MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by AlienRobot | 2025-09-28 00:24:39+00:00
My love for python was critically hurt when I learned about typing.TYPE_CHECKING.

For those unaware, due to the dynamic nature of Python, you declare a variable type like this

foo: Type

This might look like Typescript, but it isn't because "Type" is actually an object. In python classes and functions are first-class objects that you can pass around and assign to variables.

The obvious problem of this is that you can only use as a type an object that in "normal python" would be available in the scope of that line, which means that you can't do this:

def foo() -> Bar: return Bar() class Bar: pass

Because "Bar" is defined AFTER foo() it isn't in the scope when foo() is declared. To get around this you use this weird string-like syntax:

def foo() -> "Bar": return Bar()

This already looks ugly enough that should make Pythonists ask "Python... what are you doing?" but it gets worse.

If you have a cyclic reference between two files, something that works out of the box in statically typed languages like Java, and that works in Python when you aren't using type hints because every object is the same "type" until it quacks like a duck, that isn't going to work if you try to use type hints in python because you're going to end up with a cyclic import. More specifically, you don't need cyclic imports in Python normally because you don't need the types, but you HAVE to import the types to add type hints, which introduces cyclic imports JUST to add type hints. To get around this, the solution is to use this monstrosity:

if typing.TYPE_CHECKING: import Foo from foo

And that's code that only "runs" when the static type check is statically checking the types.

Nobody wants Python 4 but this was such an incredibly convoluted way to add this feature, specially when you consider that it means every module now "over-imports" just to add type hints that they previously didn't have to.

Every time I see it makes me think that if type checks are so important maybe we shouldn't be programming Python to begin with.
by amitp | 2025-09-28 00:24:43+00:00
BTW in the next article the author goes into wind, evaporation, orographic rainfall, rivers, biomes. But not ocean current or tectonic activity.

There's a different blog series that does go into plate tectonics: https://frozenfractal.com/blog/2023/11/13/around-the-world-2...

Coincidentally Civ 7 just announced they're using plates with voronoi for their new map generator.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-09-28 00:24:54+00:00
The problem is red state legislators are fond of denying rights to their residents (Missouri, Ohio, and Florida as specific recent examples as it relates to either ignoring voters on this topic, or raising the bar on democratic mechanisms to intentionally sabotage), so federalism breaks down. It works when you're experimenting with markets, social safety nets (Canada's universal healthcare started at the provincial level, for example), but not so much in this context.

California is about to pass legislation (AB 260) to allow healthcare providers in CA to mail these products anonymously to other states, so it’s mostly a moot point; red states barely have enough resources for their own states, it’s unlikely they put up any material effort in this regard (chasing providers in other states at scale, especially now that shield laws aren't just attempting to shield against liability, but it's enabling provider anonymity).

New York, Maine, Massachusetts, Vermont, and Washington have passed similar laws that allow doctors to prescribe abortion pills anonymously, and Pennsylvania is considering similar legislation [1].

[1] https://www.jezebel.com/california-law-will-let-providers-ma...
by mattkevan | 2025-09-28 00:26:51+00:00
Bandcamp is your friend here. It’s got an almost infinite selection of the tiniest of micro-genres. Vaportrap? Yes. Blackgaze? Absolutely. Barber beats? Why not.

My process is to find or invent a ludicrous sounding genre name, search for it, click on any promising-looking covers and then if I like the music I’ll look through their label, any hashtags and the profiles of people who purchased it to see what else I can find. Discovered a vast amount of excellent or at least interesting music this way.
by magicalhippo | 2025-09-28 00:26:57+00:00
So, what would you call studying the code for the fast inverse square root[1] in the Quake source code so you truly understand it, to the point you can explain what it does to someone else without invoking words like "magic" or similar?

Because I'm pretty sure most devs would not just read the code and go "ah yes, of course".

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_inverse_square_root#Overv...
by fnord77 | 2025-09-28 00:26:58+00:00
> but an AI salesman can 100% convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI that can't do your job, and when the bubble bursts, the money-hemorrhaging "foundation models" will be shut off and we'll lose the AI that can't do your job, and you will be long gone, retrained or retired or "discouraged" and out of the labor market, and no one will do your job.

Even if the big AI companies turn off their APIs, people will still be able to run local models as well as some other, new business spun up to run them as SaaS.
by squigz | 2025-09-28 00:27:31+00:00
> Also notably, you will find people with similar beliefs using expressions like "y'all" and other Southern US regionalisms, even if they're white Northerners. From my observations this seems to be intended as an act of solidarity. "Folks" arguably also belongs in this category.

This is uh... well, seems a bit of a stretch to me. Not once in all my years saying "ya'll" have I ever even remotely put it in this framing, nor have I ever heard of anything like this.
by ChuckMcM | 2025-09-28 00:27:46+00:00
It's the real deal, lots of challenges with high emf. Not surprisingly a very common failure mode is that if you induce currents in the coils of the brushless motors their controllers which are using back emf to set their waveform phase get it wrong and the motors stop spinning, spin backwards, and sometimes just go back and forth like tiny washing machine motors.

Shielding helps of course, adds expense and adds weight, the two things that cut into how many you can make for $X and how far they can fly.

Counter drone systems in battle are going to be a thing, things like the Danish 'bird' RADAR sees them easily enough[1], targeting them with EMF just needs an antenna, generator, and some clever electronics.

This becomes more important as the drones become more autonomous because if there is no operator to 'jam', electronic counter measures are not as effective.

[1] https://www.weibelradars.com/drone-detection/
by AlienRobot | 2025-09-28 00:27:56+00:00
Typescript requires a compiler to produce valid Javascript. Python 3 shoved types into Python 3 without breaking backwards compatibility I think.

You would never have typing.TYPE_CHECKING to check if type checking is being done in TypeScript, for example, because type hints can't break Javascript code, something that can happen in Python when you have cyclic imports just to add types.
by BrenBarn | 2025-09-28 00:28:11+00:00
> That's a purely personal point of view but I don't think the AP people claim that "people want the wrong things", but rather that "the things you want have a cost and we're not hiding it".

I think that's a great way of putting it, and it it's at the root of a lot of problems we have today. Our society increasingly encourages people to make money by coaxing other people into doing things whose costs are hidden.
by schwartzworld | 2025-09-28 00:29:58+00:00
I actually make a lot of sample based music, and it’s as much an art as you make it. Downloading a couple of loops from splice and layering them is lame, actually chopping and repurposing samples is not.

I never said Suno wasn’t “art”. The opposite is true. If you want to put your name on something that took no effort or skill and call it art, more power to you. You could do the same in other areas, and lame, low effort “art” proceeds AI by millennia. You are as welcome as anybody to call yourself a creator, however lame that effort may be.

But man the chutzpah of comparing that low effort drivel with people pushing genre boundaries.
by reese_john | 2025-09-28 00:30:30+00:00
Lee Kuan Yew on what made Singapore successful:

“Air conditioning. … It changed the nature of civilization by making development possible in the tropics. Without air conditioning you can work only in the cool early-morning hours or at dusk. The first thing I did upon becoming prime minister was to install air conditioners in buildings where the civil service worked. This was key to public efficiency.”
by hwillis | 2025-09-28 00:32:08+00:00
> How much energy, how long is the pulse, how close were the drones?

1 millisecond pulses and 70 kW continuous usage[1] which is roughly equivalent to the AN/TPQ-53[2]. 2 km range.

> Regardless I think the primary challenge with these systems will be energy on site and a surge of it during waves of attacks. Charged up capacitors can only handle so many waves.

That is not how this kind of thing works. Capacitors are a terrible energy source. Their voltage drops off exponentially as they discharge and almost all electronic are very particular about the voltage they require. A railgun wants current and does not care about voltage. Radio transmitters care a lot about voltage.

Regardless, a 70 kW generator fits on a small trailer. Smaller than the weapon itself. It will run for days on a good sized tank of diesel.

[1] https://www.twz.com/land/army-puts-50m-bet-on-next-gen-leoni...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AN/TPQ-53_Quick_Reaction_Capab...
by AnotherGoodName | 2025-09-28 00:32:18+00:00
I think the fact that the majority of the 'rich' nations population consisting of Europe and North America (Japan/SK/AU/NZ are a smaller population base) speaks to this.

You could just ask why those 2 regions are so rich right now and the answer i think has much to do with military dominance starting a few hundred years back.

The climate line seems to be artificially pushed by "Look the southern hemisphere below latitude -40 is as wealthy as europe/NA above latitude 40". There's literally <2million people below latitude -40... (that's the top of Tasmania, part of NZ and patagonia for reference) How can they suggest what they are suggesting without consideration of this? As in the data of "oh look southern hemisphere is rich near the poles too" is just based on a handful of people living there.
by drnick1 | 2025-09-28 00:33:32+00:00
One of the best things you can do for privacy is blocking all third party domains by default with uBlock (or uMatrix). A lot of sites will break and not render properly, but it's the best kind of active protection against trackers you can have. You then manually enable what you want, and leave all the rest (social trackers, Google/Adobe fonts, telemetry) off.
by anotherevan | 2025-09-28 00:34:52+00:00
You're right regarding 65%. The extra 15% is the arrow keys, Page up/down, home, end and delete keys. Found I often hit these one handed while the other hand is on the mouse, so a secondary layer that would require two hands to activate would be problematic.

There's neuroplasticity and there's picking your battles. :-)
by jmward01 | 2025-09-28 00:35:33+00:00
Type hints in python are just that, hints. Use them to help with clarity but enforcing them and requiring them everywhere generally leads to the worst of all worlds. Lots of boilerplate, less readable code and throwing away many of the features that make python powerful. Use the best language for the job and use the right language features at the right time. I see too many black or white arguments in the developer community, there is a middle ground and the best code is almost always written there.
by perching_aix | 2025-09-28 00:36:40+00:00
I used to have a pretty big problem with this claim myself; I'd vehemently reject it for reasons I wasn't entirely certain of.

Then I read a comment on here a while ago, something along the lines of "children have political opinions too". It was so utterly absurd, it broke something in me. One thing lead to another, and now I no longer reject the claim vehemently. I reject it trivially.

It isn't that it's not correct. It is correct, it's just also stupid. I found that the fundamental anchor of it is that people do not directly observe reality - they interpret it through their senses, so nothing can be truly known. So far, fairly uncontroversial, if a little philosophical [0].

But that means all we have is experiences and opinions about those experiences. Mix this with politics just being a group's opinion, and the fact that there's more than two people alive - what you get is that every opinion can be now considered a political opinion, and since all we have is opinions, "everything" is a political opinion, so "everything" is political [1].

I then find this stupid because it hard-misses the point of the colloquial usage of the word. By being overly universal, it functions either as just a useless segmentation, or as a pointless exercise in pedantry, a rhetorical sleight of hand. It also deals in a good amount of mind-reading, where those considering something a political opinion, rather than just a personal opinion, pretty much implicitly accuse the other person of groupthink, which is a really quite cheap accusation to make with no real argumentational benefit.

But maybe this is one of those rare cases where this definition does have its utility. Let's see.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solipsism

[1] Except of course the matters of mathematical logic, which by virtue of being inherently axiomatic systems, once again walk away unscathed.
by commandersaki | 2025-09-28 00:37:09+00:00
The vast majority of the market didn't need an iPhone at all until it was introduced. If you enable compelling enough use cases people will find ways for them to fit their workflows, and/or come up with brand new ones.

It was a compelling value proposition to Crackberries of the era; Apple clearly did market research before flinging it to the masses. Danger Inc / Google were already converging on this with their first Android.

The biggest hurdle standing in the way is that making a single one of iPhone/iPad/Mac too powerful (in terms of usability, not just raw processing power) will take away sales from the other two.

Cannibalising their product line is probably the most plausible explanation, but I'm sceptical. I reckon it's just that they haven't found a "killer" use case for it and probably bottom in the list of ideas for improving the product (if it even made a list).
by _aavaa_ | 2025-09-28 00:37:26+00:00
> They're great for the user that doesn't have to go to a garbage ad riddled page.

The websites are garbage ad riddled because the operators have to pay for the site and the writers and such, and the vast majority of people are unwilling (or unable) to pay even $1 for viewing a site.

Even YouTube premium, lots of folks prefer their ad blocker over paying to remove the ads cause the adblocker is free.
by cies | 2025-09-28 00:38:00+00:00
I have a theory not listed here: harsh winters make a people calculative (and calculative people make more money).

If you can survive all year sleeping under a tree, you eventually end up with a different gene pool than in a place where you need to calculate how much grain you need to store for winter in order to feed you family.

Harsh winters kill people that cannot plan ahead. This, over time, changes the gene pool and the attitude toward planning.
by GeekyBear | 2025-09-28 00:38:23+00:00
Pour one out for Anandtech.

SPEC has been the industry standard performance benchmark for comparing between different CPU architectures for decades.

It takes all freaking day to run, but Anandtech published the benchmarks as soon as they got their grubby little hands on a new core design for every well known architecture.

Is GeekerWan on YouTube the only outlet still doing this today, albeit in Chinese with English subtitles?

You would think that Chips and Cheese, at least, would take up the gauntlet.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-09-28 00:41:17+00:00
This works with Macs, Windows PCs and USB C based iPhones and iPads. You just connect it with a USB C cable. It gets power and video from the USB C cable.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B095GG31KX?ref=ppx_pop_mob_ap_shar...

I take it with me when I travel.
by jiggawatts | 2025-09-28 00:41:51+00:00
The readme in the source code mentions RFC 4180 compliance.

This snippet of the code shows that it is correctly handled:

// from init_tables() } else { // When in a quoted string, a quote char transitions to the escape state. st[S_QUOTED][q] = S_QUOTE_ESC; // By default, any character seen after the escape state's quote // will transition back to the unquoted state (ending the field). memset(st[S_QUOTE_ESC], S_UNQUOTED, 256); // CRITICAL OVERRIDE: If the character is another quote, it was an // escaped quote, so we go back to the quoted state. st[S_QUOTE_ESC][q] = S_QUOTED; }
by delfugal | 2025-09-28 00:41:57+00:00
Noisy does not mean good.

Old Cherry keywitches in Wyse Terminals and computers were the best keyboards ever. They had a great feel with barely there faint click. Totally nothing like the CLONK CLICK that people think made those early IBM keyboards popular. I always hated them. If you're copying a keyboard an old Wyse keyboard from say a WY50 terminal or Wyse386 PC clone and copy that.
by rvz | 2025-09-28 00:42:20+00:00
> How a crash affects anyone other than high-net-worth individuals with money tied up in VC funds is not explained.

That is even worse. There are many so-called "AI companies" drowning in spending lots of tokens and the majority of them have lots of assumptions when going to raise more money to VCs.

What if the VCs say no?

What if 90% of all these startups get competition from a frontier AI lab and undercuts them? We are seeing this with Cursor and Anthropic already.

What if early-stage startups cannot afford the 100K per H-1B hire anymore AND cannot hire remote overseas due to the HIRE act?

Additionally, we are going to find out what does not mix well together with AI and will inevitably cause a crash that could come unexpectedly.

> Real estate and crypto on the other hand...

At least we do *know* that both of them do not mix well together.

AI + layoffs + mortgages on the other hand...
by Brainfood | 2025-09-28 00:43:58+00:00
@thecupisblue. Amazing work. Logged in just to tell you this. This has just given me goose bumps and made me excited about the web again. I’ve been struggling to find my groove in the dev world post AI and have been digging back into AR and WebXR just for the fun of it. Thank you for the game and more importantly the renewed inspiration to make something cool!
by hwillis | 2025-09-28 00:44:23+00:00
> Not surprisingly a very common failure mode is that if you induce currents in the coils of the brushless motors

No, that doesn't happen. Currents can be induced in the wires to the motors, but not in the motors themselves. For one thing, the outside surface of the motors is the aluminum rotor which is an extremely effective faraday cage. For another, coils don't act like antennas. Loops of wire in an electric field have the exact same voltage difference as a straight wire.

> Shielding helps of course, adds expense and adds weight, the two things that cut into how many you can make for $X and how far they can fly.

Shielding adds virtually zero weight; carrying a spool of fiber optic cable adds a lot of weight. All the drones in Ukraine right now are fiber optic but most of them are unshielded... the reason why is not that shielding is heavy, it's just that there are lots of jammers but very few truck-sized weapons intended to totally disable drones.

That's also assuming it would even work on a drone without an antenna. If these weapons are not relatively broad-spectrum then they will be very sensitive to the particulars of the circuitry, and they won't always work.
by pessimizer | 2025-09-28 00:44:59+00:00
Yes. A lot of these people should have been laid off anyway. The Musk Twitter massacre taught everybody a lesson, and layoffs were hot before AI was even the main concern.

Also, the DEI massacre is probably going to develop (or has developed) into a full scale HR/Social PR massacre. Instead of getting yelled at for doing the wrong thing, better to do nothing but make more money. And a side-benefit is that firing all of those people makes it even easier to fire more people. (Is that the singularity?)

I don't doubt that some industries are going to be nearly wiped out by AI, but they're going to be the ones that make sense. LLMs are basically super-google translate, and translators and maybe even language teachers are in deep trouble. In-betweeners and special effects people might be in even more trouble than they already were. Probably a lot more stuff that we can't even foresee yet. But for people doing actual thinking work, they're just a tool that feeds back to you what you already know in different words. Super useful to help you think but it isn't thinking for you, it's a moron.
by hamandcheese | 2025-09-28 00:45:51+00:00
Nix is 4 or 5 different things. I agree that the term is unfortunately quite overloaded.

> But on the whole I think it's approximately two orders of magnitude more complicated than is necessary to efficiently build and deploy software.

This might be true, if you dramatically constrain the problem space to something like "only build and deploy static Go binaries". If you have that luxury, by all means, simplify your life!

But in the general case, it is an inherently complex problem space, and tools that attempt to rise to the challenge, like Bazel or Nix, will be lot more complex than a Dockerfile.
by edoceo | 2025-09-28 00:46:39+00:00
It kind of doesn't tell us what we need (or want) to know. Or at least, its not clear to me what conclusion is right from that.

On its face, none of these players have accountability. With enough noise individuals could be pressured out from either group. And if either group makes wrong choices, the penalty is just removal.

It's messy; I don't see any obvious answers or conclusions.
by refibrillator | 2025-09-28 00:47:40+00:00
Great exposition, loved the touch of humor. Please do the backward pass when it’s published.

As a fellow Tri Dao groupie and lucky duck who gets to build on Hopper/Blackwell clusters, I find it amazing how difficult it is becoming to write kernels that saturate GPU hardware.

When I squint, there appears to be a trend emerging across work like FA4, monolithic (mega) kernels, etc. Namely, a subversion of the classic CUDA programming model in the form of fine grained task based parallelism, managed entirely in “user space”.

Not exactly sure what’s ahead but I’m strapping in for a wild ride…
by Aurornis | 2025-09-28 00:47:54+00:00
A museum in my city closed because they were very unprofitable and couldn’t continue attracting more and more donations to handle their costs.

A lot of people were angry and upset that it was closing, but whenever you pressed someone about it they would admit they hadn’t visited in a decade or more. Of those who had, the experience wasn’t very good. The museum had become more interested in poor digital displays and other disappointing museum things that simply weren’t interesting to view.

It didn’t stop people from being mad that it was closed or even getting angry at donors that pulled their funding. Some people like the idea of something existing in their city even though they don’t want to pay for it with their own money.