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I built a light that reacts to radio waves [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=moBCOEiqiPs
173•codetheweb•5h ago•40 comments

AI Is a Horse (2024)

https://kconner.com/2024/08/02/ai-is-a-horse.html
34•zdw•3d ago•10 comments

Replacing Protobuf with Rust to go 5 times faster

https://pgdog.dev/blog/replace-protobuf-with-rust
25•whiteros_e•1h ago•15 comments

Ghostty's AI Policy

https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/blob/main/AI_POLICY.md
17•mefengl•1h ago•4 comments

Show HN: isometric.nyc – giant isometric pixel art map of NYC

https://cannoneyed.com/isometric-nyc/
953•cannoneyed•18h ago•187 comments

GPTZero finds 100 new hallucinations in NeurIPS 2025 accepted papers

https://gptzero.me/news/neurips/
850•segmenta•19h ago•446 comments

Proton Spam and the AI Consent Problem

https://dbushell.com/2026/01/22/proton-spam/
201•dbushell•3h ago•112 comments

Capital One to acquire Brex for $5.15B

https://www.reuters.com/legal/transactional/capital-one-buy-fintech-firm-brex-515-billion-deal-20...
304•personjerry•13h ago•232 comments

Why does SSH send 100 packets per keystroke?

https://eieio.games/blog/ssh-sends-100-packets-per-keystroke/
485•eieio•15h ago•266 comments

TI-99/4A: Leaning More on the Firmware

https://bumbershootsoft.wordpress.com/2026/01/17/ti-99-4a-leaning-more-heavily-on-the-firmware/
38•ibobev•4d ago•18 comments

I was banned from Claude for scaffolding a Claude.md file?

https://hugodaniel.com/posts/claude-code-banned-me/
553•hugodan•16h ago•470 comments

Qwen3-TTS family is now open sourced: Voice design, clone, and generation

https://qwen.ai/blog?id=qwen3tts-0115
606•Palmik•21h ago•188 comments

Douglas Adams on the English–American cultural divide over "heroes"

https://shreevatsa.net/post/douglas-adams-cultural-divide/
451•speckx•21h ago•443 comments

Bugs Apple Loves

https://www.bugsappleloves.com
653•nhod•8h ago•290 comments

Your app subscription is now my weekend project

https://rselbach.com/your-sub-is-now-my-weekend-project
361•robteix•4d ago•264 comments

Why medieval city-builder video games are historically inaccurate (2020)

https://www.leidenmedievalistsblog.nl/articles/why-medieval-city-builder-video-games-are-historic...
148•benbreen•10h ago•88 comments

Scaling PostgreSQL to power 800M ChatGPT users

https://openai.com/index/scaling-postgresql/
194•mustaphah•13h ago•87 comments

Google is ending full-web search for niche search engines

https://programmablesearchengine.googleblog.com/
77•01jonny01•1h ago•60 comments

The State of Modern AI Text to Speech Systems for Screen Reader Users

https://stuff.interfree.ca/2026/01/05/ai-tts-for-screenreaders.html
3•tuukkao•1h ago•0 comments

Improving the usability of C libraries in Swift

https://www.swift.org/blog/improving-usability-of-c-libraries-in-swift/
118•timsneath•11h ago•11 comments

Project Mercury and the Sofar Bomb

https://www.thequantumcat.space/p/project-mercury-and-the-sofar-bomb
9•verzali•4d ago•0 comments

Writing First, Tooling Second

https://susam.net/writing-first-tooling-second.html
35•blenderob•4d ago•4 comments

Turso is an in-process SQL database, compatible with SQLite

https://github.com/tursodatabase/turso
120•marklit•3d ago•73 comments

'Askers' vs. 'Guessers' (2010)

https://www.theatlantic.com/national/2010/05/askers-vs-guessers/340891/
150•BoorishBears•23h ago•101 comments

Show HN: Txt2plotter – True centerline vectors from Flux.2 for pen plotters

https://github.com/malvarezcastillo/txt2plotter
19•tsanummy•3d ago•5 comments

Stunnel

https://www.stunnel.org/
79•firesteelrain•10h ago•28 comments

CSS Optical Illusions

https://alvaromontoro.com/blog/68091/css-optical-illusions
186•ulrischa•17h ago•16 comments

Launch HN: Constellation Space (YC W26) – AI for satellite mission assurance

40•kmajid•17h ago•15 comments

In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels

https://e360.yale.edu/digest/europe-wind-solar-fossil-fuels
633•speckx•20h ago•634 comments

Why are there so many CPU bugs nowadays

https://mas.to/@gabrielesvelto/115939583202357863
20•riffraff•1h ago•6 comments
Open in hackernews

Elliptical Python Programming

https://susam.net/elliptical-python-programming.html
184•sebg•9mo ago

Comments

benob•9mo ago
TIL that in python, 1--2==3
seplox•9mo ago
It's not a python thing. 1-(-2), distribute the negative.
qsort•9mo 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•9mo 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•9mo 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•9mo ago
Also worth noting that `1 - -2` works and produces 3 in C because the space breaks the operator.
plus•9mo 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•9mo 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•9mo 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•9mo ago
Expanding on this a little, I will be replacing all occurrences of 2 with two blobs fighting, with shields:

    >>> 0^((...==...)--++--(...==...))^0
    2
rmah•9mo 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•9mo ago
And apparently string formatting which should have an ever growing number of ways to handle it. :shrug:
elijahbenizzy•9mo ago
Ok do this but for JavaScript
voidUpdate•9mo ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSFuck
mariocesar•9mo ago
If you're curious, the code in ellipsis results in executing:

    print('hello, world')
mturmon•9mo 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•9mo ago
I think we're really starting to over crowd pythons syntax and I'm not a fan.
noddleah•9mo ago
you're telling me you never program in python elliptically??
acbart•9mo ago
Pretty sure this would have been possible in Python 2.6. The Ellipsis object has been around for a very long time.
MadVikingGod•9mo 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•9mo ago
You can do this on JavaScript too.

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