frontpage.
newsnewestaskshowjobs

Made with ♥ by @iamnishanth

Open Source @Github

fp.

The mysterious black fungus from Chernobyl that may eat radiation

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20251125-the-mysterious-black-fungus-from-chernobyl-that-appea...
72•bookmtn•1h ago•14 comments

Show HN: Glasses to detect smart-glasses that have cameras

https://github.com/NullPxl/banrays
308•nullpxl•7h ago•102 comments

A Tale of Four Fuzzers

https://tigerbeetle.com/blog/2025-11-28-tale-of-four-fuzzers/
24•jorangreef•1h ago•3 comments

Pocketbase – open-source realtime back end in 1 file

https://pocketbase.io/
399•modinfo•9h ago•126 comments

EU Council Approves New "Chat Control" Mandate Pushing Mass Surveillance

https://reclaimthenet.org/eu-council-approves-new-chat-control-mandate-pushing-mass-surveillance
346•fragebogen•3h ago•193 comments

Moss: a Rust Linux-compatible kernel in 26,000 lines of code

https://github.com/hexagonal-sun/moss
182•hexagonal-sun•6d ago•29 comments

A Repository with 44 Years of Unix Evolution

https://www.spinellis.gr/pubs/conf/2015-MSR-Unix-History/html/Spi15c.html
36•lioeters•4h ago•7 comments

A Remarkable Assertion from A16Z

https://nealstephenson.substack.com/p/a-remarkable-assertion-from-a16z
43•boplicity•1h ago•12 comments

How to make precise sheet metal parts (photochemical machining) [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bR9EN3kUlfg
45•surprisetalk•5d ago•2 comments

The three thousand year journey of colchicine

https://www.worksinprogress.news/p/the-three-thousand-year-journey-of
14•quadrin•1w ago•1 comments

Switzerland: Data Protection Officers Impose Broad Cloud Ban for Authorities

https://www.heise.de/en/news/Switzerland-Data-Protection-Officers-Impose-Broad-Cloud-Ban-for-Auth...
32•TechTechTech•1h ago•9 comments

Same-day upstream Linux support for Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5

https://www.qualcomm.com/developer/blog/2025/10/same-day-snapdragon-8-elite-gen-5-upstream-linux-...
431•mfilion•21h ago•205 comments

Vsora Jotunn-8 5nm European inference chip

https://vsora.com/products/jotunn-8/
143•rdg42•14h ago•42 comments

Open (Apache 2.0) TTS model for streaming conversational audio in realtime

https://github.com/nari-labs/dia2
21•SweetSoftPillow•4d ago•2 comments

How to use Linux vsock for fast VM communication

https://popovicu.com/posts/how-to-use-linux-vsock-for-fast-vm-communication/
51•mfrw•8h ago•11 comments

How Charles M Schulz created Charlie Brown and Snoopy (2024)

https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20241205-how-charles-m-schulz-created-charlie-brown-and-snoopy
150•1659447091•13h ago•64 comments

Beads – A memory upgrade for your coding agent

https://github.com/steveyegge/beads
70•latchkey•8h ago•36 comments

GitLab discovers widespread NPM supply chain attack

https://about.gitlab.com/blog/gitlab-discovers-widespread-npm-supply-chain-attack/
263•OuterVale•22h ago•146 comments

Implementing Bluetooth LE Audio and Auracast on Linux Systems

https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/blog/2025/11/24/implementing-bluetooth-le-audio-and-aurac...
88•losgehts•3d ago•3 comments

OS Malevich – how we made a system that embodies the idea of simplicity (2017)

https://www.ajax-systems.uz/blog/hub-os-malevich-story/
5•frxx•4d ago•0 comments

Africa's forests have switched from absorbing to emitting carbon

https://phys.org/news/2025-11-africa-forests-absorbing-emitting-carbon.html
30•pseudolus•2h ago•11 comments

A programmer-friendly I/O abstraction over io_uring and kqueue (2022)

https://tigerbeetle.com/blog/2022-11-23-a-friendly-abstraction-over-iouring-and-kqueue/
98•enz•15h ago•30 comments

Quake Engine Indicators

https://fabiensanglard.net/quake_indicators/index.html
278•liquid_x•4d ago•56 comments

Physicists drive antihydrogen breakthrough at CERN

https://phys.org/news/2025-11-physicists-antihydrogen-breakthrough-cern-technique.html
202•naves•5d ago•77 comments

SQLite as an Application File Format

https://sqlite.org/appfileformat.html
13•gjvc•5h ago•1 comments

Cats became our companions way later than you think

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cq8dvdp9gn7o
21•n1b0m•2h ago•16 comments

Shor's algorithm: the one quantum algo that ends RSA/ECC tomorrow

https://blog.ellipticc.com/posts/what-is-shors-algorithm-and-why-its-the-single-biggest-threat-to...
34•iliasabs•10h ago•21 comments

Migrating to Positron, a next-generation data science IDE for Python and R

https://posit.co/blog/positron-migration-guides
42•ionychal•9h ago•37 comments

Tell HN: Happy Thanksgiving

750•prodigycorp•1d ago•185 comments

Feedback doesn't scale

https://another.rodeo/feedback/
191•ohjeez•1d ago•73 comments
Open in hackernews

Elliptical Python Programming

https://susam.net/elliptical-python-programming.html
184•sebg•7mo ago

Comments

benob•7mo ago
TIL that in python, 1--2==3
seplox•7mo ago
It's not a python thing. 1-(-2), distribute the negative.
qsort•7mo 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•7mo 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•7mo 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•7mo ago
Also worth noting that `1 - -2` works and produces 3 in C because the space breaks the operator.
plus•7mo 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•7mo 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•7mo 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•7mo ago
Expanding on this a little, I will be replacing all occurrences of 2 with two blobs fighting, with shields:

    >>> 0^((...==...)--++--(...==...))^0
    2
rmah•7mo 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•7mo ago
And apparently string formatting which should have an ever growing number of ways to handle it. :shrug:
elijahbenizzy•7mo ago
Ok do this but for JavaScript
voidUpdate•7mo ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSFuck
mariocesar•7mo ago
If you're curious, the code in ellipsis results in executing:

    print('hello, world')
mturmon•7mo 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•7mo ago
I think we're really starting to over crowd pythons syntax and I'm not a fan.
noddleah•7mo ago
you're telling me you never program in python elliptically??
acbart•7mo ago
Pretty sure this would have been possible in Python 2.6. The Ellipsis object has been around for a very long time.
MadVikingGod•7mo 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•7mo ago
You can do this on JavaScript too.

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