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What happens when an LLM never sees material beyond fifth grade?

https://littlelearner-ll.github.io/
78•porridgeraisin•1h ago•48 comments

Asus Bike Booster

https://www.asus.com/accessories/bike-booster/asus-oxiis/oxiis-intelligent-bike-booster/
363•wiradikusuma•4d ago•227 comments

Asynchronous I/O in DuckDB: Work, Thread, Work

https://duckdb.org/2026/07/31/asynchronous-io
146•pdet•5d ago•13 comments

Patterns and problems in emerging multi-agent systems

https://www.anthropic.com/research/multiagent-systems
76•maxutility•6h ago•28 comments

Semaglutide linked to lower predicted dementia risk

https://alz-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/dad2.70432
420•randycupertino•17h ago•295 comments

Software Engineering fundamentals matter more

https://rhonabwy.com/2026/08/15/software-engineering-fundamentals-matter-more-than-ever/
122•ingve•10h ago•61 comments

Cultivating a state of mind where new ideas are born (2023)

https://www.henrikkarlsson.xyz/p/good-ideas
165•felixbraun•12h ago•39 comments

Super El Niño Keeps Growing as New Forecasts Reach Record Territory Ahead Winter

https://www.severe-weather.eu/long-range-2/super-el-nino-growth-accelerating-to-record-strength-f...
233•dgellow•13h ago•121 comments

Guiding Ships with Moire Patterns

https://tinkerings.org/2018/03/28/guiding-ships-with-moire-patterns/
43•Eridanus2•7h ago•10 comments

Show HN: Mic Drop, a real-time multiplayer karaoke game

https://www.micdrop.gg/
55•johnsillings•8h ago•20 comments

At-home test for infected ticks could improve Lyme Disease diagnosis

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/the-first-at-home-test-for-infected-ticks-could-improve...
254•gmays•18h ago•92 comments

AI in drug discovery – what it is, where we stand and the path forward

https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/so-how-ai-drug-discovery-doing-really
136•AnodicElegy•13h ago•73 comments

I built a browser-native SysEx librarian for 80s/90s synthesizers

https://bipluk.com/
17•halfradaition•3d ago•11 comments

RISC-V: They Should Have Known Better

https://dmitry.gr/?r=06.%20Thoughts&proj=12.%20RV
302•dmitrygr•1d ago•359 comments

Numba in the Browser: Unlocking a New Scientific Python Stack in JupyterLite

https://notebook.link/blog/numba-in-the-browser/
38•xalfotis•4d ago•6 comments

A fortuitous decade as an indie software developer

https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/2026/8/3.html
82•frizlab•5d ago•9 comments

Abdominal fat predicts heart disease risk better than BMI

https://www.acc.org/about-acc/press-releases/2026/08/11/14/59/abdominal-fat-predicts-heart-diseas...
252•theanonymousone•11h ago•181 comments

Tracking down a Zsh history data loss bug

https://michael.stapelberg.ch/posts/2026-08-09-zsh-history-truncation-bug/
71•ingve•11h ago•25 comments

AI has access to a vastly larger working memory than the human brain

https://davidepiffer.com/p/ai-isnt-outthinking-mathematicians
488•rzk•14h ago•415 comments

A spectre is haunting Unicode

https://www.dampfkraft.com/ghost-characters.html
221•sensanaty•18h ago•80 comments

Tea5767-Radio-Tuner

https://github.com/turtushig22-blip/tea5767-radio-tuner
37•turtushig22•9h ago•2 comments

Zapping Rocks Unlocks Stimulated Geologic Hydrogen

https://spectrum.ieee.org/stimulated-geologic-hydrogen
17•adm4•6h ago•5 comments

Falstad Math and Physics Simulations

https://www.falstad.com/mathphysics.html
11•pykello•4h ago•1 comments

AI-Assisted GPU Porting of a 250k Line Legacy Weather Simulation Code

https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.13122
32•Jimmc414•10h ago•4 comments

Speaking for the Dead

https://longreads.com/2026/08/11/obituaries-new-york-times-sam-roberts/
7•NaOH•4d ago•4 comments

SugarTrack – an offline Android logbook for blood sugar (no account, no cloud)

https://sugartrack-beta.vercel.app/
44•hunzaboy•10h ago•18 comments

Program with Paint Brushes, Not Pencils

https://blog.pickcode.io/program-with-paint-brushes-not-pencils/
10•skadamat•4d ago•2 comments

Tess's Android Wayland Compositor

https://github.com/wmww/tawc
67•schmorptron•14h ago•11 comments

An image can overflow

https://master.dev/blog/something-nobody-told-you-about-the-image-element-it-can-overflow/
43•ibobev•4d ago•11 comments

Voltair (YC W26) Is Hiring a Test Flight Engineer

https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/voltair/jobs/sSOD2Ox-flight-test-engineer
1•wweissbluth•14h ago
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: