Hacker News: mont_tag

New comment by mont_tag in "TDF ejects its core developers"

mont_tag — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 17:18:15 +0000

That sounds like what happened at Boeing.

New comment by mont_tag in "FTC action against Match and OkCupid for deceiving users, sharing personal data"

mont_tag — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 17:00:07 +0000

If the service is free, you are the product :-)

New comment by mont_tag in "A “frozen” dictionary for Python"

mont_tag — Fri, 12 Dec 2025 01:34:11 +0000

Note that Python already offers MappingProxy that wraps a dictionary to hide mutating methods.

People hardly ever use this tool. That suggests that there isn't much of a need for a frozendict.

New comment by mont_tag in "Performance hacks for faster Python code"

mont_tag — Fri, 21 Nov 2025 16:36:35 +0000

All good suggestions. However, the last one should have also mentioned functools.cache and functools.lru_cache.

New comment by mont_tag in "A Few Words About Async"

mont_tag — Sun, 02 Nov 2025 15:32:58 +0000

Do you want to take advantage of having multiple cores?

* Processes do this right out of the box. * Threads only do this on Python's new GIL builds. * Async, not so much.

New comment by mont_tag in "Python: The Documentary [video]"

mont_tag — Fri, 29 Aug 2025 05:12:07 +0000

History of women in the Python world: In 2006, the first two women were voted in as PSF fellows, Laura Creighton and Anna Martelli Ravenscroft. In 2008, there were two women on the PSF board, Gloria Willadsen and Allison Randal. The woman mentored by Guido was Emily Morehouse-Valcarcel. She is now on the steering committee but was not featured in the film. Less prominent in the documentary was Carol Willing who was on the initial steering committee. Also featured were Mariatta Wijaya and Lisa Roach-Carrier who were mentored by another developer.

New comment by mont_tag in "Kodak says it might have to cease operations [updated]"

mont_tag — Wed, 13 Aug 2025 23:39:50 +0000

Crypto did pretty well during that timeframe. Likely, they didn't pivot hard enough to offset losses to the core business.

New comment by mont_tag in "The history of the Schwartzian Transform (2016)"

mont_tag — Tue, 05 Aug 2025 03:06:00 +0000

Python's key-functions nicely encapsulate the whole process.

New comment by mont_tag in "Every Visual Workflow Tool Is Just Excel for Developers Who Gave Up"

mont_tag — Mon, 04 Aug 2025 18:05:57 +0000

One place where Visual development tools almost always win is in problem domains that are intrinsically visual (think CAD, form designers, etc)

New comment by mont_tag in "Every Visual Workflow Tool Is Just Excel for Developers Who Gave Up"

mont_tag — Mon, 04 Aug 2025 18:04:02 +0000

A notable exception is MS Access. It was a huge productivity win. It did not work well with version control but otherwise, it let developers rapidly develop and maintain moderate sized solutions to common business problems. It was also extensible with plain text code when needed.

New comment by mont_tag in "A Python dict that can report which keys you did not use"

mont_tag — Wed, 30 Jul 2025 16:00:10 +0000

No, that is not the recommendation. People routinely and reliably inherit from dict.

The UserDict class is mostly defunct and is only still in the standard library because there were a few existing uses that were hard to replace (such as avoiding base class conflicts in multiple inheritance).

New comment by mont_tag in "Writing is thinking"

mont_tag — Thu, 24 Jul 2025 22:19:42 +0000

> IMO it's not the recording of ideas that is thinking, but rather the act of putting thoughts into language.

I agree with you but that article itself says, "for example, handwriting can lead to widespread brain connectivity."

New comment by mont_tag in "Section 174 is reversed, mostly"

mont_tag — Sun, 20 Jul 2025 00:42:10 +0000

Also shift in organizational investment away toward AI and away from earlier hotness.

New comment by mont_tag in "Fun with uv and PEP 723"

mont_tag — Tue, 24 Jun 2025 23:11:38 +0000

Grace Hopper technology: A well formed Python program shall define an ENVIRONMENT division that specifies the environment in which the program will be compiled and executed. It outlines the hardware and software dependencies. This division is crucial for making COBOL^H^H^H^H^HPython programs portable across different systems.

New comment by mont_tag in "Scientists genetically engineer a lethal mosquito STD to combat malaria"

mont_tag — Tue, 17 Jun 2025 00:11:35 +0000

> Scientists genetically engineer a lethal mosquito STD to combat malaria

Nothing could possibly go wrong.

New comment by mont_tag in "Starting July 1, academic publishers can't paywall NIH-funded research"

mont_tag — Thu, 01 May 2025 15:53:19 +0000

This makes me happy. It was such an obvious right thing to do, but it took so long to come to fruition.

Next, it would be great if published standards were freely available. It is astonishing to me that they are not.

New comment by mont_tag in "Python’s new t-strings"

mont_tag — Mon, 21 Apr 2025 19:37:52 +0000

No, it would fail upstream before the template post-processing even begin.

The template object itself could not be formed because the each name must be a visible variable name.

This is the same error that you would get with an f-string that contained an undefined variable name.

New comment by mont_tag in "Python's new t-strings"

mont_tag — Mon, 21 Apr 2025 16:08:04 +0000

How does this Python docs example work with t-strings?

    cur.executemany("INSERT INTO movie VALUES(?, ?, ?)", data)

Can SQLite3 cache the query as it does now?

New comment by mont_tag in "Googler... ex-Googler"

mont_tag — Mon, 14 Apr 2025 15:44:26 +0000

ISTM software engineers have been living in a privileged and elite world. They are then utterly shocked to be treated like employees are treated elsewhere.

Pretty much anywhere if you are let go, your email access and physical access are cut off immediately. Start-ups do this all the time as funding gets tight or there is a need to pivot.

I get that this sucks (and have been on the both the dishing out side of this and the receiving end of it multiple times). It is a fact of life. It would be more mature to move on rather than blog about how you feel wronged by your former employer. The next employer may see this post and reason that it is unsafe to hire this person because they feel a need to damage the company's reputation on the way out (for Google, there isn't much risk here, but for smaller companies, threats to the reputation matter).

New comment by mont_tag in "JEP Draft: Prepare to Make Final Mean Final"

mont_tag — Mon, 31 Mar 2025 20:45:24 +0000

> Even the JS standard library struggles with this. You just have to remember that .sort() modifies the array in place

ISTM that there are almost always some kinds of mutable data structures present in non-trivial programs. And outside of the program, you have databases to directories of files that get mutated by users or other parts of a program. I think this is just a fact of life.