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Linux Sandboxes and Fil-C

https://fil-c.org/seccomp
104•pizlonator•3h ago•21 comments

Closures as Win32 Window Procedures

https://nullprogram.com/blog/2025/12/12/
38•ibobev•2h ago•2 comments

Recovering Anthony Bourdain's (really) lost Li.st's

https://sandyuraz.com/blogs/bourdain/
109•thecsw•4h ago•39 comments

I tried Gleam for Advent of Code

https://blog.tymscar.com/posts/gleamaoc2025/
239•tymscar•9h ago•133 comments

I fed 24 years of my blog posts to a Markov model

https://susam.net/fed-24-years-of-posts-to-markov-model.html
99•zdw•5h ago•33 comments

VPN location claims don't match real traffic exits

https://ipinfo.io/blog/vpn-location-mismatch-report
247•mmaia•6h ago•144 comments

An Implementation of J

https://www.jsoftware.com/ioj/ioj.htm
5•ofalkaed•1h ago•0 comments

Cat Gap

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_gap
39•Petiver•3d ago•4 comments

The Rise of Computer Games, Part I: Adventure

https://technicshistory.com/2025/12/13/the-rise-of-computer-games-part-i-adventure/
49•cfmcdonald•5h ago•9 comments

Why Twilio Segment moved from microservices back to a monolith

https://www.twilio.com/en-us/blog/developers/best-practices/goodbye-microservices
170•birdculture•5h ago•131 comments

Using E-Ink tablet as monitor for Linux

https://alavi.me/blog/e-ink-tablet-as-monitor-linux/
9•yolkedgeek•4d ago•0 comments

llamafile: Distribute and Run LLMs with a Single File

https://github.com/mozilla-ai/llamafile
26•stefankuehnel•6h ago•1 comments

Useful patterns for building HTML tools

https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/10/html-tools/
246•simonw•3d ago•71 comments

Ask HN: How can I get better at using AI for programming?

220•lemonlime227•10h ago•254 comments

Cryptids

https://wiki.bbchallenge.org/wiki/Cryptids
91•frozenseven•1w ago•12 comments

Go Proposal: Secret Mode

https://antonz.org/accepted/runtime-secret/
166•enz•4d ago•68 comments

Some surprising things about DuckDuckGo

https://gabrielweinberg.com/p/some-surprising-things-about-duckduckgo
60•ArmageddonIt•4h ago•43 comments

From Azure Functions to FreeBSD

https://jmmv.dev/2025/12/from-azure-functions-to-freebsd.html
70•todsacerdoti•5d ago•6 comments

A Giant Ball Will Help This Man Survive a Year on an Iceberg

https://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/exploration-survival/how-giant-ball-will-help-man...
41•areoform•10h ago•34 comments

Flat-pack washing machine spins a fairer future

https://www.positive.news/society/flat-pack-washing-machine-spins-a-fairer-future/
53•ohjeez•3h ago•25 comments

What is the nicest thing a stranger has ever done for you?

https://louplummer.lol/nice-stranger/
295•speckx•2d ago•232 comments

EasyPost (YC S13) Is Hiring

https://www.easypost.com/careers
1•jstreebin•9h ago

Want to sway an election? Here’s how much fake online accounts cost

https://www.science.org/content/article/want-sway-election-here-s-how-much-fake-online-accounts-cost
137•rbanffy•5h ago•93 comments

Are we stuck with the same Desktop UX forever? [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fZTOjd_bOQ
118•joelkesler•7h ago•126 comments

Free Software Awards Winners Announced: Andy Wingo, Alx Sa, Govdirectory

https://www.fsf.org/news/2024-free-software-awards-winners
5•pseudolus•49m ago•0 comments

TigerBeetle as a File Storage

https://aivarsk.com/2025/12/07/tigerbeetle-blob-storage/
22•aivarsk•6d ago•2 comments

Photographer built a medium-format rangefinder

https://petapixel.com/2025/12/06/this-photographer-built-an-awesome-medium-format-rangefinder-and...
165•shinryuu•1w ago•40 comments

Researchers seeking better measures of cognitive fatigue

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-03974-w
106•bikenaga•3d ago•28 comments

Using Python for Scripting

https://hypirion.com/musings/use-python-for-scripting
93•birdculture•5d ago•74 comments

Workday project at Washington University hits $266M

https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/12/washington_university_workday_costs_revealed/
53•sebastian_z•5h ago•62 comments
Open in hackernews

Elliptical Python Programming

https://susam.net/elliptical-python-programming.html
184•sebg•8mo ago

Comments

benob•8mo ago
TIL that in python, 1--2==3
seplox•8mo ago
It's not a python thing. 1-(-2), distribute the negative.
qsort•8mo 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•8mo 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•8mo 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•8mo ago
Also worth noting that `1 - -2` works and produces 3 in C because the space breaks the operator.
plus•8mo 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•8mo 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•8mo 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•8mo ago
Expanding on this a little, I will be replacing all occurrences of 2 with two blobs fighting, with shields:

    >>> 0^((...==...)--++--(...==...))^0
    2
rmah•8mo 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•8mo ago
And apparently string formatting which should have an ever growing number of ways to handle it. :shrug:
elijahbenizzy•8mo ago
Ok do this but for JavaScript
voidUpdate•8mo ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSFuck
mariocesar•8mo ago
If you're curious, the code in ellipsis results in executing:

    print('hello, world')
mturmon•8mo 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•8mo ago
I think we're really starting to over crowd pythons syntax and I'm not a fan.
noddleah•8mo ago
you're telling me you never program in python elliptically??
acbart•8mo ago
Pretty sure this would have been possible in Python 2.6. The Ellipsis object has been around for a very long time.
MadVikingGod•8mo 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•8mo ago
You can do this on JavaScript too.

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