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Qwen 3.8 27B is excellent, but it defaults to overthinking things

https://simonwillison.net/2026/Aug/16/qwen-38-27b/
557•bilsbie•12h ago•263 comments

On A.I. regulation and messaging

https://twitter.com/DarioAmodei/status/2088758816376807762
102•jacquesm•9h ago•176 comments

Self hosted email continues to steeply decline

https://labs.ripe.net/author/artem-berezin/two-providers-a-stubborn-plateau-and-a-very-long-tail-...
10•minusf•1h ago•2 comments

Anthropic's 'watermark' text adulteration in Claude is a perversion of writing

https://daringfireball.net/2026/08/anthropics_watermark_text_adulteration_in_claude_is_a_perversi...
350•ropbear•13h ago•339 comments

A third world engineer responds to “RISC-V: They should have known better”

https://rvembedded.com/blog_post/12/
538•Narishma•18h ago•278 comments

Reticulum – Decentralized Mesh Network

https://reticulum.network/
143•sudo_cowsay•11h ago•44 comments

Claude: System Prompts

https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/release-notes/system-prompts
682•tosh•22h ago•264 comments

Show HN: Desktopcolors.com – A museum for solid background colors of classic OS

https://desktopcolors.com
22•vlowrian•3h ago•5 comments

AGI-64 Brings Sierra Adventures to the Commodore 64

https://meanhamster.com/news/agi-64-brings-sierra-adventures-to-the-commodore-64
95•erickhill•10h ago•12 comments

Production-ready detection and response queries for osquery

https://github.com/chainguard-dev/osquery-defense-kit
9•ankitg12•4d ago•0 comments

Gakutensoku

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gakutensoku
38•benbreen•3d ago•5 comments

The continuing "Q collar" scandal

https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2026/08/13/we-should-probably-be-doing-more-coverage-of-sc...
34•luu•3d ago•13 comments

The Mysterious Syndrome Destroying Endurance Athletes

https://www.outsideonline.com/health/training-performance/running-empty/
19•cwwc•2d ago•9 comments

Rhombus 1.1 is now available

https://blog.racket-lang.org/2026/08/rhombus-v1.1.html
95•spdegabrielle•10h ago•28 comments

How do I permanently disable random Google Photos popup to backup photos? (2024)

https://support.google.com/photos/thread/256212140/how-do-i-permanently-disable-google-photos-pop...
145•dt3ft•3d ago•90 comments

Linear algebra done right

https://linear.axler.net/
102•the-mitr•6h ago•42 comments

SIMD in the 90s: Programming Intel's Pentium MMX

https://pikuma.com/blog/programming-intel-pentium-mmx-simd
126•ibobev•3d ago•53 comments

Design 3D-printable parts by talking

https://nurb.dev/
28•mkmk•2d ago•12 comments

Applying a photosynthetic process to treat “dry eye”

https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/taking-tip-plants-eyes
51•gumby•11h ago•17 comments

GIMP Development Update

https://www.gimp.org/news/2026/08/16/dev-update-august-2026/
202•lumpa•8h ago•152 comments

The AI Credit Resale Economy

https://vectoral.com/blog/who-are-the-token-brokers
301•mlenhard•21h ago•121 comments

Red queen hypothesis – A new way forward for self-improving AI

https://www.cst.cam.ac.uk/news/red-queen-hypothesis-new-way-forward-self-improving-ai
78•hardlianotion•15h ago•21 comments

Prolly: A content-addressed ordered map built on prolly trees

https://github.com/crabbuild/prolly
47•forhappy•10h ago•4 comments

Tell HN: Cloudflare silently injects its analytics when you switch nameservers

541•stagas•17h ago•153 comments

Protobuf has LSP support

https://buf.build/blog/protobuf-lsp
160•theanonymousone•16h ago•110 comments

MathCode, Mathematical Coding Agent

https://math-ai-org.github.io/mathcode/
101•homarp•17h ago•29 comments

Stripe will reportedly acquire OpenRouter for $7B+

https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/16/stripe-will-reportedly-acquire-ai-gateway-startup-openrouter-fo...
380•zacharyozer•15h ago•234 comments

Strong gravitational lensing and microlensing of supernovae (2024)

https://infoscience.epfl.ch/entities/publication/644cad8a-6c9b-4b02-bcf3-b8b6e8c614c5
12•andsoitis•8h ago•1 comments

Clamiga: Common Lisp for the Amiga

https://nnamgreb.de/blog/Clamiga+-+Common+Lisp+for+the+Amiga
117•emptybits•4d ago•19 comments

Plastic mechanical computer from 1963: The Digi-Comp 1 [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-y8bGBE71yw
71•tobr•1d ago•18 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...

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/
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: