MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by diegoofernandez | 2025-10-29 21:43:20+00:00
When I built my symbolic algebra engine (RomiMath) in TypeScript, I didn't start from the symbols — I started from the mechanics and the abstraction.

I understood Buchberger's algorithm and Gröbner bases in four hours — not by memorizing notation, but by grasping why they exist, how they behave, and what they're for.

Only later came the symbolic language. That part is just a way to describe the mechanics — not to replace understanding with symbols.

The Realization: Mathematics aren't hard — they're just misframed. The mechanical part (differentiation, polynomial reduction, algebraic manipulation) is finite, reachable, and learnable through repetition and decomposition.

- Each isolated operation is simple - Repetition reveals patterns - Constant decomposition brings mastery

The Crochet Metaphor: - Needles and threads = mechanical rules (finite and concrete) - Infinite patterns emerge from finite components - The limit isn't far away — it's here, within reach

My Unexpected Advice: Study philosophy — the hard kind. Learn to divide and subdivide a thought until it dissolves into clarity. That teaches you to think in structures, to see causes and consequences — the same mental motion behind algebra itself.

Mathematics aren't an abstract wall of symbols. They're a language. Read them as you'd read words in another tongue — patiently, curiously, without fear.

Once you do, every symbol speaks.

Proof: I went from basic fractions to a working Gröbner basis engine in 3 months, without formal education. The engine now solves 7-variable systems in seconds.

Has anyone else found that changing their mental framework made previously impenetrable topics suddenly accessible?
by the8472 | 2025-10-29 21:43:36+00:00
I'm confused by this reply.

> The alternatives are to use higher-level management like uv does,

The question was specifically what's wrong with pip, venv and pyproject toml, i.e. what issues uv is trying to address. Well of course the thing trying to address the problem addresses the problem....

> I don't know what you mean about a "standard dependency dir".

like node's node_modules, or cargo's ~/.cargo/registry. You shouldn't have to manually create and manage that. installing/building should just create it. Which is what uv does and pip doesn't.

> the same as what you get with `python -m venv --without-pip`

The thing that should be automatic. And even if it is not it should at least be less arcane. An important command like that should have been streamlined long ago. One of the many improvements uv brings to the table.

> and work is under way to allow it to install from those lockfiles as well.

Yeah well, the lack up until now is one of those "what is wrong" things.

> But your download speed is still going to be primarily limited by your internet connection to PyPI.

Downloading lots of small packages dependencies serially leaves a lot of performance on the table due to latency and non-instantaneous response from congestion controllers. Downloading and installing concurrently reduces walltime further.
by afthonos | 2025-10-29 21:44:58+00:00
Definitely not GP, but I think it’s pretty clear that whatever grit there was to have, GP did not have it. “Die an early death due to being overweight or build the grit” is strictly worse than “lose the weight without building the grit, or build the grit”, and it’s even more so when you realize that “or build the grit” was never in the cards. Because then the choice becomes “die an early death or don’t“. Building the grit can be done on other, hopefully less lethal, projects.
by keeptrying | 2025-10-29 21:45:17+00:00
The LLMs help you understand how the pricing works.

Eg: when my shower didn't work I was able to figure out all steps - and also do most of them before getting stuck at one particular point because I couldn't physically pull the unit out of the socket.

I was able to negotiate down $150 for that one.

In another instance with gas pipes I was able to find laborers who were good but just didn't have a branded van yet.

In this case LLMs help me understand that the laborer was damn good at his job and how to cut the cost of the job by breaking into different pieces.

The whole process is very tactical - you will lose quite a few negotiations before figuring it out. Also its not useful to just abstract all the jobs as you've done in your post. You've somehow got to the EMH except for service providers - its just not true.

The way different types of compnaies force you to pay more is very different. Lockpickers are very different from plumbers for example. Also each service provider have their own way of doing things and breaking points.

Also every geography is different. Service providers seem to charge the most with elderly house owners and peopel with nice houses in nice areas. So you can definitely use LLMs in those situations to find areas to put ads to attract better prices.

the best part of all this is how you can apply these negotiation skills to your job search or any other situation. definitely a long game like finance or health.
by zahlman | 2025-10-29 21:45:56+00:00
All of these tools are third-party and the Python core development team can't do anything to prevent people from inventing new ones. Even pip is technically at arms length; it has special support in the standard library (Python releases will vendor a wheel for it, which is designed to be able to bootstrap itself for installation[0]), but is developed separately.

Standards are developed to allow existing tools to inter-operate; this entails allowing new tools to appear (and inter-operate), too.

This system was in some regards deliberate, specifically to support competition in "build backends". The background here is that many popular Python projects must interface to non-Python code provided with the project; in many cases this is code in compiled languages (typically C, Fortran or Rust) and it's not always possible to pre-build for the user's system. This can get really, really complicated, and people need to connect to heavyweight build systems in some cases. The Python ecosystem standards are designed with the idea that installers can automatically obtain and use those systems when necessary.

And by doing all of this, Python core developers get to focus on Python itself.

Another important concern is that some bad choices were made initially with Setuptools, and we have been seeing a very long transition because of a very careful attitude towards backwards compatibility (even if it doesn't seem that way!) which in turn is motivated by the battle scars of the 2->3 transition. In particular, it used to be normal and expected that your project would use arbitrary Python code (in `setup.py` at the project root) simply to specify metadata. Further, `setup.py` generally expects to `import setuptools`, and might require a specific version of Setuptools; but it can't express its build-time Setuptools version requirement until the file is already running - a chicken-and-egg scenario.

Modern projects use a declarative TOML file for "abstract" metadata instead (which is the source for concrete metadata included in the actual build artifacts), but the whole ecosystem still has to support a lot of really outdated ways of doing things, because in part of how much abandonware is out there.

[0]: Wheels are zip-compressed, and Python can run code from a zip file, with some restrictions. The pip project is designed to make sure that this will work. The standard library provides a module "ensurepip" which locates this wheel and runs a bootstrap script from that wheel, which will then install into the current environment. Further, the standard library "venv", used to create virtual environments, defaults to using this bootstrap in the newly created environment.
by Ygg2 | 2025-10-29 21:45:58+00:00
> It isn't essential to C;

Its being not essential doesn't matter. If you have a Fil-C code that terminates on UB and a C code that doesn't, you have two provably semantically (subtly) different programs.

Proof: You have a program that halts on UB and one that continues running on UB.

> I think there are more C programmers today than there have ever been, and I doubt that that number will ever fall to zero while there are still humans.

Think that depends on more things than just there being humans. Where my BASIC programmers at?
by TeMPOraL | 2025-10-29 21:46:04+00:00
> But they don't demand the same control over laptops and desktops. Only phones. Why is that?

Oh, but they do. PCs (and Macbooks) are products of an earlier era, and the solutions of control evolved along; it looks chaotic, but that's because it's where the R&D happened over the past decades, which ultimately produced a cleaner - and more easily identifiable - mobile control ecosystem. But it's all there, if you look closely. To name few major groups:

- Many generations of DRM plugins for games, then for streaming media

- Trusted computing hardware

- Intel Management Engine and other firmware backdoors routinely inserted into hardware

- Endpoint security software, deployed widely on corporate-owned machines

Mobile solutions are just version 2.0, built on top of all that R&D.

> Granted I can't deposit a check with my laptop but I can do any other banking I wish to do.

This is the insidious part: for many banks, this is only tolerated because they force you to use their proprietary app on a trusted mobile device as a second factor! At this point, it doesn't really matter how well-controlled your main browsing platform is, because you have to use your phone anyway, and there the control happens. And, "for your convenience", the mobile app isn't just a physical security token, but lets you do banking too, which allows them to gradually deprecate the web experience.
by Capricorn2481 | 2025-10-29 21:46:29+00:00
You can make it a language flame war, but the Python ecosystem has had no problem making this bed for themselves. That's why people are complaining about running other people's projects, not setting up their own.

Sensible defaults would completely sidestep this, that's the popularity of uv. Or you can be an ass to people online to feel superior, which I'm sure really helps.
by volemo | 2025-10-29 21:46:41+00:00
I've spent the day revisiting this issue, and, after some research, I think my next phone will be Fairphone 5 with Ubuntu Touch. It's not perfect — too big for my taste and not waterproof — and I'll need a couple of weeks of trial use before fully committing. However, I really believe it could be not just my phone for the next five years but also an ad-hoc mobile workstation running a more or less usable Linux.

If anyone has experience with this setup, ideas, or suggestions, I would be glad to hear you out (if you are here after the comment section is closed, drop me an email, address is in the bio).
by eikenberry | 2025-10-29 21:46:45+00:00
I either want one universal tool that can manage this sort of thing across multiple languages (eg. devenv) or a native, built-in tool (eg. go's tooling). I don't see how this is any different from all the previous incarnations of Python's project/package management tools. The constant churning of 3rd party tooling for Python was one of the main reasons I mostly stopped using it for anything but smaller scripts.
by DominoTree | 2025-10-29 21:46:59+00:00
I have a GitHub action that uses an OAuth token to provision a new key and store it in our secrets manager as part of the workflow that provisions systems - the new systems then pull the ephemeral key to onboard themselves as they come up

It can get especially interesting when you do things like have your GitHub runners onboard themselves to Tailscale - at that point you can pretty much fully-provision isolated systems directly from GitHub Actions if you want
by NumberCruncher | 2025-10-29 21:47:21+00:00
> They bought Komoot, laid off 80% of the staff, but they still did a major redesign

This sounds like "doing a major redesign" would be something positive. I'm a paying customer since ages and use the app on daily basis. The new design adds nothing except confusion, at the same time they broke the app on my smartwatch. I'm pretty much thinking about switching apps because I don't see myself buying a new watch just because of this.

Some companies would be better off with less bored designers. This is exactly the same situation like a couple of years ago, when Spotify every week rearranged the GUI and every week I had to relearn how I can reach the same functionality. Back then I had to use the App Store to give feedback, but I see now I can do the same directly in the Komoot app. They're gonna have something to laugh about...
by weinzierl | 2025-10-29 21:47:23+00:00
WezTerm is great. When I switched back to Linux from Apple there were very few things I missed. iTerm2 was one of them, but since I found WezTerm I am pretty happy.

I tried to use it on Windows as well but unfortunately the Antivirus freaks out on it. When I looked into it it was because of a small utility `strip-ansi-escapes` which is so simple that even I could see that it is a false positive. I tried to report it to Microsoft and other Antivirus companies with some success but in the end I gave up an this Sisyphus task.
by jmpavlec | 2025-10-29 21:47:31+00:00
Took it (didn't go too well score-wise).

Would be nice to have the units for each question on top. Or in the input boxes themselves. I was on mobile and had to scroll down to see it. Mixing raw numbers and units of billions was confusing as well. There were definitely questions like the one about volume where I had no idea what a cubic mile really was conceptually (as opposed to a liter or something).

Regardless, reading about the study and comparing my own results was interesting.

I wonder if the inputs could be done using a slider given you are always selecting a range, that would be more intuitive.
by titanomachy | 2025-10-29 21:47:58+00:00
What was your comedown like? After 6 months of taking subcutaneous semaglutide, I just stopped taking it one day and it was fine. Need a bit more effort to be mindful of snacking now, though.

EDIT: saw your other comment that you felt you were starving. that sucks. the whole thing experience sounds awful.
by zbentley | 2025-10-29 21:48:01+00:00
> I get triggered whenever someone tells me "you can just" do this thing that is actually longer and worse than the original.

Apologies for triggering you in advance, but in case you or others find it useful, here’s how to do the equivalent env-activation commands with uv: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44360892
by maradan | 2025-10-29 21:48:28+00:00
This hardware is an analog simulator for Gibbs sampling, which is an idealized physical process that describes random systems with large scale structure. The energy efficient gains come from the fact that it's analog. It may seem like jargon, but Gibbs sampling is an extremely well known concept with decades of work with connections to many areas of statistics, probability theory, and machine learning. The algorithmic problem they need to solve is how to harness Gibbs sampling for large scale ML tasks, but arguably this isn't really a huge leap, it's very similar to EBM learning/sampling but with the advantage of being able to sample larger systems for the same energy.
by RansomStark | 2025-10-29 21:48:40+00:00
It used to be cv dazzle [0] is 15 years young. But its questionable if it works anymore. Theres also a bunch of of digital camo, most seem to target IR cameras [1] here's a homebrew version.

[0] https://adam.harvey.studio/cvdazzle

[1] https://www.macpierce.com/the-camera-shy-hoodie
by thetrees | 2025-10-29 21:49:01+00:00
Condensed version: 'OpenAI built a browser that mostly benefits OpenAI. Instead, they should have built a browser that mostly benefits the customer (and, thus, benefits OpenAI less).'

Welcome to capitalism.

I wish it wasn't like this, but this is the system we have. If you want OpenAI to do things differently, another company has to do it differently, show that doing it differently is even more profitable (see Apple and their privacy angle), and force OpenAI to change for competitive reasons.

Or figure out some way to trick our way into a constitutional convention so we can change the system.
by mvanveen | 2025-10-29 21:49:26+00:00
Ironically, I don't think glibly remarking that you "still have all your limbs" and some handmade furniture at the end properly demonstrates someone "fear[ing] the saw," and it demonstrates some of the hubris we're seeing in current tech culture.

One of my high school teachers impressed the same caution upon my cohort but was missing the end of a finger.
by Bender | 2025-10-29 21:49:51+00:00
In my opinion if there is no overlapping networks or the Infrastructure as Code understands pods, k8's and such then /etc/hosts can speed up resolution leaving things outside of the data-center to utilize DNS then it makes sense but requires some critical thinking about how all the inter-dependencies in the data-center play together and how fail-overs are handled.

Why aren't cloud providers and FAANGs doing this already

This probably requires that anyone touching the Infrastructure as Code are all critical thinkers and fully understand the implications of mapping applications to hosts including but not limited to applications having their own load balancing mechanisms, fail-over IP addresses, application state and ARP timeouts, broadcast and multicast discovery. It can be done but I would expect large companies to avoid this potential complexity trap. It might work fine in smaller companies that have only senior/principal engineers. Using /etc/hosts for boot-strapping critical infrastructure nodes required for dynamic DNS updates could still make sense in some cases. Point being, this gets really complex and whatever is managing the Infrastructure as Code would have to fully aware of every level of abstraction, NAT's, SNAT's, hair-pin routes, load balanced virtual servers and origin nodes. Some companies are so big and complex that one human can not know the whole thing so everyone's silo knowledge has to be merged into this Inf as Code beast. Recursive DNS on the other hand only has to know the correct up-stream resolvers to use or if they are supposed to talk directly to the root DNS servers. This simplifies the layers upon layers of abstraction that manage their own application mapping and DNS.

Another complexity trap people get lured into is split-views which should be avoided due to growing into a complexity trap over time and breaking sites when one dependency starts to interfere with another. Everyone has to learn the hard way for themselves on this topic.

My preference would be to instead make DNS more resilient. Running Unbound [1] on every node pointing to a group of edge DNS resolvers for external IP addresses with customized settings to retry and keep state up the fastest upstream resolving DNS nodes, also caching infrastructure addresses and their state, setting realistic min/max DNS TTL times is a small step in the right direction. Dev/QA environments should also enable query logging to a tmpfs mount to help debug application misconfigurations and spot less than optimal uses of DNS within the infrastructure and application settings before anything gets to staging or production. Grab statistical data from Unbound on every node and ingest it into some form of big-data/AI web interface so questions about resolution, timing, errors may potentially be analyzed.

This is just my two cents based on my experience. If it seems like I was just spewing words I was watching Shane Gillis and did not want to turn it off.

[1] - https://unbound.docs.nlnetlabs.nl/en/latest/manpages/unbound...
by burningChrome | 2025-10-29 21:49:52+00:00
Musk said the same thing about CA too. All CEO's make decisions based on what is best for them and their companies. There is no loyalty in business.

Edward Niedermeyer, author of “Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors,” said Musk was happy to benefit from California’s largesse when it suited him and to move on when he saw fit.

“I think Musk has made the calculation that he’s gotten all the benefits he’s likely to get out of the state and he’s moving on to the next one,” Niedermeyer said. “The state of California clearly thought that all its work bought loyalty [from Musk] but, instead, I think it bought a sense of entitlement.”

Elon Musk’s messy divorce with California leaves ugly grievances all around: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-07-23/elon-mus...
by cowthulhu | 2025-10-29 21:49:52+00:00
This doesn’t seem plausible. Leading edge lithography requires you to be at (or beyond) the cutting edge in many realms - even with a breakthrough in one realm, I don’t understand how a startup could expect to catch up to ASML across the board in a few years.

Their website is light on technical details and heavy on nationalistic fluff, which does not lend much confidence.
by coder543 | 2025-10-29 21:50:18+00:00
Impressive systems write-up. A question: if Composer is an RL finetune on an open model, why keep weights closed? The edge from a slightly better checkpoint erodes quickly in this market, it's not a durable advantage. Composer protects Cursor's margins from being squeezed by the big AI labs, but that is true whether the weights are open or closed, and I think Cursor would have more lasting benefit by generating developer goodwill than from a narrow, short-lived advantage. But, that's just my opinion. I personally find it hard to get excited about yet-another proprietary model. GPT-5 and Sonnet 4.5 are around when I need one of those, but I think the future is open.
by breve | 2025-10-29 21:50:19+00:00
1. You can configure the keyboard shortcuts in KDE. Or use something like Toshy: https://github.com/RedBearAK/Toshy

2. KDE Autostart

3. KDE Discover. Supports flatpak for example: https://flathub.org/en

4. SysD Manager (https://github.com/plrigaux/sysd-manager). Can be installed from Flathub. SystemdGenie is another one.

5. KDE Plasma System Monitor

6. KDE User Manager
by opminion | 2025-10-29 21:50:21+00:00
As a player: What's the lag? Does it depend on the game and the gesture?

As a developer: I'd like to implement a "game" which would be ideal for Dynamicland (tens of cards with ID stickers on the corners), but this might be a simpler platform to set up and use. Would that be possible with the board as sold?
by coldtea | 2025-10-29 21:50:59+00:00
It's simple: linguistics is a politicized discipline, and there's a prevailing ideogically motivated tendency to put every language and dialect on equal footing.

>As someone who once studied General Linguistics, I don't understand this remark. I've learned that calling something a language is a political act and often of great significance to the speakers, but is almost never well-defined from a purely linguistic perspective. That's a fact.

Yes, this ideologically motivated idea after enough repetitionbecame "a fact" of the field, as if describing some objective physical law, and even non-political students will be taught and stick to the same (and anybody with a dissenting opinion will be getting an earful if not committing career suicide).

This wasn't always the case, it's more so with liberalism prevailing, especially in the latter half of the 20th century.
by zahlman | 2025-10-29 21:51:09+00:00
> The article shows some advantages compared to plain virtual environments

No; they are plain virtual environments. There is no special kind of virtual environment. Uv simply offers its own command structure for managing those environments. In particular, `uv run` just ensures a venv in a specific location, then uses it.

There is no requirement to activate virtual environments in order to use them (unless you have some other tooling that specifically depends on the environment variables being set). You can, similarly, "just do"

.venv/bin/python myscript.py

without uv installed.

> This command automatically picks up the correct virtual environment for you

Some people dislike such magic, especially since it involves uv having an opinion about where the virtual environment is located.