Hacker News Reader

collinmandersonon The RAM shortage comes for us all

I'll happily invest $100 into this project in exchange for stock. let me know.

collinmandersonon IBM CEO says there is 'no way' spending on AI data centers will pay off

I think it's also worth comparing to the CO2 impact of consuming meat, especially beef, which is pretty high.

(It's the training, not the inference, that's the biggest energy usage.)

collinmandersonon IBM CEO says there is 'no way' spending on AI data centers will pay off

> I also have it document and summarise its own work.

Could you share some of your prompts or CLAUDE.md? I'm still learning what works.

collinmandersonon It’s time to free JavaScript (2024)

The last time this was brought up, "WebScript" was mentioned as a possible alternative name. (Like WebAssembly, WebSockets, WebRTC, etc.)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45297066

collinmandersonon Show HN: Explore what the browser exposes about you

https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/ is less detailed but shows the individual uniqueness of each attribute.

collinmandersonon Shai-Hulud Returns: Over 300 NPM Packages Infected

> prefer the oldest version satisfying the given constraints

The problem is there's no metadata for which versions fix security bugs, and therefore which previous versions are now insecure.

collinmandersonon Shai-Hulud Returns: Over 300 NPM Packages Infected

For Python's uv, I think the closest thing to a cooldown is something like:

    uv lock --exclude-newer $(date --iso -d "24 hours ago")

uv is considering a native relative date:

https://github.com/astral-sh/uv/issues/14992

collinmandersonon The privacy nightmare of browser fingerprinting

> If I have a process that randomly installs and deletes wacky fonts, I'm unique at any given time

Technically for fonts, there’s no API for listing installed fonts, so trackers have to check each font by name. Likely they won’t be checking super obscure font names.

That method might help for other signals though.

collinmandersonon Cloudflare Global Network experiencing issues

> If you have a site with valuable content the LLM crawlers hound you to no end.

The site doesn't even need to have valuable content. Any content at all.

collinmandersonon Vine reboot called Divine has launched

The key point: AI content is banned.

collinmandersonon Uv is the best thing to happen to the Python ecosystem in a decade

Does the conda package manager have the same issue?

collinmandersonon Uv is the best thing to happen to the Python ecosystem in a decade

It handles CUDA version for PyTorch: https://docs.astral.sh/uv/guides/integration/pytorch/#instal...

collinmandersonon Uv is the best thing to happen to the Python ecosystem in a decade

> AI/ML

The Machine-Learning world, especially "Google Brain" research team figured out that NumPy was an awesome piece of software for dealing with large arrays of numbers and matrix multiplication. They built "TensorFlow" on top of it around 2015 which became very popular. Facebook followed suit and released PyTorch in 2016.

IPython/Jupiter notebooks (for Julia, Python and R) from 2015 were another factor, also adopted by the AI/ML community.

The alternative data-science languages at the time were Mathematica, MATLAB, SAS, Fortran, Julia, R, etc, but Python probably won because it was general purpose and open source.

I suspect Python would not have survived the 2/3 split very well if it wasn't for AI/ML adopting Python as its main language.

> when the tooling was so inferior

Since 2012, Conda/Anaconda has been the go-to installer in the SciPy/NumPy world which also solves a lot of problems that uv solves.

collinmandersonon Uv is the best thing to happen to the Python ecosystem in a decade

> I can only conclude, that the author of the article, and perhaps even the organization they work in, is unaware of other tools that did the job long before uv. If they really value reproducibility that much, how come they didn't look into the matter before? Things much have been really hastily stitched together, if no one ever looked at existing tooling before, and only now they make things reproducible.

Yes, Poetry has had lock files for years, and pyenv has been able to manage installations, but uv is "an incredibly powerful simplification" that makes it easy to do everything really well with just one tool.

collinmandersonon Uv is the best thing to happen to the Python ecosystem in a decade

Sorry, you're right I should have said "plain venv", as in the program.

`uv run` will also sync the environment to be sure it exists and meets the correct specifications.

But yes, it's optional. You can also just do `uv sync` to sync the environment and then activate it like normal.

Or use `uv venv`, `uv pip` commands and just take the speed advantage.

collinmandersonon Uv is the best thing to happen to the Python ecosystem in a decade

I agree that the speed improvements are inexplicable, as in I can't convince you in writing. "uv is fast!!!" doesn't do it justice. You kinda just have to experience it for yourself.

If you haven't spent 5 minutes trying it out, you don't know what you're missing.

If you're worried about getting addicted like everyone else, I could see that as a valid reason to never try it in the first place.

collinmandersonon Uv is the best thing to happen to the Python ecosystem in a decade

The best pitch deck is spending 5 minutes playing with uv and trying out installing the dependencies for your project.

It’s hard to demonstrate the speed difference in a pitch deck.

collinmandersonon Uv is the best thing to happen to the Python ecosystem in a decade

> I don’t really get that uv solves all these problems ve never encountered. Just make a venv and use it seems to work fine.

For me package installation is way, way faster with uv, and I appreciate not needing to activate the virtual environment.

collinmandersonon Uv is the best thing to happen to the Python ecosystem in a decade

They plan on making money by running private package registries, rather than making money on the client. https://astral.sh/pyx

collinmandersonon Uv is the best thing to happen to the Python ecosystem in a decade

What would you suggested as a recommend method of installation in 2025?

You can `pip install uv` or manually download and extract the right uv-*.tar.gz file from github: https://github.com/astral-sh/uv/releases

collinmandersonon Uv is the best thing to happen to the Python ecosystem in a decade

I'm waiting for ty to get TypedDict checking. https://github.com/astral-sh/ty/issues/154

collinmandersonon Uv is the best thing to happen to the Python ecosystem in a decade

uv is finally an all-in-one tool that finally takes all of the good ideas from previous projects and combines them together to work well as one (and unbelievably fast).

The fact that it's a binary, not written in python, also simplifies bootstrapping. So you don't need python+dependencies installed in order to install your python+dependencies.

collinmandersonon Uv is the best thing to happen to the Python ecosystem in a decade

I agree flake8 -> ruff was more of a game changer for me than pip+venv -> uv. I use flake8/ruff for more often than pip/venv.

uv is probably much more of a game changer for beginner python users who just need to install stuff and don't need to lint. So it's a bigger deal for the broader python ecosystem.

collinmandersonon Uv is the best thing to happen to the Python ecosystem in a decade

> The whole point of an environment manager is set the environment so that the commands I run work. They need to run natively how they are supposed to when the environment is set, not put through a translation layer.

The `uv run` command is an optional shortcut for avoiding needing to activate the virtual environment. I personally don't like the whole "needing to activate an environment" before I can run commands "natively", so I like `uv run`. (Actually for the last 10 years I've had my `./manage.py` auto-set up the virtual environment for me.)

The `uv add` / `uv lock` / `uv sync` commands are still useful without `uv run`.

collinmandersonon Uv is the best thing to happen to the Python ecosystem in a decade

> I really don't understand why you can't just pip install something globally. I want this package to be available to me EVERYWHERE, why can't I do it? I only use python recreationally because everyone uses python everywhere and you can't escape it. So there is a massive possibility I am simply wrong and pip-installing something globally is a huge risk. I'm just not understanding it.

You may have a library that's been globally installed, and you have multiple projects that rely on it. One day you may need to upgrade the library for use in one project, but there are backward incompatibile changes in the upgrade, so now all of your other projects break when you upgrade the global library.

In general, when projects are used by multiple people across multiple computers, it's best to have the specific dependencies and versions specified in the project itself so that everyone using that project is using the exact same version of each dependency.

For recreational projects it's not as big of a deal. It's just harder to do a recreation of your environment.

collinmandersonon Uv is the best thing to happen to the Python ecosystem in a decade

The article shows some advantages compared to plain virtual environments:

In principle, you can ‘activate’ this new virtual environment like any typical virtual environment that you may have seen in other tools, but the most ‘uv-onic’ way to use uv is simply to prepend any command with uv run. This command automatically picks up the correct virtual environment for you and runs your command with it. For instance, to run a script — instead of

   source .venv/bin/activate
   python myscript.py

you can just do

   uv run myscript.py

collinmandersonon Uv is the best thing to happen to the Python ecosystem in a decade

> Has the ecosystem fully moved on to uv, now?

It's moving pretty quick.

> Do they have good influence on what python's main ecosystem is moving to?

Yes, they're an early adaptor/implementer of the recent pyproject.toml standards.

collinmandersonon Uv is the best thing to happen to the Python ecosystem in a decade

> All these comments look like advertisement. "uv is better than python!!", "8/10 programmers recommend uv", "I was a terrible programmer before but uv changed my life!!", "uv is fast!!!"

Have you tried uv?

collinmandersonon Uv is the best thing to happen to the Python ecosystem in a decade

> There’s pip, virtualenv, pipx, uv, probably half a dozen others I’m missing...

> Reminds me of that competing standards xkcd.

Yes, for years I've sat on the sidelines avoiding the fragmented Poetry, ppyenv, pipenv, pipx, pip-tools/pip-compile, rye, etc, but uv does now finally seem to be the all-in-one solution that seems to be succeeding where other tools have failed.

collinmandersonon Uv is the best thing to happen to the Python ecosystem in a decade

It's fast enough that sometimes dependencies can be checked and resolved and installed at program runtime rather than it needing to be a separate step.

You can go from no virtual environment, and just "uv run myfile.py" and it does everything that's needed, nearly instantly.