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

https://openciv3.org/
612•klaussilveira•12h ago•180 comments

The Waymo World Model

https://waymo.com/blog/2026/02/the-waymo-world-model-a-new-frontier-for-autonomous-driving-simula...
915•xnx•17h ago•545 comments

What Is Ruliology?

https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2026/01/what-is-ruliology/
29•helloplanets•4d ago•22 comments

How we made geo joins 400× faster with H3 indexes

https://floedb.ai/blog/how-we-made-geo-joins-400-faster-with-h3-indexes
102•matheusalmeida•1d ago•24 comments

Unseen Footage of Atari Battlezone Arcade Cabinet Production

https://arcadeblogger.com/2026/02/02/unseen-footage-of-atari-battlezone-cabinet-production/
36•videotopia•4d ago•1 comments

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

https://github.com/valdanylchuk/breezydemo
212•isitcontent•12h ago•25 comments

Jeffrey Snover: "Welcome to the Room"

https://www.jsnover.com/blog/2026/02/01/welcome-to-the-room/
5•kaonwarb•3d ago•1 comments

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

https://github.com/pydantic/monty
206•dmpetrov•12h ago•101 comments

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

https://vecti.com
316•vecti•14h ago•140 comments

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

https://github.com/microsoft/litebox
355•aktau•18h ago•181 comments

Sheldon Brown's Bicycle Technical Info

https://www.sheldonbrown.com/
361•ostacke•18h ago•94 comments

Hackers (1995) Animated Experience

https://hackers-1995.vercel.app/
471•todsacerdoti•20h ago•232 comments

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

https://eljojo.github.io/rememory/
267•eljojo•15h ago•157 comments

An Update on Heroku

https://www.heroku.com/blog/an-update-on-heroku/
400•lstoll•18h ago•271 comments

Delimited Continuations vs. Lwt for Threads

https://mirageos.org/blog/delimcc-vs-lwt
25•romes•4d ago•3 comments

Dark Alley Mathematics

https://blog.szczepan.org/blog/three-points/
82•quibono•4d ago•20 comments

PC Floppy Copy Protection: Vault Prolok

https://martypc.blogspot.com/2024/09/pc-floppy-copy-protection-vault-prolok.html
54•kmm•4d ago•3 comments

Was Benoit Mandelbrot a hedgehog or a fox?

https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.01122
9•bikenaga•3d ago•2 comments

How to effectively write quality code with AI

https://heidenstedt.org/posts/2026/how-to-effectively-write-quality-code-with-ai/
242•i5heu•15h ago•183 comments

Introducing the Developer Knowledge API and MCP Server

https://developers.googleblog.com/introducing-the-developer-knowledge-api-and-mcp-server/
51•gfortaine•10h ago•16 comments

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

https://infisical.com/blog/devops-to-solutions-engineering
138•vmatsiiako•17h ago•60 comments

Understanding Neural Network, Visually

https://visualrambling.space/neural-network/
275•surprisetalk•3d ago•37 comments

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

https://github.com/phreda4/r3
68•phreda4•11h ago•13 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/
1052•cdrnsf•21h ago•433 comments

Why I Joined OpenAI

https://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2026-02-07/why-i-joined-openai.html
127•SerCe•8h ago•112 comments

Female Asian Elephant Calf Born at the Smithsonian National Zoo

https://www.si.edu/newsdesk/releases/female-asian-elephant-calf-born-smithsonians-national-zoo-an...
28•gmays•7h ago•10 comments

Learning from context is harder than we thought

https://hy.tencent.com/research/100025?langVersion=en
173•limoce•3d ago•93 comments

Vocal Guide – belt sing without killing yourself

https://jesperordrup.github.io/vocal-guide/
7•jesperordrup•2h ago•4 comments

FORTH? Really!?

https://rescrv.net/w/2026/02/06/associative
61•rescrv•20h ago•22 comments

Zlob.h 100% POSIX and glibc compatible globbing lib that is faste and better

https://github.com/dmtrKovalenko/zlob
17•neogoose•4h ago•9 comments
Open in hackernews

Linux mode setting, from the comfort of OCaml

https://roscidus.com/blog/blog/2025/11/16/libdrm-ocaml/
84•ibobev•2mo ago

Comments

dlcarrier•2mo ago
Is OCaml an especially comfortable environment to work in?

One of my favorite programs, an ncurses-based RPN calculator called Orpie, is written in OCaml, but I've never messed around with it.

Crespyl•2mo ago
Hey, I've also used and loved Orpie!

I'm not extremely familiar with any of the ML family, but Eric Lippert had a blog series I followed for a while in which he was writing a Z-Machine in OCaml: https://ericlippert.com/2016/02/01/west-of-house/ I followed along but in Rust for a while, though I think he paused the project at some point and I lost steam.

I learned more about Rust (which, IIRC was first implemented in OCaml) than I did about OCaml, but it's always seemed like a nice language.

yawaramin•2mo ago
Lippert started doing that blog series as part of his learning journey when he got hired at Facebook to write OCaml. Just a fun historical fact.
Yoric•2mo ago
Well, many of the benefits of Rust, but in a simpler and garbage-collected language. Possibly the best language (alongside Haskell) if you need pattern-matching. Not quite as good if you need lots of libraries or interaction with other languages.
nextos•2mo ago
It does have a lively ecosystem in some niches. Formal verification is one of them.

For example, https://opam.ocaml.org/packages/why3 is a little marvel of engineering.

yawaramin•2mo ago
Does Haskell have or-patterns yet? Last I checked OCaml still has the lead in pattern matching power :-)
antonvs•2mo ago
https://ghc.gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/doc/users_guide/exts/or_p...
yawaramin•2mo ago
I'm confused about something. According to https://www.haskell.org/ghc/ version 9.10.3 was released on 2025-09-10. How is there a version 9.12.1 listed for the or-patterns feature? Are these versions for different things?
tome•2mo ago
They're versions of the same thing, and 9.12.1 was chronologically before 9.10.3. It looks like you can find the entire chronology at https://www.haskell.org/ghc/blog.html
yawaramin•2mo ago
OK, side note, whoever decides the GHC release numbers should be pulled aside and given a quick talk about how version numbers are supposed to work.

Anyway, looks like or-patterns just landed as a GHC extension:

    foo (Bar; Baz) = 0
I still like OCaml's (built-in) syntax better:

    let foo (Bar | Baz) = 0
Which I feel stems from its elegant decision to use the pipe character as the 'alternative pattern prefix':

    let foo = function
      | Bar
      | Baz -> 0
tome•2mo ago
> whoever decides the GHC release numbers should be pulled aside and given a quick talk about how version numbers are supposed to work

How is that?

StopDisinfo910•2mo ago
> whoever decides the GHC release numbers should be pulled aside and given a quick talk about how version numbers are supposed to work.

9.10.3 is a patch for the 9.10 version which was published after 9.12.1 but relates to an older version. Haskell keeps maintaining multiple versions of the toolchain.

antonvs•2mo ago
That release numbering is pretty common for programming languages. People are still using older supported versions, which still get incremental upgrades. Other languages that do this include Python, Java, Go, Node.js, Ruby, PHP, C#.
poulpy123•2mo ago
> Is OCaml an especially comfortable environment to work in?

It is one of these small languages that are not completely niche: it is taught and used, you'll be able to do plenty of things, but there is not the community and resources you find in the big ones or even the mid-sized ones

yawaramin•2mo ago
The thing that I really like about it is that the compiler is very, very fast. Especially when you're in the edit-compile-rerun cycle and doing incremental compiles. This gives people a huge productivity boost and keeps them in flow state much more easily.
cdaringe•2mo ago
Certain parts are unmatched joy. However, some things, as basic as printing arbitrary data types, are annoying, compared to other langs.
mos87•2mo ago
The only program written in OCaml that I think I've used is WeiDU mod installer for Infinity Engine games. Took a quick look under the bonnet too. Suffice to say, my only thought has been that should the author had chosen a sane language like say Perl (which seems to be ideally suited to what WeiDu does), the software could have been improved by many, many people.
antonvs•2mo ago
That would have required the author to write Perl. Some sacrifices are not worth making.
mos87•2mo ago
well then the functionality has been sacrificed - because few people besides the author were willing to brave hacking in OCaml I presume
StopDisinfo910•2mo ago
Just to be sure, are you complaining about the work done by the solo developer of a patching tool for a collection of old games distributed for free and thanklessly maintained for years because you dislike the language they chose for their own work which I repeat they are providing for free?
mos87•2mo ago
Be sure, I'm not complaining about anything here.

Tho initially all those years back IIRC I wanted to tinker with how it installs mods for the Linux native "enhanced" editions. Otherwise I wouldn't even know what it's written in.

antonvs•2mo ago
The number of people willing to brave hacking in Perl seems to have fallen off a cliff - for good reason - so it’s a weird choice of example.
mos87•2mo ago
If falling out of fashion is that good reason then yeah. At least it's not a highbrow esoteric language thingy that next to no-one in the wild used to begin with.

I've personally fixed an early noughties Perl script where one of the modules it used had changed its name (but thankfully not the interface, not significantly at least), among a couple of other compat problems. Fixing it turned out pretty straightforward even for someone who's far from a greybeard Perl "hacker".

antonvs•2mo ago
Perl didn't just fall out of fashion. It failed as a language because it wasn't able to keep up with what other languages could do in practice. The people behind Perl recognized that, but weren't able to agree on a solution. So usage of the language collapsed.

A big part of the problem wasn't that you couldn't write good code with Perl, but that there were too many ways to write bad code with it. That made it anathema for any sort of corporate development, which is the main driver of programming language progress.

_flux•2mo ago
Unison could be one of the more popular programs written in OCaml.

This sort of lead into trouble at one time, as the author chose to use the OCaml serialization of data as the protocol, so synchronization between 32- and 64-bit platforms or even binaries compiled with different versions of OCaml was not possible. Eventually this was fixed, though, with custom serialization.

mhd•2mo ago
Perl? Are there existing modules for the Linux KMS interface? Otherwise this would also be an off-beat language choice, and these days with only marginally more developers… (And I say that as a Perl fan)

Personally, I'm glad that this isn't yet another Rust post ;)

mos87•2mo ago
No, I haven't meant to imply that Perl should be used for the subj. But doubt it'd have proven any worse than OCaml. All depends on the programmer unsurprisingly.
ernst_klim•2mo ago
> But doubt it'd have proven any worse than OCaml

Unlike Perl, OCaml is AOT compiled in a very efficient machine code, has a good static type system and has a good concurrency support. Both are not very mainstream.

jasaldivara•2mo ago
I don understand: If there are so many developers willing to contribute with non OCaml languages, why they don't just implement their own mod installer in Perl, Java, PHP or whatever a "sane" language is?