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Basalt Woven Textile – MaterialDistrict

https://materialdistrict.com/material/basalt-woven-textile/
19•rbanffy•1h ago•5 comments

The lost cause of the Lisp machines

https://www.tfeb.org/fragments/2025/11/18/the-lost-cause-of-the-lisp-machines/
35•enbywithunix•11h ago•22 comments

Show HN: An A2A-compatible, open-source framework for multi-agent networks

https://github.com/openagents-org/openagents
27•snasan•1h ago•18 comments

Loose wire leads to blackout, contact with Francis Scott Key bridge

https://www.ntsb.gov:443/news/press-releases/Pages/NR20251118.aspx
314•DamnInteresting•10h ago•122 comments

Europe is scaling back GDPR and relaxing AI laws

https://www.theverge.com/news/823750/european-union-ai-act-gdpr-changes
653•ksec•16h ago•662 comments

Meta Segment Anything Model 3

https://ai.meta.com/sam3/
415•lukeinator42•14h ago•86 comments

Researchers discover security vulnerability in WhatsApp

https://www.univie.ac.at/en/news/detail/forscherinnen-entdecken-grosse-sicherheitsluecke-in-whatsapp
199•KingNoLimit•10h ago•65 comments

Implementation of a Java Processor on a FPGA

https://mavmatrix.uta.edu/electricaleng_theses/337/
4•mghackerlady•40m ago•0 comments

Verifying your Matrix devices is becoming mandatory

https://element.io/blog/verifying-your-devices-is-becoming-mandatory-2/
123•LorenDB•6h ago•106 comments

AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

https://www.chrbutler.com/what-ai-is-really-for
246•delaugust•12h ago•173 comments

Building more with GPT-5.1-Codex-Max

https://openai.com/index/gpt-5-1-codex-max/
393•hansonw•13h ago•224 comments

What really happened with the CIA and The Paris Review?

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2025/11/11/what-really-happened-with-the-cia-and-the-paris-re...
49•frenzcan•1w ago•2 comments

Android/Linux Dual Boot

https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Dual_Booting/WiP
14•joooscha•3d ago•0 comments

#!magic, details about the shebang/hash-bang mechanism on various Unix flavours

https://www.in-ulm.de/%7Emascheck/various/shebang/
12•js2•2h ago•0 comments

Precise geolocation via Wi-Fi Positioning System

https://www.amoses.dev/blog/wifi-location/
154•nicosalm•9h ago•66 comments

PHP 8.5 gets released today, here's what's new

https://stitcher.io/blog/new-in-php-85
22•brentroose•1h ago•4 comments

Launch HN: Mosaic (YC W25) – Agentic Video Editing

https://mosaic.so
120•adishj•15h ago•109 comments

CLI tool to check the Git status of multiple projects

https://github.com/uralys/check-projects
15•chrisdugne•5d ago•6 comments

What influence has the BBC had on history?

https://www.historytoday.com/archive/head-head/what-influence-has-bbc-had-history
24•pepys•2d ago•10 comments

How Slide Rules Work

https://amenzwa.github.io/stem/ComputingHistory/HowSlideRulesWork/
94•ColinWright•10h ago•22 comments

The Lucas-Lehmer Prime Number Test

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-to-identify-a-prime-number-without-a-computer/
63•beardyw•1w ago•34 comments

Thunderbird adds native Microsoft Exchange email support

https://blog.thunderbird.net/2025/11/thunderbird-adds-native-microsoft-exchange-email-support/
394•babolivier•19h ago•114 comments

The Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online

https://darwin-online.org.uk/
38•bookofjoe•6d ago•2 comments

Static Web Hosting on the Intel N150: FreeBSD, SmartOS, NetBSD, OpenBSD and Linu

https://it-notes.dragas.net/2025/11/19/static-web-hosting-intel-n150-freebsd-smartos-netbsd-openb...
149•t-3•13h ago•51 comments

Three Hapsburgs and a Reporter Walk into a Canadian Vault

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/16/insider/florentine-diamond-hapsburgs.html
17•samclemens•2d ago•13 comments

Robert Louis Stevenson's Art of Living (and Dying)

https://lithub.com/robert-louis-stevensons-art-of-living-and-dying/
18•Caiero•11h ago•1 comments

Gaming on Linux has never been more approachable

https://www.theverge.com/tech/823337/switching-linux-gaming-desktop-cachyos
340•throwaway270925•9h ago•244 comments

Vortex: An extensible, state of the art columnar file format

https://github.com/vortex-data/vortex
69•tanelpoder•5d ago•16 comments

A surprise with how '#!' handles its program argument in practice

https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/ShebangRelativePathSurprise
52•SeenNotHeard•1d ago•42 comments

The patent office is about to make bad patents untouchable

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/11/patent-office-about-make-bad-patents-untouchable
388•iamnothere•9h ago•44 comments
Open in hackernews

Elliptical Python Programming

https://susam.net/elliptical-python-programming.html
184•sebg•7mo ago

Comments

benob•7mo ago
TIL that in python, 1--2==3
seplox•7mo ago
It's not a python thing. 1-(-2), distribute the negative.
qsort•7mo 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•7mo 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•7mo 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•7mo ago
Also worth noting that `1 - -2` works and produces 3 in C because the space breaks the operator.
plus•7mo 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•7mo 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•7mo 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•7mo ago
Expanding on this a little, I will be replacing all occurrences of 2 with two blobs fighting, with shields:

    >>> 0^((...==...)--++--(...==...))^0
    2
rmah•7mo 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•7mo ago
And apparently string formatting which should have an ever growing number of ways to handle it. :shrug:
elijahbenizzy•7mo ago
Ok do this but for JavaScript
voidUpdate•7mo ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSFuck
mariocesar•7mo ago
If you're curious, the code in ellipsis results in executing:

    print('hello, world')
mturmon•7mo 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•7mo ago
I think we're really starting to over crowd pythons syntax and I'm not a fan.
noddleah•7mo ago
you're telling me you never program in python elliptically??
acbart•7mo ago
Pretty sure this would have been possible in Python 2.6. The Ellipsis object has been around for a very long time.
MadVikingGod•7mo 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•7mo ago
You can do this on JavaScript too.

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