skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I think this person simply doesn't understand how Python works.

To be fair, if Python does something that is so different from all other languages maybe that’s a complaint in itself, even if the original complaint is invalid.
Good mentorship is REALLY hard to find. If you can be a good mentor to someone, that's a big deal.
>There is no easy way to open a Window and render a string. Period!

Yes, there is. Use a client library. That's what they're for.

>You either need to write it yourself completely (as OP stated) or you can use Gtk/Qt or other heavy weight "client libraries"

This is exactly the same as in X11. Remember Xlib is one of those heavy weight client libraries. The X11 example you showed uses Xlib.

>Look at the code again! If you really think that the code at [1] is in any way a great solution as compared to [2] we are going to disagree.

I don't think either of them are great. I'm saying that's comparing apples to oranges.

>ZERO screenshot apps on X11 use XDG screenshot portal, they all use XGetImage().

They shouldn't. Like most parts of X11, XGetImage is an obsolete API. You don't want to use that in modern clients.

>Mainly because the assumption that a dbus-daemon is always running everywhere is mostly false.

No, dbus is used by basically all modern desktop environments on Linux. If you don't have dbus available you're going to have a lot more problems running normal Linux apps than just dealing with the differences between X11 and Wayland.

>Also XDG screenshot portal is simply not a good solution. It is cumbersome to use, contains tons of edge-cases and pulls a dbus dependency for something that could be solved much simpler with onboard OS-functionality without the need for extra daemons and weird binary protocols

X11 is also one of those weird binary protocols that isn't onboard OS-functionality and has more edge-cases, so according to this XGetImage isn't a good solution either.

>Xft does server-side rendering via XRender.

No, you've got rendering mixed up with compositing. With Xft, the rendering of font data to pixels is still done in the client. XRender, despite the name, is frequently only used to composite surfaces together. That's doing the same thing that Wayland is doing.
> Misspelling a variable creates a new one.

IDEs/linters help with this one.

> Type annotations are ignored, so nobody bothers

If one really cares you can use MyPy to force errors on bad types.

Type annotations are very useful for IDEs, which is why they are spreading fast in the ecosystem.
I would also like to see some benchmarks, especially compared to aiohttp since that is what it appears to replace. I too am skeptical, aiohttp isn't all that fast, but it's execution time is negligible in a typical application. I found aiohttp to be about half the speed of gevent.pywsgi, but it turns out that doesn't matter at all when the vast majority of time is spent executing business logic and serializing responses.
> * Type annotations are ignored, so nobody bothers.

For any serious Python app worked on by multiple people, you need a CI pipeline that runs type checking. (And while you're there, run a format checker like black, too -- solves the tabs vs spaces "debate" the author complains about as well)

Certainly still a language flaw that it's not inherently enforced, though; unfortunately it just took the Python community way too long to realize how important strong typing is at scale.
Immunology of mRNA Vaccines
For “many” to be relevant here we’d have to be talking tens or even hundreds of thousands at least. A few thousand lightyears is measurement error on just our galaxy’s scale.
They've taught the world that mankind's hopes for keeping space a place of peace are over and it's now another theater of war. Guess we knew the era of peace in space would eventually end but still held out hope that it could hold out longer.
I remember when I was a kid and I went to a friend’s birthday party, a Warriors game. His Dad was general partner of a VC firm, owned part of the Warriors and we had a center box with a buffet and everything. The mascot came to hang out with us, and much later some team members

Obviously I had no idea what was going on. I went home to my parents very middle class home and promptly told my own Dad I wanted to take my 4th grade girlfriend to a Warriors game with box seats and a limo! How funny looking back.
way back when, unix admins were recommended to enter "sync" twice. this wasn't anything wrong with the program itself, but the time it took to enter the second sync gave the os to finish flushing its buffers to the hard disk.
The tone, which often shows an unwillingness to learn. The lack of humility. Confidently stating or broadcasting facts without acknowledging why others might disagree.
Do you think it does? CS is a field with many wild ideas and I don’t think python is that far into the weeds. Definitely not around 2018 when this was written. A lot of it’s big problems are 90s-scripting-language problems.
The other big quote in The Information's reporting:

“A Twitter employee […] asked when employees could expect a list of ‘approved talking points’ for questions from partners related to ‘3party clients revoked access.’ A product marketing manager responded that the company had ‘started to work on comms’.”

Shoot first, talk later.
Thanks! Macroexpanded:

Mold linker: targeting macOS/iOS now requires a commercial license - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34141912 - Dec 2022 (74 comments)

Mold linker may switch to a source-available license - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33584651 - Nov 2022 (206 comments)

Mold linker creator considers changing the license - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33495528 - Nov 2022 (19 comments)

Mold/macOS is 11 times faster than the Apple's default linker to link Chrome - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31769699 - June 2022 (116 comments)

Using the mold linker for fun and 3x-8x link time speedups - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31604772 - June 2022 (41 comments)

Using the mold linker for fun and 3x-8x link time speedups - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31592678 - June 2022 (1 comment)

Mold 1.0: the first stable and production-ready release of the high-speed linker - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29568454 - Dec 2021 (65 comments)

Mold: A Modern Linker - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26233244 - Feb 2021 (122 comments)

Mold: A Modern Linker - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25410312 - Dec 2020 (1 comment)
Modifying our orbit isn't the only thing we could do. We could do starlifting, which is mining our sun, and we can modify the composition of our sun such that it lasts longer and so forth.
> everyone knows that

Uh, no. There’s a reason I prefer Node, Deno or Rust, and the reason is that Python sucks.

Or at least sucks more than either of those.
Perhaps we should not aim so high as Earth orbit modification. What if we just figure out the Sun's fuel cycle and control that so that it doesn't hurt us.
That is not true. The dataset is needed, the same way that examples are used by a person learning to draw. But the dataset alone is not capable of producing images not derived from any part of it (and there are many examples of SD results that seem so far to be wholly original), so you can’t reduce stable diffusion to being only derived from the dataset. It may “remember” and generate parts of images in the dataset - but that is a bug, not a feature. With enough prompt tweaking, it may even generate a fairly good copy of pre-existing work - which was what the prompt requested, so responsibility should lie on the prompt writer, not on SD.

But the fact that it often generates new content, that didn’t exist before, or at least doesn’t breach the limits of fair use, goes against the argument made in the lawsuit.
> Given the final program needs to be storable in RAM + Virtual Memory it surprises me that we still need the intermediate step of pushing to the file system only to then immediately reopen and merge those files.

You don't. I recommend you learn about unity builds, and how major build systems support toggling them at the project and subproject level.

The main reason why most people haven't heard about the concept and those who did the majority doesn't bother with it is that a) you have little to nothing to gain by them, b) you throw incremental builds out if the window, c) you ruin internal linkage and thus can introduce hard to track errors.

Also, it makes no sense at all to argue how the released software needs to run in memory to justify aspects related to how the software is built. At most you have arguments over code bloat and premature optimization, but at what cost?
> if Python does something that is so different from all other languages maybe that’s a complaint in itself

No, it's just a reason not to use Python if you have trouble understanding how it works. That's true of any tool.
Thanks! I can't see beyond the introductory paragraph, which makes it sound like all third-party access has been intentionally suspended.
> They're frauds posting a fraudulent paper on a pseudoscience website.

Please explain why a) the authors are fraudulent, and b) why is the website pseudoscience?
Not sure about the US but in general smoke is a clearer case because of its well-known impact on health in addition to the insufferable smell. Some countries have banned smoking in restaurants and other places for this reason.
Discussed at the time:

Reasons Python Sucks - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18706174 - Dec 2018 (535 comments)
But the point is that fair use is almost completely principles-based rather than rules-based. Besides the four factors in the statute and some judicial precedent it's pretty much at the discretion of the court.
While not all has been lost, I strongly feel that every time the community migrates from one platform to another, the long tail of small time users gets cut off. Ties are severed, people fall out of reach, etc. I initially joined a few sites that popped up after What, but since I didn't find any of the users there that I used to talk to regularly, I don't visit much ever anymore.
As another comment notes, isn’t this how every popular language except Go, C and C++ functions?
Ah yes, miniconda. Clearly that’s about managing Python versions (and dependencies)?

Why can’t we just call it python-version-manager?

But then what would we call the other 15 methods of managing python dependencies/versions?
The Westinghouse Time Capsules
I haven't had much occasion to use them. I suspect that most use cases nowadays where the speed advantage is needed involve numerical computing where the user is probably using a library like numpy or scipy and will use their array implementation, not the built-in Python one. However, arrays have been around in Python since very early on, when those other numerical libraries didn't exist, so the array built-in might have gotten more use then.
one of the things I like about the world of analog synthesizers is the celebration of schematics.

I have a giant chart of synth designs framed in my living room.
It's very easy to use day to day, much easier to grok than C pointers for sure, despite being a bit more limited (in a good way). I remember half the CS 101 class dropping the week pointers were introduced. If it's wrong, I don't wanna be right, as they say.
Even the title, to me, indicates that the article is going to be lousy. Rather than saying “reasons why I don’t like Python”, they present the title as if Python is objectively bad, which obviously isn’t true.
Related:

1991 – a server-side web framework written in Forth - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19146767 - Feb 2019 (67 comments)
My rough estimate would go like this

- 20% efficency of solarpanels

- 1000W/m² sun under good conditions (at the equator)

-> we get 200W/m² from solar panels

- 600 W/m² energy needed for the plants

- 60% efficency of the LEDs

(both from the paper linked in another comment)

600/0.6 = 1000 W elecricity needed per m²

1000/200=5

So for 1 acre LED farm, we need 5 acres solar panels, if I made no major misstake.

Add to that further losses from energy transformation and you see that solar panel powered, it makes even less sense.

If you want to grow grain indoors, because for example outside is a dessert, but sun, you just would use windows, (mainly to keep your water).

This project only makes sense in space or very remote areas with other good sources of energy.
The rigidity of the samurai as a class varied largely depending on when you're looking in Japanese history. In the Heian Court period, samurai were just armed people in the service of Japanese nobility (deriving authority through relation with the Emperor who was considered to be descended from God.) After the Genpei War the samurai became more hereditary until the Sengoku/Warring States Period.

Several of the key players during this time were themselves just peasants. Then after Tokugawa took over, he once again encouraged the hereditary samurai as a way to ensure stability.

Yasuke was under Nobunaga who was very much active when the definition of samurai was much more fluid than rigid.
Personally I would use mold for the dev cycle tests and then in CI or prerelease tests use the other linker
Having never seen the guts of one before I was surprised to see the difference in wire gauge between the high and low sides of the transformer. In my mind the only difference between the two sides was the number of turns. Huh.
By that yardstick, it would even be difficult to rationalize a preference of life over rocks. Yeah, we should embrace anthropocentrism and perhaps dedicate some care on not going too far with it.
Do you dispute the conventional thinking that the rich get richer, frequently from passive income?
All life is whatever their version of anthropocentric is. Life simply seeks to survive and replicate. We are simply life forms seeking to secure our own survival and spread. Evolution has worked to create us and we will do what evolution wants which again is to survive even if at the expense of all others.
Sure but Kerala society is nothing like the Communist society in USSR. You still have basic freedoms like right to private property, or packing up and moving to a different state. If you disagree, mind sharing a few specific examples of what was "communist" about Kerala (eg. economic policies) apart from the name of the ruling party?
> Yep, same. I was always mostly against legalization not because I think it's some evil drug, but because the smell is absolutely stomach turning to me.

I cannot fathom supporting sending thousands of people to jail every year because I find a smell icky.
The key to learning programming or anything is not to stop. Whatever you have learned will serve you well for the next 3 months. Everything is a building block.

Perhaps frontend isn't the easiest area to start for everyone. Try a backend language before you give up.
While I agree with you, I think sales is the most important job category besides engineering, and the usual problem is with the people who put themselves between sales and engineering.

To know how important sales is, just see what is the most important talent to be paired with a programmer in a 2-person startup.

The ratio of sales to engineering at the same time depends on the required growth / burn rate of the company, which depends on the interest rates.

When interest rates go up, growth has to be sacrified to focus on survival / short term revenue generation without significant sales/marketing spend.
Lol that's what you get for using contractors
The question is where do you draw the line? Hypothetical: the smell of flowers makes me sick, it's possible to garden indoors. I want you to remove your outdoor garden and grow your flowers indoors only. Is that fair?
> It really creeps up on one over the years, and I think I can best express it as I don’t have a favorite colour any longer.

This is such a beautiful way to express it. Thanks for sharing.
As someone who writes Python 9 to 5, I much rather be writing Rust (which I do in my spare time) and would concur that Python generally sucks to write large code bases [0].

That being said, I really don't think any of the reasons here get to why python isn't fun to write large code bases in. I'd say my biggest pain point has more to do with it's typing system (which is getting better).

[0] Can it be done properly? Sure. But I personally feel worse about python the more complex a library I'm writing gets.
Then of course there was "Steal this Book". I will claim the fifth in regards to our library copy
Keep suffering upward!
When you hard code in a blacklist is that really considered progress?
But were you comparing just the linking step? Or the entire compilation process?
Personally, who cares? I think I and probably most of humanity if given a choice between the survival of the human species and the birth of some philosophical new species that may never even exist, we choose humanity every time. Going even further if given the choice of humanity over any other existing species we choose humanity. I see no issue with this choice either, we are a part of nature and Darwinism built us to want to survive and spread.
Programming itself is a lifelong pursuit. People can argue all day long about what constitutes a good programmer. To say the least the skillset is very wide and very deep with a lot of breathing room to find your place.

I will say that if you don't enjoy trying to learn new things, you might not enjoy this field. You are really forced to "learn" new things all of the time. That being said, you might be able to settle on a particular programming language and find places that are not cutting edge but are stuck on "old" tech.

Really though this isn't a job that your can just phone in...
I don’t agree. AST-as-syntax (the S-expressions) is the thing that makes a language a Lisp. Everything else (macros/non-typed/GC/Lambdas/REPL/…) is available in other languages.

Note that it is AST-as-syntax that is important. Not the concrete S-expressions syntax. You could use XML or JSON to write the AST-as-syntax instead and you would have a Lisp. However S-expressions are much more concise that XML/JSON.
drugs.

edit: i'm serious. do you guys know any drug addicts? you lose your ability to make a plan.
The proceedings of SIGBOVIK 2022 has an article [0] detailing brainfuck++, which includes a number of helpful enhancements.

[0] http://sigbovik.org/2022/proceedings.pdf, page 23.
I am writing about shared_ptr because C++ is one of a top language. Read about the ABA problem.
Amazing what you can do if you are Disney and have more money than God.
> an associative array is sometimes called a 'hash' (Perl), but Python calls it a 'dictionary'. Python seems to go out of it's way to not use the common terms found throughout the computer and information science field.

The author isn’t well-informed. “Dictionary” is the original and traditional name for associative arrays in computer science. Smalltalk uses it as well, as do many CS books on algorithms and data structures. See for example: https://www.nist.gov/dads/HTML/dictionary.html
Tell HN: Google search results include more genuine blogs lately
Did anyone else notice an increase in the search results on Google?

My web exploring experiences changed quite a bit in this last week, thanks to this welcome change.

I am coming across lots of genuine, interesting blogs.

Anyone else observing a similar pattern?
This is the game like 200k copies got trashed?
"Move slowly and break things!"
React itself doesn't bother me as much as the tooling around frontend development. I'm looking at you webpacker...
I get what you're saying, but I think the fact that convenience stores are anything but a monopoly just further illustrates how disparate Apple's authority is here. The power Apple wields is like if there was one cereal store, and if you didn't like the selection they had then you "just find another breakfast food". It doesn't, and shouldn't have to be a binary choice.
Henceforth known as Netsharc’s Razor

:D
I don't see any value in humanity leaving the earth (except for fun, which is a good reason). Our children (the robots) are doing a much better job than we are of exploring the solar system or indeed researching saving us by attacking the Didymos-Dimorphos system.

Instead of dragging a chunk of planet around with us everywhere we go, let's leave the travel to the robots that are perfectly adapted to the environment.
This, but for SHA256, is basically what Bitcoin mining is.
The concept of good and bad only exists because humanity created it. So humanity surviving at the expense of all else is good because we will it to be so. We are just an animal species that wants to survive and spread like all other animal species just as Darwinism made us. We are just pretty good at it. Humanity has the ability to survive the upcoming final extinction event that the sun will cause and spread life in the galaxy. I would say this is good, as without us doing this life itself dies.
60 Mummies Found in Two Tombs in Luxor, Egypt
I haven’t had skin in the game for years, so my opinion isn’t super valuable here.

Anyway, some of this is valid, albeit a lot of that is either well trodden (eg py3 gripes, pros/cons of significant whitespace) or host environment/tooling specific (eg where a thing installs `python` and which version without additional qualification and whether that’s stable).

But some of this is surprisingly mind boggling! I interrupted my reading of it somewhere in the beginning of

> Reason 7: Pass By Object Reference

The author spends quite a lot of time expressing familiarity with not just their preferred language C but demonstrating fairly intimate familiarity with several dynamic languages… several which have a reputation for exhibiting or even exacerbating exactly the same problem described. They even allude to some of that earlier. Huh?

I’d already glossed over the possibility to rename imports gripe (I think most module systems support this? Certainly the ones which augment the local namespace without any mechanism for disambiguation do, otherwise good luck ever getting anything done!)

If author is here reading, I’m not posting this to pile on, but to express honest confusion about how you’ve selected these gripes and how they line up for you with the seemingly greener pastures referenced. I don’t even much like Python either! I’m just getting a lot of cognitive dissonance trying to understand the perspective.
All the city farming tech stuff requires some kinda cyberpunk megalopolis scenario to be remotely practical. Or maybe a nuclear post-apocalypse. It's cool or whatever, but most of the world has quite a lot of arable land.
What is the most recent generation of Intel cpu for which an optical microscope can see enough to (at least theoretically) do what you are doing with the 8086.
Don't try to save money by getting just the e-book (which is generously included with an order for the hardcopy). The hardcopy is really worth it!

The large photos printed in very high resolution blow away what you can see on your screen.
i had a conversation yesterday with accomplished engineers from vmware and openai.

pen, paper, and whiteboards have been invaluable tools for them, but they were surprised to find that out in hindsight.

we discussed about the counter-intuitive short-comings of digital tools: a lack of contraints constraints creativity. digital whiteboards like figma have infinite canvases; most to-do list apps have infinite lists. but, a sticky note has so much space before you run out of it, so you intuitively think... maybe i should not keep adding tasks to this thing.

there is also the aspect of object permanence and the link between memory and multi-modal sensory stimuli. in other words, if you can feel the thing, you can remember the thing better.
I started writing code full time at age 38. I turn 60 this year, and I feel like I'm going strong. I might have lost a half step. I guess I won't be writing code at 70.

It's possible I'm unique, but I don't think so. I wonder if you're just distracted or perhaps experiencing burnout.