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If You Don't Design Your Career, Someone Else Will

https://gregmckeown.com/if-you-dont-design-your-career-someone-else-will/
59•TheAlchemist•1h ago•33 comments

The ancient monuments saluting the winter solstice

https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20251219-the-ancient-monuments-saluting-the-winter-solstice
41•1659447091•2h ago•23 comments

A guide to local coding models

https://www.aiforswes.com/p/you-dont-need-to-spend-100mo-on-claude
445•mpweiher•15h ago•244 comments

Programming languages used for music

https://timthompson.com/plum/cgi/showlist.cgi?sort=name&concise=yes
57•ofalkaed•1d ago•16 comments

Deliberate Internet Shutdowns

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/12/deliberate-internet-shutdowns.html
202•WaitWaitWha•3d ago•85 comments

How I protect my Forgejo instance from AI web crawlers

https://her.esy.fun/posts/0031-how-i-protect-my-forgejo-instance-from-ai-web-crawlers/index.html
47•todsacerdoti•21h ago•31 comments

Well Being in Times of Algorithms

https://www.ssp.sh/blog/well-being-algorithms/
15•articsputnik•2h ago•9 comments

Build Android apps using Rust and Iced

https://github.com/ibaryshnikov/android-iced-example
100•rekireki•9h ago•33 comments

Show HN: Books mentioned on Hacker News in 2025

https://hackernews-readings-613604506318.us-west1.run.app
478•seinvak•19h ago•172 comments

I'm just having fun

https://jyn.dev/i-m-just-having-fun/
379•lemper•6d ago•160 comments

Disney Imagineering Debuts Next-Generation Robotic Character, Olaf

https://disneyparksblog.com/disney-experiences/robotic-olaf-marks-new-era-of-disney-innovation/
200•ChrisArchitect•14h ago•80 comments

Webb observes exoplanet that may have an exotic helium and carbon atmosphere

https://science.nasa.gov/missions/webb/nasas-webb-observes-exoplanet-whose-composition-defies-exp...
70•taubek•2d ago•17 comments

Kernighan's Lever

https://linusakesson.net/programming/kernighans-lever/index.php
74•xk3•2d ago•30 comments

Aliasing

https://xania.org/202512/15-aliasing-in-general
45•ibobev•6d ago•7 comments

Cartoon Network channel errors (1995 – 2025)

https://cnas.fandom.com/wiki/Channel_Errors
14•Pikamander2•2h ago•3 comments

Functional Flocking Quadtree in ClojureScript

https://www.lbjgruppen.com/en/posts/flocking-quadtrees
56•lbj•6d ago•3 comments

Show HN: Backlog – a public repository of real work problems

https://www.worldsbacklog.com/
16•anticlickwise•3h ago•3 comments

A Guide to Magnetizing N48 Magnets in Ansys Maxwell

https://blog.ozeninc.com/resources/from-datasheet-to-demagnetization-a-guide-to-magnetizing-n48-m...
40•peter_d_sherman•5d ago•3 comments

CO2 batteries that store grid energy take off globally

https://spectrum.ieee.org/co2-battery-energy-storage
261•rbanffy•20h ago•221 comments

More on whether useful quantum computing is “imminent”

https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=9425
93•A_D_E_P_T•15h ago•77 comments

Rue: Higher level than Rust, lower level than Go

https://rue-lang.dev/
158•ingve•15h ago•133 comments

ONNX Runtime and CoreML May Silently Convert Your Model to FP16

https://ym2132.github.io/ONNX_MLProgram_NN_exploration
73•Two_hands•11h ago•15 comments

Show HN: Rust/WASM lighting data toolkit – parses legacy formats, generates SVGs

https://eulumdat.icu
34•holg•15h ago•0 comments

Making the most of bit arrays in Gleam

https://gearsco.de/blog/bit-array-syntax/
27•crowdhailer•3d ago•1 comments

Lightning: Real-time editing for tiled map data

https://felt.com/blog/lightning-tiles
12•hinting•5d ago•3 comments

I program on the subway

https://www.scd31.com/posts/programming-on-the-subway
230•evankhoury•5d ago•161 comments

Cursed circuits #3: true mathematics

https://lcamtuf.substack.com/p/cursed-circuits-3-true-mathematics
25•zdw•7h ago•3 comments

Show HN: WalletWallet – create Apple passes from anything

https://walletwallet.alen.ro/
392•alentodorov•19h ago•105 comments

QBasic64 Phoenix 4.3.0 Released

https://qb64phoenix.com/forum/showthread.php?tid=4244
39•jandeboevrie•4h ago•5 comments

Evaluating chain-of-thought monitorability

https://openai.com/index/evaluating-chain-of-thought-monitorability/
57•mfiguiere•3d ago•19 comments
Open in hackernews

Elliptical Python Programming

https://susam.net/elliptical-python-programming.html
184•sebg•8mo ago

Comments

benob•8mo ago
TIL that in python, 1--2==3
seplox•8mo ago
It's not a python thing. 1-(-2), distribute the negative.
qsort•8mo 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•8mo 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•8mo 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•8mo ago
Also worth noting that `1 - -2` works and produces 3 in C because the space breaks the operator.
plus•8mo 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•8mo 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•8mo 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•8mo ago
Expanding on this a little, I will be replacing all occurrences of 2 with two blobs fighting, with shields:

    >>> 0^((...==...)--++--(...==...))^0
    2
rmah•8mo 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•8mo ago
And apparently string formatting which should have an ever growing number of ways to handle it. :shrug:
elijahbenizzy•8mo ago
Ok do this but for JavaScript
voidUpdate•8mo ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSFuck
mariocesar•8mo ago
If you're curious, the code in ellipsis results in executing:

    print('hello, world')
mturmon•8mo 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•8mo ago
I think we're really starting to over crowd pythons syntax and I'm not a fan.
noddleah•8mo ago
you're telling me you never program in python elliptically??
acbart•8mo ago
Pretty sure this would have been possible in Python 2.6. The Ellipsis object has been around for a very long time.
MadVikingGod•8mo 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•8mo ago
You can do this on JavaScript too.

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