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Claude Haiku 5.5

https://www.anthropic.com/claude-haiku-5-5
638•sfkgtbor•6h ago•321 comments

Margaret Hamilton has died

https://news.mit.edu/2026/margaret-hamilton-computing-pioneer-dies-1007
516•muglug•3h ago•58 comments

'Jonathan' is the oldest land animal on Earth

https://www.404media.co/oldest-living-land-animal-jonathan-the-tortoise/
30•gumby•4h ago•6 comments

GPT‑6 and Intelligent UI for everyone

https://openai.com/index/gpt-6-for-everyone/
469•joshuawright11•6h ago•244 comments

How did Rosalind Franklin miss the helix in her iconic DNA image? She didn't

https://www.science.org/content/article/how-did-rosalind-franklin-miss-helix-her-iconic-dna-image...
42•pavel_lishin•2d ago•31 comments

Show HN: Bigwords.page – Turn any screen into a sign. The URL is the app

https://bigwords.page/
332•SpeakingOfBrad•8h ago•106 comments

Docker Agent

https://github.com/docker/docker-agent
168•saikatsg•6h ago•80 comments

In Vienna and Beijing, the first (thorium) nuclear clocks begin to tick

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/07/science/first-nuclear-clocks-thorium-229.html
14•gumby•6h ago•1 comments

Push ifs up and fors down: The idiom, its algebra, and its limits

https://debasishg.github.io/blog/push-ifs-up-fors-down/
96•speckx•5h ago•48 comments

Shipping JPEG XL in Chrome

https://developer.chrome.com/blog/jpeg-xl-in-chrome
474•AshleysBrain•13h ago•304 comments

If somebody tries to hot-patch an already-hot-patched function

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20261005-00/?p=112755/
34•ibobev•1d ago•9 comments

A minimal kernel in Swift, running in QEMU

https://carette.xyz/posts/minimal_swift_kernel_on_qemu/
6•surprisetalk•1d ago•1 comments

Animated ASCII Art for Web Pages

https://ascii.rest/
282•turrini•9h ago•57 comments

How machines learned precision

https://glinscott.github.io/how-machines-learned-precision/
96•glinscott•1d ago•45 comments

Navier–Stokes Lost in Translation

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.08144
239•nill0•9h ago•150 comments

A new write and space optimized storage engine for MySQL is here

https://tidesdb.com/articles/tidesdb-now-available-for-mysql/
22•alexpadula•2d ago•2 comments

A font recreated from photographs of classic Commodore 64 keycaps

https://github.com/szabadkai/c64-keyboard-font/
377•sohkamyung•15h ago•62 comments

Brownian Motion

https://gregorygundersen.com/blog/2026/04/22/brownian-motion/
23•signa11•1d ago•0 comments

Meta and Microsoft take steps to reduce employee usage of Claude AI

https://www.rswebsols.com/news/meta-and-microsoft-take-steps-to-reduce-employee-usage-of-claude-ai/
256•speckx•5h ago•251 comments

Sharing AI progress in mathematics

https://openai.com/index/sharing-ai-progress-in-mathematics/
1222•OfficialTurkey•1d ago•1399 comments

Wood Tape (2004)

http://gamesbyemail.com/WoodTape/Default.htm
151•NaOH•1d ago•17 comments

House with 15m underground tunnels for sale for 300k

https://www.readingchronicle.co.uk/news/26612080.house-15m-underground-tunnels-sale-300k/
152•librasteve•11h ago•155 comments

Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2026 to Henri B. Kagan and Kenso Soai

https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/chemistry/2026/press-release/
289•sasvari•14h ago•54 comments

Visa, Mastercard, major banks facing new litigation over 'anticompetitive' fees

https://www.classaction.org/news/visa-mastercard-major-banks-facing-new-litigation-over-anticompe...
470•DeepLogin•9h ago•331 comments

Google Playground: Create and play custom games

https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/ai/playground-experimental-gaming-platform/
117•acossta•12h ago•193 comments

SynthID Detector

https://synthid.com/
87•ilreb•10h ago•77 comments

Show HN: Agent.reviews – Where AI agents read and write reviews on tools

https://agent.reviews/
35•screm•7h ago•35 comments

Anti-patterns in software blogging

https://refactoringenglish.com/blog/anti-patterns-software-blogging/
199•ilreb•11h ago•110 comments

AI-assisted proof of optimal packing for 11 squares

https://github.com/Queuingtheorydotcom/11SquaresFormalized
108•bluepeter•10h ago•49 comments

3D-printing platform rapidly produces complex electric machines

https://news.mit.edu/2026/3d-printing-platform-rapidly-produces-complex-electric-machines-0218
58•rbanffy•2d ago•27 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...

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/
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: