MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by TMWNN | 2025-10-03 20:51:06+00:00
>2. A country with no first class citizens

Wait. A country that does not favor its own citizens? At all? Why even have "citizenship" at all? Put another way, why would anyone want to move there to become a citizen of said country?

Good grief. This reminds me of the heights (depths) of /r/redditisland.
by Spivak | 2025-10-03 20:51:09+00:00
That… seems bad? Like I guess it is what it is and you just have to deal with it but what if your "critical section" has two await calls? The code can be paused between them but it's such that it must eventually resume. Say making a change in the database and emitting an audit edit for that change. Is your only option to either not do that or put a big do not cancel sign on the function docs?
by waltbosz | 2025-10-03 20:51:37+00:00
From the research paper: https://jhr.pensoft.net/article/38972/element/2/11//

> The upper part of the ant trail in Fig. 1; the ants (on the left) were unable to move along the ceiling and thus could not reach the outlet of the ventilation pipe. Photo taken on 18.09.2016 (Wojciech Stephan).
by TuringTest | 2025-10-03 20:52:20+00:00
I prefer the name given in mathematical optimization, which is Constraints Satisfaction Problems; instead of using an imprecise physics metaphor, it gets a descriptive logical term of what's going on.

In CSPs, each cell is a 'decision variable' with a 'domain' of values, which get pruned by 'constraints' that propagate to values invalidated by the decisions made in the connected variables, until the whole 'problem' gets into either a solution which 'satisfies' all the constraints, or a contradictory state where a variable's domain is empty, causing the algorithm to backtrack.

CSPs have the advantage of having clear and efficient methods to go back to a previous state and keep exploring every alternate possibility, rather than having to restart from the beginning. The article hints at that possibility ('saving checkpoints' or'reverse the collapsing of a cell'); there's a whole field of study dedicated on the best ways to do that on a large scale for very general problems.
by giancarlostoro | 2025-10-03 20:52:45+00:00
You could absolutely have this be part of the language in any regard. The question then becomes how does one implement it in a reasonable way. I think every package should have a __version__ property you should be able to call, then you could have versioned imports.

In fact there's already many packages already defining __version__ at a package level.

https://packaging.python.org/en/latest/discussions/versionin...

Edit: What they are solving with UV is at the moment of standing up an environment, but you're more concerned about code-level protection, where are they're more concerned about environment setup protection for versioning.
by comex | 2025-10-03 20:53:23+00:00
I don't hate it but I don't love it. It sounds like everyone will start writing `lazy` before essentially every single import, with rare exceptions where eager importing is actually needed. That makes Python code visually noisier. And with no plan to ever change the default, the noise will stay forever.

I would have preferred a system where modules opt in to being lazy-loaded, with no extra syntax on the import side. That would simplify things since only large libraries would have to care about laziness. To be fair, in such a design, the interpreter would have to eagerly look up imports on the filesystem to decide whether they should be lazy-loaded. And there are probably other downsides I'm not thinking of.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-10-03 20:53:34+00:00
> who else would it be who led the transition from copper to iron, if not the people working with copper?

Karl Benz wasn’t a teamster.

Hematite colours ochre clay red. I could see just as plausible a route of origin coming through pottery, where someone stuck a lump of hematite into a kiln or whatnot.
by zahlman | 2025-10-03 20:53:42+00:00
As a counterpoint, having all the imports automatically deferred would instantly dramatically speed up pip for short tasks.

$ time pip install --disable-pip-version-check ERROR: You must give at least one requirement to install (see "pip help install") real 0m0.399s user 0m0.360s sys 0m0.041s

Almost all of this time is spent importing (and later unloading) ultimately useless vendored code. From my testing (hacking the wrapper script to output some diagnostics), literally about 500 modules get imported in total (on top of the baseline for a default Python process), including almost a hundred modules related to Requests and its dependencies, even though no web request was necessary for this command.
by neom | 2025-10-03 20:54:22+00:00
This comment is full of interesting questions! Would they return to being normal ants due to the environment shift? If they are now truly just "cannibal ants" and not regular ants acting in an opportunistic cannibal manner, would they even bother going to the colony, or would they just kinda zombie around eating other ants? And do these new ant types need to function together in this new style?
by bilbo0s | 2025-10-03 20:54:50+00:00
If it makes you feel any better, I can assure you we've been using these technologies all along. Only we used it for people we claimed were "street criminals" and "gang members". It's just that now we're rolling it out to have society-wide control instead of just using it for what we were told was simply "pacifying inner-cities".

If I were a man given to being suspicious, I'd swear that the whole time using these technologies for "street criminals" and "gang members" was never about "pacifying inner-cities" at all. I'd be inclined to think that maybe it was just the equivalent of the beta test.

But I'm not given to being suspicious. So I know that whole way of thinking is just nutty. right?
by james2doyle | 2025-10-03 20:55:10+00:00
Yeah hammerspoon seems a lot more capable.

I wrote two articles on using global hotkeys with hammerspoon:

https://ohdoylerules.com/tricks/hammerspoon-hyper-key/ https://ohdoylerules.com/tricks/hammerspoon-number-pad-short...

One think you can even do is detect which devices are being used and handle shortcuts differently. You can write a full on workflow that can be triggered with a keyboard shortcut if you’re using hammerspoon.

I recently switched from a homecooked keyboard "expansion" plugin to using Espanso but it can do that as well!
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-10-03 20:55:43+00:00
> This doesn't make the information they are putting out false

It makes it unreliable. If you’re claiming the IPC is an unreliable source, you need a reliable source to back you up on that. (And neither article actually cites any data that would undermine the IPC’s case.)

I’m genuinely open to being convinced. Another comment raised the issue of insufficient CDRs for IPC 5 status, which may or may not be relevant. But these UN Watch interviews are rally the base stuff, not argument.
by vlovich123 | 2025-10-03 20:55:57+00:00
If we’re going to overturn Wickard then let’s do that. But overturning just some of the consequences of that on idealogical grounds is super weird. Especially given that the biggest proponents of gun control were conservatives in the 70s once black people start getting organized and arming themselves. Now that it’s white supremacists doing it its ok again?
by billyrudi | 2025-10-03 20:56:21+00:00
Hi YC, I'm Paolo Lops from Morlappo, a software house in Italy.

We build business applications, and this is our warehouse management system.

We built this for logistics clients who couldn't afford $200k SAP systems.

Multi-tenant architecture, modern stack, open source.

Here's the multi-tenant dashboard. Chaotic storage algorithms, barcode tracking, real-time inventory.

So we open-sourced it with MIT license.

We want to grow this product with the open source community and sell it as a managed service.

Free to self-host, paid for hosting and support.

We need YC's help to scale the community and build a sustainable SaaS business. Thanks.
by Forgeties79 | 2025-10-03 20:56:26+00:00
If that’s going to happen with a small fish then it was certainly going to happen against a big fish. Cheaper, faster, and easier to attack a smaller business first. There is literally no reason to go after a big dog unless they did something particularly egregious and/or distinct that you can anchor your argument with. Unless your goal is just to waste their time and that of their lawyers I guess, though I think we would all assume the goal is to win ultimately.
by haute_cuisine | 2025-10-03 20:56:26+00:00
I have a brilliant phrase for you, it's called a baggage without a handle. It's hard to carry it with you and it's a shame to throw it away.

I was in very very similar situation and just put the lights off. You can't trick your brain to do hard work for free. Why spend your time working on something that unsuccessful when you can work on something that you actually like?
by kenjackson | 2025-10-03 20:56:32+00:00
The numbers are alarming, but I feel like seeing more details would be really helpful. For example MIT and CalTech both have numbers that indicate something like 7x more non-faculty staff than faculty. That sounds crazy, but is it? I'd love to know more detail about the distribution of people to those non-faculty roles.

I feel like this is an example where we can get almost everyone behind reducing costs at college by showing better data. If you were to show, for example, that 7x is almost all carbon emissions admins then I think we'd see a ton of support to cut these positions. But it may also be the case that people see the admin responsibilities and say, "Oh... OK, that makes sense". The problem is -- with this data, I have no idea.
by appreciatorBus | 2025-10-03 20:57:07+00:00
> pro-authoritarian sane-washing

The general use of the word dictator for someone in role like Jobs had or with his temperment has been around almost as long as the word dictator.

A cursory Google search for "steve jobs dictator" reveals references going back to 2007 at least. Several references even refer to him as Hitler.

Many people who worked with Steve, both those who liked him and those who hated him, described him as a dictator.
by rockercoaster | 2025-10-03 20:57:08+00:00
I don't entirely know what to make of a very-small number of companies' valuations going sky-high that fast (and a few completely without any apparent connection to the fundamentals or even the best-plausible-case mid-term future of those fundamentals, like Tesla) but I can't help but think it means something is extremely broken in the economy, and it's not going to end well.

Maybe we all should have been a little more pro-actively freaked out when dividends went from standard to all-but extinct, and nobody in the investor class seemed to mind... like, it seems that the balance between "owning things that directly make money through productive activity" and "owning things that I expect to go up in value" has gotten completely out-of-wack in favor of the latter.
by zahlman | 2025-10-03 20:57:59+00:00
Recursively importing other modules is itself a side effect.

In fact, all the code you see in the module is "side effects", in a sense. A `class` body, for example, has to actually run at import time, creating the class object and attaching it as an attribute of the module object. Similarly for functions. Even a simple assignment of a constant actually has to run at module import. And all of these things add up.

Further, if there isn't already cached bytecode available for the module, by default it will be written to disk as part of the import process. That's inarguably a side effect.
by jMyles | 2025-10-03 20:58:16+00:00
I have always used the word "plaintext" to mean content that has not been subject to encryption or hashing, whether it is text, arbitrary bytes (including multimedia formats), or even abstract ideas which can be somehow subject to a cipher.

But these terms are certainly used different in different situations by different people. But yeah, images and/or video can still be "the plaintext" in the parlance to which I'm accustomed.
by goku12 | 2025-10-03 20:58:17+00:00
> If you truly believe this, then you could point to just about anyone on earth and state they're complicit in some atrocity or oppression.

Ah! I see where it's going now. You can't reinterpret and dismiss others' statements to your liking. If you choose to vocally support an activity that you know to be harmful in some way, then you're actively complicit in it. That's a choice. And not one that everyone takes to end up fighting with their own conscience. And even those who do, weigh their actions against a moral boundary they maintain.

> I would concede there are degrees of proximity, but this particular example, that if you are in any way contributing to Apple's success (not matter the size) that you are complicit, and by implication be held responsible, for fasicm is truly whacky in my books.

Misinformation peddlers actively frustrate and defeat the efforts of those who try to raise awareness and alarm about the problem. That's plenty enough for them to be held morally responsible for the results.
by BugsJustFindMe | 2025-10-03 20:58:17+00:00
> It's been explained many times before why this is not possible: the library doesn't actually have a version number. The distribution of source code on PyPI has a version number, but the name of this is not connected to the name of any module or package you import in the source code.

You're making the common mistake of conflating how things currently work with how things could work if the responsible group agrees to change how things work. Something being the way it is right now is not the same as something else being "not possible".
by jlarocco | 2025-10-03 20:58:45+00:00
But there's a real risk that in the long term all of the "serious" AI hardware research will get done inside a few big companies, essentially shutting out smaller players with a hardware moat.

Unless they start selling the hardware, but in the current AI market nobody would do that because it's their special sauce.

On the other hand, maybe it's no different than any other hardware, and other makers will catch up eventually.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-10-03 20:59:36+00:00
> If client side scanning is mandated for everything then the natural place for it to wind up is in the OS. Once your OS is scanning all the things, your privacy is finished - pretty good or otherwise.

An air gap can solve that problem:

1. Create an illegal message on a machine with no internet.

2. Encrypt the message.

3. Copy the encrypted message over to a machine that does have internet.

4. Send it.
by sunshowers | 2025-10-03 20:59:40+00:00
Agreed that in the narrow case of a timeout it doesn't buy you much (and things like network sockets often let you do timeouts in synchronous code). But often you do want the power to do selects and more complex state machines. I wrote a blog post a couple years ago talking about why a project I'm the author of, cargo-nextest, switched from sync Rust to async. https://sunshowers.io/posts/nextest-and-tokio/

To this day I'm not aware of a better way to express what's become a set of increasingly complex state machines (the most recent improvement being to make the state machines responsive to user input). Nextest's runner loop is structured mostly like a GUI event loop, but without explicit state machines. It's quite nice being able to write code that's this complex in a bug-free manner.
by BrenBarn | 2025-10-03 21:00:02+00:00
I think you're confusing "internationally recognized" with something like "there is an interpretation of international law that supports ..." (and it was unwise of me to use the term "international law" in an earlier comment because it contributes to this blurring, although I didn't realize that at the time).

If the borders were internationally recognized, it would mean that other countries agree that those are the borders. But as far as I know no country recognizes the borders of Mandatory Palestine as the borders of Israel, nor officially recognizes Israel's occupation of the West Bank as legal. I'm not talking about citing chapter and verse of some treaty or some principle like "Uti Possidetis Juris". If the fact of the matter is that other countries do not recognize those borders as the borders of Israel, then those are not the internationally recognized borders of Israel.
by BiteCode_dev | 2025-10-03 21:00:47+00:00
We heard that about types, the walrus, asyncio, dataclasses and so much more. But it didn't happen, if people don't need something (and many don't know it exists or what it does), it's unlikely they use it.

In fact, half of the community basically uses only a modernized set of python 2.4 features and that's one of the beauties of the language. You don't need a lot to be productive, and if you want more, you can optionally reach for it.

It has worked very well for the last 2 decades and it will likely work again.
by zahlman | 2025-10-03 21:01:39+00:00
With the LazyLoader technique I described at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45467489 , there is no problem:

>>> import nonexistent_module Traceback (most recent call last): File "<python-input-2>", line 1, in <module> import nonexistent_module File "<frozen importlib._bootstrap>", line 1360, in _find_and_load File "<frozen importlib._bootstrap>", line 1322, in _find_and_load_unlocked File "<frozen importlib._bootstrap>", line 1262, in _find_spec File "<python-input-0>", line 8, in find_spec base.loader = LazyLoader(base.loader) ^^^^^^^^^^^ AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'loader'

The implementation should probably convert that exception back to ImportError for you, but the point is that the absence of an implementation can still be detected eagerly while the actual loading occurs lazily.
by colechristensen | 2025-10-03 21:02:20+00:00
A key lesson is that there is always a large proportion of the population which will cheer this kind of action.

You can't lay blame on the people doing this and feel like you're done. Unfortunately they're always going to exist. You have to lay blame on the people defending against them. They failed in their defense and here we are.

The difficulty in stopping it scales with how long you let it fester.

Last time it was a world war which could have threatened extinction.

We're still in the phase where people are hoping doing nothing will make it all better or denying outright the threat.
by quickthrowman | 2025-10-03 21:02:41+00:00
English is three languages smashed together with thousand of words borrowed from dozens of other languages (Latin, “Proto-German”, Norman French). There’s no other language that has such a rich vocabulary.

To me, Finnish is the only interesting language in your list, due to not being related to the rest of the Nordic languages or Russian (Finno-Ugric). It’s also purely phonetic, which is nice, but what a shame about all those case endings. I am definitely biased as I learned Finnish as a teenager.

Might as well take this opportunity to plug Bill Bryson’s book The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way, it’s a fun read.
by johannes1234321 | 2025-10-03 21:02:49+00:00
If vereioned imports were added to the language versioned library support obviously would have to become part of the language as well.

However it isn't trivial. First problem coming to my mind:

module a importing first somelib>=1.2.0 and then b and b then requiring somelib>1.2.1 and both being available, will it be the same or will I have a mess from combining?
by Electricniko | 2025-10-03 21:03:17+00:00
Both the Faroes and Iceland had trees before the vikings arrived and deforested the land, with birch being the most predominant species. But yeah, the wind makes it hard to bring a forest back once it's gone. The rewilding youtube channel Mossy Earth just released a video a couple days ago on their efforts to bring back some birch forests in Iceland:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-pT56a5ZUc
by joemi | 2025-10-03 21:03:28+00:00
I think kids aren't the best comparison with senior citizens when it comes to technology. I've got senior citizen parents and I've got nieces and nephews who are all under 10 years old. The kids are so much more adept at pretty much any technology they get their hands on when compared to my parents (iphones, nintendo switch, tv remotes, etc). They start off about as poorly as my parents do but quickly overcome them. My parents aren't tech illiterate, either -- my dad especially was quite a DOS power user back in the day, and to some degree has kept it up with his Windows usage too.

I think part of it might be due to the neural pathways still forming in the kids brains, but I also think a lot of it has to do with who they're around. The kids are around their parents who are using this tech all the time, while my parents don't have that benefit except for in comparatively small doses.
by quesera | 2025-10-03 21:03:37+00:00
This might be therapeutic for you:

The vast majority of people who interact with you in any way, think about you extremely little or not at all beyond the moment of interaction.

We just don't play nearly as big a role in other peoples' lives as we sometimes imagine.

It's the observant and introspective people among us who believe otherwise. Most people are neither.
by Aurornis | 2025-10-03 21:03:39+00:00
> The online function shall apply to physical payment cards and accompanying PIN code when purchasing essential goods such as food, medicine and fuel.

Is this a typo where they meant to say “the offline function”?

If I’m reading this right, the goal is to allow food, fuel, and medicine purchases with card + PIN in offline mode.

Seems like a reasonable goal. I wonder what the technical details will look like. Will there be a periodically updated list of cancelled cards/accounts distributed to endpoints? Even a hashed list of all cards cancelled before their expiration date within a country is a reasonable amount of data for modern storage systems.

Or would they simply rely on the ability to track down account owners by their originally registered contact info in the event that someone gets an invalid transaction through during an offline period?
by tialaramex | 2025-10-03 21:03:40+00:00
I think that a language which (as I understand it) already gives you a big number if you exceed the bounds of its provided integer types, might just as well provide rationals as the IEEE floating point types unless those IEEE types are very fast but to me it looks like on the whole they're not.

I was not aware of Cython, which sounds like a terrible idea but each to his own nor Numba, though I have worked with PyPy in the past. I'm afraid that the idea that somehow every Python implementation would be compatible caused me to choke. Python doesn't really care about compatibility, behaviour of the sum function you brought up was changed twice since Python 3.

This is an old machine, so I can well believe you can do the iteration faster. My initial interest happened because by total coincidence I was writing benchmarks for realistic which try out f32 and f64 vs realistic::Real for various arithmetic operations, and so I wondered well, isn't even Python much faster and (with my naive iteration) it was not.

As you are hopefully aware, new programmers are equally likely to run into languages where the default is the 32-bit IEEE floating point and so 1.0 + 2.0 > 3.0 is false for them as they are to encounter a language like Python with 64-bit IEEE floats. I'd expect, as with Python's experience with their hash tables, the kind of people writing Python as their main or even only language would always be pleased to have simpler, less surprising behaviour, and the rationals are much simpler - they're just slower.
by yieldcrv | 2025-10-03 21:04:00+00:00
offline key signing and broadcasting later should be a simple thing

although heavily misunderstood, this is built into cryptocurrencies since day 1 (many critics have long thought crypto requires power and internet access, many proponents also don't know otherwise)

with card networks learning from competition and functionally being public-only keys, this should be even simpler to implement