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I've factored the RSA keys of a Certificate Authority from the 90s

https://mcpherrin.ca/2026/09/07/rsa.html
114•ahlCVA•1h ago•22 comments

TALA Is Open-Source

https://d2lang.com/blog/tala-is-open-source/
96•alixanderwang•3h ago•8 comments

Jellyfin 12.0

https://jellyfin.org/posts/jellyfin-release-12.0/
93•0xC0ncord•1h ago•34 comments

Watch Los Angeles get built, one building at a time (1880–2026)

https://lax-skyline.parcelscope.net/
232•rustywasm•8h ago•119 comments

Leaving VMware just got harder after Broadcom pulled VDDK downloads

https://www.virtualizationhowto.com/2026/09/leaving-vmware-just-got-harder-after-broadcom-pulled-...
110•josephcsible•6h ago•51 comments

Trusting-Trust Attack against an Entire Linux Distribution

https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.24888
165•signa11•2d ago•35 comments

WeatherNext 3

https://deepmind.google/science/weathernext/
244•matthieu_bl•4d ago•61 comments

John Margolies' photographs of roadside America

https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/john-margolies-photographs-of-roadside-america/
29•duck•3d ago•9 comments

Scientists observe Einstein's gravity in the quantum world

https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2026-08-28-scientists-observe-einsteins-gravity-in-the-quantum-world
157•mudil•3d ago•40 comments

Show HN: Stuxnet – A reconstructed source code of the infamous cyber-weapon

https://github.com/Sadpainy/Stuxnet
109•CMDDestory•4h ago•35 comments

216M Spy TVs – The LG Smart TV Problem [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6IFVTcM28KA
565•treve•1d ago•812 comments

Show HN: Jigsaw Haiku

https://jigsawhaiku.com/
65•windowshopping•3d ago•21 comments

Finding a bug in Dummit and Foote's Abstract Algebra

https://kallus.org/blog/dummit_and_foote.html
69•evakhoury•3d ago•32 comments

Colorlight 5A-75B: A dive into a popular low-cost ECP5 (FPGA) development board

https://blog.yosyshq.com/p/colorlight-part-1/
11•gregsadetsky•3d ago•4 comments

Show HN: Interactive Tree of Life

https://ptree.org/
64•Lucent•4d ago•21 comments

This Month in Ladybird – August 2026

https://ladybird.org/newsletter/2026-08-31/
179•exploraz•3d ago•47 comments

Caltech Mathathon – first hackathon ever devoted to research level mathematics

https://mathathonchallenge.com/index.html
236•astroanax•17h ago•84 comments

Icy Moons Are Ocean Worlds

https://mceglowski.substack.com/p/icy-moons-are-ocean-worlds
137•worldvoyageur•1d ago•13 comments

Catching Crumbs from the Table (2000)

https://www.nature.com/articles/35014679
13•stefanpie•1d ago•5 comments

Emacs Bedrock 2.0

https://lambdaland.org/posts/2026-09-06-bedrock-v2/
42•ashton314•6h ago•0 comments

Decoding the NEC V20 Microcode

https://martypc.blogspot.com/2026/09/decoding-nec-v20-microcode.html
127•mariuz•3d ago•8 comments

Simple Is Not Small

https://jyn.dev/simple-is-not-the-same-as-small/
216•zdw•4d ago•65 comments

Macbeth and His Problems

https://porticoquarterly.com/essay/macbeth-and-his-problems/
45•apophatic•6h ago•17 comments

Keep Our Servers Running

https://blog.archive.org/2026/09/01/keep-our-servers-running-your-recurring-donation-goes-3x-this...
961•sonicrocketman•23h ago•249 comments

Methods for Random Gradients (2024)

https://justinjay.wang/methods-for-random-gradients/
47•nickswalker•4d ago•5 comments

The Dataflow Model Revisited

https://www.vldb.org/pvldb/volumes/19/paper/The%20Dataflow%20Model%20Revisited
89•scott_s•1d ago•14 comments

bzip3

https://github.com/iczelia/bzip3
388•tosh•13h ago•110 comments

Live map of public transport in Belgium

https://openbaarvervoerbelgie.be/
188•coinfused•17h ago•77 comments

She Also Found It at the Movies

https://hedgehogreview.com/web-features/thr/posts/she-also-found-it-at-the-movies
27•prismatic•3d ago•8 comments

Whistle Synth Mac App

https://www.jefftk.com/p/whistle-synth-mac-app
70•luu•3d ago•16 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...

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/
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: