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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
52•samasblack•3h ago•39 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/
464•theblazehen•2d ago•165 comments

France's homegrown open source online office suite

https://github.com/suitenumerique
510•nar001•5h ago•235 comments

Vocal Guide – belt sing without killing yourself

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

Software factories and the agentic moment

https://factory.strongdm.ai/
51•mellosouls•3h ago•52 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•60 comments

Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

https://blog.alaindichiappari.dev/p/software-engineering-is-back
189•alainrk•5h ago•282 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

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
59•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•21h ago•34 comments

Learning from context is harder than we thought

https://hy.tencent.com/research/100025?langVersion=en
198•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

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

British drivers over 70 to face eye tests every three years

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c205nxy0p31o
169•bookofjoe•2h ago•153 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/
342•eljojo•23h ago•210 comments

What Is Ruliology?

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

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

https://github.com/sandys/kappal
18•sandGorgon•2d ago•8 comments
Open in hackernews

PEP 638 – Syntactic Macros

https://peps.python.org/pep-0638/
19•skeledrew•2mo ago

Comments

pansa2•2mo ago
> Python is now sufficiently powerful and complex, that many proposed additions are a net loss for the language due to the additional complexity. […] Python was once described as “Python Fits Your Brain”, but that becomes less and less true as more and more features are added.

Looks like this was written in 2020, but IMO Python crossed the “fits in your brain” (or at least my brain!) threshold years earlier. Nowadays, are there any popular languages that could be described that way? Maybe Go? Or Lua?

vintagedave•2mo ago
Pascal, maybe. It's straightforward, capable, easy to read. You see people popping up here on HN periodically with these super light-weight, fast apps written in Delphi or Free Pascal (or Oxygene, the one I've been using lately.)
bjoli•2mo ago
So they managed to make up a variable "hygiene" system that is even less useful than gensym from common lisp...
eigenspace•2mo ago
Yeah, that was rather puzzling. Hopefully if this proposal garners any interest, some people with actual experience with dealing with macro hygiene issues can help fix that.
eigenspace•2mo ago
IMO Python really needs this. Working in a language without syntatic macros is such a downgrade, and there's been a number of syntax features added to the language over the years that IMO should have just been macros.

> The f-string `f"..."` could be implemented as macro as `f!("...")`. Not quite as nice to read, but would still be useful for experimenting with.

In julia, we have a rule where a macro whose name ends with `_str` is usable as a "string macro" and it receives the input string in its raw form, and then any string macro is usable by just prefixing the name at the beginning of the string.

An example is that our regex string literal implementation is literally just

    macro r_str(s)
        Regex(s)
    end
which allows for easy compile-time regex generation. With that you can simply write e.g. `r"^[ \t]+|[ \t]+$"` which is the same as `@r_str("^[ \t]+|[ \t]+$")`, e.g.

    julia> match(r"^[ \t]+|[ \t]+$", " hi")
    RegexMatch(" ")
So using this rule, Python's f-strings could just be re-implemented as a string macro.

https://docs.julialang.org/en/v1/manual/metaprogramming/#met...

peterlada•2mo ago
No
eigenspace•2mo ago
Yes.
skeledrew•2mo ago
This is possible in 3.14, which includes "PEP 750 – Template Strings", a generalization of f-strings. Perhaps macros is the next step of evolution.
eigenspace•2mo ago
Having a real macro system would be a replacement for that PEP
skeledrew•2mo ago
Well they should coexist, as all string formatting syntaxes have over the years. And though I think macros would be nice to have, there's a valid concern raised in the discussion: readability. Having macros opens the door to extremely unpythonic code bases, which could be very hard for anyone outside of the primary audience to understand, let alone meaningfully modify or contribute to. And one of the things that keeps me hooked to Python is that if I install a package and it has some issue or doesn't do something I'd like, it's almost trivial for me to find the relevant section in the installed code, edit it and have the desired behavior on next invocation.
7bit•2mo ago
Can someone explain this in simpler terms? I think I'm quite proficient in Python for a sysadmin, but I don't understand a single statement in the PEP.
eigenspace•2mo ago
A macro is a function that takes in parsed code and returns transformed code.

The nice thing about macros is that they run during the parsing of the code, so they have no runtime cost associated with them.

Basically, you can think of it as a (limited) way for users or packages to add new keywords to a language without having to change the whole language implementation for everyone.

Many recent new keywords that were added to Python could have been implemented as macros, which means that they could have just lived in packages rather than needing to be upstreamed into the base language implementation from day 1.

xigoi•2mo ago
(2020)
gabrielsroka•2mo ago
Take 16

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=PEP%20638%20%E2%80%93%20Syntac...

lihaoyi•2mo ago
I actually implemented something of this sorts back in college: MacroPy https://github.com/lihaoyi/macropy
clickety_clack•2mo ago
I don’t know the pros or cons of macros as I haven’t used them in any language, but the language seems to be picking up more hacks recently.