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

https://spillhistorie.no/2026/02/06/interview-with-sierra-veteran-al-lowe/
39•thelok•2h ago•3 comments

Hoot: Scheme on WebAssembly

https://www.spritely.institute/hoot/
101•AlexeyBrin•6h ago•18 comments

First Proof

https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.05192
51•samasblack•3h ago•38 comments

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

https://openciv3.org/
789•klaussilveira•20h ago•243 comments

Stories from 25 Years of Software Development

https://susam.net/twenty-five-years-of-computing.html
39•vinhnx•3h ago•5 comments

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback

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

The Waymo World Model

https://waymo.com/blog/2026/02/the-waymo-world-model-a-new-frontier-for-autonomous-driving-simula...
1040•xnx•1d ago•587 comments

Start all of your commands with a comma (2009)

https://rhodesmill.org/brandon/2009/commands-with-comma/
462•theblazehen•2d ago•165 comments

France's homegrown open source online office suite

https://github.com/suitenumerique
509•nar001•4h ago•235 comments

Vocal Guide – belt sing without killing yourself

https://jesperordrup.github.io/vocal-guide/
184•jesperordrup•10h ago•65 comments

The AI boom is causing shortages everywhere else

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/02/07/ai-spending-economy-shortages/
63•1vuio0pswjnm7•7h ago•59 comments

Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

https://blog.alaindichiappari.dev/p/software-engineering-is-back
187•alainrk•5h ago•280 comments

Software factories and the agentic moment

https://factory.strongdm.ai/
50•mellosouls•3h ago•51 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
27•rbanffy•4d ago•5 comments

What Is Stoicism?

https://stoacentral.com/guides/what-is-stoicism
17•0xmattf•2h ago•7 comments

72M Points of Interest

https://tech.marksblogg.com/overture-places-pois.html
19•marklit•5d ago•0 comments

Unseen Footage of Atari Battlezone Arcade Cabinet Production

https://arcadeblogger.com/2026/02/02/unseen-footage-of-atari-battlezone-cabinet-production/
108•videotopia•4d ago•27 comments

Where did all the starships go?

https://www.datawrapper.de/blog/science-fiction-decline
58•speckx•4d ago•62 comments

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

https://github.com/valdanylchuk/breezydemo
268•isitcontent•20h ago•34 comments

Learning from context is harder than we thought

https://hy.tencent.com/research/100025?langVersion=en
197•limoce•4d ago•107 comments

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

https://github.com/pydantic/monty
281•dmpetrov•21h ago•150 comments

British drivers over 70 to face eye tests every three years

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c205nxy0p31o
169•bookofjoe•2h ago•152 comments

Making geo joins faster with H3 indexes

https://floedb.ai/blog/how-we-made-geo-joins-400-faster-with-h3-indexes
152•matheusalmeida•2d ago•47 comments

Hackers (1995) Animated Experience

https://hackers-1995.vercel.app/
549•todsacerdoti•1d ago•266 comments

Sheldon Brown's Bicycle Technical Info

https://www.sheldonbrown.com/
422•ostacke•1d ago•110 comments

Ga68, a GNU Algol 68 Compiler

https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/PEXRTN-ga68-intro/
39•matt_d•4d ago•14 comments

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

https://vecti.com
365•vecti•23h ago•167 comments

An Update on Heroku

https://www.heroku.com/blog/an-update-on-heroku/
465•lstoll•1d ago•305 comments

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

https://eljojo.github.io/rememory/
341•eljojo•23h ago•210 comments

What Is Ruliology?

https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2026/01/what-is-ruliology/
66•helloplanets•4d ago•70 comments
Open in hackernews

The joy of recursion, immutable data, & pure functions: Making mazes with JS

https://jrsinclair.com/articles/2025/joy-of-immutable-data-recursion-pure-functions-javascript-mazes/
92•jrsinclair•5mo ago

Comments

jefecoon•5mo ago
Nice read, and beautiful website btw.
tisdadd•5mo ago
Indeed to both. I enjoyed it greatly. It was well written and on something that I think about someone's but never implemented.
hombre_fatal•5mo ago
Nice animation on the maze building algo.

I remember trying to use Immutable.js back in the day. It's probably pretty great with Typescript these days, but I remember it was kinda hell with vanilla JS back then since I'd accidentally do things like assign `thing.foo = 42` instead of `thing.set('foo', 42)` and I'd comb through the code to see why it wouldn't work, and I remember not knowing when I had a JS object or a Record. All things fixed by Typescript, of course.

dataviz1000•5mo ago
It was great working with Redux, Immutable.js which was recommended by Redux, React, and Reselect managing thousands of points of time series streaming market data. The state stayed immutable, and when I needed to break cache I returned a new object for the affected slice in the root state tree. That change, changing the object reference on a leaf of the state tree, triggered Reselect to recompute its memoized selectors, and React / Redux (with shallow equality checks) picked up the new references and rerendered only the impacted components.

I used Ramda for all data transformations as data flowed through the app. I ran the code in React Native also and could count the precise number the of operations a megabyte or two of data updating every few seconds that included data visualizations needed. Nothing was hidden!

A decade ago I attached myself to Mongo, Express, Angular, Node stack and it was a disaster waste of time and nobody was hiring for that skill set. Beginning of 2018 I started with the React, Redux, Immutable, and ReSelect and it was a massive success. I got very lucky when I started that project that was the hot new JavaScript stack all the bloggers were raving about. A broken clock is correct twice a day.

chowells•5mo ago
I'm slightly horrified by the memory leak that's casually introduced without even a remark as to the potential to cause a problem. I can't tell if I'm more horrified by the cavalier attitude or the fact that JavaScript makes having a global registry the only easy way to use an object of an arbitrary type as a key to Map.

But at the very least, if you're going to memoize immutable values, please do it in a way that allows garbage collection. JavaScript has WeakRef and FinalizationRegistry. (Why it doesn't provide the obvious WeakCache built on those is a mystery, though.)

The issues won't be visible on a toy example like making mazes a few hundred elements across, but if you use these techniques on real problems, you absolutely need to cooperate with the garbage collector.

b_e_n_t_o_n•5mo ago
Probably better to use an LRU cache rather than weak maps.
sltkr•5mo ago
No because then you lose the ability to compare objects for equality.
b_e_n_t_o_n•5mo ago
I don't think so?
chowells•5mo ago
Yes. It's using a global variable to canonicalize instances so that reference equality is value equality. An LRU cache will evict things that are still in use, so that the canonicalization process returns a different instance for the same value. (If it doesn't evict anything still in use, it's strictly inferior to just tying to the garbage collector anyway.) This will break the assumption that reference equality is the same as value equality that the rest of the code depends on.
b_e_n_t_o_n•5mo ago
Oh yeah you're right, I wasn't thinking about the possibility of creating a new point that got evicted but is still hanging around for the comparison...

Personally I'd design it with Point.Equals(p1, p2) static method and forego using referential equality, then the LRU cache could prevent runaway memory usage but tbh this is all bikesheding for this use case anyways :). The original code is fine.

sillysaurusx•5mo ago
I’m still sad that JS doesn’t have tail call optimization. I’ve always wondered why. Is it hard to implement?
chowells•5mo ago
People are too addicted to automatic stack traces for mainstream languages to optimize away stack frames.
zdragnar•5mo ago
If my memory serves right, the browser vendors couldn't agree on the implementation.

On the one hand, allowing any function to be eligible for TCO means that the developer won't know if the code was optimized or not. A trivial change can easily convert a fast function to one that blows the stack. Additionally, every function created- or at least every named function- would need to be analyzed, causing a performance hit for everyone, even those who never write a recursive function in their lives.

On the hand, some argued that TCO eligibility should be explicitly opt-in with some sort of keyword or annotation. If a function so annotated did not end up being a valid target for TCO, the script would not compile, similar to a syntax error. This is an even more harsh failure mode than the implicit version, but would have been easier to identify.

I vaguely recall chrome devs generally being in favor of explicit annotations, and Safari implicit. I could be completely wrong on this, and I don't think anyone was particularly enthused about the trade-offs either way.

Jtsummers•5mo ago
It does if you use JavaScriptCore (Safari, other Webkit browsers, Bun).
ethan_smith•5mo ago
TCO is actually in the ES6 spec but browser vendors (except Safari) haven't implemented it due to concerns about debugging (stack traces become less useful) and security implications with stack inspection.
tikhonj•5mo ago
If you enjoyed that, I have a blog post on generating mazes in Haskell (from over a decade ago!). The algorithm is very similar, but the code is written using "inductive graphs" and the post is really more of an intro to working with graphs in a purely functional style.

https://jelv.is/blog/Generating-Mazes-with-Inductive-Graphs

wk_end•5mo ago
Kind of amusing and maybe telling that this article about implementing an algorithm functionally begins by explaining it in an iterative, mutational fashion.
joshfarrant•5mo ago
The author has also written a book which I’ve read a couple of times and enjoyed.

A Skeptic’s Guide To Functional Programming With JavaScript

https://jrsinclair.com/skeptics-guide

I’d recommend it for functional-curious JS devs like myself.

vismit2000•5mo ago
Related: http://www.mazesforprogrammers.com/
hyperhello•5mo ago
Once you have the maze you need to solve it. JavaScript is a great environment for tinkering. If you would like to try, I made an online maze game for myself this year.

https://hypervariety.com/Amaze/