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How Hacker News ranking works: scoring, controversy, and penalties (2013)

https://www.righto.com/2013/11/how-hacker-news-ranking-really-works.html
94•theanonymousone•2h ago•48 comments

I built non-autoregressive decision models with RL a year ago

https://laya.convaiinnovations.com/
1058•nandakishor_ml•13h ago•247 comments

AI-generated posters don’t have to be horrible

https://john.hartnup.uk/2026/06/07/ai-event-posters.html
1330•ereiamjh•14h ago•739 comments

Measure internet censorship. Contribute to the largest open dataset

https://ooni.org/install
79•Bluestein•4h ago•40 comments

Brood War Bench

https://bw.swerdlow.dev/report
124•benswerd•9h ago•63 comments

Compiler-style optimization for drawing via Skia

https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.23696
55•PaulDavisThe1st•2d ago•16 comments

Mayday Mysteries

http://www.maydaymystery.org/mayday/
22•Eridanus2•2h ago•3 comments

You can defeat the Dream Devourer from Chrono Trigger using an int overflow

https://chrono.fandom.com/wiki/Dream_Devourer
26•ronreiter•2h ago•11 comments

Two parallel neural ectoderm progenitors contribute to the developing brain

https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2026/09/two-separate-brains.html
604•emigre•18h ago•234 comments

Deodands put a price on objects that caused death

https://daily.jstor.org/how-the-railways-killed-a-medieval-law/
35•samizdis•3d ago•12 comments

ZK-JPEG: Zero-Knowledge Image Editing and Compression

https://eprint.iacr.org/2026/2039
49•gslin•4h ago•7 comments

UFO Series Home Page: "UFO" TV Series from 1970

https://ufoseries.com/
45•DropDead•1d ago•29 comments

Show HN: CUA-S1 – A System One Model for Computer Use

https://github.com/trycua/cua
57•frabonacci•8h ago•7 comments

English: A vs. An

https://www.redblobgames.com/blog/2026-09-16-english-a-vs-an/
99•azhenley•3h ago•116 comments

The Lamentable Later Life of Lemmings

https://www.filfre.net/2026/09/the-lamentable-later-life-of-lemmings/
6•zdw•8h ago•3 comments

Android 17 is the first since 3.x to add new APIs without releasing to the AOSP

https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/117282080803799576
1112•theanonymousone•1d ago•655 comments

Tin: full-text search for Postgres

https://planetscale.com/blog/introducing-tin
181•ksec•10h ago•70 comments

Suzanne Ciani's Buchla Cookbook

https://echo.orpheusinstituut.be/article/suzannes-buchla-cookbook
56•stuart78•2d ago•21 comments

The Secret Life of Circuits

https://blog.coredump.cx/p/the-secret-life-of-circuits-is-here
279•surprisetalk•4d ago•71 comments

Supabase (YC S20) Is Hiring for OrioleDB

https://supabase.link/orioledbjob
1•awalias•7h ago

New evidence for hidden chambers beyond Tutankhamun's tomb

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-02621-2
95•rndsignals•2d ago•40 comments

GPT-6 Astra Solves a WWI German Radio Cipher

https://www.prinzai.com/p/gpt-6-astra-solves-a-wwi-german-radio
362•nsoonhui•17h ago•166 comments

Black Holes or Black Hole Stars? Astronomers Spar over 'Little Red Dots'

https://www.quantamagazine.org/black-holes-or-black-hole-stars-astronomers-spar-over-webb-telesco...
85•jandrewrogers•1d ago•44 comments

San Francisco Onion Futures Company

https://onionfutures.com/
367•z-mach9•19h ago•154 comments

I think you should almost never use AI to write

https://erichgrunewald.substack.com/p/why-you-should-almost-never-use-ai
198•erwald•7h ago•114 comments

How to Write with an LLM

https://sockpuppet.org/blog/2026/09/17/how-to-write-with-an-llm/
619•joeriddles•2d ago•372 comments

Cloudflare Quick Tunnels

https://try.cloudflare.com/
809•jcbhmr•1d ago•308 comments

Adventures in Microcontroller Circuit Debugging

https://www.bigmessowires.com/2026/08/30/adventures-in-microcontroller-circuit-debugging/
32•lateatdesk•2d ago•8 comments

Microsoft director: AI scraping 'the largest theft of labor in human history'

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/microsoft-director-called-ai-s...
105•jonbaer•5h ago•31 comments

If math is more than proof, we need to better celebrate the rest of it

https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2026/09/18/if-math-is-more-than-proof-we-need-to-better-celebrate-...
302•num42•17h ago•232 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: