere of the OPS5 implementation I wrote in C, back in the 80s :-)
oh_my_goodness•4h ago
I hear this and I agree. It's obviously a serious problem.

As a side issue. There's also a different, deeper problem. Any Q&A site that's actively hostile to people who ask questions is going to become toxic and intolerable within a few years. I'm pretty sure that's true even if the hostility is reasonable and justified.

As a newsgroup user since 1986: The problem with the original Eternal September was not only a tidal wave of ignorant new users. It was also that a large fraction of the experienced user base were smug lunatics long before September finally arrived.

Sorry for the like "radical candor" here.

jamespo•4h ago
Theres actively hostile and then there's indifference to a certain class of questions. Anyway AI models don't suffer from this nowdays
oh_my_goodness•3h ago
Yes, that is a big difference. From what I've seen indifference leads to much better outcomes.

:) Agreed, the AI models have great "people skills." Every user is a genius!

melenaboija•4h ago
I wish I still had the curriculum from my logic class in computer science from 20 years ago. It was clearly structured to build a deep understanding of how Prolog works, starting from the fundamentals of tautology, then moving on to unification and backtracking implementations in Prolog and so on. The practical classes involved solving different problems ending with simulating the Enigma encryption machine.

The approach really worked and I know it did because whenever I revisit Prolog, it only takes me a few hours to get back up to speed on the fundamentals. For something as abstract as logic and Prolog I think it says a lot.

billfruit•3h ago
Sounds very interesting, which text book did you use for your course?
melenaboija•3h ago
I don't remember sorry :(
agumonkey•1h ago
would you accept telling us which university you went to ? unless you want to keep that private
sitkack•3h ago
Many of these course websites are still around and/or recycled to later courses.
neilv•2h ago
> The pre-beginners are not at Stack Overflow to look at existing solutions (which is what Stack Overflow wants you to do). They just want someone to do their homework for them.

This is/was also a thing in the Scheme (and Racket) community, where maybe half the users in the world, at any given time, just want to pass the class and then never see it again.

The funny part was that it's a fairly small world, and the forums the students were asking include the people who wrote the textbooks and often the problem sets, as well as probably knew the students' professors.

Fortunately, :) "AI" is now doing all the lazy students' homework for them. So now:

1. The AI plagiarizes from books, open source code, and forums;

2. then the student plagiarizes from the AI;

3. then the forums are left to people who are actually interested;

4. then the AI companies come and again steal whatever the interested people do;

5. and repeat.

subjectsigma•2h ago
Someone, quick, perform the mtriska summoning ritual

I have no idea if he’s read this post but his YouTube channel provides, I feel, the missing link between a “day one” Prolog tutorial and an expert-level Prolog guide. It’s exactly what the author is talking about.

http://metalevel.at

crustycoder•2h ago
I hadn't come across that, In general I'm not a great fan of programming videos (life is too short) but the website content looks interesting - thanks!
crustycoder•2h ago
Coincidentally, on Friday I pulled my dusty 1987 copies of Sterling & Shapiro and Bratko off the bookshelf for the first time in literally decades, and built myself a copy of SWI so that I could have a tinker with it for something where I think it may be a good fit.

Sure there are now some shinier toys in the Prolog box but the problems with Prolog seem to be the same now as they were 35+ years ago - it's seen as a niche CS-only tool, where to get any traction at all you have to absorb reams of terminology that's mostly unknown outside of academia, or has been forgotten post-graduation - Prolog really doesn't do itself any favours, and never has.

I think expecting academia to ever "sell" Prolog is a bust - if it hasn't happened by now, it never will. Better to directly target people earning their crust writing code, and sell the benefits to them, with real examples, not Towers of Hanoi and N-Queens. And as far as practicable, try to relate them to things that they are more likely to already know, such as SQL or Functional programming?

JadeNB•2h ago
> Coincidentally, on Friday I pulled my dusty 1987 copies of Sterling & Shapiro and Bratko off the bookshelf for the first time in literally decades, and built myself a copy of SWI so that I could have a tinker with it for something where I think it may be a good fit.

If you care for recommendations to complement those two, O'Keefe's The craft of Prolog is my favorite Prolog book.

crustycoder•43m ago
Thanks for the recommendation :-)
thesz•22m ago
https://github.com/stassa/louise

"Louise is a machine learning system that learns Prolog programs."

For example, it can infer context-free grammar from half a dozen examples, one positive and several negatives.

jrapdx3•18m ago
Back in the ancient 80s Prolog made a splash for a time. There was Turbo Prolog (Borland) that I used for a couple of years, wrote some useful programs with it. I also have "The Art of Prolog" and pull it out once in a while. My Prolog skills seem subject to rapid decay with disuse. While the appeal of declarative programming is still there, the most that can be said is Prolog's influence is evident in subsequent languages. The incorporation of pattern matching is one example that comes to mind.
chuckadams•2h ago
Teaching prolog in the context of modern type systems might be more worthwhile, since to my understanding, there's quite a bit of overlap, to where you can write arbitrary prolog in Haskell or Scala's type systems. Probably even holds for C++ and TypeScript too. But I don't think there's a technological solution for teaching a subject for which the school cares so little that it won't hire anyone who actually understands it.
klodolph•1h ago
“Arbitrary prolog in Haskell’s type system” is overselling it.

There are a lot of GHC extensions out there, so maybe some combination of extensions can bring this statement closer to reality. But, as stated, it’s pretty far away. There’s an important common thread shared by Prolog and type certain systems, which is unification, but Prolog gives you a lot of tools to control what happens when you go forward and backward:

      +---+
  >---|   |--->
      |   |
  <---|   |---<
      +---+
Prolog is, after all, Turing complete by design. I don’t know if Haskell’s type system is Turing complete with enough GHC extensions enabled, but if it is, then it’s by accident.
syrak•20m ago
You need very little to make a Prolog-like language Turing-complete (lists and recursive predicates). And so Haskell's type system only needs one (or two) extensions to be Turing-complete, `UndecidableInstances` (and maybe `FlexibleInstances` or `MultiParamTypeClasses`). It is no accident. The name "undecidable" shows that the authors of that extension were well aware that it enables Turing-completeness.
fc417fc802•8m ago
I'm not sure how useful it is in practice but even C++ templates are turing complete. https://rtraba.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/cppturing.pdf

> I don’t know if Haskell’s type system is Turing complete with enough GHC extensions enabled, but if it is, then it’s by accident.

Undecidable instances? I don't think that's an accident. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/42356242/how-can-undecid...

Also see. https://github.com/seliopou/typo

CyberDildonics•2h ago
"I think the underlying problem is that Prolog is part of a mandatory curriculum, but the professor doesn’t understand it. How do you teach something you don’t understand?"

Or the underlying problem is prolog itself. If students are constantly learning it for a class and never wanting to touch it again, maybe it's time to face facts. Some people get caught up in the pageantry of programming and forget to spend their mental energy building the software instead of doing clever stuff with a programming language.

Bjartr•15m ago
Of the things that can expand your problem solving skills as a programmer, learning a language that's extremely unlike languages you already know is extremely powerful. It gives you new ways to think about problems, even if you never touch the language again.
disambiguation•43m ago
I'll keep shilling the idea that someone should find a way to glue LLMs and prolog together to create better reasoning agents. I say this as someone who cant write a single prolog program, but i get the gist of it and afaik it hasn't been done yet.

The idea is based on the following simple logic: LLMs are bad at counting the number of "r's" in "strawberry" but good at writing code that counts letters in a string. It follows that while LLMs are also bad at solving reasoning problems, maybe they're good at writing the prolog code (or driving a hypothetical prolog engine) that solves those types of problems instead.

Maybe one day ill stop being lazy and do it myself, but until then I'm putting the idea out there - to OP's request, that's one reason to learn prolog.

dmd•18m ago
http://www.incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html
johnecheck•15m ago
This idea feels obvious enough that people must be trying it. It's probably just hard to train such a model that performs as you'd want it to.
conception•7m ago
Would be pretty easy to write an mcp that interfaces with prolog apps. Probably an hour or two of vibe coding. ;)