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OpenCiv3: Open-source, cross-platform reimagining of Civilization III

https://openciv3.org/
413•klaussilveira•5h ago•93 comments

The Waymo World Model

https://waymo.com/blog/2026/02/the-waymo-world-model-a-new-frontier-for-autonomous-driving-simula...
766•xnx•11h ago•464 comments

Why I Joined OpenAI

https://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2026-02-07/why-i-joined-openai.html
30•SerCe•1h ago•26 comments

Show HN: Look Ma, No Linux: Shell, App Installer, Vi, Cc on ESP32-S3 / BreezyBox

https://github.com/valdanylchuk/breezydemo
137•isitcontent•5h ago•14 comments

Monty: A minimal, secure Python interpreter written in Rust for use by AI

https://github.com/pydantic/monty
128•dmpetrov•6h ago•53 comments

Dark Alley Mathematics

https://blog.szczepan.org/blog/three-points/
36•quibono•4d ago•2 comments

Show HN: I spent 4 years building a UI design tool with only the features I use

https://vecti.com
240•vecti•7h ago•114 comments

A century of hair samples proves leaded gas ban worked

https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/02/a-century-of-hair-samples-proves-leaded-gas-ban-worked/
61•jnord•3d ago•4 comments

Microsoft open-sources LiteBox, a security-focused library OS

https://github.com/microsoft/litebox
308•aktau•12h ago•152 comments

Sheldon Brown's Bicycle Technical Info

https://www.sheldonbrown.com/
309•ostacke•11h ago•84 comments

Show HN: If you lose your memory, how to regain access to your computer?

https://eljojo.github.io/rememory/
168•eljojo•8h ago•123 comments

Hackers (1995) Animated Experience

https://hackers-1995.vercel.app/
385•todsacerdoti•13h ago•217 comments

An Update on Heroku

https://www.heroku.com/blog/an-update-on-heroku/
313•lstoll•12h ago•230 comments

Show HN: R3forth, a ColorForth-inspired language with a tiny VM

https://github.com/phreda4/r3
47•phreda4•5h ago•8 comments

I spent 5 years in DevOps – Solutions engineering gave me what I was missing

https://infisical.com/blog/devops-to-solutions-engineering
103•vmatsiiako•10h ago•34 comments

How to effectively write quality code with AI

https://heidenstedt.org/posts/2026/how-to-effectively-write-quality-code-with-ai/
178•i5heu•8h ago•128 comments

Introducing the Developer Knowledge API and MCP Server

https://developers.googleblog.com/introducing-the-developer-knowledge-api-and-mcp-server/
13•gfortaine•3h ago•0 comments

Understanding Neural Network, Visually

https://visualrambling.space/neural-network/
231•surprisetalk•3d ago•30 comments

I now assume that all ads on Apple news are scams

https://kirkville.com/i-now-assume-that-all-ads-on-apple-news-are-scams/
968•cdrnsf•15h ago•414 comments

PC Floppy Copy Protection: Vault Prolok

https://martypc.blogspot.com/2024/09/pc-floppy-copy-protection-vault-prolok.html
8•kmm•4d ago•0 comments

Learning from context is harder than we thought

https://hy.tencent.com/research/100025?langVersion=en
140•limoce•3d ago•79 comments

FORTH? Really!?

https://rescrv.net/w/2026/02/06/associative
39•rescrv•13h ago•17 comments

Evaluating and mitigating the growing risk of LLM-discovered 0-days

https://red.anthropic.com/2026/zero-days/
34•lebovic•1d ago•11 comments

Show HN: Smooth CLI – Token-efficient browser for AI agents

https://docs.smooth.sh/cli/overview
76•antves•1d ago•56 comments

I'm going to cure my girlfriend's brain tumor

https://andrewjrod.substack.com/p/im-going-to-cure-my-girlfriends-brain
35•ray__•2h ago•11 comments

The Oklahoma Architect Who Turned Kitsch into Art

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2026-01-31/oklahoma-architect-bruce-goff-s-wild-home-desi...
17•MarlonPro•3d ago•3 comments

Show HN: Slack CLI for Agents

https://github.com/stablyai/agent-slack
38•nwparker•1d ago•8 comments

Claude Composer

https://www.josh.ing/blog/claude-composer
101•coloneltcb•2d ago•69 comments

How virtual textures work

https://www.shlom.dev/articles/how-virtual-textures-really-work/
25•betamark•12h ago•23 comments

The Beauty of Slag

https://mag.uchicago.edu/science-medicine/beauty-slag
31•sohkamyung•3d ago•3 comments
Open in hackernews

Elliptical Python Programming

https://susam.net/elliptical-python-programming.html
184•sebg•10mo ago

Comments

benob•10mo ago
TIL that in python, 1--2==3
seplox•10mo ago
It's not a python thing. 1-(-2), distribute the negative.
qsort•10mo 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•10mo 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•10mo 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•10mo ago
Also worth noting that `1 - -2` works and produces 3 in C because the space breaks the operator.
plus•10mo 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•10mo 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•10mo 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•10mo ago
Expanding on this a little, I will be replacing all occurrences of 2 with two blobs fighting, with shields:

    >>> 0^((...==...)--++--(...==...))^0
    2
rmah•10mo 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•10mo ago
And apparently string formatting which should have an ever growing number of ways to handle it. :shrug:
elijahbenizzy•10mo ago
Ok do this but for JavaScript
voidUpdate•10mo ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSFuck
mariocesar•10mo ago
If you're curious, the code in ellipsis results in executing:

    print('hello, world')
mturmon•10mo 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•10mo ago
I think we're really starting to over crowd pythons syntax and I'm not a fan.
noddleah•10mo ago
you're telling me you never program in python elliptically??
acbart•10mo ago
Pretty sure this would have been possible in Python 2.6. The Ellipsis object has been around for a very long time.
MadVikingGod•10mo 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•10mo ago
You can do this on JavaScript too.

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