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Rob Pike's 5 Rules of Programming

https://www.cs.unc.edu/~stotts/COMP590-059-f24/robsrules.html
116•vismit2000•1h ago•58 comments

JPEG Compression

https://www.sophielwang.com/blog/jpeg
240•vinhnx•4d ago•47 comments

Write up of my homebrew CPU build

https://willwarren.com/2026/03/12/building-my-own-cpu-part-3-from-simulation-to-hardware/
91•wwarren•2d ago•13 comments

Nightingale – open-source karaoke app that works with any song on your computer

https://nightingale.cafe/
74•rzzzzru•3h ago•11 comments

Mistral AI Releases Forge

https://mistral.ai/news/forge
518•pember•14h ago•116 comments

How the Eon Team Produced a Virtual Embodied Fly

https://eon.systems/updates/embodied-brain-emulation
27•LopRabbit•2d ago•7 comments

A Decade of Slug

https://terathon.com/blog/decade-slug.html
633•mwkaufma•16h ago•63 comments

Microsoft's 'unhackable' Xbox One has been hacked by 'Bliss'

https://www.tomshardware.com/video-games/console-gaming/microsofts-unhackable-xbox-one-has-been-h...
703•crtasm•20h ago•255 comments

Celebrating Tony Hoare's mark on computer science

https://bertrandmeyer.com/2026/03/16/celebrating-tony-hoares-mark-on-computer-science/
43•benhoyt•5h ago•5 comments

Judge orders restoration of Voice of America

https://apnews.com/article/voice-of-america-kari-lake-trump-cd6d1ef05272f842705da0ed38d3de24
21•geox•56m ago•4 comments

Python 3.15's JIT is now back on track

https://fidget-spinner.github.io/posts/jit-on-track.html
394•guidoiaquinti•17h ago•219 comments

Show HN: Pgit – A Git-like CLI backed by PostgreSQL

https://oseifert.ch/blog/building-pgit
56•ImGajeed76•1d ago•21 comments

Ask HN: What breaks first when your team grows from 10 to 50 people?

25•hariprasadr•3d ago•21 comments

Ndea (YC W26) is hiring a symbolic RL search guidance lead

https://ndea.com/jobs/search-guidance
1•mikeknoop•4h ago

More than 135 open hardware devices flashable with your own firmware

https://openhardware.directory
246•iosifnicolae2•4d ago•30 comments

(Media over QUIC) on a Boat

https://moq.dev/blog/on-a-boat/
25•mmcclure•4d ago•2 comments

The pleasures of poor product design

https://www.inconspicuous.info/p/the-pleasures-of-poor-product-design
138•NaOH•10h ago•48 comments

Get Shit Done: A meta-prompting, context engineering and spec-driven dev system

https://github.com/gsd-build/get-shit-done
355•stefankuehnel•15h ago•180 comments

OpenAI Has New Focus (On the IPO)

https://om.co/2026/03/17/openai-has-new-focus-on-the-ipo/
41•aamederen•1h ago•42 comments

Show HN: Sub-millisecond VM sandboxes using CoW memory forking

https://github.com/adammiribyan/zeroboot
183•adammiribyan•22h ago•46 comments

Have a fucking website

https://www.otherstrangeness.com/2026/03/14/have-a-fucking-website/
488•asukachikaru•8h ago•263 comments

Animation 10k Starlink Satellites

https://spaceweather.com/archive.php?view=1&day=18&month=03&year=2026
14•MeteorMarc•4h ago•19 comments

Unsloth Studio

https://unsloth.ai/docs/new/studio
300•brainless•20h ago•58 comments

Why AI systems don't learn – On autonomous learning from cognitive science

https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.15381
131•aanet•14h ago•67 comments

A tale about fixing eBPF spinlock issues in the Linux kernel

https://rovarma.com/articles/a-tale-about-fixing-ebpf-spinlock-issues-in-the-linux-kernel/
110•y1n0•11h ago•8 comments

Leviathan (1651)

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3207/3207-h/3207-h.htm
87•mrwh•3d ago•31 comments

It Took Me 30 Years to Solve This VFX Problem – Green Screen Problem [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Ploi723hg4
253•yincrash•4d ago•100 comments

Electron microscopy shows ‘mouse bite’ defects in semiconductors

https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2026/03/electron-microscopy-shows-mouse-bite-defects-semiconductors
82•hhs•4d ago•20 comments

Launch an autonomous AI agent with sandboxed execution in 2 lines of code

https://amaiya.github.io/onprem/examples_agent.html
44•wiseprobe•10h ago•15 comments

Ryugu asteroid samples contain all DNA and RNA building blocks

https://phys.org/news/2026-03-ryugu-asteroid-samples-dna-rna.html
253•bookofjoe•23h ago•137 comments
Open in hackernews

Elliptical Python Programming

https://susam.net/elliptical-python-programming.html
184•sebg•11mo ago

Comments

benob•11mo ago
TIL that in python, 1--2==3
seplox•11mo ago
It's not a python thing. 1-(-2), distribute the negative.
qsort•11mo 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•11mo 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•11mo 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•11mo ago
Also worth noting that `1 - -2` works and produces 3 in C because the space breaks the operator.
plus•11mo 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•11mo 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•11mo 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•11mo ago
Expanding on this a little, I will be replacing all occurrences of 2 with two blobs fighting, with shields:

    >>> 0^((...==...)--++--(...==...))^0
    2
rmah•11mo 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•11mo ago
And apparently string formatting which should have an ever growing number of ways to handle it. :shrug:
elijahbenizzy•11mo ago
Ok do this but for JavaScript
voidUpdate•11mo ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSFuck
mariocesar•11mo ago
If you're curious, the code in ellipsis results in executing:

    print('hello, world')
mturmon•11mo 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•11mo ago
I think we're really starting to over crowd pythons syntax and I'm not a fan.
noddleah•11mo ago
you're telling me you never program in python elliptically??
acbart•11mo ago
Pretty sure this would have been possible in Python 2.6. The Ellipsis object has been around for a very long time.
MadVikingGod•11mo 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•11mo ago
You can do this on JavaScript too.

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