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Publish (On Your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere

https://indieweb.org/POSSE#
48•47thpresident•46m ago•6 comments

4th Edition Unix in the Browser

https://unixv4.dev/
42•pjmlp•1h ago•15 comments

Ask HN: Who is hiring? (January 2026)

193•whoishiring•4h ago•96 comments

Clicks Communicator

https://www.clicksphone.com/en/communicator
157•microflash•3h ago•111 comments

TinyTinyTPU: 2×2 systolic-array TPU-style matrix-multiply unit deployed on FPGA

https://github.com/Alanma23/tinytinyTPU-co
27•Xenograph•1h ago•6 comments

FracturedJson

https://github.com/j-brooke/FracturedJson/wiki
429•PretzelFisch•7h ago•111 comments

IPv6 just turned 30 and still hasn't taken over the world

https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/31/ipv6_at_30/
113•Brajeshwar•5h ago•170 comments

10 years of personal finances in plain text files

https://sgoel.dev/posts/10-years-of-personal-finances-in-plain-text-files/
359•wrxd•9h ago•149 comments

What you need to know before touching a video file

https://gist.github.com/arch1t3cht/b5b9552633567fa7658deee5aec60453/
205•qbow883•6d ago•133 comments

Punkt. Unveils MC03 Smartphone

https://www.punkt.ch/blogs/news/punkt-unveils-mc03
73•ChrisArchitect•4h ago•71 comments

Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (January 2026)

62•whoishiring•4h ago•105 comments

Standard Ebooks: Public Domain Day 2026 in Literature

https://standardebooks.org/blog/public-domain-day-2026
300•WithinReason•11h ago•45 comments

Accounting for Computer Scientists (2011)

https://martin.kleppmann.com/2011/03/07/accounting-for-computer-scientists.html
18•tosh•2h ago•0 comments

Assorted less(1) tips

https://blog.thechases.com/posts/assorted-less-tips/
129•todsacerdoti•8h ago•29 comments

Fighting Fire with Fire: Scalable Oral Exams

https://www.behind-the-enemy-lines.com/2025/12/fighting-fire-with-fire-scalable-oral.html
54•sethbannon•2h ago•56 comments

39th Chaos Communication Congress Videos

https://media.ccc.de/b/congress/2025
313•Jommi•7h ago•48 comments

C –> Java != Java –> LLM

http://www.observationalhazard.com/2025/12/c-java-java-llm.html
16•WoodenChair•5d ago•11 comments

Miri: Practical Undefined Behavior Detection for Rust [pdf]

https://research.ralfj.de/papers/2026-popl-miri.pdf
47•ingve•5d ago•10 comments

The rsync algorithm (1996) [pdf]

https://www.andrew.cmu.edu/course/15-749/READINGS/required/cas/tridgell96.pdf
22•vortex_ape•3h ago•1 comments

HPV vaccination reduces oncogenic HPV16/18 prevalence from 16% to <1% in Denmark

https://www.eurosurveillance.org/content/10.2807/1560-7917.ES.2025.30.27.2400820
428•stared•10h ago•221 comments

Why users cannot create Issues directly

https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/issues/3558
686•xpe•19h ago•246 comments

Happy Public Domain Day 2026

https://publicdomainreview.org/blog/2026/01/public-domain-day-2026/
407•apetresc•18h ago•83 comments

ThingsBoard: Open-Source IoT Platform

https://github.com/thingsboard/thingsboard
36•pretext•5d ago•5 comments

Parental controls aren't for parents

https://beasthacker.com/til/parental-controls-arent-for-parents.html
259•beasthacker•6h ago•256 comments

Grok Can't Apologize. So Why Do Headlines Keep Saying It Did?

https://www.readtpa.com/p/grok-cant-apologize-grok-isnt-sentient
28•afavour•1h ago•6 comments

One Number I Trust: Plain-Text Accounting for a Multi-Currency Household

https://lalitm.com/post/one-number-i-trust/
104•ayi•10h ago•65 comments

A small collection of text-only websites

https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2025/12/a-small-collection-of-text-only-websites/
89•danielfalbo•9h ago•39 comments

A website to destroy all websites

https://henry.codes/writing/a-website-to-destroy-all-websites/
718•g0xA52A2A•23h ago•347 comments

Matz 2/2: The trajectory of Ruby's growth, Open-Source Software today etc.

https://en.kaigaiiju.ch/episodes/matz2
97•kibitan•1w ago•50 comments

Going immutable on macOS, using Nix-Darwin

https://carette.xyz/posts/going_immutable_macos/
102•weird_trousers•11h ago•66 comments
Open in hackernews

Elliptical Python Programming

https://susam.net/elliptical-python-programming.html
184•sebg•8mo ago

Comments

benob•8mo ago
TIL that in python, 1--2==3
seplox•8mo ago
It's not a python thing. 1-(-2), distribute the negative.
qsort•8mo 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•8mo 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•8mo 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•8mo ago
Also worth noting that `1 - -2` works and produces 3 in C because the space breaks the operator.
plus•8mo 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•8mo 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•8mo 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•8mo ago
Expanding on this a little, I will be replacing all occurrences of 2 with two blobs fighting, with shields:

    >>> 0^((...==...)--++--(...==...))^0
    2
rmah•8mo 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•8mo ago
And apparently string formatting which should have an ever growing number of ways to handle it. :shrug:
elijahbenizzy•8mo ago
Ok do this but for JavaScript
voidUpdate•8mo ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSFuck
mariocesar•8mo ago
If you're curious, the code in ellipsis results in executing:

    print('hello, world')
mturmon•8mo 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•8mo ago
I think we're really starting to over crowd pythons syntax and I'm not a fan.
noddleah•8mo ago
you're telling me you never program in python elliptically??
acbart•8mo ago
Pretty sure this would have been possible in Python 2.6. The Ellipsis object has been around for a very long time.
MadVikingGod•8mo 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•8mo ago
You can do this on JavaScript too.

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