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Chemistry behind the Garden Grove chemical tank

https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/methyl-methacrylate-tank
205•nooks•5h ago•83 comments

A few interesting modern pixel fonts

https://unsung.aresluna.org/a-few-interesting-modern-pixel-fonts/
229•zdw•1d ago•51 comments

I Bypassed Adobe and Microsoft to Build a Git-Tracked Book Production Pipeline

https://www.djspeckhals.com/posts/2026-05-22-how-i-bypassed-adobe-and-microsoft-to-build-a-git-tr...
150•dustin1114•4d ago•36 comments

Agent Memory: An Anatomy

https://brgsk.xyz/agent-memory-anatomy/
14•brgsk•26m ago•2 comments

Cloudflare Flagship

https://developers.cloudflare.com/flagship/
16•tjek•1h ago•4 comments

C array types are weird

https://anselmschueler.com/blogposts/2025-c-pointers/
49•signa11•1d ago•23 comments

A portentous reunion

https://bcantrill.dtrace.org/2026/05/25/a-portentous-reunion/
38•cafkafk•18h ago•13 comments

Big tech's anti-labor playbook has come for Wikipedia

https://medium.com/@jakeorlowitz/wikipedia-is-doing-the-capitalist-thing-56a393232943
252•cdrnsf•4h ago•134 comments

Rosalind: A genomics toolkit in Rust running whole-genome pipelines on a laptop

https://github.com/logannye/rosalind
119•samuell•5d ago•29 comments

Spain blocks prediction markets Polymarket, Kalshi over lack of gambling licence

https://www.reuters.com/business/spain-blocks-prediction-markets-polymarket-kalshi-over-lack-gamb...
754•thm•11h ago•343 comments

The Steinwinter Supercargo

https://www.thedrive.com/article/12603/the-forgotten-steinwinter-supercargo-is-unlike-anything-on...
38•itronitron•3d ago•6 comments

Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/26/dropbox-ceo-drew-houston-ashraf-alkarmi.html
277•aghuang•11h ago•316 comments

Liverpool and Manchester Railway

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liverpool_and_Manchester_Railway
6•daverol•2d ago•1 comments

The real cost of owning a home

https://ericturner.dev/posts/cost-of-home-ownership/
259•ggcr•8h ago•585 comments

Launch HN: Minicor (YC P26) – Windows desktop automations at scale

https://www.minicor.com/
69•fchishtie•9h ago•46 comments

The Ballad of TIGIT

https://www.owlposting.com/p/the-ballad-of-tigit
92•crescit_eundo•8h ago•17 comments

What color is your function? (2015)

https://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2015/02/01/what-color-is-your-function/
90•tosh•8h ago•106 comments

C64 Basic: Game Map Overhead “Camera View”

https://retrogamecoders.com/overhead-camera-view/
74•ibobev•10h ago•10 comments

Show HN: Rapel – chunked resumable downloads in unstable networks

https://github.com/redraw/rapel
4•autorun•21h ago•1 comments

Sage Care (YC S24) Is Hiring Software Engineers

https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/sagecare/jobs/xtloH8r-senior-software-engineer
1•ian-gillis•7h ago

Sonny Rollins, Jazz's Saxophone Colossus and Greatest Improvisor, Dead at 95

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/sonny-rollins-jazz-legend-saxophone-colossus-dead-o...
10•boarsofcanada•41m ago•0 comments

Use boring languages with LLMs

https://jry.io/writing/use-boring-languages-with-llms/
165•evakhoury•4d ago•137 comments

Outsourcing plus local AI will soon become more economical vs. frontier labs

https://www.signalbloom.ai/posts/outsourcing-plus-localai-will-soon-become-more-economical-vs-fro...
238•GodelNumbering•12h ago•257 comments

Opaque Types in Python

https://blog.glyph.im/2026/05/opaque-types-in-python.html
111•lumpa•3d ago•49 comments

Are we self-sovereign PKI yet?

https://buffrr.dev/blog/are-we-self-sovereign-pki-yet/
72•ca98am79•5d ago•44 comments

The worst job interview I ever had

https://www.oliverio.dev/blog/the-worst-job-interview-i-had
132•oliverio•4h ago•110 comments

Netherlands blocks US takeover of vital digital supplier

https://www.politico.eu/article/netherlands-blocks-us-takeover-vital-digital-supplier/
521•vrganj•12h ago•206 comments

Phantasy Star IV – 1993 Developer Interviews

https://shmuplations.com/phantasystariv/
132•speckx•4d ago•55 comments

DeepSWE: A contamination-free benchmark for long-horizon coding agents

https://deepswe.datacurve.ai/blog
26•ammar_x•5h ago•8 comments

The user is visibly frustrated

https://pscanf.com/s/354/
273•croes•20h ago•242 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...

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:
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/