MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nickjj | 2025-10-13 23:19:11+00:00
uv works great in a container, you can tell it to skip creating a venv and use the system's version of Python (in this case, let's say Python 3.14 from the official Python image on the Docker Hub).

The biggest wins are speed and a dependable lock file. Dependencies get installed ~10x faster than with pip, at least on my machine.

Both of my Docker Compose starter app examples for https://github.com/nickjj/docker-flask-example and https://github.com/nickjj/docker-django-example use uv.

I also wrote about making the switch here: https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/switching-pip-to-uv-in-a-dock...
by Tadpole9181 | 2025-10-13 23:19:19+00:00
I don't mean for this to be as pointed as it probably will come off - but do you allow these workers to listen to music, take regular (not smoke) breaks, and do their job from a chair?

The few factory jobs I've seen were not only monotonous, they were needlessly soul crushing.

For no reason at all, you had to stand for hours on end. Your only breaks were lunch and smokes. Bathroom breaks were monitored like a crime. And you were afforded no distractions from the task, 100% focus required.

Coupled with no care put into making someone feel actually appreciated and the end-products being MBA shrinkflated garbage nobody could be proud of, it's not shocking that no one in their right mind would want to work there.
by gblargg | 2025-10-13 23:19:53+00:00
Seconded on LectroFan. I've been using one for years for sleeping all night. No looping at all. Inside it only has 16K of flash, not enough to store samples. I once recorded it for 8 hours and looked for any repeating dips in the waveform, but found nothing. I used the old analog Marsona units for decades before this, so it had some good competition. Customer service was great when I contacted them years ago with a rattling problem with one of mine.
by tombert | 2025-10-13 23:19:56+00:00
I will not. Go away.

Just kidding. I just started last Saturday, so I can’t speak much to it. Thus far it has been primarily assigned reading and practice courses. There is an assignment due in November that I need to start which I haven’t yet.

I am taking analytical number theory and fractal geometry.

It’s not really self paced; you can go a little ahead but you can’t speed through it like WGU.
by mapontosevenths | 2025-10-13 23:20:03+00:00
Post-modern relatavism and extreme cynicism are destroying everything that was once good in the world.

Some things are objectively true, and those objective things are exactly what encyclopedias are for. Starting from the presupposition that all statements are equally true is wrong headed in the extreme.

Some people will disagree with even obvious facts like the world not being flat. We don't have to listen to them, and we should not.
by dangus | 2025-10-13 23:20:43+00:00
I would argue that something like an Intel N100 mini PC isn’t doing noticeably worse on your power bill, and more powerful x86 mini PCs will give you a better performance per dollar at close enough performance per watt.

And then you get all the advantages of the x86 ecosystem, more modularity, etc.

Heck, I wouldn’t be surprised if the base model M series Mac mini is competitive so long as you can get Asahi Linux to do what you need.

Maybe five years from now we will see ARM or RISC-V mini PCs further narrow the Venn diagram for raspberry pi systems.
by imtringued | 2025-10-13 23:21:46+00:00
I'm not really interested in building an interpreter, but the part about scalar out of order execution got me thinking. The opcode sequencing logic of an interpreter is inherently serial and an obvious bottleneck (step++; goto step->label; requires an add, then a fetch and then a jump, pretty ugly).

Why not do the same thing the CPU does and fetch N jump addresses at once?

Now the overhead is gone and you just need to figure out how to let the CPU fetch the chain of instructions that implement the opcodes.

You simply copy the interpreter N times, store N opcode jump addresses in N registers and each interpreter copy is hardcoded to access its own register during the computed goto.
by milesvp | 2025-10-13 23:21:57+00:00
Having done quite a bit of politicing at a centuries old, med sized company, I can tell you that what management wants you is the assurance that this particular problem won’t happen again. Ideally there will be an actionable outcome, so someone can check that off a todo list at a later meeting Though what I’ve found is that if you have enough clout you can add an addendum to the root cause analysis, and you can start getting into things like misaligned incentives. But always keep in mind, at best you can only point out this will mean this class of problem will keep happening.

If you do this, know that there be dragons. You have to be very careful here, because for any sufficiently large company, misaligned incentives are largely defined by the org chart and it’s boudaries. You will be adding fuel to politics that is likely above your pay grade, and the fallout can be career changing. I was lucky to have a neutral reputation, as someine who cared more about the product than personal gain. So I got a lot of leeway when I said tonedeaf things. Even still I ended up in crosshairs once or twice in the 10 years I was at the company for having opinions about systemic problems.
by supern0va | 2025-10-13 23:22:33+00:00
With 60 minutes of talk time included, I kind of get the impression this isn't designed so that you can hand it to your kid and let them spend the day talking to Santa. I'm assuming the idea is that they do this in lieu of writing to Santa, and you would supervise the experience.

Also, if your eight year old is trying to jailbreak Santa, you might have bigger issues to worry about.
by simonw | 2025-10-13 23:22:34+00:00
It's mostly about age. Python has been around for 35 years now. The first version of a Python package directory was the cheeseshop (Monthy Python reference) in 2003. The earliest version of a pip-like tool was "easy_install" which - I kid you not - worked by scraping the HTML listing page of the cheeseshop and downloading zip files linked from that!

More recent languages like Node.js and Rust and Go all got to create their packaging ecosystems learning from the experiences of Perl and Python before them.

There is one part of Python that I consider a design flaw when it comes to packaging: the sys.modules global dictionary means it's not at all easy in Python to install two versions of the same package at the same time. This makes it really tricky if you have dependency A and dependency B both of which themselves require different versions of dependency C.
by ProllyInfamous | 2025-10-13 23:23:07+00:00
Same. My 2010 Toyota had a GPS/DVD navigation system that was awesome (only required updates every few years).

My 2022 Toyota requires the phone connection for the navigation system to even start up — so I just bought a $60 GPS with SD-card updates. Having both allows me to have navigation running while also running Sirius XM / hybrid info screens, simultaneously.
by benbucksch | 2025-10-13 23:23:13+00:00
Back then, did we have an app that can do email and calendar, and sync that with our phone?

Did that app work on all operating systems that were in use at that time? With a simple install? On DOS, Amiga, Apple, Acorn, Unix? The same app, with the same functionality?

If not: Would you rather live in a world dominated by native Windows applications, written in C with Win32?
by elmerfud | 2025-10-13 23:23:23+00:00
This is clearly not true. You don't see people with dedicated programming professions. What you do see is engineers that have different job focuses. You have engineers dedicated to mechanical systems you have engineers dedicated to the computer systems and you do see engineers that are highly focused on specializations within those fields. If you wouldn't call the designer of the EMH program a programmer what would you call him?

Even in the current society a programmer is not some dedicated person to just program things. They have to be able to branch out and understand the systems their program is going to interface with. It is no different in Star Trek. It seems programming is more common across all jobs but there absolutely those who specialize in it.
by zelphirkalt | 2025-10-13 23:24:40+00:00
> Open source produces good infrastructure, but does not build good products. Asking people to use a worse alternative for some ideological reason that they don't feel strongly about is silly.

Waaay too generalized a statement. I've not seen a better password manager than KeepassXC. I have not seen a better browser than Firefox or its derivatives. There are so many good Open Source apps, that it wouldn't be "Asking people to use a worse alternative for some ideological reason". It would be asking people to be a bit more informed and then having a better digital life in many cases.

In contrast, I've not yet heard of any good Windows deployments. So far whenever I have somehow noticed, that a server is running Windows, it was because of it acting in silly ways or silly URL structure, or the thing frequently stopping to work. (See for example Deutsche Bahn infrastructure in Germany, ticket machines, in train screens, their ticket search and shop online ... all suck.)

So to me it actually seems like uninformed people making worse choices by not knowingly making them, and instead accepting whatever the vendors of proprietary software prescribe for them.
by ghshephard | 2025-10-13 23:24:56+00:00
I'm intrigued. I've been using virtualenv in numerous companies for about 8 years, traditionally wrapped in virtualenvwrappers, and now in uv.

UV doesn't change any of that for me - it just wraps virtualenv and pip downloads dependencies (much, much) more quickly - the conversion was immediate and required zero changes.

UV is a pip / virtualenv wrapper. And It's a phenomenal wrapper - absolutely changed everything about how I do development - but under the hood it's still just virtualenv + pip - nothing changed there.

Can you expand on the pain you've experienced?

Regarding "things that need to be deployed" - internally all our repos have standardized on direnv (and in some really advanced environments, nix + direnv, but direnv alone does the trick 90% of the time) - so you just "cd <somedir>", direnv executes your virtualenv and you are good to go. UV takes care of the pip work.

Has eliminated 100% use of virtualenvwrappers and direct-calls to pip. I'd love to hear a use case where that doesn't work for you - we haven't tripped across it recently.
by maxglute | 2025-10-13 23:25:05+00:00
Strategic REEs, i.e. heavyREE (Dysprosium, Terbium) are infact exceptionally rare, as in GEOLOGICALLY RARE. They are produced in China, because China (and Myanmar deposits controlled by China) are where ionic clays containing strategic HREEs can be economically extracted at scale. It's not just building altenrate HREE (empahsis on H) is not worth it, the technology simply doesn't exist to do so in other geologic deposits, i.e. all the har rock REE US+co has access to. The fact is PRC controls 90% of deposits and 99% percent of processing for elements that enable high temperature magnets, high power sensors, EW aka all the good shit that enables modern military capabilities... which was designed BECAUSE PRC commericialized process on specific geologic deposits that enabled commoditizing those materials. US built their miltary overmatch on material science and dirt that PRC controls and is nearly exclusively geopgraphically bound to PRC, with no short/medium term alternatives. PRC as monopoly supplier has much more complete ability to enforce export controls. This is just MIC specific, there's also stuff like dysprosium for highend capacitators where PRC has functionally 100% control, i.e. less performant alternative materials would effective regress performance by 10-25%, comparable to losing node size.
by rainsford | 2025-10-13 23:25:10+00:00
"Building things" is not science, it's engineering. We could certainly compare the outcomes of "bureaucratic" science against the free market variety, but there's basically no free market science going on to support such a comparison.

This isn't a value judgement. Engineering is just as important as science, but just as more science is not a replacement for engineering, neither does better engineering free us from the need to keep pursuing science. And at the end of the day, SpaceX might be an impressive engineering company, but we still need the scientists. And it's weird how often the success of SpaceX is brought up as an implicit argument that we can send all the scientists to work on farms or whatever without any ill effects.

It also seems notable that a company like SpaceX is an obvious candidate to bring back the 20th century style corporate funded scientific research organizations to underpin their engineering efforts in a way that would presumably be free of the hated "bureaucracy". But if they've done so, I haven't heard about it.
by rtpg | 2025-10-13 23:25:18+00:00
uv having a good pip compatibility layer probably helped a lot, because you could try things out that way and see what fit, so to speak.

It's probably worth mentioning that Astral (The team behind uv/etc) has a team filled with people with a history of making very good CLI tooling. They probably have a very good sense for what matters in this stuff, and are thus avoiding a lot of pain.

Motivation is not enough, there's also a skill factor. And being multiple people working on it "full time"-ish means you can get so much done, especially before the backwards compat issues really start falling into place
by mrbadger | 2025-10-13 23:25:24+00:00
Been using Synology for more than 10 years. Very used to DSM and my default would have been to continue.

The drive policy was a calculated insult to customers. I don't buy the argument that Synology was incurring support costs. If true it should have charged for support. It looked price gouging.

As result I switched to Ugreen (2x 4800 Plus units) and think I'm unlikely to buy Synology in the foreseeable future.
by msteffen | 2025-10-13 23:25:32+00:00
Lot of finger pointing at the author in this thread. I googled her and found this article from nine months earlier (I think), complaining that her husband does jack shit around the house: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/01/fair-play-...

Seems like the more boring but more real story here is that this mom is really struggling to hold her career together and give her kids the care she clearly wishes she could because her husband is being lazy. To the haters in the thread: I think this article can be read as "avoiding UPFs is completely unrealistic for authors trying to establish themselves while functionally raising a baby and a toddler by themselves". Which, even as a perpetual proponent of the anti-UPF book "Ultra-Processed People," I kind of understand.

I get a lot of pride and satisfaction from being an involved dad. I do almost all of the cleaning, a fair amount of cooking, and probably 2/3 of the missing-work-because-no-childcare (and I try to put in a good amount of solo weekend time, to let my spouse catch up on work). A valuable life lesson I learned in Boy Scouts: if you're not doing about twice as much work as you think is fair, you're probably not doing enough.
by loveparade | 2025-10-13 23:25:44+00:00
Reading HN I seem to be in the minority but AI has made programming a lot more fun for me. I've been an engineer for nearly 25 years and 95% of the work is rather mindless boilerplate. I know exactly what I need to do next, it just takes time and iteration.

The "you think about the problem and draw diagrams" part of you describe probably makes up less than 5% of a typical engineering workflow, depending on what you work on. I work in a scientific field where it's probably more than for someone working in web dev, but even here it's very little, and usually only at the beginning of a project. Afterwards it's all about iteration. And using AI doesn't change that part at all, you still need to design the high level solution for an LLM to produce anything remotely useful.

I never encountered the problem of not understanding details of the AI's implementation that people here seem to describe. I still review all the code and need to ask the LLM to make small adjustments if I'm not happy with it, especially around not-so-elegant abstractions.

Tasks that I actively avoided previously because they seemed like a hassle, like large refactorings, I no longer avoid now because I can ask an AI to do most of it. I feel so much productive and work is more satisfying because I get to knock out all these chores that I had resistance to before.

Brainstorming with an AI about potential solutions to a hard problem is also more fun for me, and more productive, than doing research the old ways. So instead of drawing diagrams I now just have conversations.

I can't say for certain whether using LLMs has made me much more productive (overall it likely has but for certain tasks it hasn't), but it definitely has made work more fun for me.

Another side effect has been that I'm learning new things more frequently when using AI. When I brainstorm solutions with an AI or ask for an implementation, it sometimes uses libraries and abstractions I have not seen before, especially around very low level code that I'm not super familiar with. Previously I was much more likely to use or do things the one way I know.
by hermitcrab | 2025-10-13 23:26:23+00:00
I read it recently. I thought it was going to be a bit dry and heavy going. But it was a really good read.

TIL Shockley, one of the original pioneers of semi-conductors and Nobel prize winner, was a total shit. His staff hated him so much that the key players left and started a new company (Fairchild). He later became a eugenics crank.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Shockley
by lanfeust6 | 2025-10-13 23:26:36+00:00
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32874648/ -- "they expect replication rates to differ between fields, with the highest replication rate in economics (average survey response 58%), and the lowest in psychology and in education (average survey response of 42% for both fields). "

https://replicationnetwork.com/2021/01/06/reed-the-state-of-... -- "indeed, there has been an increase in the number of replications over time. "

https://www.banque-france.fr/en/publications-and-statistics/... -- "First, we find a moderate replication success, in spite of a data availability policy."
by mitthrowaway2 | 2025-10-13 23:27:01+00:00
Shouldn't you be thinking about it? Whether you can control it or not, if you need to rely on it, you should be thinking about it.

Otherwise when an airplane crashes because of a defect in the aluminum, the design team's RCA will have to conclude that the root cause is "a lack of a redundant set of wings in the plane design", because they don't want to pin the blame on the materials quality inspection team mixing up some batch numbers.

If you were relying on something not to fail and it failed, your RCA should state as much. At best in the GP's case they could say "it's our fault for trusting the testing team to test the feature".
by bsder | 2025-10-13 23:27:05+00:00
> development/project dependencies are not and should not be managed by either of those but through project-specific means" on macOS, the standard Linux "one package manager does everything" approach feels simply wrong.

This predates macOS. The mainframe folks did this separation eons ago (see IBM VM/CMS).

On Unix, it's mostly the result of getting rid of your sysadmins who actually had a clue. Even in Unix-land in the Bad Old Days(tm), we used to have "/usr/local" for a reason. You didn't want the system updating your Perl version and bringing everything to a screeching halt; you used the version of Perl in /usr/local that was under your control.
by JCM9 | 2025-10-13 23:27:09+00:00
Glad to see this, but there’s a lot more cleanup to do. AWS went from having a few core excellent services with a strong innovation pipeline to a chaotic “jack of all trades master of none” approach with no clear product strategy. Some of the recent panic trying to catch up on AI has resulting in even more slop thrown at the wall hoping something sticks.

We love you, but focus on the core infrastructure bits and stop chasing everything that moves! Your customers build better apps and services that you do… just build great building blocks and folks will be very happy.
by bane | 2025-10-13 23:27:21+00:00
Containers happened because nobody can be bothered to build an entire application into a single distributable executable anymore - heck even the tooling barely exists anymore. But instead of solving problems like dependency management and linking, today's engineers simply build piles of abstraction into the problem space until the thing you want to do more than anything (i.e. execute an application) becomes a single call.

Of course you now need to build and maintain those abstract towers, so more jobs for everybody!
by belorn | 2025-10-13 23:27:38+00:00
The point of doing simulations is that you will want to avoid to repeat that which happen in EU. During the worst month of the energy crisis, the price started circulating around 10x of the average month, or phrase it in a different way, a single month costed about the same as a usual whole year. Market prices can easily spike when demand start to exceed supply, even if it only occur for a few weeks.

Having a massive fleet of gas plants available do help with keeping the prices down, but it has it own problems. They need to be built, maintained and staffed, which is independent on how much energy they sell. Where I come that means government subsidizes, paid through taxes and grid fees. Those fees can quickly become bigger than the actually consumption cost for some households. Natural gas power plants also natural gas which contribute to global warming, and unless they use expensive filtering, they also contribute to pollution. When you see the pitch black smoke being released, you know they are burning up the build up of contaminants and imperfectly burned fuel, releasing it into the environment.
by delichon | 2025-10-13 23:27:54+00:00
It just wasn't siloed by a priesthood. Everyone was programming. Spock was running simulations and logical analyses. Scotty was optimizing ship functions. Kirk was composing AI logic bombs. Sulu was generating navigational computations. Uhuru was doing signal analysis. This is people communicating their intentions in detail to computers, also known as programming.
by zahlman | 2025-10-13 23:28:22+00:00
> I thought, just Python needs, another dependency manager… this was after fighting with pip, venv, venvwrapper, and poetry for years.

Pip, venv and virtualenvwrapper (people still use this?) are not meaningfully "dependency managers". A venv is just a place to put things, and pip does only basic tracking and tries to maintain a consistent environment. It isn't trying to help you figure out what dependencies you need, create new environments from scratch, update pyproject.toml....

Pip's core capability is the actual installation of packages, and uv does a far better job of that part, using smarter caching, hard links to share files, parallelized pre-compilation of .pyc files, etc. Basically it's designed from the ground up with the intention to make lots of environments and expect starting a new one to be cheap. Poetry, as far as I was able to determine, does it basically the same way as pip.
by corvad | 2025-10-13 23:28:26+00:00
I would argue that the people programming things that are used on starships are not in the field. The people in the field are the specialist who need to be there to monitor and explore. Most of the engineering work of design and development happens on research stations and other places that may not be reflected in Star Trek specifically. It would illogical to send a programmer so far away for work that can be done from anywhere. And that is retaining the concept of programming that is argued by society right now as being in risk. Not to mention that programming is not always by definition writing software at a keyboard.