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ASCII characters are not pixels: a deep dive into ASCII rendering

https://alexharri.com/blog/ascii-rendering
391•alexharri•5h ago•50 comments

We Put Claude Code in Rollercoaster Tycoon

https://labs.ramp.com/rct
74•iamwil•5d ago•20 comments

The 600-year-old origins of the word 'hello'

https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20260113-hello-hiya-aloha-what-our-greetings-reveal
56•1659447091•5h ago•28 comments

ClickHouse acquires Langfuse

https://langfuse.com/blog/joining-clickhouse
145•tin7in•7h ago•64 comments

The Dilbert Afterlife

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-dilbert-afterlife
248•rendall•1d ago•155 comments

Map To Poster – Create Art of your favourite city

https://github.com/originalankur/maptoposter
120•originalankur•6h ago•41 comments

East Germany balloon escape

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Germany_balloon_escape
608•robertvc•23h ago•254 comments

Show HN: Streaming gigabyte medical images from S3 without downloading them

https://github.com/PABannier/WSIStreamer
92•el_pa_b•8h ago•27 comments

The recurring dream of replacing developers

https://www.caimito.net/en/blog/2025/12/07/the-recurring-dream-of-replacing-developers.html
68•glimshe•2h ago•54 comments

Italy investigates Activision Blizzard for pushing in-game purchases

https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/16/italy-investigates-activision-blizzard-for-pushing-in-game-purc...
59•7777777phil•3h ago•9 comments

Cloudflare acquires Astro

https://astro.build/blog/joining-cloudflare/
893•todotask2•1d ago•373 comments

Counterfactual evaluation for recommendation systems

https://eugeneyan.com/writing/counterfactual-evaluation/
5•kurinikku•11h ago•0 comments

US electricity demand surged in 2025 – solar handled 61% of it

https://electrek.co/2026/01/16/us-electricity-demand-surged-in-2025-solar-handled-61-percent/
224•doener•6h ago•201 comments

The 'untouchable hacker god' behind Finland's biggest crime

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jan/17/vastaamo-hack-finland-therapy-notes
94•c420•9h ago•89 comments

Cursor's latest “browser experiment” implied success without evidence

https://embedding-shapes.github.io/cursor-implied-success-without-evidence/
644•embedding-shape•1d ago•281 comments

Escaping the trap of US tech dependence

https://disconnect.blog/escaping-the-trap-of-us-tech-dependence/
13•laurex•44m ago•2 comments

Sergei Fedorov's Escape from Soviet Union Helped Save Red Wings (2020)

https://www.freep.com/story/sports/nhl/red-wings/2026/01/12/sergei-fedorov-detroit-red-wings-russ...
26•rmason•4d ago•1 comments

High-Level Is the Goal

https://bvisness.me/high-level/
201•tobr•2d ago•94 comments

Apples, Trees, and Quasimodes

https://systemstack.dev/2025/09/humane-computing/
7•entaloneralie•14m ago•1 comments

Show HN: I built a tool to assist AI agents to know when a PR is good to go

https://dsifry.github.io/goodtogo/
3•dsifry•7h ago•2 comments

The Resonant Computing Manifesto

https://resonantcomputing.org/
5•sinak•15m ago•0 comments

16 Best Practices for Reducing Dependabot Noise

https://nesbitt.io/2026/01/10/16-best-practices-for-reducing-dependabot-noise.html
7•zdw•5d ago•1 comments

PCs refuse to shut down after Microsoft patch

https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/16/patch_tuesday_secure_launch_bug_no_shutdown/
135•smurda•6h ago•146 comments

6-Day and IP Address Certificates Are Generally Available

https://letsencrypt.org/2026/01/15/6day-and-ip-general-availability
445•jaas•1d ago•250 comments

Architecture for Disposable Systems

https://tuananh.net/2026/01/15/architecture-for-disposable-systems/
39•tuananh•5h ago•22 comments

FLUX.2 [Klein]: Towards Interactive Visual Intelligence

https://bfl.ai/blog/flux2-klein-towards-interactive-visual-intelligence
186•GaggiX•17h ago•53 comments

An explanation of cheating in Doom2 Deathmatch (1999)

https://www.doom2.net/doom2/cheating.html
3•Lammy•6h ago•1 comments

The Risks of AI in Schools Outweigh the Benefits, Report Says

https://www.npr.org/2026/01/14/nx-s1-5674741/ai-schools-education
65•backpackerBMW•4h ago•33 comments

Lies, Damned Lies and Proofs: Formal Methods Are Not Slopless

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rhAPh3YzhPoBNpgHg/lies-damned-lies-and-proofs-formal-methods-are-...
75•OgsyedIE•3d ago•41 comments

LLM Structured Outputs Handbook

https://nanonets.com/cookbooks/structured-llm-outputs
322•vitaelabitur•2d ago•51 comments
Open in hackernews

Elliptical Python Programming

https://susam.net/elliptical-python-programming.html
184•sebg•9mo ago

Comments

benob•9mo ago
TIL that in python, 1--2==3
seplox•9mo ago
It's not a python thing. 1-(-2), distribute the negative.
qsort•9mo 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•9mo 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•9mo 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•9mo ago
Also worth noting that `1 - -2` works and produces 3 in C because the space breaks the operator.
plus•9mo 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•9mo 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•9mo 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•9mo ago
Expanding on this a little, I will be replacing all occurrences of 2 with two blobs fighting, with shields:

    >>> 0^((...==...)--++--(...==...))^0
    2
rmah•9mo 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•9mo ago
And apparently string formatting which should have an ever growing number of ways to handle it. :shrug:
elijahbenizzy•9mo ago
Ok do this but for JavaScript
voidUpdate•9mo ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSFuck
mariocesar•9mo ago
If you're curious, the code in ellipsis results in executing:

    print('hello, world')
mturmon•9mo 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•9mo ago
I think we're really starting to over crowd pythons syntax and I'm not a fan.
noddleah•9mo ago
you're telling me you never program in python elliptically??
acbart•9mo ago
Pretty sure this would have been possible in Python 2.6. The Ellipsis object has been around for a very long time.
MadVikingGod•9mo 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•9mo ago
You can do this on JavaScript too.

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