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Show HN: SQL-tap – Real-time SQL traffic viewer for PostgreSQL and MySQL

https://github.com/mickamy/sql-tap
34•mickamy•2h ago•3 comments

Understanding the Go Compiler: The Linker

https://internals-for-interns.com/posts/the-go-linker/
19•valyala•5d ago•0 comments

NPMX – a fast, modern browser for the NPM registry

https://npmx.dev
66•slymax•4h ago•36 comments

Show HN: Data Engineering Book – An open source, community-driven guide

https://github.com/datascale-ai/data_engineering_book/blob/main/README_en.md
129•xx123122•8h ago•11 comments

GPT-5.2 derives a new result in theoretical physics

https://openai.com/index/new-result-theoretical-physics/
442•davidbarker•11h ago•300 comments

Common Lisp Screenshots: today's CL applications in action

http://www.lisp-screenshots.org
79•_emacsomancer_•2d ago•20 comments

Building a TUI is easy now

https://hatchet.run/blog/tuis-are-easy-now
189•abelanger•12h ago•127 comments

Adventures in Neural Rendering

https://interplayoflight.wordpress.com/2026/02/10/adventures-in-neural-rendering/
20•ingve•3d ago•1 comments

Font Rendering from First Principles

https://mccloskeybr.com/articles/font_rendering.html
128•krapp•6d ago•17 comments

Gradient.horse

https://gradient.horse
192•microflash•4d ago•43 comments

Show HN: I spent 3 years reverse-engineering a 40 yo stock market sim from 1986

https://www.wallstreetraider.com/story.html
110•benstopics•4d ago•30 comments

The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

https://www.politico.eu/article/tiktok-meta-facebook-instagram-brussels-kill-infinite-scrolling/
471•danso•9h ago•481 comments

Backblaze Drive Stats for 2025

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-2025/
26•Brajeshwar•1h ago•3 comments

gRPC: From service definition to wire format

https://kreya.app/blog/grpc-deep-dive/
112•latonz•4d ago•15 comments

Monosketch

https://monosketch.io/
749•penguin_booze•18h ago•131 comments

OpenAI has deleted the word 'safely' from its mission

https://theconversation.com/openai-has-deleted-the-word-safely-from-its-mission-and-its-new-struc...
459•DamnInteresting•8h ago•238 comments

I'm not worried about AI job loss

https://davidoks.blog/p/why-im-not-worried-about-ai-job-loss
228•ezekg•11h ago•382 comments

Marginal Revolution

https://sebastiangaliani.substack.com/p/marginal-revolution
3•jandrewrogers•3d ago•0 comments

WolfSSL sucks too, so now what?

https://blog.feld.me/posts/2026/02/wolfssl-sucks-too/
101•thomasjb•20h ago•78 comments

CSS-Doodle

https://css-doodle.com/
147•dsego•22h ago•16 comments

How did the Maya survive?

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2026/feb/12/apocalypse-no-how-almost-everything-we-thought-we-kn...
120•speckx•15h ago•96 comments

Advanced Aerial Robotics Made Simple

https://www.drehmflight.com
118•jacquesm•5d ago•10 comments

The wonder of modern drywall

https://www.worksinprogress.news/p/the-wonder-of-modern-drywall
98•jger15•1d ago•153 comments

Faster Than Dijkstra?

https://systemsapproach.org/2026/02/09/faster-than-dijkstra/
118•drbruced•4d ago•70 comments

What dating apps are optimizing. Hint: It isn't love

https://phys.org/news/2026-02-dating-apps-optimizing-hint-isnt.html
85•i7l•5h ago•49 comments

Ask HN: Are there examples of 3D printing data onto physical surfaces?

5•catapart•9h ago•2 comments

Show HN: Skill that lets Claude Code/Codex spin up VMs and GPUs

https://cloudrouter.dev/
115•austinwang115•11h ago•31 comments

Implementing Auto Tiling with Just 5 Tiles

https://www.kyledunbar.dev/2026/02/05/Implementing-auto-tiling-with-just-5-tiles.html
89•todsacerdoti•6d ago•16 comments

Green’s Dictionary of Slang - Five hundred years of the vulgar tongue

https://greensdictofslang.com/
98•mxfh•6d ago•15 comments

Fix the iOS keyboard before the timer hits zero or I'm switching back to Android

https://ios-countdown.win/
1379•ozzyphantom•16h ago•687 comments
Open in hackernews

Elliptical Python Programming

https://susam.net/elliptical-python-programming.html
184•sebg•10mo ago

Comments

benob•10mo ago
TIL that in python, 1--2==3
seplox•10mo ago
It's not a python thing. 1-(-2), distribute the negative.
qsort•10mo 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•10mo 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•10mo 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•10mo ago
Also worth noting that `1 - -2` works and produces 3 in C because the space breaks the operator.
plus•10mo 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•10mo 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•10mo 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•10mo ago
Expanding on this a little, I will be replacing all occurrences of 2 with two blobs fighting, with shields:

    >>> 0^((...==...)--++--(...==...))^0
    2
rmah•10mo 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•10mo ago
And apparently string formatting which should have an ever growing number of ways to handle it. :shrug:
elijahbenizzy•10mo ago
Ok do this but for JavaScript
voidUpdate•10mo ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSFuck
mariocesar•10mo ago
If you're curious, the code in ellipsis results in executing:

    print('hello, world')
mturmon•10mo 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•10mo ago
I think we're really starting to over crowd pythons syntax and I'm not a fan.
noddleah•10mo ago
you're telling me you never program in python elliptically??
acbart•10mo ago
Pretty sure this would have been possible in Python 2.6. The Ellipsis object has been around for a very long time.
MadVikingGod•10mo 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•10mo ago
You can do this on JavaScript too.

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