Python as a language will likely never have a "fast" implementation and still be Python. It is way too dynamic to be predictable from the code alone or even an execution stream in a way that allows you to simplify the actual code that will be executed at runtime either through AOC or JIT. The language is itself is also quite large in terms of syntax and built-in capability at this point which makes new feature-conplete implementations that don't make major trade offs quite challenging. Given how capable LLMs are at translating code, it seems like the perfect time to build a language with similar syntax, but better scoped behavior, stricter rules around typing, and tooling to make porting code and libraries automated and relatively painless. What would existing candidates be and why won't they work as a replacement?
Readit Newsrobmccoll commented on Python performance myths and fairy tales lwn.net/SubscriberLink/10... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti
robmccoll commented on So you want to parse a PDF? eliot-jones.com/2025/8/pd... · Posted by u/UglyToad
As someone who has written a PDF parser - it's definitely one of the weirdest formats I've seen, and IMHO much of it is caused by attempting to be a mix of both binary and text; and I suspect at least some of these weird cases of bad "incorrect but close" xref offsets may be caused by buggy code that's dealing with LF/CR conversions.
What the article doesn't mention is a lot of newer PDFs (v1.5+) don't even have a regular textual xref table, but the xref table is itself inside an "xref stream", and I believe v1.6+ can have the option of putting objects inside "object streams" too.
Yeah I was a little surprised that this didn't go beyond the simplest xref table and get into streams and compression. Things don't seem that bad until you realize the object you want is inside a stream that's using a weird riff on PNG compression and its offset is in an xref stream that's flate compressed that's a later addition to the document so you need to start with a plain one at the end of the file and then consider which versions of which objects are where. Then there's that you can find documentation on 1.7 pretty easily, but up until 2 years ago, 2.0 doc was pay-walled.
robmccoll commented on Show HN: EnrichMCP – A Python ORM for Agents github.com/featureform/en... · Posted by u/bloppe
Why wouldn't we just give the agent read permission on a replica db? Wouldn't that be enough for the agent to know about:
- what tables are there
- table schemas and relationships
Based on that, the agent could easily query the tables to extract info. Not sure why we need a "framework" for this.
Disclaimer: I don't know the details of how this works.
Time-to-solution and quality would be my guess. In my experience, adding high level important details about the way information is organized to the beginning of the context and then explaining the tools to further explore schema or access data produces much more consistent results rather than each inference having to query the system and build its own world view before trying to figure out how to answer your query and then doing it.
It's a bit like giving you a book or giving you that book without the table of contents and no index, but you you can do basic text search over the whole thing.
robmccoll commented on Magistral — the first reasoning model by Mistral AI mistral.ai/news/magistral... · Posted by u/meetpateltech
It does not do any thinking. It is a statistical model, just like the rest of them.
What are we doing when we think?
robmccoll commented on A bit more on Twitter/X's new encrypted messaging blog.cryptographyengineer... · Posted by u/vishnuharidas
> If you can't look at the code doing the encrypting, it's simply encoded.
Not sure it being open source is required to be considered "encryption". Besides, even if you can look at the code you don't know if that's what's running on the server.
If I can look at the code, decide I trust the implementations of the primitives being used, how they're being used, how identity is established, and how initial key exchange works, I don't need to know what's running on the server. That's sort of the point of end to end encryption.
robmccoll commented on Google restricts Android sideloading puri.sm/posts/google-rest... · Posted by u/fsflover
False dichotomy. They're both perfectly capable of doing things that are potentially detrimental to consumers but good for bottom line.
robmccoll commented on Getting forked by Microsoft philiplaine.com/posts/get... · Posted by u/phillebaba
> but they very clearly aren't.
Peerd seems very different from Spegel, so Microsoft does hold quite a bit of copyright over Peerd.
Now I genuinely wonder if the main LICENSE should say "copyright Spegel and Microsoft", or if somewhere in the repo Microsoft should just have a copy of the Spegel LICENSE file?
Generally, you would want to do one of:
a) Keep any code that you've pulled in from another project in its own directory structure with a license file indicating where it came from and its licensing terms.
b) If you intend to modify the code or integrate it more tightly with your own, copy the notice into each source file that was taken and perhaps put a pre-amble along the lines of "Portions of this file were copied from XXX under the MIT license as follows:". Ideally you would make a commit with the file in its initial state as copied, and then if you ever need to determine what came from where and how it was licensed, it shouldn't be too difficult.
robmccoll commented on Getting forked by Microsoft philiplaine.com/posts/get... · Posted by u/phillebaba
Don’t entertain meetings without compensation from megacrop. But the project is open source. The author provided the right for them to take it in any way possible and copy it. If I’m not mistaken the MIT license allows what they did.
I’m assuming the complaint is more about Microsoft duplicity in asking for information as opposed to the forking of the code. The latter is fine - the license explicitly allows it.
You are mistaken. The license explicitly allows it subject to the terms of the license:
> The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
Microsoft didn't follow these terms. They copied "substantial portions of the Software" and didn't include the notice.
#[table(name = person, public)]
pub struct Person {
name: String,
}
This sounds like a fundamental disagreement with using ORM. Are you advocating for always writing queries (not excluding the possibility of a query builder) over treating database rows as application-side entities that can have CRUD operations performed on them / persisted?
People complain that we can’t have nice things. But even when we do, enough developers will be lazy enough not to learn them anyway.