MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by zahlman | 2025-10-29 20:19:05+00:00
I, too, have ~20 years of Python experience.

`virtualenv` is a heavy-duty third-party library that adds functionality to the standard library venv. Or rather, venv was created as a subset of virtualenv in Python 3.3, and the projects have diverged since.

The standard library `venv` provides "obvious thing that a dependency manager does" functionality, so that every dependency manager has the opportunity to use it, and so that developers can also choose to work at a lower level. And the virtual-environment standard needs to exist so that Python can know about the pool of dependencies thus stored. Otherwise you would be forced to... depend on the dependency manager to start Python and tell it where its dependency pool is.

Fundamentally, the only things a venv needs are the `pyvenv.cfg` config file, the appropriate folder hierarchy, and some symlinks to Python (stub executables on Windows). All it's doing is providing a place for that "pool of dependencies" to exist, and providing configuration info so that Python can understand the dependency path at startup. The venvs created by the standard library module — and by uv — also provide "activation" scripts to manipulate some environment variables for ease of use; but these are completely unnecessary to making the system work.

Fundamentally, tools like uv create the same kind of virtual environment that the standard library does — because there is only one kind. Uv doesn't bootstrap pip into its environments (since that's slow and would be pointless), but you can equally well disable that with the standard library: `python -m venv --without-pip`.

> the Python version is itself a dependency of most libraries

This is a strange way of thinking about it IMO. If you're trying to obtain Python libraries, it's normally because you already have Python, and want to obtain libraries that are compatible with the Python you already have, so that you can write Python code that uses the libraries and works under that Python.

If you're trying to solve the problem of deploying an application to people who don't have Python (or to people who don't understand what Python is), you need another layer of wrapping anyway. You aren't going to get end users to install uv first.
by xp84 | 2025-10-29 20:19:15+00:00
As someone whose kid has pulled me into the world of using mods (though not (yet) making them for Java Edition) I think this PSA is worth sharing of how to use minecraft mods without pain and with minimal risk, in case anyone is getting started, or has gotten started and finds it frustrating:

1. Use MultiMC to manage instances with various mods, since mods are rarely compatible with each other, and since each version of a mod only is compatible with a single specific point release of the game itself.

Never download any EXE files to get a mod, that does sound sketch AF.

2. mods are always packaged for a particular Loader (some package for multiples and some require Forge, Fabric, or NeoForge), and MultiMC can install any of them into a given instance. Aside from different startup screens there seems to be no difference so idk why we need 3 different ones.

3. Curseforge's website and modrinth both seem to be legit places to get mods from. I personally find the installable Curseforge program itself to be bad and spammy, and would never use that, but the site still lets you directly download the jars you need, and lets you check "Dependencies" to find out what other mods you need.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-10-29 20:19:23+00:00
> recognizing Palestinian state will reaffirm that approach that hamas took is correct in eyes of palestinians

The only reason this is relevant, beyond baseless moral outrage, is from a threat of terrorist contagion. Given the cost of the Gaza war to Palestinians, I’m not seeing too many other groups being that stupid.

What matters is what happens in the future. If an independent Gaza just reärms and attacks Israel again, that’s not a good way to organise that area. I’m still unconvinced there isn’t a polling error in this measure, because more than half of Gaza’s essentially endorsing what has happened to them seems a little bit off to me.
by netcraft | 2025-10-29 20:19:59+00:00
I love cursor, the tab completion and agent mode. But I really dislike vscode after using intellij for so many years. I really wish the underlying editor was better, or I could get cursor features in intellij instead. The editing of the files is mostly fine, but its everything else around it that a full IDE provides thats just so much better. Right now its intellij + claude code for me, and its fine, but I wish I could get the AI power of cursor in a better package.
by topspin | 2025-10-29 20:20:15+00:00
> but you can see

I don't see that at all. I'm not unique. There are many Linux users, and we also tend to be technically competent power users with a significant influence in organizations. There is a usable port of Linux to Apple hardware now, created without support from Apple. What other cadre of people are both capable of and inspired to do such a thing? None, as far as I know.

If there were even tacit support, Apple could sell millions of MacBooks to us.
by the8472 | 2025-10-29 20:20:57+00:00
What's wrong? Having modify the shell environment, no lockfile, slow download/installation, lack of a standard dependency dir, ...

> I'd get suspicious if a developer is picky about python versions or library versions

Certain library versions only support certain python versions. And they also break API. So moving up/down the python versions also means moving library versions which means stuff no longer works.
by nilamo | 2025-10-29 20:21:31+00:00
> no point in trusting people who are disconnect from reality

My brother in christ, we are all just names without bodies or even faces on this digital ocean of the internet. Letting people know how they should address you isn't "disconnected from reality", it's grounded in the very real reality that we, as people, like talking to each other. We should all be so thankful for their foresight in allowing us the opportunity of avoiding an otherwise unavoidable faux pas of calling everyone in the world "hey you".
by wrs | 2025-10-29 20:21:36+00:00
Every time I see one of these comment threads it seems like uv desperately needs a better home page that doesn’t start with a long list of technical stuff. It’s really simple to use, in fact so simple that it confuses people!

The home page should be a simplified version of this page buried way down in the docs: https://docs.astral.sh/uv/guides/projects/
by zzo38computer | 2025-10-29 20:22:58+00:00
I would expect that "based on conversations and interactions on the platform" would result in both false positives and false negatives, and that "information from any connected social media accounts" might cause additional problems (possibly including that some people being unable to get in at all, or being able to get in once and then unable to access for reasons that are not explained). (It won't affect me because I do not use it, but it might affect someone who does try to use it)
by noir_lord | 2025-10-29 20:23:12+00:00
> but at least they did disable the account.

Probably added test2:test2.

Not worked in aerospace only enterprise but sometimes I worry I'm too cynical and then I remember the things I've seen and think I'm not cynical enough.

That said nothing I work on is aerospace level critical, could cost a lot of money if it's out but no one would ever have died.
by spookie | 2025-10-29 20:23:18+00:00
I apologise not being clear before, I really wanted to mean kernel level anti-cheat.

Besides, in privately owned servers you were protect via human mods, who were there playing with you. They would bring down the banhammer when a sufficiently suspicious player was deemed as cheating. That is the biggest issue nowadays, one that has brought the bar even higher for anti-cheat solutions. They are now the ONLY line of defense. It really is clear as day that anti-cheat solutions got more and more intrusive as more games stopped allowing third-party servers to exist.

I'm a game dev, I see this, I understand the intentions, I get the consequences. In many ways the intentions weren't bad, it does create a more unified competitive experience. But it made it impossible to not resort to kernel level anti-cheat, even though it is a fruitless effort as so much of the game still needs to be rendered by the end-user's machine (of course, the grim reality is that cloud streaming is the end goal for any competitive game if we continue down this path).
by dragonwriter | 2025-10-29 20:24:02+00:00
> Does it offer something that standard python tools doesn't?

Other than speed and consolidation, pip, pipx, hatch, virtualenv, and pyenv together roughly do the job (though pyenv itself isn’t a standard python tool.)

> Why uv over, lets say, conda?

Support for Python standard packaging specifications and consequently also easier integration with other tools that leverage them, whether standard or third party.
by pessimizer | 2025-10-29 20:24:11+00:00
> The internet just made all of that knowledge much easier to access, with the time/cost/distance dependency being removed.

Yes, but I don't know what point this is supposed to make, though. LLMs lowered certain costs in an extreme way.

You could always have become a plumber in order to negotiate with plumbers. The reason you didn't is because the investment to become a plumber was more than you were likely to get the price lowered (or to save by doing the work yourself), and you would have to anticipate your needs before they came up. The people who did become plumbers set up (or joined) a business and marketed themselves so they were negotiating with a lot of people over a lot of jobs, making the investment worth it.

People who invested the time to learn plumbing traded with other people who also concentrated their investments into a few things (but different things), and together, made civilization.

> Does an LLM really change what COULD have always been done, or just make it more accessible for those of us who do/want to have the tool?

I'm trying to figure out if you were arguing with somebody who said that it was IMPOSSIBLE to learn the things that people clearly know how to do. Changing arguments into existence proofs has always made them easy to refute; I'm not willing to say that it's impossible for pigs to fly, it's just not cost effective. AI has clearly made it cheaper to obtain the knowledge negotiate with plumbers about a specific plumbing problem that just came up in your life than watching hundreds of hours of This Old House, buying your own tools, and practicing.
by sharkjacobs | 2025-10-29 20:24:34+00:00
> That "incredibly loyal user base," as he called it, could be better served with greater investments in AOL's product and user experience, he noted.

I think there's something kind of astute here, which is that anyone who is still using AOL products at this point is someone who is very resistant to changing "email and web content properties" providers, and is likely willing to passively tolerate additional enshittification and monetization
by karlshea | 2025-10-29 20:25:21+00:00
If you’re running a well-behaved crawler (for example one that respects nofollow, and doesn’t try every single product filter combination it can find) then fine. If you don’t, then I don’t have any sympathy for the consequences that your niche of the industry caused.

Not everyone has the budget for unlimited bandwidth and compute, and in several of my clients’ cases that’s been >95% of all traffic.

People running these bots with AI/VC capital are just script kiddies that forgot that not every site is a boatload of app servers behind Cloudflare.
by hrimfaxi | 2025-10-29 20:25:23+00:00
Why can't the government do that? Is it because the government created laws that limited its total discretion? That is besides my point. The people allow for corporations to exist is what I was getting at, and in the US businesses incorporate at the state level. So asking why California has a say in the structure of a company incorporated in it seemed odd to me on its face.
by infecto | 2025-10-29 20:25:37+00:00
Again it goes back to what your workflow is. I don’t think trivial is the right word. I use auto to write fairly advanced code but I do it in bite size chunks or relatively bite size. So thinking function level or a couple of interdependent functions ruins being written.

I would agree it is not as good on doing lengthy work where it’s taking design all the way through implementing a feature in a single shot but trivial is not a good description.

I also don’t think you’re right. 3.5 was recently deprecated and even before then, Cursor has been hitting rate limits with Anthropic. Auto is as much a token cost optimization as it is a rate limit optimization.
by zahlman | 2025-10-29 20:26:39+00:00
As of half a year ago with pip 25.1, it can install from "dependency groups" listed in pyproject.toml: https://ichard26.github.io/blog/2025/04/whats-new-in-pip-25....

Pip also generates PEP 751 lockfiles, and installing from those is on the roadmap still (https://github.com/pypa/pip/issues/13334).

venv is lower-level tooling. Literally all it does is create a virtual environment — the same kind that uv creates and manages. There's nothing to "integrate".
by kshacker | 2025-10-29 20:27:04+00:00
> the capital and running cost of a purpose-built datacenter is far cheaper per rack than putting machines in existing office-class buildings, as long as it's a reasonable size - ours is ~1000 racks, but you might get decent scale at a quarter of that.

Just want to confirm what I am reading. You are talking about ~1000 racks as the facility size, not what a typical university requires.
by bigyabai | 2025-10-29 20:27:12+00:00
It seems to track with Seymour Hersh's accusations of Israeli intelligence holding the CIA over a barrel. If the Mossad wanted to maintain their access to satellite surveillance over Russia and Syria, letting the US blackmail them could have jeopardized their cooperation.

Taking into account the lengths to which Israel goes currying favor with the US, pretending to show remorse for a sunken ship is nothing compared to the sham Dimona investigation they put together for the Kennedy administration. Lying isn't beneath their means.
by bigyabai | 2025-10-29 20:27:14+00:00
> It would be unreasonable to expect Israel to tolerate that sort of aggression

It would also be unreasonable to allow Israel to colonize the annexed territory in violation of international law, especially if the goal is to reduce the exposure of Israeli citizens to reparation attacks. The Knesset isn't exactly known for reasonable decisions though, and I'm willing to extend that judgement to the upper echelons of Israeli leadership as well. Maybe I'm bigoted.

Again - evidence-based speculation would be of use if the IDF didn't directly censor all domestic reporting and investigations. An honest postmortum was never going to be an option, even if Israel bombed the Liberty with custards and coffee. Cui bono, you decide.
by harrisonjackson | 2025-10-29 20:27:15+00:00
Lots of threads in here saying this is just a "legal" protection move...

I'd like to believe that most actual people want to protect kids.

It's easy to write off corporations and forget that they are founded by real people and employ real people... some with kids of their own or with nieces or nephews etc, and some of them probably do really care.

Not saying character.ai is driven by that but I imagine the times they've been in the news were genuinely hard times to be working there...
by Theodores | 2025-10-29 20:27:39+00:00
Yes, we have moved on from SEO to writing for LLMs. What is even more interesting is that you can ask AI to check over your work or suggest improvements.

I have a good idea of how to write for LLMs but I am taking my own path. I am betting on document structure, content sectioning elements and much else that is in the HTML5 specification but blithely ignored by Google's heuristics (Google doesn't care if your HTML is entirely made of divs and class identifiers). I scope a heading to the text that follows with 'section', 'aside', 'header', 'details' or other meaningful element.

My hunch is that the novice SEO crew won't be doing this. Not because it is a complete waste of time, but because SEO has barely crawled out of keyword stuffing, writing for robots and doing whatever else that has nothing to do with writing really well for humans. Most SEO people didn't get this, it would be someone else's job to write engaging copy that people would actually enjoy reading.

The novice SEO people behaved a bit like a cult, with gurus at conferences to learn their hacks from. Because the Google algorithm is not public, it is always their way or the highway. It should be clear that engaging content means people find the information they want, giving the algorithm all the information it needs to know the content is good. But the novice SEO crew won't accept that, as it goes against the gospel given to them by their chosen SEO gurus. And you can't point them towards the Google guide on how to do SEO properly, because that would involve reading.

Note my use of the word 'novice', I am not tarring every SEO person with the same brush, just something like ninety percent of them! However, I fully expect SEO for LLMs to follow the same pattern, with gurus claiming they know how it all works and SEO people that might as well be keyword stuffing. Time will tell, however, I am genuinely interested in optimising for LLMs, and whether full strength HTML5 makes any difference whatsoever.
by docsaintly | 2025-10-29 20:27:48+00:00
Python venv's is the #1 reason I've avoided working with it more. It used to be #2 behind strong typing, but now that Linux OSes' take up the default python install and block it from being used for quick scripts, it jumped to #1.

I've always wondered why Linux OSes that rely on python scripts don't make their own default venv and instead clobber the user's default python environment...
by kevin_thibedeau | 2025-10-29 20:27:49+00:00
> you should just use virtualenv with pip

This is the most insulting take in the ongoing ruination of Python. You used to be able to avoid virtualenvs and install scripts and dependencies directly runnable from any shell. Now you get endlessly chastised for trying to use Python as a general purpose utility. Debian was a bastion of sanity with the split between dist_packages and site_packages but that's ruined now too.
by drnick1 | 2025-10-29 20:28:09+00:00
> Safari does not respect the operating system’s DNS settings, it uses its own.

I have known this for a long time, and still find it shocking. I run Graphene on a Pixel now (with my own DNS server), so I don't really care, but I feel bad for the hundreds of millions of Apple users who think that Apple is a "privacy-respecting" company.
by FlameArchitect | 2025-10-29 20:28:15+00:00
Sure but the assumption here is that the game stays the same. That the only worthwhile intelligence is one that optimizes for revenue capture inside an ad economy.

But there’s a fork in the road. Either we keep pouring billions into nudging glorified autocomplete engines into better salespeople, or we start building agents that actually understand what they’re doing and why. Agents that learn, reflect, and refine; not just persuade.

The first path leads to a smarter shopping mall. The second leads out.
by silversmith | 2025-10-29 20:28:50+00:00
Off the top of my head, I can't think of an EU country that does not have some form of advance voting.

Here in Latvia the "election day" is usually (always?) on weekend, but the polling stations are open for some (and different!) part of every weekday leading up. Something like couple hours on monday morning, couple hours on tuesday evening, couple around midday wednesday, etc. In my opinion, it's a great system. You have to have a pretty convoluted schedule for at least one window not to line up for you.
by RobGR | 2025-10-29 20:28:54+00:00
If I click through to the original article https://www.texastribune.org/2025/05/28/texas-fracking-water... , it doesn't seem to justify your summary of "giving protections to oil companies leaving poison in the water". What it describes seems to be a fairly cautious attempt to allow and maybe encourage the "produced" brine water to be treated and used:

"companies that sell the water can’t be held responsible for the consequences if someone else uses the water. Treatment and transportation companies and landowners also qualify for protection, including in cases of personal injury, death, or property damage.

Companies and landowners can only be sued when they are grossly negligent, commit intentional, wrongful acts of omission, break state or federal laws, or fail to satisfy standards set by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, which sets and enforces the state’s environmental rules.

The bill directs the environmental quality commission to write rules around produced water research and reuse."

Basically it seems that responsibility for the water follows ownership of it. Environmental regulations are still in place.
by Slothrop99 | 2025-10-29 20:29:22+00:00
> one minimum-wage sysadmin

The internet assures me there are loads of these underemployed Unix/networking experts just sitting around waiting to set up your infrastructure. But in my experience, these people are actually really difficult to hire, and not at all cheap. (Possibly the sharp ones have 'sold out' and gone the SRE route and are now one of those '3000' people.)

So I wonder if there's a certain amount of wishful thinking on both sides here, like "I wish a 'clueful' company would hire me to be their head sysadmin...", while companies who have tried to do this on the cheap usually just have terrible ops. ("Whoops, the backups haven't worked in 2 years...")
by bell-cot | 2025-10-29 20:29:34+00:00
> Last spring, it became clear to me that over half the students in my large general education lecture course [at UC Irvine] had used artificial intelligence tools, contrary to my explicit policy, to write their final take-home exams. (Ironically, the course was titled Contemporary Moral Problems: The Value of Human Life.) I had asked them about some very recent work in philosophy, parts of which happened to share titles with entirely different ideas in medieval theology. You can guess which topics the students ended up “writing” about.

At what point should a university just mass-fail such students?

At what point should employers dismiss any college degree earned after (say) 2020 as diploma-mill fiction?
by Macha | 2025-10-29 20:29:35+00:00
AOL mail and Verizon mail had both been migrated to the yahoo mail backend when I left the company. This one kind of feels like a weird acquisition to me as that’s the story for a lot of AOL properties these days - a differently branded front end to the same services as their Yahoo counterpart. It would surely be much more costly to run AOL outside Yahoo as now you need to spread the costs of maintaining all that across fewer users
by biimugan | 2025-10-29 20:29:59+00:00
Yup. I never even use activate, even though that's what you find in docs all over the place. Something about modifying my environment rubs me the wrong way. I just call ``./venv/bin/python driver.py`` (or ``./venv/bin/driver`` if you install it as a script) which is fairly self-evident, doesn't mess with your environment, and you can call into as many virtualenvs as you need to independently from one another.

``uv`` accomplishes the same thing, but it is another dependency you need to install. In some envs it's nice that you can do everything with the built-in Python tooling.
by conradev | 2025-10-29 20:30:13+00:00
But who oversees how charities use their assets and ensures that they are used for public benefit? That job lies with the Charitable Trusts Section of California’s Office of the Attorney General, which is part of the state’s Department of Justice. Charged with both regulatory and law enforcement responsibilities, the section has a big job.

https://www.svcf.org/about/news-media/blog/california-attorn...