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Tiny C Compiler

https://bellard.org/tcc/
52•guerrilla•1h ago•20 comments

You Are Here

https://brooker.co.za/blog/2026/02/07/you-are-here.html
37•mltvc•1h ago•33 comments

SectorC: A C Compiler in 512 bytes

https://xorvoid.com/sectorc.html
148•valyala•5h ago•25 comments

The F Word

http://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2026/02/friction.html
76•zdw•3d ago•31 comments

Speed up responses with fast mode

https://code.claude.com/docs/en/fast-mode
82•surprisetalk•5h ago•89 comments

LLMs as the new high level language

https://federicopereiro.com/llm-high/
20•swah•4d ago•12 comments

Software factories and the agentic moment

https://factory.strongdm.ai/
119•mellosouls•8h ago•232 comments

Hoot: Scheme on WebAssembly

https://www.spritely.institute/hoot/
157•AlexeyBrin•11h ago•28 comments

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

https://openciv3.org/
864•klaussilveira•1d ago•264 comments

Stories from 25 Years of Software Development

https://susam.net/twenty-five-years-of-computing.html
113•vinhnx•8h ago•14 comments

GitBlack: Tracing America's Foundation

https://gitblack.vercel.app/
17•martialg•50m ago•3 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...
29•randycupertino•58m ago•29 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-...
21•mbitsnbites•3d ago•1 comments

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

https://spillhistorie.no/2026/02/06/interview-with-sierra-veteran-al-lowe/
73•thelok•7h ago•13 comments

First Proof

https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.05192
75•samasblack•7h ago•57 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...
36•gnufx•4h ago•40 comments

Vocal Guide – belt sing without killing yourself

https://jesperordrup.github.io/vocal-guide/
253•jesperordrup•15h ago•82 comments

I write games in C (yes, C) (2016)

https://jonathanwhiting.com/writing/blog/games_in_c/
156•valyala•5h ago•136 comments

Start all of your commands with a comma (2009)

https://rhodesmill.org/brandon/2009/commands-with-comma/
532•theblazehen•3d ago•197 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
38•momciloo•5h ago•5 comments

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback

https://rlhfbook.com/
98•onurkanbkrc•10h ago•5 comments

Selection rather than prediction

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

Italy Railways Sabotaged

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/czr4rx04xjpo
69•vedantnair•1h ago•55 comments

The AI boom is causing shortages everywhere else

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/02/07/ai-spending-economy-shortages/
212•1vuio0pswjnm7•12h ago•323 comments

72M Points of Interest

https://tech.marksblogg.com/overture-places-pois.html
42•marklit•5d ago•6 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
52•rbanffy•4d ago•14 comments

Unseen Footage of Atari Battlezone Arcade Cabinet Production

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

Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

https://blog.alaindichiappari.dev/p/software-engineering-is-back
273•alainrk•10h ago•452 comments

France's homegrown open source online office suite

https://github.com/suitenumerique
649•nar001•9h ago•284 comments

Microsoft account bugs locked me out of Notepad – Are thin clients ruining PCs?

https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/windows-11/windows-locked-me-out-of-notepad-is-the-thin-...
51•josephcsible•3h ago•67 comments
Open in hackernews

Show HN: Attempt – A CLI for retrying fallible commands

https://github.com/MaxBondABE/attempt
73•maxbond•5mo ago
Hi HN,

Here's a tool I wrote for retrying fallible commands. Nothing groundbreaking here, this is a tool that's been made many times (and several have been submitted to Show HN). Though this one does have a more comprehensive feature set than most. I hope one or two people will find it useful.

I wrote `attempt` for two reasons:

- To have a more featureful alternative to `wait-for-it.sh` for use in Docker Compose. Specifically to apply migration scripts to a database that may not be up yet. I wanted to be able to inspect the error messages from my migration tool & retry on connection errors.

- To test a hypothesis I had that a good way to make a CLI was to copy the API of a good library (in this case, `tenacity`). I want to write a blog post at some point to discuss this at length, but the tl;dr is that I believe it was a success.

Here are some usage examples: https://maxbondabe.github.io/attempt/usage.html

There may not be much to discuss for such a small tool, but I am open to all feedback and am happy to answer any questions.

Cheers,

Max

Comments

adastra22•5mo ago
Is “try” taken as a CLI command? Seems like a better name.
maxbond•5mo ago
That would be a good name. If it's taken it's not in the Debian or Arch repositories. I've been working on this on and off for a couple years, so I honestly don't remember why I picked `attempt`.
onionisafruit•5mo ago
There is no try. There is only do
SparkyMcUnicorn•5mo ago
`dotry`
dannyobrien•5mo ago
This great! Thank you for writing it.
maxbond•5mo ago
Thanks! Glad you like it!
brirec•5mo ago
This is kind of neat. I appreciate how well it falls into the whole Unix philosophy of small tools that do one thing really well.

One thing I’m kind of curious about from a UI standpoint is why the exponential argument isn’t a double-hyphen flag. It kind of feels like it should be, given all of the other arguments are flags.

maxbond•5mo ago
Thanks! That was the intention. There's a tool called `retry` which does an even better job by caching stdin so that it can be integrated into shell pipelines.

I was thinking of it as a subcommand, like `git pull`. I think of the backoff schedules as different "modes" the command can be put into, each with their own set of arguments. I also made some questionable design decisions and coupled too closely to the CLI argument parser (`clap`), which would make it a big pain to back out of that decision.

js2•5mo ago
I also think `retry` is the most widely known of these?

https://formulae.brew.sh/formula/retry

https://manpages.debian.org/trixie/retry/retry.1.en.html

maxbond•5mo ago
Probably, it's the only one that's in OS package managers to my knowledge.
NightMKoder•5mo ago
I was recently in the market for one of these! I ended up going with https://github.com/dbohdan/recur due to the nice stdout and stdin handling. Though this has stdout/stderr pattern matching for failures which is nice too!
maxbond•5mo ago
Cool, I hadn't seen this one yet! Using Starlark is a very good idea. I ended up writing some tiny DSLs to specify certain things like status code patterns and durations; using an off the shelf DSL like Starlark would've saved a lot of effort.
bharrison•5mo ago
Very nice work!

I am very far from expert, but understood expect: https://linux.die.net/man/1/expect to be the "swiss army knife" for this type of thing.

maxbond•5mo ago
I'll confess I've never used `expect`, but I think `expect` is for interactive commands. I think if you were going to write retry logic in bash you would pipe it to `grep` and examine the return code. If `grep` doesn't find any matches, it'll exit with a status code of 1.

I'd never heard of the `wish` command shell (discussed briefly in that document) but you can always rely on the Tcl community to find a great pun.

jalk•5mo ago
This is useful. Don't want to think about how many times I have implemented retrying in shell scripts. I appreciate the extensive documentation, but I would suggest adding the output of `attempt --help` to the README / docs, so that features can be discovered at a glance.
maxbond•5mo ago
Thank you for the suggestion. It's a reasonable one. I'm undecided. The --help output is pretty long, I don't want to put so much information in the README that it damages it's legibility. But you're right that the documentation is maybe too dense for easy discovery. I'll add it to the docs shortly, but for the README I'm going to keep thinking about it for now.

I've created an issue: https://github.com/MaxBondABE/attempt/issues/5

juliangmp•5mo ago
This looks nice Maybe I can finally replace that sshtry shell function which I've been using for a few years
nickdothutton•5mo ago
I am reminded of the lack of really strong batch/job control of the sort I enjoyed as far back as VAX VMS at university, anything that brings a stronger capability to modern OS is welcome. This is I think a big missing thing.
lloydatkinson•5mo ago
> `wait-for-it.sh` for use in Docker Compose.

Any time I hear people praising all these orchestrators, whether it's Docker, K8, or whatever, I remember that a good amount of it is all lies built with glue and sticks like "wait-for-it.sh".