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whohas – Command-line utility for cross-distro, cross-repository package search

https://github.com/whohas/whohas
23•peter_d_sherman•1h ago•3 comments

GhostBox – disposable little machines from the Global Free Tier.

https://www.ghost.charity/
87•keepamovin•1h ago•47 comments

Ask HN: Who is hiring? (May 2026)

39•whoishiring•1h ago•51 comments

Your Website Is Not for You

https://websmith.studio/blog/your-website-is-not-for-you/
188•pumbaa•4h ago•120 comments

Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (May 2026)

20•whoishiring•1h ago•50 comments

Running Adobe's 1991 PostScript Interpreter in the Browser

https://www.pagetable.com/?p=1854
71•ingve•4h ago•15 comments

Sally McKee, who coined the term "the memory wall", has died

https://www.online-tribute.com/SallyMcKee
20•deater•1h ago•4 comments

I'm Peter Roberts, immigration attorney who does work for YC and startups. AMA

29•proberts•1h ago•28 comments

An open letter asking NHS England to keep its code open

https://keepthingsopen.com
34•tvararu•51m ago•2 comments

Apple accidentally left Claude.md files Apple Support app

https://x.com/aaronp613/status/2049986504617820551
290•andruby•4h ago•208 comments

New copy of earliest poem in English, written 1,3k years ago, discovered in Rome

https://www.tcd.ie/news_events/articles/2026/caedmons-hymn-discovery/
158•giuliomagnifico•2d ago•93 comments

Advanced Quantization Algorithm for LLMs

https://github.com/intel/auto-round
55•lastdong•6h ago•9 comments

Show HN: Loopsy, a way for terminals and AI agents on different machines to talk

https://github.com/leox255/loopsy
10•todience•5h ago•1 comments

Show HN: Perfect Bluetooth MIDI for Windows

77•mayerwin•6h ago•19 comments

Grok 4.3

https://docs.x.ai/developers/models/grok-4.3
265•simianwords•7h ago•365 comments

OpenWarp

https://openwarp.zerx.dev
153•zero-lab•13h ago•114 comments

Shai-Hulud Themed Malware Found in the PyTorch Lightning AI Training Library

https://semgrep.dev/blog/2026/malicious-dependency-in-pytorch-lightning-used-for-ai-training/
436•j12y•23h ago•161 comments

Show HN: WhatCable, a tiny menu bar app for inspecting USB-C cables

https://github.com/darrylmorley/whatcable
270•sleepingNomad•7h ago•101 comments

Opus 4.7 knows the real Kelsey

https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/i-can-never-talk-to-an-ai-anonymously
410•ilamont•1d ago•229 comments

If I could make my own GitHub

https://matduggan.com/if-i-could-make-my-own-github/
89•matricaria•1d ago•112 comments

Softmax, can you derive the Jacobian? And should you care?

https://idlemachines.co.uk/essays/softmax
89•smaddrellmander•3d ago•30 comments

Maladaptive Frugality

https://herbertlui.net/maladaptive-frugality/
161•herbertl•2d ago•167 comments

How an oil refinery works

https://www.construction-physics.com/p/how-an-oil-refinery-works
492•chmaynard•1d ago•165 comments

Pro-Iran crew turns DDoS into shakedown as Ubuntu.com stays down

https://www.theregister.com/2026/05/01/canonical_confirms_ubuntu_infrastructure_under/
10•ndsipa_pomu•55m ago•4 comments

Claude Code refuses requests or charges extra if your commits mention "OpenClaw"

https://twitter.com/theo/status/2049645973350363168
1255•elmean•1d ago•686 comments

A Letter from Dijkstra on APL

https://www.jsoftware.com/papers/Dijkstra_Letter.htm
24•tosh•4h ago•19 comments

I built a Game Boy emulator in F#

https://nickkossolapov.github.io/fame-boy/building-a-game-boy-emulator-in-fsharp/
317•elvis70•22h ago•72 comments

CPanel and WHM Authentication Bypass – CVE-2026-41940

https://labs.watchtowr.com/the-internet-is-falling-down-falling-down-falling-down-cpanel-whm-auth...
135•zikani_03•17h ago•50 comments

Can I disable all data collection from my vehicle?

https://rivian.com/support/article/can-i-disable-all-data-collection-from-my-vehicle
684•Cider9986•19h ago•291 comments

Roboticist-Turned-Teacher Built a Life-Size Replica of Eniac

https://spectrum.ieee.org/roboticist-turned-teacher-eniac-replica
51•oldnetguy•2d ago•10 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...

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:
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/