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Don't rent the cloud, own instead

https://blog.comma.ai/datacenter/
446•Torq_boi•7h ago•191 comments

When internal hostnames are leaked to the clown

https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2026/02/03/badnas/
248•zdw•7h ago•136 comments

Nanobot: Ultra-Lightweight Alternative to OpenClaw

https://github.com/HKUDS/nanobot
51•ms7892•3h ago•25 comments

The Missing Layer

https://yagmin.com/blog/the-missing-layer/
22•lubujackson•2h ago•12 comments

Show HN: Micropolis/SimCity Clone in Emacs Lisp

https://github.com/vkazanov/elcity
43•vkazanov•4h ago•7 comments

Making Ferrite Core Inductors at Home

https://danielmangum.com/posts/making-ferrite-core-inductors-home/
35•hasheddan•3d ago•6 comments

Simply Scheme: Introducing Computer Science (1999)

https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~bh/ss-toc2.html
8•AlexeyBrin•4d ago•1 comments

Freshpaint (YC S19) Is Hiring a Senior SWE, Data

https://www.freshpaint.io/about?ashby_jid=3a7926ba-cf51-4084-9196-4361a7e97761
1•malisper•59m ago

A Broken Heart

https://allenpike.com/2026/a-broken-heart/
16•memalign•4d ago•0 comments

Wirth's Revenge

https://jmoiron.net/blog/wirths-revenge/
89•signa11•9h ago•23 comments

Sqldef: Idempotent schema management tool for MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite

https://sqldef.github.io/
194•Palmik•4d ago•39 comments

Claude Code: connect to a local model when your quota runs out

https://boxc.net/blog/2026/claude-code-connecting-to-local-models-when-your-quota-runs-out/
309•fugu2•4d ago•158 comments

Battle-Testing Lynx at Allegro

https://blog.allegro.tech/2026/02/battle-testing-lynx-js-at-allegro.html
17•tgebarowski•3h ago•8 comments

A case study in PDF forensics: The Epstein PDFs

https://pdfa.org/a-case-study-in-pdf-forensics-the-epstein-pdfs/
330•DuffJohnson•22h ago•187 comments

AI is killing B2B SaaS

https://nmn.gl/blog/ai-killing-b2b-saas
380•namanyayg•19h ago•592 comments

A few CPU hardware bugs

https://www.taricorp.net/2026/a-few-cpu-bugs/
76•signa11•9h ago•22 comments

Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/microsofts-pivotal-ai-product-is-running-into-big-problems-ce235b28
234•fortran77•20h ago•273 comments

Claude Code for Infrastructure

https://www.fluid.sh/
232•aspectrr•18h ago•156 comments

OpenClaw is what Apple intelligence should have been

https://www.jakequist.com/thoughts/openclaw-is-what-apple-intelligence-should-have-been
368•jakequist•12h ago•302 comments

Remarkable Pro Colors

https://www.thregr.org/wavexx/rnd/20260201-remarkable_pro_colors/
111•ffaser5gxlsll•4d ago•44 comments

I built a search engine to index the un-indexable parts of Telegram

https://telehunt.org
37•alenmangattu•3d ago•9 comments

Voxtral Transcribe 2

https://mistral.ai/news/voxtral-transcribe-2
921•meetpateltech•21h ago•224 comments

Why S7 Scheme? (2020)

https://iainctduncan.github.io/scheme-for-max-docs/s7.html
37•bmacho•5d ago•3 comments

Building a 24-bit arcade CRT display adapter from scratch

https://www.scd31.com/posts/building-an-arcade-display-adapter
163•evakhoury•19h ago•45 comments

Postgres Postmaster does not scale

https://www.recall.ai/blog/postgres-postmaster-does-not-scale
106•davidgu•20h ago•51 comments

An interactive version of Byrne's The Elements of Euclid (1847)

https://c82.net/euclid/
42•tzury•2d ago•7 comments

Lily Programming Language

https://lily-lang.org
56•FascinatedBox•3d ago•39 comments

Listen to Understand

https://talk.bradwoods.io/blog/listen-to-understand/
75•bradwoodsio•4d ago•11 comments

Why more companies are recognizing the benefits of keeping older employees

https://longevity.stanford.edu/why-more-companies-are-recognizing-the-benefits-of-keeping-older-e...
181•andsoitis•13h ago•84 comments

The Great Unwind

https://occupywallst.com/yen
286•jart•19h ago•272 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/