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hermitdev

3,624 karma · joined June 13, 2016

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hermitdev··on Show HN: Kreuzberg – Modern async Python library for document text extraction
Caveat: I have not looked at the neither the API nor the implementation of Kreuzberg, this is purely from personal work.

Even with CPU bound code in Python, there are valid reasons to be using async code. Recognizing that the code is CPU bound, it is possible to use thread and/or process pools to achieve a certain level of parallelism in Python. Threading won't buy you much in Python, until 3.13t, due to the GIL. Even with 3.12+ (with the GIL enabled), it's possible (but not trivial) to use threading with sub interpreters (that have their own, separate GIL). See PEP 734 [0].

I'm currently investigating the use of sub interpreters on a project at work where I'm now CPU bound. I already use multiprocessing & async elsewhere, but I am curious if PEP 734 is easier/faster/slower or even feasible for me. I haven't gotten as far as to actually run any code to compare (I need to refactor my code a bit with the idea of splitting the work up a bit differently to account for being CPU instead of just IO bound).

[0] https://peps.python.org/pep-0734/

hermitdev··on Fun facts about SQLite
It's not that they don't understand; it's that it causes more work for the lawyers, because someone has to review the license if it's not one of the standard boilerplate acceptable licenses.

I once had to go to lawyers to get a license approved on a lib that went something along the lines of "this work is in the public domain; do whatever the fuck you want with it, just don't come crawling to me for help". I'm paraphrasing from ~20-year-old memories here, but I do distinctly remember the profanity. It elicited a chuckle from the lawyer and something along the lines of "I wish all of these were this simple".

hermitdev··on Xiaomi Home Integration for Home Assistant
Total stab in the dark here, but it could be the local time on the device. Your local clock needs to be relatively close to the actual clock. I've run into this more than a few times with an old Surface Tablet I seldom use. Powered off/battery dead, clock gets out of sync. Power on, cannot get online because everything is TLS/SSL now, even clock sync. Cannot even sync the clock, because of certificate issues. Manually set the time to approximately correct time has resolved my issues with long powered off devices. That is, assuming of course, the _ability_ to set the time on the device.
hermitdev··on Mouseless – fast mouse control with the keyboard
On desktop, the embedded video is also fairly small and annoyingly, they disallow full-screen. why?
hermitdev··on Python type hints may not be not for me in practice
FWIW, you have some control over how this inference is done. Search your settings in vscode for `@ext:ms-python.vscode-pylance strict`.
hermitdev··on A C++ Mixin System
> That `String` leaks memory, [...]

So does the clone...

hermitdev··on DOJ will push Google to sell off Chrome
> What is there to sell exactly?

widevine and all the other DRMy bits.

Or, better yet, deprecate and disable all the DRMy bits. (One can wish)

hermitdev··on Why is it so hard to find a job now? Enter Ghost Jobs
I was working for Meta in Bellevue, WA in 2022. Got laid off. Applied to several positions at MS (I was living in Redmond at the time), couldn't get a callback. Months and months go by, get a job, move across the country, get an email 9-12 months after applying that they'd like to interview me. I didn't even bother responding.
hermitdev··on Apple to Face First EU Fine Under Bloc's Digital Markets Act
And if the blue bubble matters to one's "friends" in the US...then one needs better friends.
hermitdev··on Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (October 2024)
Nah, bullshit. I grew up in a rural area [0], my parents are still in a rural area (their postal address literally contains 'rural route'). You just don't go to town every day. You didn't go to town every day in the past; you planned your trips ahead of time. It was a rare occurrence - maybe a monthly, quarterly or even less frequent occurrence. And if you do go to town, it might be a multi-day trip. Why? Because you were either walking or going on horseback. People got around before roads. Roads make travel easier. People have been trying to make traveling easier since the dawn of history. See: roads, ships, animal husbandry, the wheel, etc.

People can live far apart without problem if they're self-sufficient or plan ahead: grow your own food, have stockpiles that can last months if you can't make it to town (rural winters can be a bitch). What's new is this dependency on others and belief of "oh my god, I'll die if I don't make it to town (grocery store) this week".

[0] Our closest neighbor was a quarter mile away. Nearest paved road (and our bus stop as kids) was 2.5 miles away over private dirt roads with about 1000 feet change in elevation. It was 8 miles to town, 20 to city (which would barely be a suburb most places).

hermitdev··on European govt air-gapped systems breached using custom malware
Kaspersky is/was a brand-name AV. Look at what happened on their way out after the US ban...
hermitdev··on European govt air-gapped systems breached using custom malware
I work in finance, and this sort of setup is pretty common. Yes, I have a USB headset and camera for calls. My USB keyboard and mouse work just fine. If I plug my phone in, best I can do is charge it (slowly), so I use a wall-plug charger instead.

I could easily bypass the policy since I have the permissions to do so, but I won't. Working in the trading/hedge fund space, it's not unheard of to see employees sued for stealing trade secrets (quant models, for example). One only needs to search "citadel sues former employees" for examples.

edit: former Citadel employee; have not worked there in over a decade.

hermitdev··on Do U.S. ports need more automation?
Exactly. There's literally classes of ships that are something "max". e.g. Panamax. Panamax ships are literally built to the absolute limit of what will fit through the locks at the Panama Canal. And yes, sometimes the locks get bigger, and the ships follow.
hermitdev··on Why does man print "gimme gimme gimme" at 00:30? (2017)
"ba" + "na" * severity
hermitdev··on Why Most Published Research Findings Are False (2005)
One I always go back to: You can represent a perfect impulse (think electrical signals, a switch from 0 (low voltage) to 1 (high voltage)) mathematically, but it's impossible to physically create.
hermitdev··on Microsoft donates the Mono Project to the Wine team
Microsoft needs to stop letting marketing decide product names. Just look at Xbox: Xbox, Xbox 360, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S.
hermitdev··on Microsoft donates the Mono Project to the Wine team
> Which rich cross-platform GUI frameworks are you talking about? > Win32? Silverlight/Blend? XAML? MAUI? They're all windows only.

MAUI is not windows only. I have a MAUI app on my android phone. Cross-platform? yes. Rich? Now, I wouldn't call it that.

hermitdev··on Zuckerberg claims regret on caving to White House pressure on content
> The idea that a private social/sharing/communications platform should be required to carry the messages of the head of government is strongly authoritarian and quite unconstitutional.

Except it's neither authoritarian nor unconstitutional. Private companies are already _required_ to carry government messaging. Several examples: emergency broadcast system, AMBER alerts or presidential alerts (which cannot be silenced) to your phone.

hermitdev··on Toasts are bad UX
Just wait until the author sees the toasts in MS Teams. I expect his head will explode.

Teams has, hands-down in my opinion, _the_ worst usage of toasts that I've seen. It's bad enough I get the OS toast from Teams, that may or may not disappear on its own after a time (on both Windows and Linux). However, there's also an in-app toast that blocks part of UI that is used the most: replying to messages. Literally, typing a reply, then boom, toast appears, blocks most of the buttons used to interact with your reply. (formatting, emoji/gifs, attachments and even the reply button!)

hermitdev··on Go is my hammer, and everything is a nail
As someone with +20 years in finance (hedge funds/trading) and knows .Net, Java, Python, C++, shell, etc, the first question I'd ask is: where's the data?

If I'm being asked to do data analysis, it's because we need the answer yesterday. So, the tool I choose always going to be a matter of which gets me the answer fastest and with the least amount of friction. That's almost always dictated by where the data is _now_. Not where it'd ideally be.

hermitdev··on Apple's requirements are about to hit creators and fans on Patreon
> It’s time for tech (not just Apple) to be broken up. If only we haven’t defanged the regulatory agencies …

I think you mean we should de-FAANG the regulatory agencies.

hermitdev··on AT&T says criminals stole phone records of 'nearly all' customers in data breach
AT&T does a lot more than just cell phones. Probably also the largest US ISP behind Comcast, I'd expect. I had AT&T fiber to the home at a previous residence, and that was a great product. Far superior to Comcast.
hermitdev··on AT&T says criminals stole phone records of 'nearly all' customers in data breach
My SS card has that text. I got into an argument at the DMV when they asked for it. I relented because I needed my drivers license.

Congress could solve this by enacting a simple law. Something to the effect of SSNs shall not be used as a means of identification by any party, governmental or otherwise other than the Social Security Administration. Use of an SSN as identification shall be subject to a $100 fine per each SSN used as identification, per day.

hermitdev··on C++ patterns for low-latency applications including high-frequency trading
It's really going to come down to which firm you're at and who your manager is. I'm at a smaller shop currently, and it's great. I basically work 8-5 most days, sometimes a little later if processes don't come up cleanly for market open at 5P (CME basically operates 23 hours a day with different trading sessions).

There are firms that are more like sweatshops. I spent roughly a decade at Citadel; when I started, average tenure was thought to be about 18 months. Hours were brutal, but it largely depended on your manager. I had one (he was fired 6 months after I started) that insisted on 80 hour weeks, ass in seat, no work from home, not even on the weekends. The kicker was, my team didn't even have the work at the time to justify all of us pulling 80 hour weeks. I also spent months at times pulling 100 hour weeks. That is, if you slept, it was at your desk (there were cots/sleeping bags available, but I never saw anyone bother). Maybe go home every 2nd or 3rd day for a change of clothes (you could shower at the office). Then, I had other managers where it was more 8-5. But, I was always on call 24/7, even while on vacation. That was the truly rough part. I would say on a whole, the reputation of working for Citadel is worse than it deserves, but it really matters who your manager is. That said, not sure I know anyone left at Citadel anymore other than Ken G. (I've been gone over a decade now).

My best advice when you're interviewing people, ask pointed questions about work-life balance. Avoid asking overly broad questions like "How's the work/life balance?". Instead prefer: "When was the last time you took a 2 or 3 week vacation?"

edit: At my current role, I do sometimes work outside of 8-5 and on weekends, but its because I choose to, because I'm working on something interesting that excites me. I'm not expected to, and no one gives me a hard time if I don't.

hermitdev··on C++ patterns for low-latency applications including high-frequency trading
I can't go into too much detail (I currently work at an HFT, but not on the HFT bits), but some of the FPGAs make decisions without even seeing a entire packet coming in on the wire. Latencies are more often measured in nanos than micros from what I've seen lately.
hermitdev··on Modifying the OG Xbox to have 256M of RAM [video]
Are you kidding? It's a Bethesda game, of course it won't fix any bugs. It's 2024 and the exact same sort of issues exist in Skyrim and Fallout 4 (even after the remasters/anniversary editions)!

I've run into issues recently (in June) with Fallout 4 where if your saved game data starts approaching 2GB on Xbox One x, saving the game will fail in weird ways (may hang the game, may crash the game). Once the game gets in this state, I'm not even able to launch the game without it hanging. Have to delete local game data, resync your saves from Live and pray you didn't lose more than a few minutes of gameplay.

hermitdev··on Python with Braces
It was only ever true for "clr safe" code, or a subset of C#. In particular, since VB.NET didn't/doesn't have unsigned types, not all C# could be expressed in VB.NET, even after decompiling from IL. (Not sure what happens if you try and decompile to VB.NET code that uses unsigned, for example).
hermitdev··on Background of Linux's "file-max" and "nr_open" limits on file descriptors (2021)
And yet people will die on a hill defending using X number of spaces instead of a single tab for indentation (where X is some positive integer, usually 2, 3, 4, or 8), with zero regard for the bytes wasted.
hermitdev··on Welsh government commits to making lying in politics illegal
You conveniently left out, additionally, the service members that died during the botch Afghanistan pull out. It was during the dignified return of remains that Biden was seen repeatedly checking his watch.
hermitdev··on Welsh government commits to making lying in politics illegal
Except "fact checkers" are just as corrupt and biased as the politicians they supposedly check.
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