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What algorithm did Windows XP use to choose your initial user picture?

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20260909-00/?p=112683
147•soheilpro•3h ago•65 comments

Show HN: The same nine streaming subscriptions cost $702/year more than in 2021

https://honestlyranked.com/guides/streaming-price-increases/
174•honestlyranked•2h ago•163 comments

Hitachi launches CO2 heat pump water heaters with solar-friendly tariff controls

https://www.pv-magazine.com/2026/09/07/hitachi-launches-co2-heat-pump-water-heaters-with-solar-fr...
26•thelastgallon•21h ago•17 comments

Stockfish 19

https://stockfishchess.org/blog/2026/stockfish-19/
108•atiedebee•2d ago•56 comments

DeepSeek v4.1 Flash

https://twitter.com/deepseek_ai/status/2097930608790167907
542•Liwink•6h ago•293 comments

iPhone Duo

https://www.apple.com/iphone-duo/
1256•thecosmicfrog•18h ago•2201 comments

Show HN: What if the speed of light was 5 km/h?

https://rivendell.dmitrybrant.com/relativity/
429•dmitrybrant•10h ago•175 comments

Object storage is all you need

https://www.tigrisdata.com/blog/object-storage-all-need/
22•jpsaccount•1d ago•16 comments

Shopify acquires Tailwind

https://tailwindcss.com/blog/tailwind-is-joining-shopify
1066•EdwinHoksberg•23h ago•414 comments

What do Visa and Mastercard do? An intro to card networks

https://tautology.town/2026/06/01/card-networks.html
575•evakhoury•1d ago•354 comments

Thanks to Siri Recaps, your Apple Watch is always listening

https://www.techradar.com/health-fitness/smartwatches/thanks-to-siri-recaps-your-apple-watch-is-a...
52•geox•2h ago•32 comments

Larger Pacific Striped Octopus

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larger_Pacific_striped_octopus
86•olalonde•1d ago•45 comments

Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives

https://spectrum.ieee.org/are-self-driving-cars-safe
378•bookofjoe•19h ago•655 comments

PlayStation cancels Kojima's PHYSINT, Xbox steps in

https://twitter.com/hideo_kojima_en/status/2097877506401681753
52•HatchedLake721•2h ago•24 comments

Samsung Debuts zHBM Prototype, Stacking Memory Directly on AI Accelerators

https://www.thelec.net/news/articleView.html?idxno=12835
35•peter_d_sherman•3d ago•7 comments

Show HN: Art – draw one stroke, let symmetry complete it

https://mrdee.in/mandala/
25•cyb0rg0•4d ago•11 comments

No Man's Sky Cosmos

https://www.nomanssky.com/cosmos-update/
416•Limb•21h ago•415 comments

GPT-6 Astra, looped transformers, and hidden reasoning

https://magazine.sebastianraschka.com/p/gpt-6-astra-looped-transformers-and
465•ModelForge•22h ago•147 comments

Liesegang Rings

https://chillphysicsenjoyer.substack.com/p/liesegang-rings
4•surprisetalk•23h ago•0 comments

AirPods 5

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/09/apple-introduces-airpods-5-with-best-in-class-open-ear-act...
474•awad•19h ago•404 comments

iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/09/apple-debuts-iphone-18-pro-and-iphone-18-pro-max/
380•meetpateltech•19h ago•422 comments

Show HN: Persistent Jupyter kernel execution and live output streaming in VSCode

https://github.com/rnoro/tithon
6•rnoro_•23h ago•1 comments

Automattic's board forces CEO Matt Mullenweg into leave of absence

https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/09/automattics-board-forces-ceo-matt-mullenweg-into-leave-of-absence/
347•LeoPanthera•12h ago•221 comments

All grown-ups were once children, but only few of them remember it

https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/117244102901892965
221•yurivish•8h ago•162 comments

Aardman (Wallace and Gromit) Is Selling Its Original Movie Puppets

https://gizmodo.com/aardman-is-selling-its-original-movie-puppets-this-month-2000807968
64•Gaishan•3d ago•15 comments

Desert Ant Labs: local, fast models that run on device

https://desertant.com/blog/introducing-desert-ant-labs/
463•willwhitedc•1d ago•97 comments

Open Source Durable Objects for Postgres

https://solidobjects.dev/blog/introducing-solidobjects
33•cardmagic•1d ago•13 comments

Show HN: Compute polynomials twice as fast

https://thomasahle.com/fast-polynomials/
102•thomasahle•1d ago•34 comments

Qwen 3.8 follows GPT-5.5 Pro reasoning prefills

https://gist.github.com/wsxiaoys/e0286dc6bb624ff5fdf49e7f4c528ba3
226•wsxiaoys•19h ago•87 comments

Training a 3.8B LLM to 0.384 CORE for $998

https://hugovergnes.github.io/little-lm-3-8b/
98•Anon84•10h ago•14 comments
Open in hackernews

Comparing Parallel Functional Array Languages: Programming and Performance

https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.08906
91•vok•1y ago

Comments

yubblegum•1y ago
Chapel got a mention in the 'Related Work' section. I looked at it a few years ago and found it compelling (but I don't do HPC so it was just window watching). What's the HN feedback on Chapel?

https://chapel-lang.org/

marai2•1y ago
If you scroll down on the Chapel-lang website, there seems to be a lot of activity happening with this language. There is even going to be a ChapelCon 2025.

https://chapel-lang.org/blog/posts/chapelcon25-announcement/

throwaway17_17•1y ago
Chapel and Lustre (a parallel, distributed file system) from Cray were funded by DARPA’s High Productivity Computing Systems program. This work, along with Fortress, from Sun, were developed explicitly to enable and ‘simplify’ the programming of distributed “supercomputers”. The work and artifacts, along with the published documentation and research is of particularly high quality.

Even if you aren’t involved in HPC I’d say the concepts transfer or provide a great basis for parallel and distributed idioms and methodologies that can be adapted to existing languages or used in development of new languages.

TL;DR - Chapel is cool and if you are interested in the general subject matter (despite a different focus) Fortress, which is discontinued, should also be checked out.

bradcray•1y ago
@yubblegum: I'm unfairly biased towards Chapel (positively), so won't try to characterize HN's opinion on it. But I did want to note that while Chapel's original and main reason for being is HPC, now that everyone lives in a parallel-computing world, users also benefits from using Chapel in desktop environments where they want to do multicore and/or GPU programming. One such example is covered in this interview with an atmospheric science researcher for whom it has replaced Python as his go-to desktop language: https://chapel-lang.org/blog/posts/7qs-dias/
yubblegum•1y ago
Thank you Brad! I was in fact wondering about GPU use myself. Does it work with Apple's M# GPUs?

Btw, I was looking at the docs for GPU [1] and unsolicited feedback from a potential user is that the setup process needs to become less painful. For example, yesterday installed it via brew but then hit the setup page for GPU and noted I now needed to build from source.

(Back in the day, one reason some of Sun's Java efforts to extend Java's fieddom faltered was because of the friction of setup for (iirc) things like Applets, etc. I think Chapel deserves a far wider audiance.)

[1]: https://chapel-lang.org/docs/technotes/gpu.html#setup (for others - you obviously know the link /g)

p.s. just saw your comment from last year - dropping it here for others: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39032481

bradcray•1y ago
@yubblegum: I'm afraid we don't have an update on support for Apple GPUs since last year's comment. While it comes up from time-to-time, nobody has opened an issue for it yet (please feel encouraged to!), and it isn't something we've had the chance to prioritize, where a lot of our recent work has focused on improving tooling support and addressing user requests.

I'll take your feedback about simplifying GPU-based installs back to our team, and have noted it on this thematically related issue: https://github.com/chapel-lang/chapel/issues/25187#issuecomm...

munchler•1y ago
Are these languages pure in the functional sense? E.g. Do they allow/encourage mutation? My understanding is that APL permits mutable state and side effects, but maybe they are rarely used in practice? If you're modifying the contents of an array in-place, I don't think it's reasonable to consider that functional.
zfnmxt•1y ago
Futhark, SaC, and Accelerate have purely functional semantics. Futhark has something called "in-place updates" that operationally mutate the given array, but semantically they work as if a new array is created (and are statically guaranteed to work this way by the type system).
RodgerTheGreat•1y ago
APL arrays are values in the same sense as value types in any functional language. You don't explicitly modify arrays in-place; if they happen to have a refcount of 1 operations may happen in-place as an optimization, but not in a manner which observably alters program behavior.
grg0•1y ago
Accelerate is a Haskell library/eDSL.
axman6•1y ago
I wasn’t expecting to personally know two of the authors, but having Accelerate included makes sense.
geocar•1y ago
teleforce•1y ago
Notice that all the all the languages mentioned depends on the external BLAS library for example OpenBLAS for performance.

D language have excellent support functional and array features with parallel support. On top that not known to others it has high performance native BLAS kind of library with ergonomic and intuitiveness similar to python [1].

[1] Numeric age for D: Mir GLAS is faster than OpenBLAS and Eigen (2016):

http://blog.mir.dlang.io/glas/benchmark/openblas/2016/09/23/...

zfnmxt•1y ago
> Notice that all the all the languages mentioned depends on the external BLAS library for example OpenBLAS for performance.

That's incorrect. Futhark doesn't even have linear algebra primitives---everything has to be done in terms of map/reduce/etc: https://github.com/diku-dk/linalg/blob/master/lib/github.com...

tomsmeding•1y ago
The same holds for Accelerate, and I'm fairly sure also SaC and APL. DaCe even gets a special mention in the paper in section 10.5 stating that they specifically _do_ use BLAS bindings.
joe_the_user•1y ago
"Notice that all the all the languages mentioned depends on the external BLAS library". I didn't notice this 'cause I don't think it's true. For example, it highly implausible that APL[1] would depend on BLAS[2] considering APL predates BLAS by 5-10 years ("developed in the sixties" versus "between 1971 and 1973"). I don't think Futhark uses BLAS either but in modern stupidity, this currently two hour old parent has taken over Google results so it's hard to find references.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APL_(programming_language)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Linear_Algebra_Subprogra...

DrNosferatu•1y ago
Matlab supposedly is “portable APL”.
DrNosferatu•1y ago
the man who invented MATLAB, Cleve Moler said: [I’ve] always seen MATLAB as “portable APL”. [1]

…why the downvoting?

[1] - https://computinged.wordpress.com/2012/06/14/matlab-and-apl-...

beagle3•1y ago
I didn't downvote, but ... as someone who used both, this statement seems nonsensical.

APL is mathematical notation that is also executable. It is all about putting a mathematical algorithm in a succinct, terse way.

MATLAB is a clunky Fortran-like language that does simple 2D matrix stuff reasonably terse (though not remotely as terse as APL), and does everything else horribly awkwardly and verbosely.

Modern MATLAB might be comparable to 1960s APL, but original MATLAB was most certainly not, and even modern MATLAB isn't comparable to modern APL (and its successors such as BQN and K)

devlovstad•1y ago
I took a course on massively parallel programming taught by one of the authors of this paper that extensively used Futhark and CUDA. While I have not used any of these languages since, I have used JAX[1] quite a lot, where the learnings from this course have been quite helpful. Many people will end up writing code for GPUs through different levels of abstraction, but those who are able to reason about the semantics through functional primitives might have an easier time understanding what's happening under the hood.
vanderZwan•1y ago
I think the intended footnote was accidentally left out. Were you talking about this Python library?

https://docs.jax.dev/en/latest/index.html

tough•1y ago
There's a JAX for AI/LM too

https://github.com/jax-ml/jax

but yeah no idea which the OP meant

zfnmxt•1y ago
> I took a course on massively parallel programming taught by one of the authors of this paper that extensively used Futhark and CUDA.

PMPH? :)

> My understanding is that APL permits mutable state and side effects ... If you're modifying the contents of an array in-place, I don't think it's reasonable to consider that functional.

      a←'hello'
      a[1]←'c'
This does _not_ modify the array in-place. It's actually the same as:

     a←'hello'
     a←'c'@1⊢a
which is more obviously functional. It is easy to convince yourself of this:

      a←'hello'
      b←a
      b[1]←'j'
      a,b
returns 'hellojello' and not 'jellojello'.