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We Mourn Our Craft

https://nolanlawson.com/2026/02/07/we-mourn-our-craft/
63•ColinWright•57m ago•27 comments

Speed up responses with fast mode

https://code.claude.com/docs/en/fast-mode
18•surprisetalk•1h ago•15 comments

U.S. Jobs Disappear at Fastest January Pace Since Great Recession

https://www.forbes.com/sites/mikestunson/2026/02/05/us-jobs-disappear-at-fastest-january-pace-sin...
96•alephnerd•1h ago•43 comments

Hoot: Scheme on WebAssembly

https://www.spritely.institute/hoot/
120•AlexeyBrin•7h ago•22 comments

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

https://openciv3.org/
822•klaussilveira•21h ago•248 comments

Stories from 25 Years of Software Development

https://susam.net/twenty-five-years-of-computing.html
55•vinhnx•4h ago•7 comments

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

https://spillhistorie.no/2026/02/06/interview-with-sierra-veteran-al-lowe/
53•thelok•3h ago•6 comments

The AI boom is causing shortages everywhere else

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/02/07/ai-spending-economy-shortages/
102•1vuio0pswjnm7•8h ago•117 comments

The Waymo World Model

https://waymo.com/blog/2026/02/the-waymo-world-model-a-new-frontier-for-autonomous-driving-simula...
1057•xnx•1d ago•608 comments

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback

https://rlhfbook.com/
75•onurkanbkrc•6h ago•5 comments

Start all of your commands with a comma (2009)

https://rhodesmill.org/brandon/2009/commands-with-comma/
476•theblazehen•2d ago•175 comments

Vocal Guide – belt sing without killing yourself

https://jesperordrup.github.io/vocal-guide/
202•jesperordrup•11h ago•69 comments

France's homegrown open source online office suite

https://github.com/suitenumerique
545•nar001•5h ago•252 comments

Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

https://blog.alaindichiappari.dev/p/software-engineering-is-back
213•alainrk•6h ago•331 comments

Selection Rather Than Prediction

https://voratiq.com/blog/selection-rather-than-prediction/
8•languid-photic•3d ago•1 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
34•rbanffy•4d ago•7 comments

72M Points of Interest

https://tech.marksblogg.com/overture-places-pois.html
27•marklit•5d ago•2 comments

Unseen Footage of Atari Battlezone Arcade Cabinet Production

https://arcadeblogger.com/2026/02/02/unseen-footage-of-atari-battlezone-cabinet-production/
113•videotopia•4d ago•30 comments

Where did all the starships go?

https://www.datawrapper.de/blog/science-fiction-decline
73•speckx•4d ago•74 comments

Software factories and the agentic moment

https://factory.strongdm.ai/
68•mellosouls•4h ago•73 comments

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

https://github.com/valdanylchuk/breezydemo
273•isitcontent•21h ago•37 comments

Learning from context is harder than we thought

https://hy.tencent.com/research/100025?langVersion=en
199•limoce•4d ago•111 comments

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

https://github.com/pydantic/monty
285•dmpetrov•22h ago•153 comments

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

https://github.com/sandys/kappal
21•sandGorgon•2d ago•11 comments

Making geo joins faster with H3 indexes

https://floedb.ai/blog/how-we-made-geo-joins-400-faster-with-h3-indexes
155•matheusalmeida•2d ago•48 comments

Hackers (1995) Animated Experience

https://hackers-1995.vercel.app/
555•todsacerdoti•1d ago•268 comments

Sheldon Brown's Bicycle Technical Info

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

Ga68, a GNU Algol 68 Compiler

https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/PEXRTN-ga68-intro/
42•matt_d•4d ago•18 comments

An Update on Heroku

https://www.heroku.com/blog/an-update-on-heroku/
472•lstoll•1d ago•312 comments

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

https://eljojo.github.io/rememory/
348•eljojo•1d ago•215 comments
Open in hackernews

The history of Indian science fiction

https://altermag.com/articles/the-secret-history-of-indian-science-fiction
224•adityaathalye•2mo ago

Comments

ping00•2mo ago
Added all of these to my Goodreads -- as an Indian, I had no idea that these books existed. Great article (with some really cool UI choices); I'm looking forward to reading more from this magazine! Thanks for sharing.
srean•2mo ago
She is also read well in Bangladesh because she wrote primarily in Bengali. Infact she was well versed in quite a few languages. Her Sultana's Dream is a little over the top though
mtalantikite•2mo ago
And also because she was from what is now Bangladesh. Same with Bose from this list.
srean•2mo ago
That's true. Bose is also the source of Marconi's radio component and he developed junction based electronics way before it's time. Bose was quite fiercely anti-patent. Marconi patented the coherer in his name.

It is only recently that Bose's contributions in radio and electronics are being acknowledged (colonialism doing what it does) although these were quite well known in Bengal.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jagadish_Chandra_Bose#Microwav...

blacksmith_tb•2mo ago
I can second the article's recommendation of Samit Basu, I've liked everything of his I've read. I would also recommend Indra Das, and Saad Z. Hossain.
adityaathalye•2mo ago
Ditto... several titles they listed were alien to me! And I had no idea about Rokeya.

Alas, these will have to wait a bit until my next book-funding cycle... I accidentally overdid some Diwali discount book shopping and have a slushpile of about forty scifi titles to work through, and a fiscal deficit to repair :sweat-smile: :D

That said, my extant slushpile has Sci-Fi by contemporary Indian / Indian-origin authors...

Lavanya Lakshminarayan's Interstellar Megachef (next up in the reading Q, along with the Strugatsky brothers).

And SB Divya's books:

  Read and enjoyed and will recommend:
  - Meru (very cool embodiment of beings, mythologically-inspired)

  To-read:
  - Loka
  - Machinehood
  - Contingency plans for the apocalypse
msabalau•2mo ago
The articles references articles she has written on science fiction, but if one is interested in SFF more broadly, Monidipa "Mimi" Mondal is India's first Hugo nominee, as he co-editor of Luminescent Threads: Connections to Octavia E. Butler, an anthology of letters and essays. This won a Locus award.

Her fantasy novella, "His Footsteps, Through Darkness and Light" was nominated for a Nebula. She also contributed a DnD adventure to "Journeys through the Radiant Citadel"

Not a profilic author, but a strong one.

srean•2mo ago
Hey thanks, will check her works out. I am more into scifi than fantasy, especially hard sci-fi.
zem•2mo ago
"the sultana's dream" is online, and well worth a read: https://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/sultana/dream/dream....
adityaathalye•2mo ago
Thanks for the link! I read it earlier today and, wow, she was hard sci-fi, as of the early 1900s. I want to call out two things (water harvesting, energy use), but further details will be spoilers.

I reckon she also presaged some of the demographic / cultural re-workings we are experiencing in the 21st century. Hers was a time of radical social reform and political turmoil in the Indian subcontinent, as well as the world. I suppose many urban intellectuals as well as revolutionaries in the hinterland felt a palpable sense of "hang on, this <insert huge transformation> could actually happen, and we could make it happen".

Fertile ground for all sorts of literary imagination.

dartharva•2mo ago
Well yes I have read Zelazny's Lord of Light, how did you like it? /s
s_Hogg•2mo ago
Probably worth drawing this thread's attention to the debate over whether ancient Hindu texts mention nuclear weapons and atomic war. Up to the beholder whether that makes those texts sci-fi or not, I guess.
sashank_1509•2mo ago
I’d say that’s more fantasy than science fiction.
adityaathalye•2mo ago
Every great culture, over the millennia has imagined great weapons and unlimited godlike destructive power. You could, as you are doing now, retrofit our narrative on any of those if you wish. Make your own sci-fi fantasy. Those texts are not.

Example:

Gotham Chopra did that with what is now Virgin Comics: https://liquidcomics.com/

See the gorgeous Ramayan 3392 A.D. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramayan_3392_A.D.

Also see the film Cargo, which turns mythological narrative into a rather watchable space opera https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_(2019_film)

never_inline•2mo ago
It's true that ancient Indians had some interesting insights into astronomy and natural sciences (recognizing the heliocentricity as early as the aitareya BrAhmaNa, and some ideas about electricity) and have some evidence about Indo-Aryan warfare being evolved with variety of weapons.

But it would sound like boomer uncles to claim that there is mention of space travel or nuclear weapons in our epics. The astra-s are simply figments of imagination.

s_Hogg•2mo ago
And yet people do haha

I was just bringing up something I thought was tangentially related without expressing an opinion on it

adityaathalye•2mo ago
Don't. Please.

> Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Your original comment checks all three boxes.

pkd•2mo ago
This is an interesting article but unfortunately there's some brigading of this thread by new accounts that's leaving a bad taste in my mouth.
adityaathalye•2mo ago
Yeah, same here. I submitted the article and I'm unhappy about said briganding.

To all these new accounts: Please read the HN guidelines and follow them https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Keep it classy, folks.

tomhow•2mo ago
[stub]
ninju•2mo ago
Very interesting visual effect in the first sections of the article
culi•2mo ago
Seems like it's the first article of this magazine. I'd be excited to see what else they work on but I don't see any links to an rss feed :(
sparshselim•2mo ago
here's a list of future articles we are looking to commission btw: https://altermag.com/pitch-us
mnsh•2mo ago
Hi @culi, Quick update, our RSS feed is now live :3 Subscribe here: https://altermag.com/rss.xml
culi•2mo ago
Wow, that's awesome! Thanks for getting back on this and thanks for the awesome work
tclancy•2mo ago
Bookmarked to read tonight, thanks for this -- the site is gorgeous.
dyauspitr•2mo ago
What a beautiful site.
visioninmyblood•2mo ago
Should we not start with Ramayana and Mahabartham? Although they are religious texts they had a lot of science fiction storylines.
nirav72•2mo ago
More mythological than science fiction.
abundanceitis•2mo ago
this looks like India's answer to Works In Progress
adityaathalye•2mo ago
They reference Works in Progress in their "pitch us" page: https://altermag.com/pitch-us

Though I wouldn't say "India's answer to..." that's just lazy hyperbole. Give the magazine's makers credit, not some arbitrary national identity.

Works In Progress is a Stripe production. Alter Magazine is a production by a parent company "Alt Carbon". That's the similarity.

sd_alt•2mo ago
Gorgeous essay. Less a story and more a museum tour of Indian Sci-Fi. Enjoyed it!
sayantani15•2mo ago
All the hard work put into this piece really shows! It’s just fascinating.
anan523•2mo ago
What a beautifully designed and insightful piece!
sparshselim•2mo ago
there's limited mention of satyajit ray and his feud with spielberg a la Aliens. would have been fun to read about it-- https://harpercollins.co.in/product/embark-on-an-intergalact...
dev_manus•2mo ago
what an enlightening and inspiring deep-dive that celebrates the bold emergence and evolution of Indian science fiction.
anony1anony2•2mo ago
Loved the article!
jonyi•2mo ago
Heyo, Great article. Gautam Bhatia is a great science fiction writer himself.
throaway123213•2mo ago
it wouldn't be a thread about India without a massive brigading / bot campaign!
__rito__•2mo ago
A surprisingly missing entry is Calcutta Chromosome by Amitav Ghosh. It's oddly good, and is very unique.

The writer talks at length about Bengali SciFi, but misses Ghana Da! The novels and stories are really enjoyable mixture of SF and pulp. Two collections are there in Eglish: The adventures of Ghanada, and Mosquito and Other stories. They are by the author Premendra Mitra/Mitter.