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SectorC: A C Compiler in 512 bytes

https://xorvoid.com/sectorc.html
126•valyala•4h ago•22 comments

Tiny C Compiler

https://bellard.org/tcc/
11•guerrilla•47m ago•2 comments

The F Word

http://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2026/02/friction.html
57•zdw•3d ago•21 comments

Brookhaven Lab's RHIC concludes 25-year run with final collisions

https://www.hpcwire.com/off-the-wire/brookhaven-labs-rhic-concludes-25-year-run-with-final-collis...
29•gnufx•3h ago•24 comments

FDA Intends to Take Action Against Non-FDA-Approved GLP-1 Drugs

https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-intends-take-action-against-non-fda-appro...
3•randycupertino•8m ago•1 comments

Speed up responses with fast mode

https://code.claude.com/docs/en/fast-mode
65•surprisetalk•4h ago•79 comments

Software factories and the agentic moment

https://factory.strongdm.ai/
104•mellosouls•7h ago•199 comments

Hoot: Scheme on WebAssembly

https://www.spritely.institute/hoot/
147•AlexeyBrin•10h ago•26 comments

Stories from 25 Years of Software Development

https://susam.net/twenty-five-years-of-computing.html
107•vinhnx•7h ago•14 comments

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

https://openciv3.org/
856•klaussilveira•1d ago•263 comments

You Are Here

https://brooker.co.za/blog/2026/02/07/you-are-here.html
5•mltvc•44m ago•1 comments

Italy Railways Sabotaged

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/czr4rx04xjpo
23•vedantnair•50m ago•14 comments

The Waymo World Model

https://waymo.com/blog/2026/02/the-waymo-world-model-a-new-frontier-for-autonomous-driving-simula...
1101•xnx•1d ago•619 comments

First Proof

https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.05192
71•samasblack•7h ago•51 comments

I write games in C (yes, C)

https://jonathanwhiting.com/writing/blog/games_in_c/
147•valyala•4h ago•122 comments

Vocal Guide – belt sing without killing yourself

https://jesperordrup.github.io/vocal-guide/
246•jesperordrup•14h ago•82 comments

Al Lowe on model trains, funny deaths and working with Disney

https://spillhistorie.no/2026/02/06/interview-with-sierra-veteran-al-lowe/
67•thelok•6h ago•12 comments

Show HN: A luma dependent chroma compression algorithm (image compression)

https://www.bitsnbites.eu/a-spatial-domain-variable-block-size-luma-dependent-chroma-compression-...
12•mbitsnbites•3d ago•0 comments

Start all of your commands with a comma (2009)

https://rhodesmill.org/brandon/2009/commands-with-comma/
524•theblazehen•3d ago•195 comments

Show HN: I saw this cool navigation reveal, so I made a simple HTML+CSS version

https://github.com/Momciloo/fun-with-clip-path
34•momciloo•4h ago•5 comments

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback

https://rlhfbook.com/
95•onurkanbkrc•9h ago•5 comments

Selection Rather Than Prediction

https://voratiq.com/blog/selection-rather-than-prediction/
15•languid-photic•3d ago•5 comments

72M Points of Interest

https://tech.marksblogg.com/overture-places-pois.html
39•marklit•5d ago•6 comments

The AI boom is causing shortages everywhere else

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/02/07/ai-spending-economy-shortages/
198•1vuio0pswjnm7•11h ago•289 comments

A Fresh Look at IBM 3270 Information Display System

https://www.rs-online.com/designspark/a-fresh-look-at-ibm-3270-information-display-system
51•rbanffy•4d ago•11 comments

France's homegrown open source online office suite

https://github.com/suitenumerique
627•nar001•8h ago•277 comments

Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

https://blog.alaindichiappari.dev/p/software-engineering-is-back
263•alainrk•9h ago•437 comments

Unseen Footage of Atari Battlezone Arcade Cabinet Production

https://arcadeblogger.com/2026/02/02/unseen-footage-of-atari-battlezone-cabinet-production/
126•videotopia•4d ago•40 comments

Where did all the starships go?

https://www.datawrapper.de/blog/science-fiction-decline
103•speckx•4d ago•129 comments

Show HN: Kappal – CLI to Run Docker Compose YML on Kubernetes for Local Dev

https://github.com/sandys/kappal
37•sandGorgon•2d ago•17 comments
Open in hackernews

Lost Chapter of Automate the Boring Stuff: Audio, Video, and Webcams in Python

https://inventwithpython.com/blog/lost-av-chapter.html
217•AlSweigart•7mo ago

Comments

alabhyajindal•7mo ago
I learned Python from your Udemy course of the same name. Congrats on the new edition of the book!
AlSweigart•6mo ago
I know I've been saying this for years, but I seriously will get around to updating the videos in the Udemy course this year.
bix6•6mo ago
One of my favorite programming books of all times. Cheers Al!
geophph•6mo ago
And a transit nerd supporter!
AlSweigart•6mo ago
Hello, this is Al. Ha ha, I'm always surprised when people spot my name in supporter credits. Here's a (very out of date) web page of other folks I support: https://alsweigart.com/patreon.html
cortical_iv•6mo ago
I'm curious why you didn't end up including this material?
globalnode•6mo ago
When I saw yt-dlp I thought "risky", wasn't there was a lot of complaining from YT back in the day about this programs predecessor?
AlSweigart•6mo ago
Page count. Automate the Boring Stuff with Python is supposed to be a beginner book for people with no coding experience, but it's almost 600 pages. The biggest hurdle to coding isn't being "smart" enough, but rather getting over the intimidation factor.

The editor recommended we cut this chapter. It made me realize that even though I work with multimedia stuff all the time, this isn't really something most office workers do (at least, not at the scale where you'd want to write Python scripts).

A lot of teaching people to code is hiding details so you don't fire hose them with information they don't need yet. So many software nerds don't get this, and they're excited about all these cool advanced techniques without realizing that beginners don't need to know about recursion or operator overloading. (I completely skip OOP in the book.)

cortical_iv•6mo ago
Makes sense: OpenCV is amazing, but has many rabbit holes and pitfalls. Thanks for posting the draft for us to peruse!
analog31•6mo ago
This is fantastic. I've gotten so much out of cv2 and Python, and just a perusal of the page suggests that there's lots more to learn.
xbmcuser•6mo ago
I was never able to get my head around programing despite my interest over the years. But LLM and python scripts in the last 3-4 years have changed my life.
ymck•6mo ago
What thing have you found most interesting or impactful for you?
Simon_O_Rourke•6mo ago
Love it, that's where I direct all our new hires who want to pick up the basics of Python. I'll be reading this chapter myself this weekend too.
fireattack•6mo ago
> playsound

This library is unfortunately effectively abandoned -- it hasn’t received any updates in over four years, and its latest version doesn’t work at all: https://github.com/TaylorSMarks/playsound/issues/101

(A workaround exists: downgrading to version 1.2.2, but that comes with its own issues.)

The last time I experimented with audio in Python, I was surprised by how lacking its multimedia libraries are.

For example, when I needed to read audio files as data, I tried `SoundFile`, `librosa` (a wrapper around `SoundFile` or `audioread`), and `pydub`, and none of them was particularly satisfying or has seen much active development lately.

If you need to read various formats, pydub is probably your best bet (it does this by invoking ffmpeg under the hood). I was hoping for a more "native" solution, but oh well. Unfortunately, `pydub` is also unmaintained and has some serious performance issues (for example: https://github.com/jiaaro/pydub/issues/518 )

AlSweigart•6mo ago
Oh, thanks for pointing this out. This was an early unpublished draft. I later changed to `playsound3` which is a modern fork of `playsound`. I've updated the web page.
frainfreeze•6mo ago
I guess it depends on the context? For example panda3d supports openAL, FMOD and Miles.
acheong08•6mo ago
Huh I recognize that library. Ran into the same issues last year and made a fork. https://github.com/acheong08/playsound https://pypi.org/project/playsound2/
amelius•6mo ago
> Playing a video file from your Python program is complicated.

You can use PySide6. Here is an example:

    import sys
    from PySide6.QtWidgets import QApplication, QWidget, QVBoxLayout
    from PySide6.QtMultimedia import QMediaPlayer, QAudioOutput
    from PySide6.QtMultimediaWidgets import QVideoWidget
    from PySide6.QtCore import QUrl


    class VideoPlayer(QWidget):
        def __init__(self):
            super().__init__()
            self.setWindowTitle("Video Player - video.mp4")
            self.resize(800, 600)

            # Layout
            layout = QVBoxLayout()
            self.setLayout(layout)

            # Video widget
            self.video_widget = QVideoWidget()
            layout.addWidget(self.video_widget)

            # Media player
            self.media_player = QMediaPlayer(self)
            self.audio_output = QAudioOutput(self)
            self.media_player.setAudioOutput(self.audio_output)
            self.media_player.setVideoOutput(self.video_widget)

            # Load video file
            self.media_player.setSource(QUrl.fromLocalFile("video.mp4"))

            self.media_player.play()


    if __name__ == "__main__":
        app = QApplication(sys.argv)
        player = VideoPlayer()
        player.show()
        sys.exit(app.exec())
bgwalter•6mo ago
This author is an apologist for the slander of Tim Peters:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Python/comments/1f00qdo/no_vote_of_...

He cites Glyph Lefkowitz to support him, who now gives advice on lunch vs. dinner networking strategies at PyCons. Which should be taken seriously: Being in the right circles and talking is all that matters in the Python ecosystem.

sfilmeyer•6mo ago
I'm not in near deep enough to have any ideas what you're talking about, and the link didn't really help. Can you explain?

Who is Tim Peters? How were they slandered? What did the author do that you disliked? Who is Glyph Lefkowitz? Why is citing Glyph Lefkowitz an indictment of the author?

worthless-trash•6mo ago
Let the post stand on its own. I'm fucking sick and tired of people dragging unrelated politics into discussions.
ajot•6mo ago
As others here have already said, thank you for your book, and for having it for free on your website. After years of thinking about leraning to program, I finally started with you book a couple of years ago. It is so much fun, and it's been super helpful on my day to day job.
jmlim00•6mo ago
Back in school, after taking an intro to programming language course as an elective, I've been struggling to understand the missing link between knowing a programming language and writing a program. This book bridged that gap, and everything finally clicked. I'll definitely be checking out the new content as well. Thanks for changing my life!