The next step should be to send enthusiasts there, get samples of this mushroom from that market, and introduce it to the underground for personal research. That’s normally what happens when something interesting is discovered.
For example, members of a famous forum recently found, analyzed for alkaloid content, and re-cultivated a strain of Phalaris Aquatica because of its notable alkaloid content. Some other mushrooms became popular this way as well — for example, Psilocybe Natalensis, first found in Natal, Africa. Or the now famous Tamarind Tree British Virgin Islands (TTBVI) Panaeolus Cyanescens that’s widely cultivated at home.
So IMO it's not only scientists, but often enthusiasts who end up gifting these discoveries to everyone else!
The natalensis story is even stranger: the underground was growing what they thought was natalensis for many years, until someone finally did the sequencing and found out that what everyone had grown and loved was actually new to science. At this point last year, their "natalensis" received its proper scientific name, ochraceocentrata. The underground then had to go out and fetch some actual natalensis, which is only just now being introduced to those circles (eg by Yoshi Amano). I haven't yet tried true natalensis, but ochras are definitely distinguishable from the usual cubensis, experentially, and I'd heartily recommend them to anyone that likes that kind of thing.
The issue is lanmaoa asiatica is ectomycorrhizal, meaning it grows exclusively on the roots of certain plant species in a symbiotic relationship. This is not like TTBVI or p. ochraceocentrata (misclassified as p. natalensis until recently) where amateurs can produce grain spawn with relative ease. Cultivation would involve planting or having access to the correct host species (Yunnan pine) which is a prohibitive barrier for most.
It's also not yet known if the active compound can survive dehydration like psilocybin. If not, it would mean even experiencing l. asiatica will be very difficult to impossible for enthusiasts not residing in its native region.
You might be getting a good _recall_ rate, since vectorize search is ANN, but the _precision_ can be low, because reranker piece is missing. So I would slightly improve it by adding 10 more lines of code and introducing reranker after the search (slightly increasing topK). Query expansion in the beginning can be also added to improve recall.
I'm happy to see v4.0, but 2025 was the year I switched from Ruby to Python after gradually drifting back to it more and more. The tipping point was when I had Claude Code automatically convert one of my Ruby projects to 100% Python - and after that, I just had no Ruby left.
I spent over a decade enjoying Ruby and even wrote a book about it. At this point, though, Python has won for me: fastapi, pytorch, langchain, streamlit, and so on and on.
It's a bit sad, but I'll always remember the Christmas gifts, and the syntax that is always so much better than Python.
> fastapi, pytorch, langchain, streamlit, and so on and on
It's telling that your reasons for switching are all features of Python's ecosystem, not of the language itself. A lot of developers are moving to Python because of its libraries, and in many cases they don't care for the language at all.
That's causing a problem for Python: many of these developers who'd rather be using different languages seem to want to morph Python into their language of choice. The result is that the Python language is pulled in many different directions, and with each release gets increasingly bloated and strays further from its foundations.
Ruby, on the other hand, has a community that's mostly made up of people who actually like the language. That allows it to do a much better job of staying true to its core philosophy.
> It's telling that your reasons for switching are all features of Python's ecosystem, not of the language itself.
Right, because ecosystem beats syntax any day of the week. Plus many of us also think the Python language is nicer anyway. For me I can't get past Ruby's free wheeling approach to import scoping and tolerance for magic.
Sure ecosystem beats syntax. Ecosystem also beats semantics, but less so. Python has an amazing ecosystem and a pretty nice syntax. Pity about the semantics...
That core philosophy is a focus on aesthetics which means that API design in Ruby is much more driven by developer taste than practical considerations (for better or worse)
None of what you say about Python is true. It’s not even plausible. The Python language hasn’t even had any significant syntax changes for four versions now; versions 3.11-3.14 are basically all internals optimizations.
Both are true. Different camps meant that any significant change to the language was scrutinised loudly. If my memory doesn't fail me, the last significant changes from the time Guido was still in charge, and he mostly abandoned the BDFL because of backlash. Since then python has been on a constant "analysis paralysis" state, with only efforts about performance pushing through (no one complains about a faster horse).
> If my memory doesn't fail me, the last significant changes from the time Guido was still in charge, and he mostly abandoned the BDFL because of backlash
I think Guido left the BDFL role in 2018, and we’ve gotten walrus operators, structured matching, and exception groups since then (just off the top of my head). There’s also been significant language/grammar accommodations towards type annotations.
Overall, I’m of the opinion that Python’s language evolution has struck a pretty nice balance — there’s always going to be something new, but I don’t feel like the syntax has stagnated.
The other poster said “The result is that the Python language is pulled in many different directions, and with each release gets increasingly bloated and strays further from its foundations.” Which is directly contradictory to your (more correct) notion that language changes have slowed and only changes with low or no additions of complexity are worked on.
The falsehood is the phrase "with each release gets increasingly bloated and strays further from its foundations."
It hasn't had any such language-changing release for at least six years. The implication that this is an ongoing process attributable to newer adopters is simply false. It is a process that has stopped, and when it was happening, it was attributable to longtime Python developers.
This year I also switched from Ruby to Kotlin on my hobby/light commercial backends. I just can't stand the way Ruby is not statically typed, and the resulting insecurity around if everything is actually doing what it should do. Kotlin gives me joy, and performance is actually better (trading memory requirements ofcourse, but that's not a big problem anymore). I still love Ruby, but only use it for simple scripts now.
This has sort of been my issue with Elixir. I've been doing Scala for years but I think Phoenix is really the best web story at the moment for how I want to be building web apps. And while I believe that the benefits of static typing somewhat decrease in the web arena, it's still frustrating to have to manage type relationships in my head.
I'm hopeful that the incoming type system work makes me happier there, though I'd also prefer a nicer editor experience than is currently available.
> I believe that the benefits of static typing somewhat decrease in the web arena
I’ve seen this sentiment expressed numerous times and have never found it to be true in my own work (e-comm), do you mind mentioning _what_ type of domain your web apps are in?
Edit: or if not domain, what do you mean by “web arena”
I find that if most of my logic is relatively gluey, then the fields in my API boundaries are heavily optional, at which point types add a lot less than they do when most of my logic is more internal, and in cases where what I'm doing is just getting some JSON and doing something with it, I'd rather just have the dynamic shape of the JSON in a lot of cases than have to declare an entire schema/codec.
We have so much boilerplate and tooling to share request/response types between services and it's just... heavy. The same feeling arises when I'm sitting here trying to share a shape between a web app and the backend service, where FINALLY I just want the types to get out of my way instead of having to go through all this ceremony.
And my domain is relatively precise and typeable - streaming video with a deterministic set of parameters.
Generally though I'm more likely to agree with the value of types than to undersell them; I just can't find a ways to describe the above experiences such that they reflect that perspective.
I think it's not that I don't want types, it's that I want simple types that play slightly more dynamically - maps of <string, heterogeneous values>, for example, and reasonable means of interacting with them (like various "safe traversal" operators that some languages have added).
what advantage/disadvantages does Scala/jvm have over Elixir/otp/beam?
i am learning Elixir and liking the concepts.
i am coming from kotlin/jvm and i like kotlin, apart from kotlin-coroutines.
planning to migration all threading code to virtual threads. but biggest problem is threadlocal.
I think they're pretty different, but there are some places where you can compare them:
1. Hiring and job market - the JVM is simply more employable
2. Ecosystem - in general you can expect the JVM to have library support for most things you're going to need.
3. Typing - if you like static types, you're probably going to miss that in Elixir/Erlang. They're working on a gradual type system for Elixir that looks quite pragmatic, so I'm excited to see how that works out.
The Elixir side of things has some real advantages, though. Runtimes like the JVM are slowly adding threading paradigms that start to look like how the beam works, if you squint enough. Naturally, Elixir already has that, and already has technologies that work very well with it. Virtual threads on the JVM are a smart effort that will take a long time to be complete and will always have to take backwards-compatibility into account, especially if you're in Java itself.
Phoenix is also IMO a best-in-class web framework. I don't think it's universally applicable, but if any JVM language had something like Phoenix I doubt I'd be considering Elixir nearly as strongly (due to my affection for types). So while the JVM ecosystem is broader, it's not uniformly stronger.
I also think that "domain" is much broader for JVM stuff. The web technologies there feel pretty baroque rather than empowering, but you can still do web on the JVM, and Kotlin or Scala in particular IMO serve better for systems where the bulk of the code is internal business logic. I think that even if I adopted Elixir entirely, I'd probably retain some "second language" for deeper systems.
How do you know it? Today you have to re-assess what you've learnt in the past. If you think JVM is "simply more employable" and haven't tested the waters in last 1-2 years, chances are you're just wrong.
The feeling I have: more simpler the tech is (and JVM/Ruby/other CRUD), the highest salary cuts you're getting. And you're actually less employable.
It is that counter-intuitive, because it's one person with a coding agent vs a team in the past.
This is patronizing. I'm a professional and am constantly hiring and being hired. The JVM has far more jobs and engineers willing to do those jobs, _and_ in terms of your own employment, a better salary market, and this is not only self-evident, but reinforced by even a cursory investigation into the trends. In fact, your claim is so outrageous (that I'm wrong and that somehow Elixir has more to offer on either side of the hiring bar) that I think the onus is on you to somehow prove it.
Langchain? I tried using/learning langchain then I found out that it was evolving so fast that even the latest ai models didn't have even remotely up to date information on it! Not to mention the hundreds of Google search results for ---- why do langchain docs suck?
I finally switched to haystack and I have been really happy. (Don't work on corporate ai software this is just for personal use)
Used Ruby for a decade, knew about it for more than that. I still sometimes use ruby syntax to communicate ideas with friends and colleagues.
For me, the killer feature of Python was the typing module and the intellij pycharm community edition being free and RubyMine having a subscription fee.
Nothing beats a MacBook Air if you’re not chasing raw performance.
I ended up with two machines:
- MacBook Air (16GB)
- MINISFORUM UM870 with 48GB RAM
The Air is unbeatable for portability and battery life. The MinisForum is still “portable enough” and gives me real horsepower when I need it.
I flew SF -> NY -> SF with the MinisForum and a portable monitor as carry-on. Everything fit in a Trader Joe’s tote bag. I even presented a conference talk using that setup.
For ~$2k total, you can buy:
- a MacBook Air
- a small PC + one or two portable monitors
- and still have money left
IMO the era of $2-3–4k “do-everything” laptops is over. I don't see how and why they're competitive.
This year I spoke at HOPE - Hackers On Planet Earth. The topic was "Hacking ATMs: past and present". I really enjoyed it, it took a lot to prepare though. I haven't gotten any monetary benefit from it, but I would definitely do it again.
HOPE is one of the best hacker conferences, and it's somehow [subjectively] friendlier than other. Feels like home, so if you're on hacker news, I guess you wanna speak at hacker conference or contribute to 2600? ^_^
Having this RAG layer was always another thing to try for me. I haven't coded it myself, and super interested if this gives a real boost while working with Claude. Curious from anyone who have already tried the service, what's your feedback? Did you feel you're getting real improvements?
Wouldn’t call it just RAG though. Agentic discovery and semantic search are the way to go right now, so Nia combines both approaches. For example, you can dynamically search through a documentation tree or grep for specific things.
It's both good and bad. On one hand, it's sad that there's no access. On the other hand, it increases the diversity of tools and services worldwide. Google, for example, is well known for buying startups just to kill them.
In Russia and China, they have their own search engines, social networks, eBay/Amazon alternatives, and so on. These companies have produced great free software like LLMs, databases, development tools, etc.
Seeing a corporation lose control over the Internet is usually good news for us, the small people - even if that change is coming from the government.
What form of government do you think we live in? Where laws are routinely ignored by our "leadership" and bribery is essentially legal and we have our own "oligarchs"?
The US initiates wars and supports war crimes as policy - dictatorship? We're far beyond that.
Considering the Biden administration pressured Facebook and Twitter to shadownban people/organizations they didn't like, TikTok being forced to sell to a US company, which has a literal shitton of goverment contracts and CIA ties.. the US is not that far away from Russia. Russia is just more open about it.
It is funny that you are comparing the scope of covid misinformation bans to Russia's broad censorship of international media. Ultimately, though, you should evaluate the system rather than the efforts of a single individual. Because the social media bans were litigated.
Wouldn't TikTok being sold to a company that the government trusts be an indication that the concern over access to Americans' data (rather than the message) is a genuine one?
They're both censoring what individuals and organizations are allowed to say online and what their citizens are allowed to read/hear..? Just because they took a different approach and pressured companies without telling the public doesn't change that fact.
So you think the government forced TikTok to sell it's US operations to Oracle, the company with CIA ties, that has been caught spying on it's customers data before, and who's CEO proudly said "Citizens will be on their best behavior,” and “because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on.” is about" data privacy"?
If your position is "all censorship is equivalent" then I don't have much to say.
The TikTok legislation was about protecting Americans' data from foreign ownership. Oracle was not named in the legislation. Regardless of how corrupt the subsequent events have been, I don't think anyone on the platform has been censored as a result.
A rich billionaire can still be affected by shareholders. If they stop providing shareholder value (due to mass boycotts or public scandals), they have to change.
If it's a Putin-style dictator who has spent a quarter century digging his claws into every facet of the country, there's literally nothing you can do that doesn't involve physical violence to change things.
A rich billionaire has millions of times more political power than you.
You are living in a dictatorship right now. The dictatorship of capital. And just because our culture does not draw a line to differentiate capitalists and workers doesnt mean a difference doesnt exist.
Capitalists arent "just another citizen like you or me", but thats what they want us to think. It keeps the dream alive and the story going.
Oh "its us against the government". lol. Really?
Im telling you. The capitalists, the wealthy are the government.
> A rich billionaire can still be affected by shareholders.
A rich billioneaire is a shareholder.
> If they stop providing shareholder value [...] they have to change.
But we (the small people) don't care about the shareholder value. Shareholder value is often contrary to what we (the small people) value, so expect change for the worse.
> due to mass boycotts or public scandals
Sorry, what?
> has spent a quarter century digging his claws into every facet of the country
Well, capitalists (as a group) spent 100+ years doing the same, so ...
It's baffling for me living in Russia that modern western societies see everything wrong with dictatorship from a goverment but nothing or almost nothing wrong with dictatorship from big capital. E.g. you can't change your break pads unless you go to authorized repair (literal control over your private property and how you use it) and big platforms banning you from multiple public forums because you said a big no-no word (deplatforming and cross-platform restrictions are a thing)
You don’t have to look very hard to see an enormous number of people expressing discontent at the latter.
To speak to your examples, the right to repair, farmers vs John Deere, the exodus from X to Bluesky, the rise of alternative messaging platforms, the outright murder of CEOs on the street and the beatification of the primary suspect on social media…just to scratch the surface
These are all headlines straight from HN and the fact that you even know about them is the difference.
The fundamental difference is while we both lack any real power to change this, under an actual dictatorship people get jailed or worse for that expression.
Let’s touch base on this again when Dictatorship from big capital means Disney puts me in prison for dissent against the mouse and then offers me clemency if I go to the front lines in their next special military operation.
oh boy. you served GP a portion so generous they'll have plenty left over to take home and chew on for a while.
that last sentence rung like a bell & will reverberate until Larry Ellison's police drones follow you home because you blocked the drive-in of a Larry-owned fastfood franchise by way of a peaceful sit-in, protesting the mistreatment of human workers by robot overseers at Larry's Lasagna, nation-wide.
I have mixed feelings about this. On the other hand, developments like Deepseek are clearly marks of progress and practically a gift to the society, and it's a good thing. The Chinese are also creating and maintaining many valuable open source projects (although they might not be that popular in the West due to security concerns, which is a different lengthy topic). So everybody wins, right?
On the other hand... People in the West rarely get the taste of what happens if someone deeply immoral gets to the top. The closest we got is Trump who might be an arrogant egoistic asshole, but he's very far from deciding to kill thousands of people to fulfill his ambitions. Nevertheless, normal sensitive people feel abhorred when they hear or see how immigrants are treated and so on. Imagine this developed decade after decade, also using modern tech, into a cold machine an ordinary person is powerless against.
It's hard to explain to someone who hasn't experienced it but imagine your whole life, and often of your family, can be destroyed in an instant because you found yourself in a wrong place, you made a wrong comment, you expressed your opinion too openly. You were relaxed because maybe you did similar things in the past but you still lived a normal life; then at that particular moment it ended abruptly and there is no recourse. Nobody can save you and you know it's all finished. In the West there is nothing close to that.
Well, actually, the whole cancel culture dynamic is a softer alternative to what you just described. And it doesn’t even require you to be the actor — it can be your spouse, your child, whoever. One tweet and you can lose your job, your house, your marriage, especially in an economy like this it hits hard. It really is the same idea: "your whole life, and often your family’s life, can be destroyed in an instant." You won’t go to jail, but your life can still become miserable.
Of course, the big difference is jail time — and that matters. I'm familiar with cases where a 30-year-old woman was sentenced to more than 10 years just for donating $20 to Ukrainian forces (she was traveling to her mom's funeral and got caught).
And at the end of the day, all of this is politics. If you're smart enough and in Russia or China, you can learn to navigate it. But there's never a guarantee. You can still end up as "лёд под ногами майора" ("ice under the major's feet"), as the famous Russian punk rock singer put it.
I'm the owner of one of these laptops. I paid like $2-3k or even more for the laptop. The screen got broken almost on arrival. I think few days later it started glitching. It was intermittent, so I thought it would go away. I didn't. Over time it started glitching more and more. I reached out to the person in China who sold the laptop. In broken English he told me that I should replace the screen and sent me a link. I bought the screen, actually two of them, since for some reason you can't buy one. Turned out that the screen doesn't fit, and I cracked the first one while trying to install. So now I have a laptop without a screen, and it just doesn't work.
I bought Macbook Air for $1k just one week ago. I can't be more happier. Fuck these ThinkPads.
I think parent poster had an X1 or something and assumed the conversation was about a similar contemporary device.
I'm a little sad this board isn't for my X220 ... I would be sorely tempted if it were - but like other posters I'd have some reservations about things like battery life even so.
By the (contemporary) by, a Mac Book is probably a better buy if you like Mac OS (I don't) because the hardware really is excellent. One physical point in favour of the modern Thinkpad though is weight - a MacBook Air is about 1.2 kg, whereas the X1 is not quite 1 kg.
You paid how much? I use my x200 every day and love it but never considered I could sell it for so much. Is that really a normal price for such an old model? My screen works perfectly too.
For that purpose I do not update my book on LeanPub about Ruby. I just know one day people gonna read it more, because human-written content would be gold.
For example, members of a famous forum recently found, analyzed for alkaloid content, and re-cultivated a strain of Phalaris Aquatica because of its notable alkaloid content. Some other mushrooms became popular this way as well — for example, Psilocybe Natalensis, first found in Natal, Africa. Or the now famous Tamarind Tree British Virgin Islands (TTBVI) Panaeolus Cyanescens that’s widely cultivated at home.
So IMO it's not only scientists, but often enthusiasts who end up gifting these discoveries to everyone else!
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