Hacker News: synparb

Slopification and Its Discontents

synparb — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 16:50:54 +0000

Article URL: https://charlesleifer.com/blog/slopification-and-its-discontents/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47505609

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by synparb in "Agent Safehouse – macOS-native sandboxing for local agents"

synparb — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 21:57:18 +0000

I’ve been playing around with https://nono.sh/ , which adds a proxy to the sandbox piece to keep credentials out of the agent’s scope. It’s a little worrisome that everyone is playing catch up on this front and many of the builtin solutions aren’t good.

New comment by synparb in "A year of uv: pros, cons, and should you migrate"

synparb — Wed, 19 Feb 2025 03:03:12 +0000

I'm also a long time conda user and have recently switched to pixi (https://pixi.sh/), which gives a very similar experience for conda packages (and uses uv under the hood if you want to mix dependencies from pypi). It's been great and also has a `pixi global` similar to `pipx`, etc the makes it easy to grab general tools like ripgrep, ruff etc and make them widely available, but still managed.

New comment by synparb in "FastHTML – Modern web applications in pure Python"

synparb — Tue, 30 Jul 2024 14:40:41 +0000

I've added fasthtml (and its dependencies) to conda-forge, so it's available in conda/mamba now.

Let's stop dependency hell: Launching Pixi

synparb — Wed, 16 Aug 2023 14:14:47 +0000

Article URL: https://prefix.dev/blog/launching_pixi

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37147338

Points: 13

# Comments: 0

New comment by synparb in "Faster Python calculations with Numba"

synparb — Sat, 19 Feb 2022 04:06:03 +0000

I use numba quite a bit at work and it's fantastic. I recently, however, did a comparison between numba, cython, pythran and rust (ndarray) for a toy problem, and it yielded some interesting results:

https://github.com/synapticarbors/ndarray_comparison/blob/ma...

Most surprising among them was how fast pythran was with little more effort than is required of numba (still required an aot compilation step with a setup.py, but minimal changes in the code). All of the usual caveats should be applied to a simple benchmark like this.

New comment by synparb in "PyInstrument – A statistical Python profile that focuses on the slow parts"

synparb — Tue, 20 Oct 2020 14:43:06 +0000

Another relatively new addition to the python statistical sampler space is Austin[1], that has a lot of similar features to py-spy. I haven't made a direct comparison yet between the two.

[1] https://github.com/P403n1x87/austin

New comment by synparb in "GitHub: Deprecating the Network Graph"

synparb — Wed, 01 May 2019 23:12:14 +0000

It looks like Github, after some push back across various forums, reverted the change and the network graph is back.

New comment by synparb in "GitHub: Deprecating the Network Graph"

synparb — Wed, 01 May 2019 18:03:57 +0000

I'm actively looking for alternatives since I found this to be a super useful feature in terms of seeing the state of a repository and the relationship between active branches. I've seen https://gitup.co/, but it doesn't have a view that is organized by commit date.

New comment by synparb in "Non-citizen voting likely changed outcomes of 2008 US elections"

synparb — Fri, 18 Nov 2016 18:28:59 +0000

New comment by synparb in "Non-citizen voting likely changed outcomes of 2008 US elections"

synparb — Fri, 18 Nov 2016 18:26:29 +0000

Here appears to be the text of that paper:

http://projects.iq.harvard.edu/cces/news/perils-cherry-picki...

And here is a follow-up from the original authors (standard academic back-and-forth):

https://fs.wp.odu.edu/jrichman/wp-content/uploads/sites/760/...

New comment by synparb in "2017 Rust Roadmap"

synparb — Sat, 22 Oct 2016 02:57:08 +0000

First class multi-dimensional arrays with natural indexing syntax would be a huge draw. You get that in Numpy, Julia, Fortran and it is extremely powerful in terms of expressing the types of operations that are common across many scientific domains.

New comment by synparb in "Transit’s public transportation app gets a big overhaul and $2.4M in funding"

synparb — Tue, 20 Sep 2016 19:45:23 +0000

It's much more entertaining and useful to read about the overhaul from Transit itself: https://medium.com/transit-app/transit-4-0-is-now-live-2329f...

New comment by synparb in "Python JITs are coming"

synparb — Tue, 23 Aug 2016 17:55:20 +0000

Conda is 100% free and open source, but is developed by Continuum, which is a company (but one that contributes heavily to many of the key components of the open-source pydata/scipy ecosystem, and whose CEO basically created numpy/scipy for the community at the expense of his academic career). Personally I have had nothing but good interactions with people from Continuum and the software they develop. They (as a company and as the individuals in it) do an incredible amount for the open source community and we all benefit from that. They seem to have worked out a sustainable model for running a company and working in/contributing to open source.

New comment by synparb in "Python JITs are coming"

synparb — Tue, 23 Aug 2016 17:47:24 +0000

The actual package distribution/management (it is also a replacement for virtualenv) is conda (http://conda.pydata.org/). Since it can be confusing, the difference between conda, anaconda and miniconda is described here: http://conda.pydata.org/docs/faq.html#general-questions

New comment by synparb in "Python JITs are coming"

synparb — Tue, 23 Aug 2016 17:27:03 +0000

You should also check out https://conda-forge.github.io/, which is building high quality, community curated conda packages for a lot of stuff that isn't available from the main Continuum channel.

New comment by synparb in "Python JITs are coming"

synparb — Tue, 23 Aug 2016 17:21:53 +0000

While I still think it a bit unfair, the exact quote is "...but to a first approximation, no one is using it". So I think (assuming fijal's numbers of 0.5-1% are roughly correct) it is not completely unreasonable to say that PyPy adoption is very limited to date, which was the point of what he was saying (although I think it could have been said more diplomatically).

New comment by synparb in "Moore Foundation provides grant for Contiuum's Python Numba and Dask Compilers"

synparb — Thu, 14 Jul 2016 16:26:58 +0000

I tried looking on the Moore Foundation website and the grant wasn't listed yet. Here's one to Numfocus though from last year: https://www.moore.org/grantee-detail?granteeId=2114

New comment by synparb in "Making Cython as easy as Python"

synparb — Tue, 22 Sep 2015 11:28:04 +0000

I'll echo @dagw's comments. Cython has been rock solid for me for a long time and it is my go to for any sort of external c/c++ library interfacing. That said, I find myself using Numba more and more in the places that I can as Numba has gotten significantly better in the last 6 months or so. It's still not a complete replacement for cython (and I don't think it ever will or intends to be), but for hot spot numerical calculations it's really nice since it's much faster to test things out since it doesn't involve the boiler plate required by Cython, and doesn't require the (often slow) compilation times.

In Numba 0.21.0, on-disk caching of jit'd code was also introduced, which was one of the major sticking points for us to put Numba into production in areas where we needed faster start-up times. Before we could really only use Cython because we required the start-up times available only from AOT compilation.

That all said, Numba has been a bit buggy for me at times, although these get squashed pretty quickly. I've only found a single bug in Cython in all of the years I've been using it, and it's amazing how quickly Robert Bradshaw or Stefan Behnel respond and fix things considering Cython is not their full time job.

New comment by synparb in "Vy – A Vim-like in Python made from scratch"

synparb — Wed, 02 Sep 2015 14:18:24 +0000

pyvim (https://github.com/jonathanslenders/pyvim) is also a pretty slick vim clone in python that uses the python prompt toolkit (https://github.com/jonathanslenders/python-prompt-toolkit)