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OpenCiv3: Open-source, cross-platform reimagining of Civilization III

https://openciv3.org/
395•klaussilveira•5h ago•86 comments

The Waymo World Model

https://waymo.com/blog/2026/02/the-waymo-world-model-a-new-frontier-for-autonomous-driving-simula...
751•xnx•10h ago•460 comments

Monty: A minimal, secure Python interpreter written in Rust for use by AI

https://github.com/pydantic/monty
122•dmpetrov•5h ago•50 comments

Show HN: Look Ma, No Linux: Shell, App Installer, Vi, Cc on ESP32-S3 / BreezyBox

https://github.com/valdanylchuk/breezydemo
131•isitcontent•5h ago•14 comments

Dark Alley Mathematics

https://blog.szczepan.org/blog/three-points/
29•quibono•4d ago•2 comments

Show HN: I spent 4 years building a UI design tool with only the features I use

https://vecti.com
235•vecti•7h ago•113 comments

A century of hair samples proves leaded gas ban worked

https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/02/a-century-of-hair-samples-proves-leaded-gas-ban-worked/
57•jnord•3d ago•3 comments

Microsoft open-sources LiteBox, a security-focused library OS

https://github.com/microsoft/litebox
302•aktau•11h ago•152 comments

Sheldon Brown's Bicycle Technical Info

https://www.sheldonbrown.com/
304•ostacke•11h ago•82 comments

Show HN: If you lose your memory, how to regain access to your computer?

https://eljojo.github.io/rememory/
161•eljojo•8h ago•122 comments

Hackers (1995) Animated Experience

https://hackers-1995.vercel.app/
379•todsacerdoti•13h ago•215 comments

Show HN: R3forth, a ColorForth-inspired language with a tiny VM

https://github.com/phreda4/r3
44•phreda4•4h ago•7 comments

An Update on Heroku

https://www.heroku.com/blog/an-update-on-heroku/
307•lstoll•11h ago•230 comments

I spent 5 years in DevOps – Solutions engineering gave me what I was missing

https://infisical.com/blog/devops-to-solutions-engineering
101•vmatsiiako•10h ago•34 comments

How to effectively write quality code with AI

https://heidenstedt.org/posts/2026/how-to-effectively-write-quality-code-with-ai/
171•i5heu•8h ago•127 comments

Learning from context is harder than we thought

https://hy.tencent.com/research/100025?langVersion=en
139•limoce•3d ago•76 comments

Understanding Neural Network, Visually

https://visualrambling.space/neural-network/
224•surprisetalk•3d ago•30 comments

I now assume that all ads on Apple news are scams

https://kirkville.com/i-now-assume-that-all-ads-on-apple-news-are-scams/
956•cdrnsf•14h ago•413 comments

FORTH? Really!?

https://rescrv.net/w/2026/02/06/associative
36•rescrv•13h ago•17 comments

Introducing the Developer Knowledge API and MCP Server

https://developers.googleblog.com/introducing-the-developer-knowledge-api-and-mcp-server/
8•gfortaine•2h ago•0 comments

PC Floppy Copy Protection: Vault Prolok

https://martypc.blogspot.com/2024/09/pc-floppy-copy-protection-vault-prolok.html
7•kmm•4d ago•0 comments

Claude Composer

https://www.josh.ing/blog/claude-composer
98•coloneltcb•2d ago•68 comments

Evaluating and mitigating the growing risk of LLM-discovered 0-days

https://red.anthropic.com/2026/zero-days/
33•lebovic•1d ago•11 comments

I'm going to cure my girlfriend's brain tumor

https://andrewjrod.substack.com/p/im-going-to-cure-my-girlfriends-brain
31•ray__•1h ago•6 comments

Show HN: Smooth CLI – Token-efficient browser for AI agents

https://docs.smooth.sh/cli/overview
76•antves•1d ago•56 comments

The Oklahoma Architect Who Turned Kitsch into Art

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2026-01-31/oklahoma-architect-bruce-goff-s-wild-home-desi...
17•MarlonPro•3d ago•2 comments

Show HN: Slack CLI for Agents

https://github.com/stablyai/agent-slack
37•nwparker•1d ago•8 comments

Evolution of car door handles over the decades

https://newatlas.com/automotive/evolution-car-door-handle/
38•andsoitis•3d ago•61 comments

How virtual textures work

https://www.shlom.dev/articles/how-virtual-textures-really-work/
23•betamark•12h ago•22 comments

The Beauty of Slag

https://mag.uchicago.edu/science-medicine/beauty-slag
28•sohkamyung•3d ago•3 comments
Open in hackernews

Pluto is a unique dialect of Lua with a focus on general-purpose programming

https://github.com/PlutoLang/Pluto
77•90s_dev•7mo ago

Comments

90s_dev•7mo ago
Basically a more convenient/intuitive Lua for JS/C/Java/C++ users, plus optional static typing. May in fact use this instead of Lua.
Imustaskforhelp•7mo ago
Yea. I am definitely trying this out too. It really has some new features changes that I wished lua had.
JdeBP•7mo ago
There's almost nothing in there that's like C or C++. But there's a definite influence of .NET and C♯ with things like null-coalescing, null-conditionals, and interpolated strings.
wavemode•7mo ago
Curious how this compares with Luau: https://luau.org
Rochus•7mo ago
Or Luon: https://github.com/rochus-keller/Luon
msephton•7mo ago
Lua = OG

Luau = Performance

Pluto = Features

Luon = statically typed

tzury•7mo ago
Well, this is a very poor design, one which makes me think what is the purpose of this project in the first place?

    for i = 1, 10 do -- Loop 1.
        for ii = 1, 5 do -- Loop 2.
            break 1 -- This will break from Loop 2.
            break 2 -- This will break from Loop 1.
        end
    end
https://pluto-lang.org/docs/New%20Features/Break%20Statement
sweetgiorni•7mo ago
That's... interesting.
tzot•7mo ago
If the numeric argument to break is what you find interesting, then this is exactly the same construct as the shell's break argument:

https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/V...

ModernMech•7mo ago

  "Pluto aspires to be a version of Lua with a larger feature-set, that is all. Pluto is not a Lua-killer, an attempted successor, or any of that. Many people (rightly so) love Lua precisely because of the design philosophy. And fundamentally, Pluto is a major deviation from Lua's design philosophy. Some may prefer this, some may not."
chirsz•7mo ago
I guess it is inspired by De Bruijn index[1].

[^1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Bruijn_index

philsnow•7mo ago
What's poor about it, the numbers in the example? Think of them as inner/outer instead of "1" and "2". Without this kind of break statement, what do you do when you want to exit the outer loop, something like this probably:

  local stop = false
  for i = 1, 10 do         -- outer loop
    if stop then break end
    for j = 1, 5 do        -- inner loop
      break                -- to break from inner loop
      stop = true; break   -- to break from outer loop
    end
  end
So this new feature fits with the general theme of pluto being a very-sugared lua.
aa-jv•7mo ago
This is just poor language design.

The reason one might find this cumbersome or problematic, is in the case of very large numbers of lines of code - sure, your example is visible and somewhat readable (arguable) in its current form - but tell me you won't have issues when the loop is 80 or 100 lines of code, and you need to add another inner loop as part of the development process.

Are you now going to go through and be sure all your breaks are numbered properly? Are you really, though?

Better, imho, would have been to introduce labels and "break <label>", but even that is going to cause more headaches than its worth.

Ultimately, one shouldn't write such horrid code anyway.

philsnow•7mo ago
Ah, well said on all points and i couldn't agree more.
gitaarik•7mo ago
Seems logical to me. 1 = break the current level, 2 = break 1 level up, 3 = break 2 levels up, etc.

If you would do it the other way around, and then if you would add another for loop around the others, the breaks will break. You wouldn't expect that if you're modifying this code without looking at the current breaks or knowing about the break behavior.

If you however move the break statements inside a new for loop, at the most inner level, it would seem obvious that you have to update the break numbers.

nextaccountic•7mo ago
Adding a label to each loop and breaking by label (like in Rust) feels better and more resistant to code changes
lifthrasiir•7mo ago
I don't particularly dislike that design, but Lua already supports a goto target label `::label::` so I think the following syntax would work better:

    ::outer:: for i = 1, 10 do
        ::inner:: for ii = 1, 5 do
            break inner
            break outer
        end
    end
raincole•7mo ago
That's a Lua dialect so I don't know what you expect ;)
quietbritishjim•7mo ago
I often wished for a multi-level break statement when I started programming. But it turns out that, most of the time, you're best served by moving that whole chunk into its own function and using "return" instead of "break outer". That amount of control flow complexity usually justifies moving into a separate function anyway.
Rochus•7mo ago
Interesting, apparently the source also includes a (modified) version of the PUC Lua VM. Why don't they just generate bytecode for the existing VM and leave it as is (unless the modified version somehow would significantly increase performance)? What changes were necessary to the original VM to implement the language?
90s_dev•7mo ago
Some features like break N and default function args seem to be incompatible with the vanilla lua vm.
Rochus•7mo ago
I think that would be achievable with plain PUC Lua bytecode; it's actually just a jump. The same for default function arguments; the VM doesn't actually care how many arguments the caller pushes on stack, and providing default values is easy to implement for the caller.
yannis•7mo ago
Well written and well documented. I will be trying it out. One drawback that I see is the use of packages from LuaRocks might be an issue and one does not really want to cope with compilation issues. But Lua is a beautiful language in any form.
matusnovak•7mo ago
Is it possible to use Pluto alongside with a binding library such as Sol2[0]? I don't mind not being able to set type hints in the bindings to use in some IDE, I can create stubs for it manually.

[0]: https://github.com/ThePhD/sol2

WillAdams•7mo ago
Would general-purpose programming include making a Graphical User Interface?

A simple and small language with GUI bindings and a graphical tool for laying out a design in a flexible manner with a responsive result is something a lot of folks would find useful.

nathan_compton•7mo ago
This appears to be a pile of syntactic sugar on top of Lua, which is an idea which would have appealed to me a lot as a younger developer. But the older I get the more I realize that its almost never actually syntax or brevity that gets in the way in a software project and that this sort of thing often introduces a lot of cognitive overhead. It isn't that these extra doodads are hard to wrap your head around, but the fact that we have two very similar languages (Pluto, Lua) that we are interactive with on a regular basis (because Pluto works within the Lua ecosystem) and now we have to think about that a lot.

I think a lot of programmers when they first learn Lisp go crazy with macros, adding all sorts of flimflam to their programs because they can, but then eventually you realize that just makes life harder, or at least marginally more complicated, and you gradually give it up. Feels like a similar calculation could apply here.

ryandvm•7mo ago
Absolutely agree. In my experience, languages that have multiple forms of syntax for doing the same thing are just laborious to read.

Kotlin has some great ideas, but it's kind of frustrating to have half my code yellow-highlighted because the IDE has detected that there's a short-hand version of everything.

Lerc•7mo ago
I feel like good syntactic sugar should reduce cognitive load.

for example in JavaScript

    let fish = 5
    let cheese = 27
    let nop = 0x4e71
being able to do

    result = {fish,cheese,nop}
Is 'only' syntatic sugar but significantly reduces the cognitive load over

    result = {fish:fish,cheese:cheese,nope:nop}
looking at the latter it is harder to take in the options at a glance, when reviewing you have to check if the names match. If they don't match was it intentional or accidental. Whereas if you encountered

    result = {fish,cheese,nope:nop} 
You are left with no doubt that the nope is not a typo but a explicit name specifier.
nathan_compton•7mo ago
I don't know, from my point of view having both syntaxes is clearly more to think about, and all you get from the shorter one is typing a few fewer keystrokes.

Philosophically, I feel a little ambivalent about the briefer syntax because it mixes two sorts of denotations. Variables refer to scoped objects for which, from the point of view of what the program means, vanish (in compiled languages they literally can totally vanish - variable references are just resolved into the appropriate reference to memory). The keys of a hash table are totally different sorts of things and persist at runtime. I'd prefer that these two very distinct conceptual spaces remain separate, even if in a certain sense they overlap in a specific case.

Doesn't really matter, though.

Lerc•7mo ago
>I don't know, from my point of view having both syntaxes is clearly more to think about

That's storage, not load. You need you know more, but you don't have to think about as much at any one time.

BrainFuck has extremely simple operations. You don't have to think about very many different things at all, but you need to think about them a lot.

>and all you get from the shorter one is typing a few fewer keystrokes.

I'm not particularly concerned about keystrokes (unless I'm golfing). I'm happy to increase the size of the content to reduce how much I think about it. Reducing the number of elements I have to look at to grasp the same concept is distinct from keystrokes.

Sometimes

   ArbitraryLongVariableName = 43
is better than

   a = 43
one the other hand I'd take

   ArbitraryLongVariableName += 1 
over

   ArbitraryLongVariableName = ArbitrarilyLongVariableName + 1
hmmokidk•7mo ago
Low key this is so interesting because in Elixir there was this specific example with a library that extended the lang to do this.

The concise syntax was tossed out, but I have a soft spot for it.

spacechild1•7mo ago
Lot's of good stuff in there. My personal highlights:

1. classes

2. named parameters with default values

3. string interpolation

I love Lua, but it's a bit sad that everyone ends up hacking together their own OOP system (including myself). I would really prefer a standardized solution.

Named parameters are such an underrated feature IMO. It makes function calls so much easier to read, in particular if the arguments all have the same type. I know, we can "fake" named arguments by passing a single table argument, but this has some overhead and default values are still rather awkward to implement. The one big downside of named parameters is that the parameter names are now part of the public API.

jay_kyburz•7mo ago
In my next lua project I'm going to try and avoid oop and stick with functions and data.

I don't know why, but 100 times a day I have to go back and replace a dot with a colon and it drives me nuts.

actinium226•7mo ago
I've heard that Lua can be configured to avoid dynamic memory allocation, potentially allowing it to be used in real-time safety critical contexts. I'm not sure if anyone has used it that way, but I wonder if Pluto retains this?
HexDecOctBin•7mo ago
More specifically, Lua allows you to inject your own memory allocator function, so one can get Lua to use a real-time allocator like TLSF operating out of a fixed memory block in such contexts.
TeddyDD•7mo ago
I like the idea of bundling Lua with bunch of batteries but the syntactic changes go too far. They seem to be lousily designed attempt at turning Lua into Typescript.

For example coalescing operator. You can do the same in standard Lua with or. Pipe operator might seem like cool idea, but the language needs to be designed around it (Elixir) or you need multiple variants (threading macros in Lisps).

Lerc•7mo ago
I'm not a Lua user but is this a falsiness issue?

local function report(result) print(result ?? "The value was nil.") end

report(filesize("/path/to/file/of/length/zero"))

If filesize returns nil for file-not-found and the length otherwise. Wouldn't coalescing work and or would not be able to identify existing but empty files.

90s_dev•7mo ago
As a TypeScript fan, I was really happy to read pretty much every one of these changes. This is a language I wouldn't personally use unless it gains massive traction, but one that I hope it gains massive traction so that I can justify spending the time memorizing and learning all these new language additions.

It's particularly exciting that they constantly rebase upstream Lua, and plan to update it to be compatible with Lua 5.5. Especially because Lua 5.5 finally has the ability to turn off globals!

shayway•7mo ago
Yeah, there are a lot of odd inclusions like that; things that overlap or replace standard lua flow for no reason (see ternary expressions[0]). I would love an expanded lua, with built-in classes and a more robust standard library, but this feels more like a rewrite into a new langauge with two vastly different design philosophies layered awkwardly on top of each other. Which it is I guess.

I don't mean to discount the work that has gone into it, and there are a lot of really neat features here. But honestly I think it would be stronger as a standalone thing, without all the lua baggage, given how far idiomatic pluto diverges from idiomatic lua.

[0]https://pluto-lang.org/docs/New%20Features/Ternary%20Express...

yungporko•7mo ago
i was expecting something dumb if i'm honest but it looks really nice, i would probably use this. it seems like the perfect extension of the "code vomit" speed of writing lua and moves it further in that direction imo.

the thing i like lua for is easily getting into that "flow state" of just writing code without having to think about "how should i approach this" but sometimes the lack of things which pluto addresses forces a level of verbosity that snaps me out of it. i often find myself hitting a mental roadblock where i think "like fuck am i gonna write that much code to do X, i'll just go work on a more fun part of the program and come back later".