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How NASA built Artemis II’s fault-tolerant computer

https://cacm.acm.org/news/how-nasa-built-artemis-iis-fault-tolerant-computer/
177•speckx•13h ago•63 comments

Apple's New iPhone Update Is Restricting Internet Freedom in the UK

https://bigbrotherwatch.org.uk/blog/apples-new-iphone-update-is-restricting-internet-freedom-in-t...
84•josephcsible•3h ago•34 comments

Native Instant Space Switching on macOS

https://arhan.sh/blog/native-instant-space-switching-on-macos/
382•PaulHoule•9h ago•188 comments

Generative art over the years

https://blog.veitheller.de/Generative_art_over_the_years.html
61•evakhoury•2d ago•17 comments

RAM Has a Design Flaw from 1966. I Bypassed It [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKbgulTp3FE
98•surprisetalk•2d ago•9 comments

CollectWise (YC F24) Is Hiring

https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/collectwise/jobs/Ktc6m6o-ai-agent-engineer
1•OBrien_1107•5m ago

Charcuterie – Visual similarity Unicode explorer

https://charcuterie.elastiq.ch/
171•rickcarlino•8h ago•29 comments

The Raft Consensus Algorithm Explained Through "Mean Girls"

https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/raft-is-so-fetch/
12•vermilingua•1h ago•1 comments

Hip-hop pioneer, Afrika Bambaataa, dies aged 68

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c2evppm30p7o
16•mellosouls•31m ago•0 comments

PicoZ80 – Drop-In Z80 Replacement

https://eaw.app/picoz80/
165•rickcarlino•9h ago•30 comments

Reverse engineering Gemini's SynthID detection

https://github.com/aloshdenny/reverse-SynthID
124•_tk_•8h ago•47 comments

Unfolder for Mac – A 3D model unfolding tool for creating papercraft

https://www.unfolder.app/
174•codazoda•11h ago•34 comments

Principles of Mechanical Sympathy

https://martinfowler.com/articles/mechanical-sympathy-principles.html
13•zdw•2d ago•0 comments

Moving from WordPress to Jekyll (and static site generators in general)

https://www.demandsphere.com/blog/rebuilding-demandsphere-with-jekyll-and-claude-code/
60•rgrieselhuber•7h ago•28 comments

Research-Driven Agents: When an agent reads before it codes

https://blog.skypilot.co/research-driven-agents/
152•hopechong•11h ago•48 comments

Old laptops in a colo as low cost servers

https://colaptop.pages.dev/
185•argentum47•10h ago•104 comments

Hegel, a universal property-based testing protocol and family of PBT libraries

https://hegel.dev
94•PaulHoule•10h ago•30 comments

An AI robot in my home

https://allevato.me/2026/04/07/an-ai-robot-in-my-home
23•kukanani•2d ago•6 comments

Many African families spend fortunes burying their dead

https://davidoks.blog/p/how-funerals-keep-africa-poor
165•powera•6h ago•143 comments

How Close Is Too Close? Applying Fluid Dynamics Research Methods to PC Cooling

https://www.lttlabs.com/articles/2026/04/04/how-close-is-too-close-applying-fundamental-fluid-dyn...
22•LabsLucas•4d ago•5 comments

Show HN: I built a Cargo-like build tool for C/C++

https://github.com/randerson112/craft
132•randerson_112•12h ago•113 comments

Microsoft PhotoDNA scanning problem

https://www.elevenforum.com/t/microsoft-photodna-scanning-problem-it-is-comical-now.45961/
91•darkzek•3h ago•36 comments

A WebGPU implementation of Augmented Vertex Block Descent

https://github.com/jure/webphysics
133•juretriglav•16h ago•15 comments

Show HN: Druids – Build your own software factory

https://github.com/fulcrumresearch/druids
39•etherio•1d ago•6 comments

Microsoft is employing dark patterns to goad users into paying for storage?

https://lzon.ca/posts/other/microsoft-user-abuse/
268•jpmitchell•7h ago•145 comments

EFF is leaving X

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/04/eff-leaving-x
1221•gregsadetsky•11h ago•1031 comments

LittleSnitch for Linux

https://obdev.at/products/littlesnitch-linux/index.html
1286•pluc•1d ago•418 comments

Launch HN: Relvy (YC F24) – On-call runbooks, automated

https://www.relvy.ai
43•behat•16h ago•22 comments

Kagi Product Tips – Customize Your Search Results with URL Redirects

https://blog.kagi.com/tips/redirects
22•treetalker•7h ago•0 comments

The Training Example Lie Bracket

https://pbement.com/posts/lie_brackets/
26•pb1729•6h ago•12 comments
Open in hackernews

Elliptical Python Programming

https://susam.net/elliptical-python-programming.html
184•sebg•12mo ago

Comments

benob•12mo ago
TIL that in python, 1--2==3
seplox•12mo ago
It's not a python thing. 1-(-2), distribute the negative.
qsort•12mo 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•12mo 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•12mo 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•12mo ago
Also worth noting that `1 - -2` works and produces 3 in C because the space breaks the operator.
plus•12mo 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•12mo 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•12mo 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•12mo ago
Expanding on this a little, I will be replacing all occurrences of 2 with two blobs fighting, with shields:

    >>> 0^((...==...)--++--(...==...))^0
    2
rmah•12mo 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•12mo ago
And apparently string formatting which should have an ever growing number of ways to handle it. :shrug:
elijahbenizzy•12mo ago
Ok do this but for JavaScript
voidUpdate•12mo ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSFuck
mariocesar•12mo ago
If you're curious, the code in ellipsis results in executing:

    print('hello, world')
mturmon•12mo 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•12mo ago
I think we're really starting to over crowd pythons syntax and I'm not a fan.
noddleah•12mo ago
you're telling me you never program in python elliptically??
acbart•12mo ago
Pretty sure this would have been possible in Python 2.6. The Ellipsis object has been around for a very long time.
MadVikingGod•12mo 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•12mo ago
You can do this on JavaScript too.

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