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Canvas is down as ShinyHunters threatens to leak schools’ data

https://www.theverge.com/tech/926458/canvas-shinyhunters-breach
618•stefanpie•10h ago•377 comments

Maybe you shouldn't install new software for a bit

https://xeiaso.net/blog/2026/abstain-from-install/
506•psxuaw•10h ago•260 comments

Cloudflare to cut about 20% workforce

https://www.reuters.com/business/world-at-work/cloudflare-cut-over-1100-jobs-2026-05-07/
701•PriorityLeft•12h ago•452 comments

Dirtyfrag: Universal Linux LPE

https://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2026/05/07/8
628•flipped•13h ago•258 comments

ClojureScript Gets Async/Await

https://clojurescript.org/news/2026-05-07-release
38•Borkdude•2h ago•6 comments

The map that keeps Burning Man honest

https://www.not-ship.com/burning-man-moop/
642•speckx•19h ago•317 comments

Rumors of my death are slightly exaggerated

225•CliffStoll•1d ago•29 comments

The surprisingly complex journey to text-selectable client-side generated PDFs

https://sdocs.dev/blogs/journey-to-pdf-generation
6•FailMore•1d ago•0 comments

Pinocchio is weirder than you remembered

https://storica.club/blog/pinocchio-in-italian/
135•cemsakarya•1d ago•63 comments

A polynomial autoencoder beats PCA on transformer embeddings

https://ivanpleshkov.dev/blog/polynomial-autoencoder/
34•timvisee•2d ago•9 comments

Agents need control flow, not more prompts

https://bsuh.bearblog.dev/agents-need-control-flow/
463•bsuh•16h ago•225 comments

Inventing Cyrillic

https://www.historytoday.com/archive/history-matters/inventing-cyrillic
29•lermontov•2d ago•36 comments

Blaise – A modern self-hosting zero-legacy Object Pascal compiler targeting QBE

https://github.com/graemeg/blaise
44•peter_d_sherman•4h ago•12 comments

GNU IFUNC is the real culprit behind CVE-2024-3094

https://github.com/robertdfrench/ifuncd-up
77•foltik•9h ago•34 comments

Dithering with CSS

https://ikesau.co/blog/dithering-with-css/
4•speckx•3d ago•1 comments

Natural Language Autoencoders: Turning Claude's Thoughts into Text

https://www.anthropic.com/research/natural-language-autoencoders
274•instagraham•15h ago•89 comments

DeepSeek 4 Flash local inference engine for Metal

https://github.com/antirez/ds4
383•tamnd•17h ago•105 comments

Digging into Drama at the Document Foundation

https://lwn.net/Articles/1066418/
26•signa11•5h ago•3 comments

HantaWatch Real time hantavirus outbreak tracker

https://hantawatch.net/
13•Accher•3h ago•8 comments

AlphaEvolve: Gemini-powered coding agent scaling impact across fields

https://deepmind.google/blog/alphaevolve-impact/
291•berlianta•18h ago•123 comments

Plasticity and language in the anaesthetized human hippocampus

https://www.bcm.edu/news/researchers-discover-advanced-language-processing-in-the-unconscious-hum...
106•hhs•10h ago•39 comments

Singapore introduces caning for boys who bully others at school

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/may/06/singapore-caning-school-bullies
174•rustoo•2d ago•232 comments

Brazil's Pix payment system faces pressure from Visa and Mastercard

https://www.elciudadano.com/en/brazils-pix-payment-system-faces-pressure-from-visa-and-mastercard...
190•wslh•15h ago•166 comments

Hardening Firefox with Claude Mythos Preview

https://hacks.mozilla.org/2026/05/behind-the-scenes-hardening-firefox/
186•HieronymusBosch•17h ago•87 comments

AI slop is killing online communities

https://rmoff.net/2026/05/06/ai-slop-is-killing-online-communities/
644•thm•14h ago•560 comments

How to make SSE token streams resumable, cancellable, and multi-device

https://zknill.io/posts/everyone-said-sse-token-streaming-was-easy/
27•zknill•1d ago•2 comments

Gambling ads on social media reach more than twice as many men as women: study

https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/gambling-ads-on-social-media-reach-more-than-twice-as-many-me...
67•hhs•9h ago•54 comments

Los Alamos and the long path to detecting neutrinos

https://www.lanl.gov/media/publications/1663/from-ghost-particle-to-cosmic-messenger
31•LAsteNERD•1d ago•3 comments

Nonprofit hospitals spend billions on consultants with no clear effect

https://www.uchicagomedicine.org/forefront/research-and-discoveries-articles/nonprofit-hospitals-...
145•hhs•10h ago•43 comments

Two Home Affairs officials suspended after AI 'hallucinations' found

https://www.citizen.co.za/news/home-affairs-officials-suspended-ai-hallucinations/
89•jruohonen•13h ago•19 comments
Open in hackernews

Elliptical Python Programming

https://susam.net/elliptical-python-programming.html
184•sebg•1y ago

Comments

benob•1y ago
TIL that in python, 1--2==3
seplox•1y ago
It's not a python thing. 1-(-2), distribute the negative.
qsort•1y ago
In most C-like languages that would be a syntax error. E.g. in C and C++ as a rule you tokenize "greedily", "1--2" would be tokenized as "1", "unary decrement operator", "2", which is illegal because you're trying to decerment an rvalue.

Python doesn't have "--", which allows the tokenizer to do something else.

nyrikki•1y ago
In C, that is really because Unary minus (negation) has precedence over binary operations.

    +a - b; // equivalent to (+a) - b, NOT +(a - b)
    -c + d; // equivalent to (-c) + d, NOT -(c + d)

https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/language/operator_arithmet...

    +-e; // equivalent to +(-e), the unary + is a no-op if “e” is a built-in type
     // because any possible promotion is performed during negation already
The same doesn't apply to, !! Which is applied as iterated binary operations (IIRC)

I am pretty sure the decriment operator came around well after that quirk was established.

seanhunter•1y ago
Peter van der Linden’s book “Expert C Programming” (which is awesome btw) says that one of them (Kernighan, Richie or maybe Ken Thompson I forget) realised early on that the c compiler had the wrong operator precedence for bit twiddling and unary and boolean operators but “at that stage we had a few thousand lines of C code and thought it would be too disruptive to change it”
j2kun•1y ago
Also worth noting that `1 - -2` works and produces 3 in C because the space breaks the operator.
plus•1y ago
For those who are curious, `...` is a placeholder value in Python called Ellipsis. I don't believe it serves any real purpose other than being a placeholder. But it is an object and it implements `__eq__`, and is considered equal to itself. So `...==...` evaluates to `True`. When you prefix a `True` with `-`, it is interpreted as a prefix negation operator and implicitly converts the `True` to a `1`, so `-(...==...)` is equal to `-1`. Then, you add another prefix `-` to turn the `-1` back into `1`.

`--(...==...)--(...==...)` evaluates to `2` because the first block evaluates to 1, as previously mentioned, and then the next `-` is interpreted as an infix subtraction operator. The second `-(...==...)` evaluates to `-1`, so you get `1 - -1` or `2`.

When chaining multiple together, you can leave off the initial `--`, because booleans will be implicitly converted to integers if inserted into an arithmetic expression, e.g. `True - -1` -> `1 - -1` -> `2`.

> There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it.

This article is obviously completely tongue-in-cheek, but I feel the need to point out that this sentence is not meant to be a complete inversion of the Perl philosophy of TIMTOWTDI. The word "obvious" is crucial here - there can be more than one way, but ideally only one of the ways is obvious.

pletnes•1y ago
Numpy actively uses … to make slicing multidimensional arrays less verbose. There are also uses in FastAPI along the lines of «go with the default».
abuckenheimer•1y ago
excellent explanation, to add to this since I was curious about the composition, '%c' is an integer presentation type that tells python to format numbers as their corresponding unicode characters[1] so

'%c' * (length_of_string_to_format) % (number, number, ..., length_of_string_to_format_numbers_later)

is the expression being evaluated here after you collapse all of the 1s + math formatting each number in the tuple as a unicode char for each '%c' escape in the string corresponding to its place in the tuple.

[1] https://docs.python.org/3/library/string.html#format-specifi...

nomel•1y ago
Expanding on this a little, I will be replacing all occurrences of 2 with two blobs fighting, with shields:

    >>> 0^((...==...)--++--(...==...))^0
    2
rmah•1y ago
>> There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it.

Except for package management, of course. There, we need lots and lots of ways.

blooalien•1y ago
And apparently string formatting which should have an ever growing number of ways to handle it. :shrug:
elijahbenizzy•1y ago
Ok do this but for JavaScript
voidUpdate•1y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSFuck
mariocesar•1y ago
If you're curious, the code in ellipsis results in executing:

    print('hello, world')
mturmon•1y ago
Thank you!

I noticed some ** and * in the thing sent to eval(), which (given that the building blocks are small integers) seemed related to prime factorizations.

The initial %c is duplicated 21 times (3*7, if I read correctly), and then string-interpolated (%c%c%c...) against a long tuple of integers. These integers themselves are composed of products of factors combined using * and **.

There is also one tuple "multiplication" embedded within that long tuple of integers -- (a,b)*2 = (a,b,a,b). That is for the 'l' 'l' in "hello".

It's all very clever and amusingly mathy, with a winking allusion to the construction of natural numbers using sets. It made me Godel.

callamdelaney•1y ago
I think we're really starting to over crowd pythons syntax and I'm not a fan.
noddleah•1y ago
you're telling me you never program in python elliptically??
acbart•1y ago
Pretty sure this would have been possible in Python 2.6. The Ellipsis object has been around for a very long time.
MadVikingGod•1y ago
This behavior can be replicated with any class that has two special methods: __neg__ that returns -1 and __sub__ that accepts ints and returns 1-other.

For example if you make this class:

  class _:
       def __neg__(self):
           return -1
       def __sub__(self, other):
           return 1-other
You get similar behavior:

  >>> --_()
  1
  >>> _()--_()
  2
Fun python for everyone.
maxloh•1y ago
You can do this on JavaScript too.

  alert(1)
  // equals to:
  [][(![]+[])[+!+[]]+(!![]+[])[+[]]][([][(![]+[])[+!+[]]+(!![]+[])[+[]]]+[])[!+[]+!+[]+!+[]]+(!![]+[][(![]+[])[+!+[]]+(!![]+[])[+[]]])[+!+[]+[+[]]]+([][[]]+[])[+!+[]]+(![]+[])[!+[]+!+[]+!+[]]+(!![]+[])[+[]]+(!![]+[])[+!+[]]+([][[]]+[])[+[]]+([][(![]+[])[+!+[]]+(!![]+[])[+[]]]+[])[!+[]+!+[]+!+[]]+(!![]+[])[+[]]+(!![]+[][(![]+[])[+!+[]]+(!![]+[])[+[]]])[+!+[]+[+[]]]+(!![]+[])[+!+[]]]((![]+[])[+!+[]]+(![]+[])[!+[]+!+[]]+(!![]+[])[!+[]+!+[]+!+[]]+(!![]+[])[+!+[]]+(!![]+[])[+[]]+([][(![]+[])[+!+[]]+(!![]+[])[+[]]]+[])[+!+[]+[+!+[]]]+[+!+[]]+([]+[]+[][(![]+[])[+!+[]]+(!![]+[])[+[]]])[+!+[]+[!+[]+!+[]]])()
https://jsfuck.com/