MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by zelphirkalt | 2025-10-30 10:06:24+00:00
> Python/pip though… Every time I need to containerize or setup a Python project for some arbitrary task, there’s always an issue with “Your Linux distro doesn’t support that version of Python anymore” [...]

How are you containerizing Python projects? What confuses me about your statement are the following things:

(1) How old must the Python version of those projects be, to not be supported any longer with any decent GNU/Linux distribution?

(2) Are you not using official Python docker images?

(3) What's pip gotta do with a Python version being supported?

(4) How does that "Your Linux distro doesn’t support that version of Python anymore" show itself? Is that a literal error message you are seeing?

> [...] demanding new —yes-destroy-my-computer-dangerously-and-step-on-my-face-daddy flags and crashing my automated scripts from last year

It seems you are talking about installing things in system Python, which you shouldn't do. More questions:

(1) Why are you not using virtual environments?

(2) You are claiming Node.js projects to be better in this regard, but actually they are just creating a `node_modules` folder. Why then is it a problem for you to create a virtual environment folder? Is it merely, that one is automatic, and the other isn't?

> This was always my issue with pip and venv: I don’t want a thing that hijacks my terminal and PATH, flips my world upside down and makes writing automated headless scripts and systemd services a huge pain.

It is very easy to activate a venv just for one command. Use a subshell, where you `. venv/bin/activate && python ...(your program invocation here)...`. Aside from that, projects can be set up so that you don't even see that they are using a venv. For example I usually create a Makefile, that does the venv activating and running and all that for me. Rarely, if ever, I have to activate it manually. Since each line in a Makefile target is running in its own shell, nothing ever pollutes my actual top level shell.
by grebc | 2025-10-30 10:07:37+00:00
I am just a lay person so a lot of the maths is over my head for all of this, but I do try to follow the best I can.

Do you ever ponder that the maths that you try to distill into the “laws of physics” is just too low of a fidelity for such a complicated system?

For example when you capture a gorgeous sunrise/sunset in a photo, and despite you doing every trick under the sun to get a good angle/lighting etc, the photo is never as good as what you experienced in person.

Or maybe you just never experienced the sunrise/sunset shrug.
by saberience | 2025-10-30 10:07:54+00:00
Yes but the practical reality of it is it can be used exactly the same way as you would do a queue and you can make it work just as well as any MQ based system. I know this as I moved from a RabbitMQ system to Kafka for additionally scalability requirements and it worked perfectly.

So sure "technically" it's not a queue, but in reality its used as a queue for 1000s of companies around the world for huge production workloads which no MQ system can support.
by JPLeRouzic | 2025-10-30 10:08:10+00:00
All these theories question the nature of space, time, and matter:

- Loop Quantum Gravity

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loop_quantum_gravity

- Causal Set Theory

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causal_sets

- AdS/CFT & Tensor Networks

https://qspace.fqxi.org/videos/121/a-tensor-network-approach...

- Relational Quantum Mechanics

The one discussed here

- “It from Qubit”

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/tangled-up-in-spa...

- Thermodynamic Gravity

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropic_gravity

- Noncommutative Geometry

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noncommutative_quantum_field_t...
by vincnetas | 2025-10-30 10:09:08+00:00
With proper mail voting you have a way to verify that your mailed in vote is counted.

(AI generated explanation) How the double-envelope system works

Inner “secrecy” envelope

You mark your ballot, fold it, and slip it into an unmarked inner envelope. No name or identifying info is on this envelope, so your choices stay anonymous. Outer declaration envelope

The inner envelope goes inside a larger outer envelope that carries: – A ballot ID/barcode unique to you. – A signature line that must match the one on file with your election office. In many states, a detachable privacy flap or perforated strip hides the signature until election officials open the outer envelope, keeping the ballot secret.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-10-30 10:10:09+00:00
This.

Also, China has always taken the long view, and has, historically, leveraged experience.

I’m no expert in their culture, and am rather worried about their influence, but I can’t but admire their incredible strategic vision.

Also, as a retiree, I’m rather saddened by some of the discussions, here.
by fxwin | 2025-10-30 10:10:40+00:00
I don't like the title of this paper, since most people in this space probably think of language models not as producing a distribution (wrt which they are indeed invertible, which is what the paper claims) but as producing tokens (wrt which they are not invertible [0]). Also the author contribution statement made me laugh.

[0] https://x.com/GladiaLab/status/1983812121713418606
by sdoering | 2025-10-30 10:11:40+00:00
"Solved problem for now." With "now" being the important word here.

We should not forget the significant amount of soil erosion. Not only, but especially in already vulnerable regions. While I will probably not get to feel it, the next generation will.

There are quite relevant studies already showing how the erosion of soil is already impacting agricultural yields. And that it is likely only getting worse from here on out.
by Sammi | 2025-10-30 10:11:55+00:00
But that's haaard. Can't I just do the easy solution instead? Don't you have a pill I can take or something?

Aldous Huxley was correct, we truely are amusing ourselves to death. The new meta glasses are really scaring me.

Sorry for the doomerism. There's lots of other stuff to be optimistic about. Maybe this is just an evolutionary filter. Those that fit into these new circumstances will survive.
by galangalalgol | 2025-10-30 10:12:04+00:00
I don't know the work in question, but the extremes of agriculture we have gone to aren't sustainable simply from a soil destruction standpoint. We may figure that problem out too, but just assuming our ingenuity will get us out of any predicament we create will eventually leave us with a catastrophe. Carefully planning demographics is going to be necessary for stable long term well-being. Doing that in a way that isn't dystopian is a good problem to point our ingenuity at.
by Ekaros | 2025-10-30 10:12:05+00:00
And why would people work if they do not get to consume? Okay some amount of self-actualisation. But doing some real work say manufacturing goods used in health-care. The factory part of that?

With such move, there would like to be move to general welfare as well. So enough people might just cut down their labour to match the minimum level they would be getting anyway. And then you have no more surplus for healthcare...
by GolDDranks | 2025-10-30 10:12:32+00:00
The difference is that when there is text on the original video material, in the good examples the translations are positioned in the proximity of the original texts, and styled similarly, which makes it easier to understand what is translation of what, and generally improves immersion.

In the bad examples, the translations for the texts are mixed with the lines the characters are speaking, which makes it harder to follow.
by saberience | 2025-10-30 10:13:13+00:00
I used Cursor for the total of one day (paid for a year subscription), discovered Claude Code later that day and havent opened Cursor since.

Note, later I started using Codex and now Codex is my daily driver, Claude Code for problems where Codex fails (not many), and again Cursor is never used.

They were the first mover but Codex (in my opinion) blows Cursor up into 1000 tiny pieces. It's just so, so much better.
by jammo | 2025-10-30 10:13:30+00:00
We all need to move away from these big cloud providers. Two medium size smaller providers is enough.

-Cloudflare for R2 (object storage) and CDN (Fastly+backblaze also available). -Two VPS/Server providers with a decent reputation and mid-size (using a comparison site like https://serversearcher.com or look directly into people like Hetzner or latitude) -PlanetScale or Neon for database if you don't co-locate it, though better to use someone like digital ocean, vultr or latitude who offer databases too)
by CuriouslyC | 2025-10-30 10:13:54+00:00
If you had enough tokens to completely wash out the parent latent distribution you would have just trained a new model instead of fine tuning. That means by definition your model is still inheriting properties of the parent, and for your business customers who want predictable, understandable systems, knowing the inherited properties of your model is going to be useful.

I think the real reason is that it's a Chinese model (I mean, come on) and your parent company doesn't want any political blowback.
by yanhangyhy | 2025-10-30 10:14:09+00:00
Maybe this topic is too hot. I originally just wanted to mention it in passing, since these are all slogans ingrained in our minds. Everyone's discussion is about groups, not individuals. It's about government policies. Just like in China, our generation basically doesn't expect to have a pension, nor to retire before 70. Our elderly enjoy life in the parks, benefit from free public transport and cheap tickets to attractions, while we work day after day, until we die. Any normal person would be dissatisfied.
by pjmlp | 2025-10-30 10:15:19+00:00
Multitasking, SOM (contrary to COM, it does implementation inheratance across languages, multiple inheritance and has meta-classes), object based desktop, Smalltalk for business application development (basically a similar role as VB and .NET have gotten latter on on Windows), Visual Age for C++ had a Smalltalk like experience (although ported to Windows as well).

However this also meant a more beefy hardware than the DOS/Windows 3.x combo.
by jimnotgym | 2025-10-30 10:15:40+00:00
Another way to look at it: When a companies bubble bursts, when people realise that it is just a note taking app (or whatever), and that its never going to grow 10x again, VC investors want shot of it.

Without a constant stream of new investment, the company simply can't afford to be loaded up with SV staff producing features that nobody will pay for. Bending Spoons change the business model to 'normal business'. They move to much cheaper European staff, stop work on nonsense 'features', concentrate instead on servicing their existing customers with a stable platform and well thought out incremental advances.

So they take businesses that are dying because nobody will give them free money any more, and make them into real sustainable businesses that can stand on their own two feet?
by d4rkn0d3z | 2025-10-30 10:17:25+00:00
QM provides the most accurate and verifiable predictions in human history. The follow on from that is that my thoughts can be conveyed to you over a sea of quivering electrons. The one catch is that you must accept that when you are not looking the universe does its evolving in a way that is inimical to your conceptualizations.
by ZeroGravitas | 2025-10-30 10:17:40+00:00
I asked Claude to translate a book title from Hebrew (well not translate exactly but locate the original English title of the same book).

That's not a language I speak or generally have anything else to do with.

I then asked it an unrelated question about a science topic and it returned something with a citation. When I clicked on the citation, not only was it not relevant to the science question it claimed it was cited to support, it was basically a conspiracy theory from the 1970s about Jews controlling the media.

Which somehow seems even worse than my usual experience of the link being totally made up dead end.
by zozbot234 | 2025-10-30 10:18:11+00:00
> Dave Long had the sharp observation earlier today that Bresenham-style line drawing is a form of dithering, where the signal being represented is the position of the pen rather than the brightness of the visual field.

Bresenham is the equivalent of a sharp quantization, with no dithering. Using true 1D dithering for line drawing would instead result in a "wobbly" almost hand-drawn output.
by zelphirkalt | 2025-10-30 10:19:06+00:00
It is probably because Java took this design philosophy (or I should say dogma) to heart as its very syntax and structure encourages to write code like that. One example: It does not have proper modules. Modules, the one thing that most people can agree upon that are a good thing, enabling modularity, literally. Another one: You cannot have simply a function in a module. Shit needs to be inside classes or mixed up with other unrelated concepts. Java the language encourages this kind of madness.
by jkercher | 2025-10-30 10:19:17+00:00
Couldn't agree more. I have a project at work from 2016 that builds multiple different HMIs (C++) along with 2 embedded systems (C). They all have to play nicely with each other as they share some structures and can all be updated in the field with a single file on a USB stick. So there is a bash script that builds everything from a fresh clone, makes update files, and some other niceties. Then, there is a single python script that generates a handful of tables from a json file.

Guess which part of the build I spent fixing the other day... It wasn't the ~200000 lines of c/c++ or the 1000+ line bash script. No. It was 100 lines of python that was last touched 2 years years ago. Python really doesn't work as a scripting language.
by wkjagt | 2025-10-30 10:20:01+00:00
It's weird to think that we need a mirror (or other means of imaging) to see our own face. We can see a large part of our own body directly, but we will never be able to directly see our own face like other people do (unless, I guess, you have an eye pop out in some kind of accident, but I guess at that point this is not the kind of thing you would consider).
by TheFlyingFish | 2025-10-30 10:20:22+00:00
SPy looks really interesting! I've run across projects like MyPyc before, but as you say they kill a lot of the "joy" of Python by removing things like decorators and operator overloading.

One question, more out of curiosity than any genuine need: do you (or do you plan to) support any kind of trait/interface based polymorphism? E.g. it's a pretty common idiom to have a function that works on "any iterable type" and that sort of thing, which seems like it would be best modeled as an interface. I guess you could argue that's at odds with Python's tradition of "duck typing" but then again, so is static typing in general so I'm not sure.
by bboozzoo | 2025-10-30 10:20:45+00:00
> What is surprising is that a classic Time-of-check-time-of-use (TOCTOU) bug was latent in their system until Monday. Call me naive, but I thought AWS, an organization running a service that averages 100 million RPS, would have flushed out TOCTOU bugs from their critical services.

Yeah, right. I'm surprised how anyone involved with software engineering can be surprised by this. I would argue that there many, if not infinitely many, similar bugs out there. It's just that the right conditions for them to show up haven't been met yet.
by HeavyStorm | 2025-10-30 10:21:18+00:00
Heck, I love the long names. I know, I also hate FooBarSpecializedFactory, but that's waaaay better than FBSpecFac.

A sample: pandas loc, iloc etc. Or Haskell scanl1. Or Scheme's cdr and car. (I know - most of the latest examples are common functions that you'll learn after a while, but still, reading it at first is terrible).

My first contact with a modern OO language was C# after years of C++. And I remember how I thought it awkward that the codebase looked like everything was spelled out. Until I realize that it is easier to read, and that's the main quality for a codebase.
by georgefrowny | 2025-10-30 10:23:28+00:00
Lego has had sets to build for ages as well as freeform packs which you can still get, both normal blocks and Technics. They even had branded sets way back in the 50s (VW and Esso, for example).

Of course the really cost-effective way to get it remains buying it second-hand by the kilogram.

Adults getting in on the game and dropping hundreds on nostalgia-provoking kits is a relatively newer thing, but it's not preventing access to freeform building supplies.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-10-30 10:24:07+00:00
Well, one of the issues, is that younger folks look at retired older folks, and think “unproductive leech,” while ignoring wrecked hands, shattered spines, and cancers. I also know many veterans, and they provided a Service that I definitely benefit from, today.

Also, speaking only for myself, I live off of investments and savings, created from 40 years of living frugally and sensibly. Every few months, I have to chase off people that try to steal those savings. It’s not surprising, but is annoying. There’s a huge industry, based completely around stealing money from older folks (usually ones without the means to defend themselves).

Back when I was young, there was this rather silly movie, called Logan’s Run. Besides a brief flash of Jenny Agutter naked, it offered a vision of a culture that literally kills off anyone over 30. The interesting thing, was that the culture still had strategic vision, but that vision was supplied by a machine.
by fingerlocks | 2025-10-30 10:24:50+00:00
You can write directly to the frame buffer, like a video game. You still need the UIKit import to publish, because it has to be bundled into a .ipa which requires an AppDelegate, a UIBundle, among other things.

If you want to “technically” avoid UIKit, you can drop one step lower. UIKit is implemented on CoreAnimation. A bare UIView is nearly a pass through wrapper around CALayer. It wouldn’t be hard to build your own custom UI on CALayers. The old CA tutorials for implementing a ScrollView from the ground up are still floating around out there.
by zelphirkalt | 2025-10-30 10:24:54+00:00
I hope you are right. I really do. But I have a hunch, that if I accepted any Java job, I would simply have coworkers, who are still stuck with "enterprise" Java ideology, and whose word has more weight than the word of a newcomer. That's one of the fears, that stops me from seriously considering Java shops. Fear of unreasonable coworkers and then being forced to deliver shitty work, that meets their idea of how the code should be written in the most enterprise way they can come up with.

Always makes me think of that AbstractProxyFactorySomething or similar, that I saw in Keycloak, for when you want to implement your own password quality criteria. When you step back a bit and think about what you actually want to have, you realize, that actually all you want is a function, that takes as input a string, and gives as output a boolean, depending on whether the password is strong enough, or fulfills all criteria. Maybe you want to output a list of unmet criteria, if you want to make it complex. But no, it's AbstractProxyFactorySomething.
by generichuman | 2025-10-30 10:25:47+00:00
I'm only thinking in terms of Linux distributions since I never needed to deploy software on other UNIXes (excluding macOS, but Apple constantly forces changes anyway).

Do other UNIXes have any problems similar to glibc ABI problems that Linux users experience, or do they stabilise the libc ABI similar to how Linux keeps syscalls stable?
by AdilG | 2025-10-30 10:26:14+00:00
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by lurk2 | 2025-10-30 10:26:21+00:00
Where are you getting that from? Minecraft has been comfortably above 100,000,000 monthly active users since at least 2019. The only comparable figure I can find for Fortnite claims 650,000,000 registered users, which doesn’t seem remotely possible unless at least half of them are bots. 650,000,000 is something like 1/12th of the world’s entire population. The Roblox figures I could find showed just under 400,000,000 MAU in 2024, which also seems completely beyond the pale.
by cobbaut | 2025-10-30 10:27:22+00:00
Back in 1995 it was, to my knowledge, the only OS capable of sharing CD-ROM's on the network. Even MS-DOS and Windows 3.11 machines could access it.

It was also capable of sharing Mainframe printers using a real null-printer-driver, which was not possible on Windows NT3.51 or NT4.0. Windows always messed with the Mainframe codes that it could not understand.

It was also easy to set up OS/2 as a gateway between different network hardware and protocols (Token Ring to Ethernet, or NetBios to IPX/SPX, ...)

It had REXX!
by GolDDranks | 2025-10-30 10:27:26+00:00
I also grew up where 90% of TV was subtitled (Finland, where, incidentally, the author of the article is from too), but I find the "good" anime subtitles better – for the simple reason that they make it easier to see which translation corresponds to which text.

Note that anime has generally more text on the screen that many western shows, so I think subtitling practices of some subtitle-heavy western countries, while informed and proven by time, don't necessarily represent optimal practices for anime.

But I think you are correct about the subtitle preferences of anime fans. The "general wisdom" of audiovisual translations is that great translations manage to convey the important point very succinctly, and a professional translator knows how to shave off the fluff to achieve subtitles that are quick to read and "fade in the background" in the sense that you don't even realize that you are reading them.

However, many anime fans actually LIKE so-called foreignizing translations ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestication_and_foreignizati... ). I think this plays into the fancier subtitle preferences too.
by zelphirkalt | 2025-10-30 10:27:40+00:00
> I recognise there are problems where OOP is a good abstraction, but there are so many places where it isn't.

Exactly. This is the way to think about it, imo. One of those places is GUI frameworks, I think, and there I am fine doing OOP, because I don't have a better idea how to get things done, and most GUI frameworks/toolkits/whatever are designed in an OOP way anyway. Other places I just try to go functional.