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PGSimCity - How PostgreSQL Works

https://nikolays.github.io/PGSimCity/
75•jonbaer•1h ago•12 comments

Decker, a platform that builds on the legacy of Hypercard and classic macOS

https://beyondloom.com/decker/
222•tosh•7h ago•54 comments

Show HN: Physically accurate black hole you can put in your room

https://blackhole.plav.in
17•aplavin•3d ago•1 comments

We have proof automation now

https://www.imperialviolet.org/2026/07/26/zstd-lean.html
73•zdw•4h ago•9 comments

French firefighters face 'pyrocumulonimbus' for first time

https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20260726-french-firefighters-face-pyrocumulonimbus-for-firs...
181•saaaaaam•8h ago•88 comments

Teaching Kids Forth

https://gracefulliberty.com/articles/teaching-kids-forth/
50•rbanffy•4h ago•13 comments

US citizen charged after GrapheneOS phone wipes during airport search

https://www.techspot.com/news/113236-us-prosecutors-charge-atlanta-man-after-grapheneos-phone.html
147•eecc•3h ago•78 comments

Simulate cassette tape audio profiles using FFmpeg

https://github.com/AARomanov1985/Audio-Cassette-Simulation
72•xterminal•5h ago•39 comments

I Championed Prediction Markets. Look What They've Become

https://newsletter.platypuseconomics.com/p/i-championed-prediction-markets-look
18•NomNew•1h ago•32 comments

Design is compromise

https://stephango.com/design-is-compromise
195•ankitg12•9h ago•73 comments

Introduction to Data-Oriented Design [pdf]

https://www.gamedevs.org/uploads/introduction-to-data-oriented-design.pdf
107•tosh•7h ago•33 comments

Htmx 4.0, the first JavaScript library to release exclusively on the Game Boy

https://swag.htmx.org/en-cad/products/htmx-4-the-game
358•rcy•13h ago•111 comments

Plasma Tunnels Reveal How Dying Satellites Fall to Earth

https://spectrum.ieee.org/space-debris-atmosphere-burn-up
42•marc__1•5h ago•24 comments

Show HN: CheapSecurity – Lightweight, Self-Hosted CCTV for Linux SBCs

https://github.com/gmrandazzo/CheapSecurity
104•zeldone•9h ago•22 comments

How to Write English Prose

https://thelampmagazine.com/blog/how-to-write-english-prose
71•geneticdrifts•8h ago•37 comments

Fonts In Use – Find out where a font is used

https://fontsinuse.com/
11•open_•2h ago•0 comments

How to Block Some of the Bots

https://nochan.net/b/Internet-Crap/20260606-How-To-Block-Some-Of-The-Bots/
81•Bender•7h ago•89 comments

How AST-grep Rewrote Tree-sitter in Rust and Made It 30% Faster

https://astgrep.com/blog/tree-sitter-rust-rewrite
69•herrington_d•7h ago•11 comments

How the Atmos clock functions

https://atmos-atelier.de/en/atmos-uhr/
4•r3trohack3r•1h ago•0 comments

Go Analysis Framework: modular static analysis by go team

https://pkg.go.dev/golang.org/x/tools/go/analysis
179•AbuAssar•13h ago•39 comments

Show HN: Port Zero – how I learned to stop worrying and love PORT=0

https://portzero.net/
6•octopoc•1h ago•2 comments

The New AI Superpowers: Focus and Followthrough

https://www.rickmanelius.com/p/the-new-ai-superpowers-focus-and
143•mooreds•12h ago•45 comments

The relay market powering token resellers and fraud

https://vectoral.com/blog/token-relay-market
152•mlenhard•10h ago•92 comments

The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge (1939) [pdf]

https://faculty.lsu.edu/kharms/files/flexner_1939.pdf
19•jxmorris12•3d ago•2 comments

I learned PCB design, 3D printing and C just to listen to music

https://pentaton.app/blog/2026-07-12-introducing-pentaton-lp/
174•interfeco•3d ago•35 comments

Kill The Cookie Banner

https://killthecookiebanner.eu/
829•rapnie•13h ago•403 comments

I wanted a clock that never needed setting. Things escalated

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/07/i-wanted-a-clock-that-never-needed-setting-things-escalated/
49•lee_ars•3d ago•44 comments

Show HN: Reverse Minesweeper

https://sunflowersgame.com/
148•pompomsheep•12h ago•50 comments

Jimothy the raccoon has a rare spinal condition. Here's what that means

https://www.popsci.com/science/whats-jimothy-raccoon-condition/
101•speckx•5d ago•53 comments

Using sed to make indexes for books (1997)

https://www.pement.org/sed/make_indexes.txt
49•TMWNN•3d ago•9 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: