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Anthropic Outage for Opus 4.5 and Sonnet 4/4.5 across all services

https://status.claude.com/incidents/9g6qpr72ttbr
168•pablo24602•2h ago•91 comments

2002: Last.fm and Audioscrobbler Herald the Social Web

https://cybercultural.com/p/lastfm-audioscrobbler-2002/
114•cdrnsf•2h ago•57 comments

JSDoc is TypeScript

https://culi.bearblog.dev/jsdoc-is-typescript/
78•culi•4h ago•103 comments

Hashcards: A plain-text spaced repetition system

https://borretti.me/article/hashcards-plain-text-spaced-repetition
218•thomascountz•7h ago•87 comments

History of Declarative Programming

https://shenlanguage.org/TBoS/tbos_15.html
7•measurablefunc•1h ago•1 comments

Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (December 2025)

118•david927•7h ago•416 comments

Claude CLI deleted my home directory Wiped my whole Mac

https://old.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1pgxckk/claude_cli_deleted_my_entire_home_directory_wi...
45•tamnd•34m ago•26 comments

In the Beginning was the Command Line (1999)

https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs81n/command.txt
73•wseqyrku•6d ago•30 comments

Developing a food-safe finish for my wooden spoons

https://alinpanaitiu.com/blog/developing-hardwax-oil/
124•alin23•4d ago•67 comments

Interview with Kent Overstreet (Bcachefs) [audio]

https://linuxunplugged.com/644
16•teekert•3d ago•10 comments

The Typeframe PX-88 Portable Computing System

https://www.typeframe.net/
84•birdculture•6h ago•21 comments

Advent of Swift

https://leahneukirchen.org/blog/archive/2025/12/advent-of-swift.html
40•chmaynard•3h ago•7 comments

AI and the ironies of automation – Part 2

https://www.ufried.com/blog/ironies_of_ai_2/
198•BinaryIgor•10h ago•84 comments

Shai-Hulud compromised a dev machine and raided GitHub org access: a post-mortem

https://trigger.dev/blog/shai-hulud-postmortem
172•nkko•13h ago•106 comments

GraphQL: The enterprise honeymoon is over

https://johnjames.blog/posts/graphql-the-enterprise-honeymoon-is-over
157•johnjames4214•6h ago•138 comments

Price of a bot army revealed across online platforms

https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/price-bot-army-global-index
70•teleforce•7h ago•18 comments

Checkers Arcade

https://blog.fogus.me/games/checkers-arcade.html
10•fogus•2d ago•1 comments

GNU recutils: Plain text database

https://www.gnu.org/software/recutils/
94•polyrand•4h ago•29 comments

Linux Sandboxes and Fil-C

https://fil-c.org/seccomp
331•pizlonator•1d ago•131 comments

Standalone Meshtastic Command Center – One HTML File Offline

https://github.com/Jordan-Townsend/Standalone
42•Subtextofficial•5d ago•10 comments

Baumol's Cost Disease

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect
68•drra•11h ago•76 comments

Illuminating the processor core with LLVM-mca

https://abseil.io/fast/99
54•ckennelly•8h ago•5 comments

From sci-fi to reality: Researchers realise quantum teleportation using tech

https://cordis.europa.eu/article/id/462587-from-sci-fi-to-reality-researchers-realise-quantum-tel...
11•donutloop•1h ago•4 comments

Compiler Engineering in Practice

https://chisophugis.github.io/2025/12/08/compiler-engineering-in-practice-part-1-what-is-a-compil...
99•dhruv3006•16h ago•18 comments

Efficient Basic Coding for the ZX Spectrum (2020)

https://blog.jafma.net/2020/02/24/efficient-basic-coding-for-the-zx-spectrum/
48•rcarmo•11h ago•11 comments

Do dyslexia fonts work? (2022)

https://www.edutopia.org/article/do-dyslexia-fonts-actually-work/
45•CharlesW•4h ago•41 comments

Ask HN: Is starting a personal blog still worth it in the age of AI?

6•nazarh•55m ago•5 comments

iOS 26.2 fixes 20 security vulnerabilities, 2 actively exploited

https://www.macrumors.com/2025/12/12/ios-26-2-security-vulnerabilities/
125•akyuu•7h ago•112 comments

I fed 24 years of my blog posts to a Markov model

https://susam.net/fed-24-years-of-posts-to-markov-model.html
286•zdw•1d ago•112 comments

Getting into Public Speaking

https://james.brooks.page/blog/getting-into-public-speaking
100•jbrooksuk•4d ago•35 comments
Open in hackernews

Elliptical Python Programming

https://susam.net/elliptical-python-programming.html
184•sebg•8mo ago

Comments

benob•8mo ago
TIL that in python, 1--2==3
seplox•8mo ago
It's not a python thing. 1-(-2), distribute the negative.
qsort•8mo 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•8mo 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•8mo 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•8mo ago
Also worth noting that `1 - -2` works and produces 3 in C because the space breaks the operator.
plus•8mo 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•8mo 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•8mo 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•8mo ago
Expanding on this a little, I will be replacing all occurrences of 2 with two blobs fighting, with shields:

    >>> 0^((...==...)--++--(...==...))^0
    2
rmah•8mo 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•8mo ago
And apparently string formatting which should have an ever growing number of ways to handle it. :shrug:
elijahbenizzy•8mo ago
Ok do this but for JavaScript
voidUpdate•8mo ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSFuck
mariocesar•8mo ago
If you're curious, the code in ellipsis results in executing:

    print('hello, world')
mturmon•8mo 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•8mo ago
I think we're really starting to over crowd pythons syntax and I'm not a fan.
noddleah•8mo ago
you're telling me you never program in python elliptically??
acbart•8mo ago
Pretty sure this would have been possible in Python 2.6. The Ellipsis object has been around for a very long time.
MadVikingGod•8mo 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•8mo ago
You can do this on JavaScript too.

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