borntyping's comments

borntyping | 4 months ago | on: Python Software Foundation gets a donor surge after rejecting federal grant

The PSF withdrew their application for the grant from the US government after being presented with terms that included "do not, and will not during the term of this financial assistance award, operate any programs that advance or promote DEI, or discriminatory equity ideology in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws", which conflicts with their mission statement: "The mission of the Python Software Foundation is to promote, protect, and advance the Python programming language, and to support and facilitate the growth of a diverse and international community of Python programmers."

[1]: https://pyfound.blogspot.com/2025/10/NSF-funding-statement.h...

borntyping | 4 months ago | on: At the end you use `git bisect`

> Can someone explain why anyone would want non-squashed PRs? > > For the 5% of engineers that diligently split each PR into nice semantic changes, I suppose that's nice. But the vast majority of engineers don't do this.

I think cause and effect are the other way around here. You write and keep work-in-progress commits without caring about changes because the history will be discarded and the team will only look at pull requests as a single unit, and write tidy distinct commits because the history will be kept and individual commits will be reviewed.

I've done both, and getting everyone to do commits properly is much nicer, though GitHub and similar tools don't really support or encourage it. If you work with repository history a lot (for example, you have important repositories that aren't frequently committed to, or maintain many different versions of the project) it's invaluable. Most projects don't really care about the history—only the latest changes—and work with pull-requests, which is why they tend to use the squashed pull request approach.

borntyping | 4 months ago | on: Wheels for free-threaded Python now available for psutil

It doesn't mean anything useful in this context. It's a leftover from when PyPI was called "the cheeseshop", which in turn was a reference to a Monty Python sketch.

borntyping | 1 year ago | on: Nearly all binary searches and mergesorts are broken (2006)

Nearly all binary searches and mergesorts are broken in languages with bounded integers.

borntyping | 2 years ago | on: Ludic: New framework for Python with seamless Htmx support

I've been looking for something exactly like this for a while — a small Python library for generating HTML that isn't prescriptive about framework and doesn't introduce any particually weird syntax. Jinja2 macros are... not great when you want to turn your HTML into lots of smaller functions.

borntyping | 3 years ago | on: Finding relationships between Ruby’s top packages and their dependencies

I'd suggest there's a correlation between the size of those package repositories and how much they get talked about. npm has several times the package count of PyPI and RubyGems together, and I don't think that can be accounted for just because it's common to make "micro" JavaScript packages.

borntyping | 3 years ago | on: Scientists, Not Doing Science

> This is not doing science. It is “publishing articles written by scientists that you happen to find emotionally appealing”.

Have scientific journals ever _not_ worked this way? They're generally curated by an editor who curates the articles the journal peer-reviews and publishes.

borntyping | 6 years ago | on: YAML: Probably not so great after all

The first example (i.e. `yaml.load()` in Python) doesn't work with the current version of PyYAML.

Function application was disabled some time ago, and `yaml.load()` logs a noisy deprecation warning telling users to use `yaml.safe_load()` instead [1].

[1]: https://github.com/yaml/pyyaml/wiki/PyYAML-yaml.load(input)-...

borntyping | 6 years ago | on: Entropic – A Federated Package Manager for JavaScript

Because package managers are used for more than just source code - many packages want or need to distribute intermediate or compiled artifacts.

borntyping | 7 years ago | on: Mozilla and independent researchers publish guidelines for an ad archive API

"Just block ads" isn't a useful answer here - this is about being able to see who is advertising to the people who aren't using ad-blockers (which is most users on the internet), and being able to do research into who is paying for advert and who they are targeting. As long as the advertising industry still has a presence on the internet, this information will be important.

borntyping | 7 years ago | on: A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

Bitcoin is currently estimated to be responsible for ~0.21%, more than either Hong Kong or Iraq use [1]. Criticisms of Bitcoin have been around as long as the hype - cryptocurrencies were never going to save the world.

[1]: https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption

borntyping | 7 years ago | on: Show HN: Retool – build internal tools faster

Definitely impressive. The short description seems a little vague or misleading to me though. "Internal tools" can mean a lot of different things - deployment tools, testing tools, data management, etc - so I expected something more generic by the title.

borntyping | 7 years ago | on: Compile Time Prevention of SQL-Injections in Rust

The second function only accepts strings defined at compile time, meaning it can't be called with strings created at runtime (i.e. any string containing user input).

borntyping | 8 years ago | on: Smartphone cradle used to cheat “10k steps/day” health insurance discounts

I'm sure I've something similar come up a few times recently, but never with any source discussing the health insurance plans that supposedly collect this data.

Has anyone come across anything on these insurance plans? I'm sure it's something many companies would love to do but I remain skeptical.

borntyping | 8 years ago | on: Why Tesla is having a harder time than SpaceX

There are millions of working, reusable electric cars; and tens of working, reusable rockets (maybe even less than that). Tesla is having problems building factories, but that certainly doesn't mean electric cars are hard to make.

borntyping | 8 years ago | on: Show HN: Tech Companies That Won't Delete Your Information

Slack's inclusion feels a little odd, since the customer in their case is the business paying for the service, not the individual. They do claim deleting a workspace cannot be undone.

borntyping | 8 years ago | on: Overconfident Students, Dubious Employers

This means almost nothing without a baseline to compare it to. I'd suggest it's very likely that you'd get similar results if you surveyed any other age group - that individuals give higher estimates of their ability than someone else would is hardly surprising.

borntyping | 8 years ago | on: Many packages suddenly disappeared

> If everything is a house of cards, then why don't i hear the same stories about PyPI or gems or crates?

npm is roughly twice as big as PyPI, RubyGems and crates.io together.

borntyping | 8 years ago | on: Many packages suddenly disappeared

The npm repository is the largest package repository in the world. A lot of the major incidents they've could have happened to other ecosystems (e.g. PyPi allows a user to delete packages that other packages depend on), but they've either not happened or haven't had as large an impact. When npm breaks, everyone notices, because everyone either uses npm or knows someone who does.

borntyping | 8 years ago | on: “Hey”, an interruption tracker written in Scheme

The purpose is tracking who is interrupting and why, not stopping interruptions, with the aim of finding patterns.

In previous places I worked, it might have been quite useful if I kept a record of what questions people interrupted me to ask, so I could look back on that and work out parts of my software than needed to be made easier to use or have documentation added. If I was using OP's tool to track this, I'd probably include "interruptions" where someone sent an email or slack message as well as those where someone came over in person.