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GLM-Legal

https://z.ai/blog/glm-legal
364•ilreb•5h ago•201 comments

AI Is a Tool. Using It Well Takes Skill.

https://yyhh.org/blog/2026/10/ai-is-a-tool/
15•layer8•15m ago•3 comments

A Modern Web App in C

https://prophitt.me/writing/a-modern-web-app-in-c
313•prophittcorey•5h ago•130 comments

Writing a Demoscene Intro for the ZX Spectrum

https://www.markround.com/blog/2026/zx-spectrum-intro
40•zdw•2h ago•3 comments

Hackers activate automatic defrosting in supermarket fridges across Europe

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/cyber-security/unprecedented-cyberattack-cripples-supe...
313•Zeekaas•9h ago•539 comments

Codex CLI installs a persistent, self-updating background daemon by default

https://github.com/openai/codex/issues/48195
366•whimblepop•3h ago•204 comments

Phreak.ing – Internet Phone Switch

https://phreak.ing/
7•rickcarlino•16m ago•0 comments

Launch HN: Agent37 (YC F26) – Low-cost agent sandboxes for running agents

71•vishnukool•5h ago•50 comments

Turn a WiFi 7 Router into a 320Msps Software Defined Radio Receiver

https://github.com/h0m3us3r/w1700k-sdr
209•djfergus•9h ago•54 comments

Citroen revives the 2CV for an electric age

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c620r33plgppo
228•scrlk•9h ago•262 comments

Muse Wonder

https://research.meta.ai/blog/muse-wonder
449•meetpateltech•5h ago•239 comments

The Making Of Super Mario 64 – full Giles Goddard interview (2001)

https://pixelatron.com/blog/the-making-of-super-mario-64-full-giles-goddard-interview-ngc/
201•gregsadetsky•2d ago•74 comments

AI coding agents generate more code, but not more software

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/10/ai-coding-agents-generate-more-code-but-not-more-software/
261•gumby•4h ago•214 comments

Secret of Orange Cats Revealed After 60-Year Search

https://www.sciencealert.com/secret-of-orange-cats-finally-revealed-after-60-year-search
208•bookofjoe•1d ago•168 comments

'AI' Is Not a Tool by Rich Hickey

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/ai-tool-rich-hickey-kjl8e
105•svieira•3h ago•46 comments

Kevin Kelly's 2016 AI Predictions, 10 Years Later

https://taylor.town/kk-ai-2026
103•surprisetalk•6h ago•26 comments

Thinking will become a hobby

https://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20261008/?li261008
172•pranitha_m•5h ago•222 comments

America's Longest Highway Tunnel (2025)

https://www.thetravel.com/americas-longest-highway-tunnel-not-for-faint-of-heart/
3•NaOH•1d ago•1 comments

In Praise of John Cale, the Superior Velvet

https://thequietus.com/subscriber-area/low-culture-essay/john-cale-low-culture/
3•sebmellen•1h ago•0 comments

Fingerprints are the new cookies

https://royfish.dev/fingerprints-are-the-new-cookies
694•royfish•23h ago•333 comments

Show HN: PS2 games statically recompiled to WebAssembly

https://github.com/snuri00/ps2-web-recomp
246•deadxwarrior•15h ago•132 comments

Epic Games tells employees to use AI to get Disney game done

https://www.avclub.com/epic-games-disney-ai-delay
50•pavel_lishin•1h ago•24 comments

Publishers Killed the Paperback, Then Blamed Readers

https://jacobin.com/2026/10/books-publishing-reading-mass-market-paperback
77•PaulHoule•3h ago•57 comments

Solar panels that plug into your wall

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/balcony-plug-in-solar-panels-renewable-energy
66•speckx•7h ago•64 comments

My Reddit AMA on the Law of Web Scraping

https://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2026/10/my-reddit-ama-on-the-law-of-web-scraping.htm
59•speckx•3h ago•8 comments

Making big downloads resumable in Firefox

https://lunarwatcher.codeberg.page/til/firefox/resumable-big-downloads.html
8•speckx•2h ago•0 comments

OpenFatigue™ – Open is the new closed

https://openfatigue.ai/
169•ajcp•2h ago•33 comments

Type-safe HTML templating in Zig

https://lalinsky.com/2026/10/11/type-safe-html-templating-in-zig.html
225•lukaslalinsky•16h ago•80 comments

QGIS enacts moratorium on AI contributions

https://github.com/qgis/QGIS-Enhancement-Proposals/pull/387
353•bwnkl•10h ago•387 comments

No portable way to detect string-to-float conversion errors in standard C

https://sebsite.pw/w/20261009-strtod.html
57•signa11•2d ago•77 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: