skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Doesn't seem right to say that engineers hate code. IMO, in a sense, code is lossy; rarely does it document the full set of assumptions, intentions and context relevant at its inception or over its life. Possibly more appropriate to say that writing new code can sometimes avoid the lack of those things which make modifying code simpler. Do engineers hate being in a position where they have to rely only on intuition and inferences rather than hard evidence? Well, I do, at least. Do I hate code? Nope
> perhaps there will be a flag to selectively operate a python process without the GIL (and leave the onous on you to completely test and validate your code works with potentially new and spooky behaviour).

Worked for ruby. The original interpreter MRI has a GIL too. Rubinius and JRuby added multi-threading with limited amounts of pain and people fixed libraries over the years. Sometimes just sprinkling lock blocks around a particular FFI calls or only doing them from a dedicated thread will do the job.
TBH having CPython internal experiance is quite a qualification. They would probably contribute at least some of thier time in the no PEP 703 case so the delta is even leass.
> Many have called this the come trough of AI disillusionment.

I don't this that's what's happening. I think it's more about a combination of summer break and people who were trying it out from curiosity and moved on.

I think the trough of disillusionment is still in the future.
San Francisco's new venture capital hotspot: The Presidio
I don't think anyone is unilaterally going to move to multiprocess as a programming paradigm. Web browsers have their own reasons for using Multi-process, including security from memory isolation, resilience against crashes in the client side code, killing individual tabs, and so on.

I'd wager the vast majority of programs being written that need concurrency or parallelism still use multi threading or SIMD.
I don't think you mean free as in freedom. Maybe freemium, I can't think of a closer short description. They don't cost anything but you're not allowed to use them for most stuff either.

Otoh, there are plenty of Apache and MIT licensed models. For example Open LLaMA and Falcon, Dolly, etc. HF lets you filter by license.
Cities are ending fares on transit. Here’s why
The facts that they know who's used it and can charge a monthly subscription for it mean that the car isn't fit to be bought or used in the first place.
10 Notes on the End of Affirmative Action

https://colemanhughes.substack.com/p/10-notes-on-the-end-of-...
It doesn't.

LLMs are mysterious black-boxes which cannot transparently explain themselves or their decisions and just regurgitates and rewords the output it was trained on and doesn't even know if its generated text is correct.

Grady Booch has deconstructed this question perfectly in a recent Twitter thread. [0]

[0] https://twitter.com/Grady_Booch/status/1673797840605433856
These are real pros doing products, they know what’s real, not helping grifters pumping to pass bags, I.e hedge funds, banks, startups, influencers
You'll need an appointment, head scan, prescription data to buy Apple Vision Pro
You have long since missed the boat on changing that. This is how business is done: "well we can charge you 5x the market price for the RAM/SSD upgrade, so we will!"
I mean I guess I should have explicitly said "derived distribution for commercial projects" but I kinda thought that was obvious since nobody is going to use Genera as is, it would require substantial upgrading to make it useful for the 21st century.

Which would be a derived work under GPL and require publication of sources if distributed etc. etc.

GPL makes a lot of sense to me for something like this. Nobody is going to make money off Symbolic's old IP, but if they somehow were, clauses in the GPL3 or some variant of a copyleft license would likely force them to contribute back.
There are so many people that could have your number.

That one plumber you called that one time, who added your number to their phone could have added everyone in their contact list to WhatsApp.

Maybe you did a favour for someone and helped out their cousin and you gave the cousin your number and never talked to them again.

Maybe you had a friend you lost touch with and their number changed but they kept their address book.

You told absolutely everyone? Are you sure? Absolutely everyone and stressed to them how important this was to them?

Worse, are these replies which completely lack empathy. Such a lack of imagination as to how your number could leak. And a tone as if no one has anything else going on in their lives or more important things to do.
It's far too early to say Sam Altman has succeeded at anything. We must imagine "replacement Sam Altman" who does the same things with the same resources and obtains lesser outcomes, or totally fails.

There's a Sam Altman replacement middle manager out there who only got the job because of nepotism, one of them barely pays his rent because his parents cut him off, the other one died of a bad trip of psychedelics in college, etc.

If success of this scale were repeatable we'd have bottled lightning for sale like it was Coca Cola. If people had such a formula they'd keep it just as secret.
Nitrates in bacon are essential for making bacon. Aspartame is not essential for making coke.
But it is just for the nogil project. If suppose python foundation doesn't believe merit in GIL, they aren't getting any benefit out of the situation.
From the top post in that thread:

Most of this work has been on Javascript, which is single-threaded and less mutable than Python, but PyPy has also made some significant contributions. PyPy has a GIL.

There is also work on Ruby. Ruby is even more mutable than Python, but also has a GIL. Work on Ruby mirrors that on Javascript.
The Future of War Has Come in Ukraine: Drone Swarms
The article was too long but I thought had some interesting ideas.

Lately though I think the key to understanding Twitter is the relationship with the media and particularly “media amplification”

For instance there was that case where somebody bought a blue check for a fake Eli Lilly account, tweeted “insulin is now free”, allegedly caused the stock to drop, and the media erupts in outrage. Suddenly it is a big problem you can get a bogus blue check but, really, there is very little top stop me from buying some name like “elilil.ly”, copying their template, and making a fake page with all the fake information I want. It would take their lawyers days if not weeks to get a preliminary injunction in a case like that, but truth is a site like that might go undiscovered for years. There is isn’t a lot of talk about about the danger of website impersonation although there must be millions or billions scammed out of people yearly by fake web sites.

Similarly there was the incident of J.K. Rowling getting dogpiled on Twitter that was only remarkable because (1) she was famous and (2) the story got picked up in the media. All kinds of people get dogpiled every day (often for being gender-nonconforming) and (as awful as it is) it’s usually a free in the forest that falls without making a sound.

In both of these cases only a few very people experienced them on Twitter and the situation quickly blew over. The stories get told over and over and over again away from Twitter, people may still be reading about them 20 years from now but it won’t be on Twitter.

Cases like this happen on all kinds of social media but Twitter’s got a special attraction to people in the media that makes it all the more so.
That's exactly my point. To my best knowledge "semantic versioning" refers to Tom Preston-Werner's codified version, which is not valuable for the aforementioned reasons. The general idea behind semantic versioning is of course valuable, but we already had a word for that... it's called versioning.
No, i get it. But the author analogy is dumb (even if funny). There's literally no one stopping you from just downloading a "hammer" from the internet and just using that. The "stores" haven't stopped selling "hammers". Even if they're also selling "factory factory factory".

Go ahead and build your apps out of whatever you want, no one is forcing you to build it using frameworks.

But I promise you, if frameworks did not exist half the apps I use today wouldn't either. There's a right tool for every job and the article pretends there isn't.
I previously worked on Cinder. Maintaining a fork is hard and the goal is not to do that.
Bahahaha!
Chat with Falcon-7B-instruct demo
Ah, so "I am not an expert in English" must be sufficient to get out of contracts!
Would you consider an "open source database connector" to be a new, open source database that also has a connector?
GIL removal doesn't mean "make all of this lockless" it means "replace the GIL with fine-grained locking". So those problems are still solved for Python code. The three issues are the amount of work it takes to do right, the performance cost for single-threaded code, and the CAPI.
I've been a software developer for almost 10 years and during that time I've questioned many times why I keep on going.

A while ago I realized that the biggest thing that I like about software development is the simplicity within it's complexity.

What I mean by this is; software either works or it doesn't. In many other professions this is not the case.

So while there are many things that could be done better and more efficiently, at the end of the day, your code either works or it doesn't.

So simple, but yet, so ruthless.
For one argument, consider the disparities between the # of people who've used a type of drug at some point in their life, vs the # that have used them in the past year, vs the # that have used them in the past month.

While some % of those are people who got help and quit in the past year, or people on the start of a downward spiral/addiction, plenty of those seem to just be infrequent users.

Unless the drug kills you so frequently/quickly that you can't sustain use for long or is rapidly gaining users for a new addiction crisis, the level of greater than monthly users should be higher if most of those infrequent users are going to become addicts.

https://www.samhsa.gov/data/sites/default/files/reports/rpt3...

You can further see that the spread of yearly vs monthly use is closer for substances typically considered more addictive and wider for those less thought to be. (not a lot of LSD addicts out there, relatively speaking).

-------

My experience is that a lot of people are very quiet about their drug use outside the environment where they dabble in it and never mention it at all in company where they're uncertain about how it'll be viewed, so I also suspect that you may not recognize most of those people as people who'd use drugs at all.

I'm a big live music person and being around people using drugs somewhat comes with the territory, especially festival-type environments. But most of the people I've met at those things don't do much of those substances otherwise aside from possibly weed. They've got their once or twice a year time of hitting up the party drugs for their weekend of fun + music, but that's it.
Like the author, I also do a lot of Kotlin development and use intellij and pycharm a lot. This sounds like an awful laptop to do that on. Kotlin is great but it's compiler is rather slow and you end up waiting for that a lot. So, faster is better.

I noticed about a 2.5x build speed improvements when I upgraded my cheap Samsung i5 laptop (a temporary thing I used for a while) to the M1 14" Mac Book Pro. On a typical day, I run full builds quite often so this really matters to me. The difference between waiting 5 minutes or 1.5 is really important to me. During this build, 250 integration tests run with 20 threaads maxing out all of the cpu cores.

This windows laptop is being described as a lack luster i5 sounds like it would be a hard no for me. That and all the other issues (the usual meh touchpad, the underwhelming GPU, etc.) makes for an overpriced laptop that just isn't worth having. You can probably get something way nicer for the money. Including a mac.
Perhaps the softening is related to the open sourcing of LLaMa? I softened a bit on Microsoft after it started embracing the open source approach in the 2010s... even if the motivate was being late to the party.
Correct. Python multi-threaded code is not magically thread-safe. What it did do is make C functions atomic, like dictionary and list methods, since they're implemented by C functions. The reason is the GIL is released and re-acquired while executing Python code (every 100 ops if memory serves), but isn't released by most C functions, making them called with the global lock held, which makes them atomic. You can still have a thread switch between any two Python op codes. e.g. foo += 1 may or may not be atomic depending on how many op codes it compiles to (IIRC, in CPython, it is not atomic.)
Sort of related, I'm surprised there are no "edge" GPUs available in the style of cloudflare workers or AWS lambda. I heard that cloudflare was going to do something like this but it never materialized. It would be great (as an alternative to API access) to be able to pay for a worker GPU that you only used when doing inference. I know there are technical challenges to that, I wonder of it's still too hard to make something responsive enough to be useful?
Also the number of ppl having bacon at every meal is small. The number of ppl drinking diet soda - and consuming diet anything else - multiple times per day is significantly larger, at least in the First World.
> If PEP 703 is accepted, Meta can commit to support […] between the acceptance of PEP 703 and the end of 2025

Meanwhile, the Steering Council is dragging their feet, even though so many people in the community have chimed in their support for nogil being a thing (in the linked thread and two others).

https://github.com/python/steering-council/issues/188#issuec...
Why should library authors be put under pressure because someone else chose the wrong tool for the job, and is now trying to push that externality on to the community?

Python is a single-threaded language. That’s part of its DNA. The community has already been through one traumatic transition in recent history and the appetite for another one is low.

Library authors should not update their libraries to support multithreading, rather the people who want that should be forced to rewrite their code in a language that is more suitable for the problem they want to solve.
I think that just further shows your worldview that defaults to information/data as property. I think this is wrong both in the sense that it isn't really what the law says (but aren't going to agree here anyway) but more importantly I think what it should say. Information should not be and is not property by default. There are only three specific ways in which it can become property ("intellectual property"): copyright, trademark and patent. If it's none of those then the government doesn't get to make any rules about how anyone deals in the data because of the 1st Amendment. That's my understanding of the US system at least.
BMW ConnectedRide smartglasses bring head-up displays to eyewear
For a while there Guile (Scheme not Lisp, but similar vibe) was being pushed as the preferred glue and extension and scripting language for the GNU ecosystem, but this didn't really go anywhere. Nor did the elisp->euile transition in GNU emacs ever happen.
Recent discussions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36519942

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36522471

And to a lesser extent:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36562739
The headline is exactly what I've heard in many hobbyist forums for decades. (My particular sin is woodworking.) It's almost inconceivable to me that this would be shocking or surprising to anyone deep into any particular hobby.
Show HN: UI/UX Primer is a free eBook with 150+ topics
I'm launching a free UI/UX primer ebook for people who want to start learning about user interface design and user experience development.

Thank you to many HN readers who suggested topics a couple weeks ago. Constructive feedback is welcome.

https://github.com/sixarm/ui-ux-primer
> Luckily (or perhaps shadily), you will rarely ever pay the full price for the Thinkpad x13s. As is tradition, Lenovo seems to be perpetually running deals, taking up to 40% off (at time of writing, 45% time of purchase), bringing the laptop to a much more reasonable $1479.60.

If something has a $2500 price tag but always has a deal where you can take it only for $1500 then the real price is $1500, not $2500.
Yup. The entire roof is full of radiators and fans that blow straight up into the night air.
Sorry, stupid question, can someone tell, please, how do other interpreted languages deal with problem similar to GIL or noGIL?
I dropped out of college and my earnings last year (still in my mid/late 20s, have easily another promo or job hop before 32) are over double the Harvard median, therefore dropping out of school causes you to earn 8x the national median.

"Doesn't count" you say? "Confounding variables" you say? "Causation and correlation aren't the same" you say? I'll just have to take your word for it, grad, it's not like I have a college degree after all!

P.S. I love rejecting Ivy League grads in interview loops. They've very consistently been the absolute worst performers on LC easies.
Conversely...in a lot of cases you can reasonably project it's likely you won't be maintaining it. So what you're really projecting is how much trouble you expect to save yourself for your forseeable remaining time at the company.
I saw some posts urging people to “get in on the beginning” in order to take advantage of the primitive ranking and go viral. Everyone wants a chance at that. Just like the promise of pump and dump crypto’s or the still private startups that told me “you just don’t understand how equity works, we are about to IPO soon, take our lowball offer”
This is a dupe and it's only technically true, it's being added to some low impact "possible carcinogen" category that already contains vast swaths of food and human activities. It has no material impact on any health guidance, it's just a clickbait headline.
This was really funny. Got lost in it, and the site, for a while yesterday. Made for an enjoyable week end. Many thanks to the author.
> I also frequently have fat finger emojis in Slack, Discord or WhatsApp, now it's legally bounded?

I would bet my business prospects that no court would conclude that a thumbs-up followed less than a minute later by a “disregard previous typo” message as binding acceptance.

This is not some trick “no backsies” situation, but rather a case where a pattern of short acceptance messages was continued, just in picture form.

Other than the defendant objecting after the fact, I think most reasonable people would look at the pattern of communication and reach the same conclusion the court did.
Reusing code cause issues if you are not very careful because if not checked people often keep adding to it or someone modified it for their use case and breaks others. Many times is just better not to reuse
The simple ways cities can adapt to heatwaves
Still? That would surprise me.
Eh. It’s usually not that hard to take two tightly coupled components and insert an abstraction layer in between. Usually tightly coupled code is small, and you can almost always use the compiler to find all the places you need to modify things.

Practically speaking I’d much rather that problem than it’s inverse. It’s exhausting dealing with code that’s too abstract. Especially if the abstractions don’t do anything anyway. Eg - Java interfaces with exactly one implementation. Removing useless abstractions never feels pressing enough to do, but you pay a tax for those abstractions constantly. And it doesn’t take many abstractions before your productivity plummets. No thanks.

The best code is like the best writing. Say what you mean. Be direct. And be humble enough to redo it all when you figure out a better way to proceed.
> Python is like Perl,

Perl never had anywhere near the wealth of libraries and community support Python enjoys today. The language is used nearly everywhere, from utility-scripts to build piplines, desktop applications, webservice backends, all the way up to scientific computing and AI.

Python shines because of it's ecosystem and community support, which I'd guess (without having any numbers to back this up) may very well be unmatched among programming languages today. Maybe Java and C/C++ come somewhat close, but I'd doubt even these behemoths would stand a chance in a 1:1 comparison for sheer size and versatility of what for Python is just a quick `pip install` away.

Any language that want's to replace Python, even internally at a company, will either have to deal with the fallout of leaving all that behind, OR be compatible with Python to an extend that it doesn't matter. And that's a really tall order.
It's easy to forget that prior to its acquisition, Twitter was a financial catastrophe. It still could be, but Twitter seems to be working hard at becoming a profitable business. Does praising its unsustainable past and lost designs makes us some kind of spoiled brats?
Healthcare Triage did a review of the research years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mf82FfX-wuU
tl;dw: artificial sweeteners get a bad rap, multiple studies have found no harm, studies that did find harm were on rats (which often doesn't translate to humans), and the harms associated with excess sugar consumption are numerous, well-founded, and damning.
Cows Learn Better with Friends (2014)
"Hallucination" is a term that is just as problematic as "lying", for the same reason. Both terms imply a cognition that just isn't happening. The model doesn't "think" it's telling the truth. It doesn't "think" at all, at least in that sense. Nor does it "believe" or "disbelieve" anything.

A better term than "lying" or "hallucination" would be "erroneous".
In the third world, far more people drink diet soda than eat bacon. In the first world, I wouldn't be so sure.
Previous threads with tons of comments:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36519942

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36522471
It doesn't really matter to the argument though, no?
> Do it the wrong way, and you do hurt yourself.

Can you define “wrong”?

Injury risk is mostly a function of load and fatigue management, not form.
Singing up to know more updates ? No, sorry.
If we want to compare this to libraries, it’s necessary to redefine the role of libraries.

For the analogy to work, libraries now provide the service of generating new books/stories based on works under the library’s care. As a library patron, you’ll give the librarian a prompt, and they’ll generate a book for you.

This book will be intrinsically dependent on the authors of all of the books in the library, but those authors will not be credited or paid for the new work.

“Librarian, please generate a fantasy novel in the style of George R. R. Martin that continues where A Dance with Dragons left off”.

If this is what libraries did, authors would not want their books there.

This is not what libraries do, and the analogy does not hold up.
Browsers use multiple processes for security and reliability, not as an alternative to multi-threading. They extensively use multi-threading for performance (as does a lot of other modern software).
Then just put up a fundraiser. There's enough nerds that would pitch in I'm sure it could get covered and someone hired to do it.

Though I think it's more than likely that once people had free access to it and saw what modern conveniences were missing etc the mystique would be lost and it would be kept more as an archaeological asset than as an ongoing thing people wanted to maintain and use.
Unfortunately I know people who drink diet coke like it's water. If somebody ate bacon at that volume they wouldn't live long enough for cancer to get them.
But do they actually want to read the code on the existing project, or just write new code adding to it?

Nothing is universal, but I think often the latter.