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Surveillance vendors caught abusing access to telcos to track people's locations

https://techcrunch.com/2026/04/23/surveillance-vendors-caught-abusing-access-to-telcos-to-track-p...
221•mentalgear•2h ago•56 comments

Sneaky spam in conversational replies to blog posts

https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/04/sneaky-spam-in-conversational-replies-to-blog-posts/
63•ColinWright•2h ago•42 comments

I am building a cloud

https://crawshaw.io/blog/building-a-cloud
636•bumbledraven•9h ago•320 comments

Show HN: Honker – Postgres NOTIFY/LISTEN Semantics for SQLite

https://github.com/russellromney/honker
84•russellthehippo•2h ago•13 comments

Alberta startup sells no-tech tractors for half price

https://wheelfront.com/this-alberta-startup-sells-no-tech-tractors-for-half-price/
1929•Kaibeezy•22h ago•647 comments

Your hex editor should color-code bytes

https://simonomi.dev/blog/color-code-your-bytes/
254•tobr•2d ago•82 comments

A Renaissance gambling dispute spawned probability theory

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-a-renaissance-gambling-dispute-spawned-probability...
31•sohkamyung•2d ago•1 comments

Modern Board Games: and why you should play them (2022)

https://boardgamegeek.com/blog/10755/blogpost/124992/modern-board-games-and-why-you-should-play-them
16•maayank•2d ago•3 comments

Apple fixes bug that cops used to extract deleted chat messages from iPhones

https://techcrunch.com/2026/04/22/apple-fixes-bug-that-cops-used-to-extract-deleted-chat-messages...
696•cdrnsf•18h ago•172 comments

Writing a C Compiler, in Zig

https://ar-ms.me/thoughts/c-compiler-1-zig/
55•tosh•5h ago•16 comments

Jiga (YC W21) Is Hiring

https://jiga.io/about-us/
1•grmmph•2h ago

The Onion to Take over InfoWars

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/20/business/infowars-alex-jones-the-onion.html
327•lxm•2d ago•119 comments

We found a stable Firefox identifier linking all your private Tor identities

https://fingerprint.com/blog/firefox-tor-indexeddb-privacy-vulnerability/
800•danpinto•20h ago•236 comments

Work with the Garage Door Up

https://notes.andymatuschak.org/Work_with_the_garage_door_up
31•jxmorris12•1d ago•24 comments

Isopods of the world

https://isopod.site/
64•debesyla•2d ago•26 comments

5x5 Pixel font for tiny screens

https://maurycyz.com/projects/mcufont/
708•zdw•3d ago•145 comments

Arch Linux Now Has a Bit-for-Bit Reproducible Docker Image

https://antiz.fr/blog/archlinux-now-has-a-reproducible-docker-image/
156•maxloh•12h ago•55 comments

Trump administration reclassifies cannabis as less dangerous

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cdxd0xxp0jko
39•kaycebasques•53m ago•23 comments

Raylib v6.0

https://github.com/raysan5/raylib/releases/tag/6.0
54•rydgel•2h ago•1 comments

A True Life Hack: What Physical 'Life Force' Turns Biology's Wheels?

https://www.quantamagazine.org/what-physical-life-force-turns-biologys-wheels-20260420/
131•Prof_Sigmund•2d ago•23 comments

Our newsroom AI policy

https://arstechnica.com/staff/2026/04/our-newsroom-ai-policy/
110•zdw•9h ago•80 comments

Over-editing refers to a model modifying code beyond what is necessary

https://nrehiew.github.io/blog/minimal_editing/
390•pella•20h ago•227 comments

Highlights from Git 2.54

https://github.blog/open-source/git/highlights-from-git-2-54/
70•ingve•2d ago•35 comments

Website streamed live directly from a model

https://flipbook.page/
346•sethbannon•20h ago•91 comments

An amateur historian's favorite books about the Silk Road

https://bookdna.com/best-books/silk-road
51•bwb•2d ago•17 comments

Technical, cognitive, and intent debt

https://martinfowler.com/fragments/2026-04-02.html
293•theorchid•22h ago•78 comments

Ping-pong robot beats top-level human players

https://www.reuters.com/sports/ping-pong-robot-ace-makes-history-by-beating-top-level-human-playe...
147•wslh•23h ago•210 comments

Parallel agents in Zed

https://zed.dev/blog/parallel-agents
253•ajeetdsouza•20h ago•138 comments

Books are not too expensive

https://www.millersbookreview.com/p/no-books-are-not-remotely-too-expensive
80•herbertl•2d ago•94 comments

Qwen3.6-27B: Flagship-Level Coding in a 27B Dense Model

https://qwen.ai/blog?id=qwen3.6-27b
900•mfiguiere•1d ago•418 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/