MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by BeetleB | 2025-10-01 17:40:36+00:00
> Students are taught it, a bunch of libraries were written for it, now everyone keeps using it.

This is revisionism.

When I was in school, that's what people would say about C/C++/Java.

People like me switched to Python well before it became common to teach it at school. Lots of great libraries were written in it before then as well. I mean, it's really easy to write a library in it than it was in most other languages.

It was picked for teaching in schools because it was a decent language, and was already widespread. It's much more useful to teach Python to an average engineering student than C/C++/Java.

It became popular because it was easy to learn, and a lot nicer to use than the other big scripting language: Perl. When I was in grad school, I would routinely find non-engineers and non-programmers using it for their work, as well as writing libraries for their peers. There is no way they would have done that in any of the prevailing languages of the time - many of them learned to program while in grad school. It became quite popular amongst linguists. Then NumPy/SciPy became a popular alternative to MATLAB, and once again my peers, who would never write C++ to do their work, were suddenly getting matching speed by using Python. That's how it ended up being the language for ML.

So no - the fact that it's taught in schools is not the reason it's used today.
by XiZhao | 2025-10-01 17:40:39+00:00
One would imagine they are broadly similar; but that's off the assumption that codebases are similar as well.

Migrations between versions can have big variance largely as a function of the parent codebase and not the dependency change. A simple example of this would be a supported node version bump. It's common to lose support for older node runtimes with new dependency versions, but migrating the parent codebase may require large custom efforts like changing module systems.
by giantg2 | 2025-10-01 17:41:07+00:00
It might be experienced by non-disabled people, but I would say it disproportionately affects people with autism. Promotions are political and most people on the spectrum are at a disadvantage in the political realm due to the way ASD tends to affect social behavior etc. I've seen everyone other dev that joined around my time is at least 1-2 levels further than me. We can see these impacts in data for things like disability pay gap research.
by floatrock | 2025-10-01 17:41:14+00:00
sure, but that's not what we're talking about here.

the article is framing LLM's as a kind of fuzzy pipe that can automatically connect lots of tools really well. This ability works particularly well with unix-philosophy do-one-thing tools, and so being able to access such tools opens a superpower that is unique and secretly shiny about claudecode that browser-based chatgpt doesn't have.
by robenkleene | 2025-10-01 17:41:57+00:00
> It always bothered me that people got in the trouble of making a web-app, that generates designs, and those designs are not plain web pages.

Figma isn't a web app in the traditional sense of the word, it's a C++ app with a WebAssembly compile target. https://www.figma.com/blog/webassembly-cut-figmas-load-time-...

E.g., it's more similar to how Adobe Illustrator and other C++ graphics programs render content than it is how a web browser engine renders HTML and CSS.
by BeetleB | 2025-10-01 17:42:09+00:00
> No errors produced in the IDE because the place where it is updated is now just creating the variable instead so all the references still work. `let` is a good keyword.

I too would prefer let. But the number of times what you mentioned has bitten me in almost 20 years of programming Python can be counted on in one hand. And these days, just use the "rename" feature in your IDE!
by jpcody | 2025-10-01 17:42:14+00:00
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by bigyabai | 2025-10-01 17:42:17+00:00
The government didn't make you take the vaccine. They just didn't protect you from the consequences... and why should they?

If your private employer considers you a risk, they have every right to make you choose between vaccination or the pink-slip in an at-will employment state. Get over it, there are real issues worth being butthurt over. Unless you live in Montana, the legal side of this was hashed out literal decades ago.
by smj-edison | 2025-10-01 17:42:19+00:00
Perhaps a bit more of an unorthodox blog post, but Gilad Bracha's Ban on Imports really changed the way I think about module systems: https://gbracha.blogspot.com/2009/06/ban-on-imports.html

He talks about how imports and exports are global state, and that they have all the issues that global state brings. It's made me appreciate dependency injection a lot more.
by jmyeet | 2025-10-01 17:42:19+00:00
Python’s popularity seems to me driven by ML and data science.

Personally, I can’t take seriously any language without a good type system and, no, optional type hints don’t count. Such a type system should express nullability and collection parameterization (ie genetics).

I simply won’t write a lot of code in any language where a typo or misspelling is a runtime error.
by blfletcher942 | 2025-10-01 17:42:29+00:00
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by tptacek | 2025-10-01 17:42:39+00:00
I was psyched for Alex to post this here because I think it's a super valuable bit of understanding for startups that need to do vendorsec† that mostly gets hand-waved away in writing about startup security programs. The bit about the power differential in particular!

There's a startup vendorsec playbook that mostly revolves around SOC2 and security people increasingly call out how performative it is. This piece is about non-performative stuff.

† vendorsec: the part of your security program where you do something about all your third-party vendors
by ActorNightly | 2025-10-01 17:42:46+00:00
Scrum is literally a scam though. It was invented by some guy not even worth remembering who sold it to both sides (buyers and sellers of software). On the buyer side, the incentive was to encourage the seller to use scrum to communicate progress. On the seller side, they are encouraged to use scrum because the buyer wants it, and it "proven" to be an effective management tool.

There are too many unknowns to deal with to actually make use of it, and managing the unknowns is a whole other aspect of management outside scrum. This is why most scrums essentially devolve into ad hoc work per sprint with very loose planning.
by cestith | 2025-10-01 17:42:50+00:00
I think it's partly because this is what was started and caught on.

There are also folk life festivals with traditional art forms from before mass production, frontier festivals, colonial festivals, Civil War reenactments, Revolutionary War reenactments, the Vintage Computer Festivals, conventions for antique radio and TV equipment, and all sorts of periods people commemorate. This is the one that has been around a few decades, caught on in a big way, and spread nationwide.

There are also pumpkin festivals, apple festivals, corn festivals, other harvest festivals, May Day festivals, county fairs, state fairs, and more despite most of the things involved in all of these are anachronistic for most of the population. Very few people actually raise prize cattle, sheep, and pigs. Very few farm crops. We still celebrate these as if we’re an agrarian society though.
by hollerith | 2025-10-01 17:42:53+00:00
In contrast, I prefer the least restrictive laws and regulations that achieve the goal.

Our nation's continuing to emit a little CO2 from automobile tailpipes is not so dire a danger that we can't meet our goal with a sufficiently drastic tax on fossil fuels, enabling those few consumers and organizations that benefit the most from emitting CO2 from automobile tailpipes to continue to emit a little.

It is hard for policymakers even to imagine all the ways an outright ban on something will incur costs -- and most of the time, they shouldn't even try.
by klaaz0r | 2025-10-01 17:43:01+00:00
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by hackyhacky | 2025-10-01 17:43:06+00:00
> THe FTC is part of the Federal Gov't whereas the Federal Reserve is not.

I think you know that blanket statements of this type are at best inaccurate and not helpful to the discussion. The Fed is an entity created by federal statute and staffed by presidential appointees, so it's at least a little misleading to say that it's not part of the federal government.
by mrguyorama | 2025-10-01 17:43:12+00:00
No, I am not arguing about the merits of the product, I am explicitly saying that using FOMO as a marketing tactic is shitty and bad and should make a person who does that feel bad.

I do not care that it is common. I want it to be not common.

I do not care that bad marketing tactics like this can be used to sell "good" products, whatever that means.
by bonoboTP | 2025-10-01 17:43:26+00:00
MS Excel is much much much much more accessible to the normal office worker than MS Access. It's not even close. As a kid, most of us intuitively picked up Excel but Access was a mystery even with a teacher in computer class trying to teach us the basics. Later I learned SQL to create websites, and graduated with a good CS degree, but the learning curve is uncomparable.
by tejohnso | 2025-10-01 17:43:35+00:00
> If the regime is able to do this because of speech

Okay but that's a big "IF". I suspect a regime attempting to do that might be promulgating a significant amount of propaganda, but I doubt that they're able to be oppressive "because of speech".

What about loss of upward mobility for the middle class, or loss of living wages, mismanaged public institutions, corruption, bribery, collapse of democratic process?

All of this enables or sustains oppressive regimes and doesn't require any kind of speech from citizens. And without these kinds of serious problems, citizens barking nonsense won't result in much. Hindering free speech only makes it easier for a regime to continue to exacerbate these serious problems and continue oppression without being called out.
by palmotea | 2025-10-01 17:43:35+00:00
> It'll be interesting to see if they still can design and build a new ground-up airplane design. The last all-new design was the 787, initiated in 2003 and launched in 2009, and its design was fraught with problems.

I've listened to a fair number of podcasts about this, and consensus seemed to be they need to start designing a new airplane now, because if they wait as long as they'd previously been indicating, they'd have lost too much of their "new airplane design" experience.
by jdottdot | 2025-10-01 17:43:37+00:00
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by bignorthchris | 2025-10-01 17:43:48+00:00
You've likely seen the terms AGI and ASI thrown around a lot lately, and you may even think you know what they mean - but not everyone agrees on the definition.

I was curious what the ACTUAL distinction is between AI, AGI, and ASI, so I did some research to learn about the history of these terms and what they mean today.

Give it a read and let me know what YOU think AGI really means!
by mrandish | 2025-10-01 17:44:11+00:00
Yeah, a typical advice trope is "Find things with meaning and do those" which isn't very useful once you understand we create meaning internally. Meaning is an individualized perception not an extrinsic property.

This gets tricky because our perceptions can be influenced by societal expectations of which things should be meaningful - as if it's an objective property. It's easy to think of activities to which many people would respond "Oh, that must be soooo meaningful" and yet it's entirely possible you may not personally experience a sense of meaning from doing them - yet feel like you're supposed to. It's important to realize there's nothing wrong with that (or with you). You may not experience the 'expected meaning' meaning while doing some "charitably noble activity" widely thought to be meaningful, yet discover something else few would associate with "meaningful" does evoke meaning for you.
by ravenzachary | 2025-10-01 17:44:17+00:00
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by vpShane | 2025-10-01 17:44:17+00:00
Agreed. But python is tried and true and battle tested. I like hobby coding and tried wasm python for the first time the other day, needed JS to load the wasm on the front end. Front end python socket io to python backend? Forget about it. That was my first trial I'm sure there's getting things to work. I've moved straight to python for flask, and web front end stuff being VUE. Tried pythons GTK and app development and could only get my test app to only look slightly better than a 1990s website; BUT, it isn't electron.

For sys level things even TUIs, parsing data, it's a joy.

Edit: QT not GTK
by ASalazarMX | 2025-10-01 17:44:52+00:00
It's a beautiful and expressive language, and I use it a lot. My only gripe is how prone it is to bit rot, too sensitive to version changes in libraries or runtimes. It needs frequent babysitting if you want to keep everything updated.

Even if it's less secure, the beauty of Go, a single, static binary impervious to version changes, is very appealing for small projects you don't want to keep returning to for housekeeping.
by TrainedMonkey | 2025-10-01 17:44:53+00:00
There is but a sliver of atmosphere between Earth and Uranus... and all of the atmosphere between sensing apparatus and microbes 90m away. I am curious how moon would look like if there was the atmospheric scattering the entire way there. Or if would even be able to spot Mars / Venus if we had a constant 1 atm the entire way.
by slibhb | 2025-10-01 17:44:54+00:00
> And it's especially egregious when people use that meme to then weaponize it to exclude people from the groups with shared experiences, weaknesses, skills, and needs.

> If you really feel the need to be exclusive, and tell other people that their experience is invalid, and demand that they preform their rock bottom for you, before you'll believe them. Might I suggest instead of telling other people that the way they describe their life is wrong, instead try adding the prefix subclinical. As in my asthma (through work and effort), is subclinical.

The fact that people have started applying social-justice-y terminology ("gatekeeping," "weaponize," "shared experiences," etc) to medical diagnosis is a clear sign we've gone too far. "You can't question my diagnosis because it's part of my identity! Stop gatekeeping me!"

Please. "Austism" is not a settled category and it's okay to argue about boundaries. The irony here is that autistic as an adjective means "unfeeling" e.g. "He rose and stood tottering in that cold autistic dark with his arms outheld for balance while the vestibular calculations in his skull cranked out their reckonings". When sorting out the definition of autism (and similar conditions), we should be a little more autistic.
by ipython | 2025-10-01 17:44:57+00:00
Yes, the book has a clear point of view. That said, it's not subtle at all, and they're very clear about their bias. I'd rather a clearly defined bias than one that is hidden from view or some half-hearted attempt at "bothsiding" the argument.

I felt they had some very good points, though, and I don't see any progress on the major blockers to any sort of large scale extra-planetary colonization. I hadn't considered the issues with procreation discussed in the book, for example--that's kind of a huge issue if we want to have any sort of self-sustaining population outside of this earth!
by f0e4c2f7 | 2025-10-01 17:45:09+00:00
I don't like the premise of this game. If you're autistic, don't mask. Live authentically as yourself and find people who love you for who you are.

You'll annoy the hell out of some people, and thats fine. They can find other people to spend time with.

You can probably find a good community where you are, and if not just move to SF which is something like the autism homeland. Being autistic there is valorized and even imitated in sort of amusing ways.

Masking is a kind of hell, living someone else's life. Unmasking and living as yourself feels scary at first but the people who will love you that way can only find you if you live that way.
by tomatohs | 2025-10-01 17:45:14+00:00
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by nhourcard | 2025-10-01 17:45:19+00:00
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by joshstrange | 2025-10-01 17:45:49+00:00
Aside from "AI is going to take my job" what is their complaint? The "quotes" from real actors don't really have any substance:

- “Wow … no thanks,”

- “I hope this backfires in every way humanly and well… Non humanly possible.”

- “F*k off.”

I guess this just fits under my general "Horse drivers mad that cars exist" categorization. These tools lower the bar of entry (just like they can lower the bar to entry of programming when used correctly) but I don't quite understand why we need to protect jobs from AI.

Maybe I'm completely out of touch but I look at LLMs and I'm not concerned for job (in tech). Sure, my job will/has changed but it's always changing, I've never understood people who expect to learn a job then never have to learn anything else ever again.

I'll apologize in advance if this sound callous, it's not meant to be that way. Technology comes for everyone/everything eventually, that's life and it's not like we can just stop the forward march of technology. If we do we will become irrelevant on the global stage.