frontpage.
newsnewestaskshowjobs

Made with ♥ by @iamnishanth

Open Source @Github

fp.

Game Devs Explain the Tricks Involved with Letting You Pause a Game

https://kotaku.com/video-game-devs-explain-how-pausing-works-and-sometimes-it-gets-weird-2000686339
67•speckx•2d ago•37 comments

NIST scientists create 'any wavelength' lasers

https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2026/04/any-color-you-nist-scientists-create-any-wavelength...
295•rbanffy•11h ago•133 comments

What are skiplists good for?

https://antithesis.com/blog/2026/skiptrees/
59•mfiguiere•1d ago•13 comments

Anonymous request-token comparisons from Opus 4.6 and Opus 4.7

https://tokens.billchambers.me/leaderboard
512•anabranch•16h ago•501 comments

College instructor turns to typewriters to curb AI-written work

https://sentinelcolorado.com/uncategorized/a-college-instructor-turns-to-typewriters-to-curb-ai-w...
263•gnabgib•13h ago•253 comments

The electromechanical angle computer inside the B-52 bomber's star tracker

https://www.righto.com/2026/04/B-52-star-tracker-angle-computer.html
324•NelsonMinar•16h ago•89 comments

SI Units for Request Rate (2024)

https://entropicthoughts.com/si-units-for-request-rate
61•fanf2•2d ago•29 comments

Updating Gun Rocket through 10 years of Unity Engine

https://jackpritz.com/blog/updating-gun-rocket-through-10-years-of-unity-engine
74•tyleo•2d ago•28 comments

Keep Pushing: We Get 10 More Days to Reform Section 702

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/04/keep-pushing-we-get-10-more-days-reform-section-702
40•nobody9999•1h ago•4 comments

Why Japan has such good railways

https://worksinprogress.co/issue/why-japan-has-such-good-railways/
396•RickJWagner•20h ago•362 comments

The RAM shortage could last years

https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/914672/the-ram-shortage-could-last-years
20•omer_k•1h ago•12 comments

The world in which IPv6 was a good design

https://apenwarr.ca/log/20170810
34•signa11•5h ago•7 comments

State of Kdenlive

https://kdenlive.org/news/2026/state-2026/
395•f_r_d•20h ago•122 comments

Modern Common Lisp with FSet

https://fset.common-lisp.dev/Modern-CL/Top_html/index.html
145•larve•3d ago•18 comments

Migrating from DigitalOcean to Hetzner

https://isayeter.com/posts/digitalocean-to-hetzner-migration/
766•yusufusta•19h ago•385 comments

Optimizing Ruby Path Methods

https://byroot.github.io/ruby/performance/2026/04/18/faster-paths.html
95•weaksauce•11h ago•35 comments

It's cool to care (2025)

https://alexwlchan.net/2025/cool-to-care/
7•surprisetalk•3d ago•3 comments

Metatextual Literacy

https://www.jenn.site/metatextual-literacy/
24•dado3212•3d ago•3 comments

Dizzying Spiral Staircase with Single Guardrail Once Led to Top of Eiffel Tower

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/a-dizzying-spiral-staircase-with-a-single-guardrail-onc...
24•bookofjoe•2d ago•9 comments

Zero-Copy GPU Inference from WebAssembly on Apple Silicon

https://abacusnoir.com/2026/04/18/zero-copy-gpu-inference-from-webassembly-on-apple-silicon/
72•agambrahma•9h ago•27 comments

Thoughts and feelings around Claude Design

https://samhenri.gold/blog/20260418-claude-design/
299•cdrnsf•13h ago•193 comments

Binary Dependencies: Identifying the Hidden Packages We All Depend On

https://vlad.website/binary-dependencies-identifying-the-hidden-packages-we-all-depend-on/
8•PaulHoule•2d ago•0 comments

Sumida Aquarium Posts 2026 Penguin Relationship Chart, with Drama and Breakups

https://www.sumida-aquarium.com/special/sokanzu/en/2026/
208•Lwrless•3d ago•10 comments

Bypassing the kernel for 56ns cross-language IPC

https://github.com/riyaneel/Tachyon/tree/main/docs/adr
39•riyaneel•2d ago•17 comments

My first impressions on ROCm and Strix Halo

https://blog.marcoinacio.com/posts/my-first-impressions-rocm-strix-halo/
39•random_•10h ago•33 comments

Show HN: MDV – a Markdown superset for docs, dashboards, and slides with data

https://github.com/drasimwagan/mdv
111•drasim•17h ago•42 comments

NASA Shuts Off Instrument on Voyager 1 to Keep Spacecraft Operating

https://science.nasa.gov/blogs/voyager/2026/04/17/nasa-shuts-off-instrument-on-voyager-1-to-keep-...
165•sohkamyung•8h ago•77 comments

Scientists discover “cleaner ants” that groom giant ants in Arizona desert

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/04/260414075641.htm
98•t-3•3d ago•37 comments

Understanding the FFT Algorithm (2013)

https://jakevdp.github.io/blog/2013/08/28/understanding-the-fft/
89•peter_d_sherman•4d ago•9 comments

Fuzix OS

https://www.fuzix.org/
100•DeathArrow•17h ago•25 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/