The complaint [1] is linked in the article. They're suing over Intel internally using and redistributing the anaconda software distribution.

[1] https://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/legaldocs/znvnxomagvl/...

Right now there is a significant single-threaded performance cost. Somewhere from 30-50%. Part of what my colleague Ken Jin and others are working on is getting back some of that lost performance by applying some optimizations. Expect single-threaded performance to improve for Python 3.14 next year.

To be honest, that seems a lot. Even today a lot of code is single-threaded, and this performance hit will also affect a lot of code running in parallel today.

There have been patches to remove the GIL going back to the 90s and Python 1.5 or thereabouts. But the performance impact has always been the show-stopper.

It’s an experimental release in 3.13. Another example: objects that will have deffered reference counts in 3.14 are made immortal in 3.13 to avoid scaling issues from reference count thrashing. This wasn’t originally the plan but deferred reference counting didn’t land in time for 3.13. It will be several years before free-threading becomes the default, at that point there will no longer be any single-threaded performance drop. Of course that assumes everything shakes out as planned, we’ll see.

This post is a call to ask people to “kick the tires”, experiment, and report issues they run into, not announcing that all work is done.

That would be in the order of previous GIL-removal projects, which were abandoned for that reason.

That kind of negates the whole purpose of multi threading. An application running on two cores might end up slower, not faster. We know that the python developers are kind of incompetent when it comes to performance, but the numbers you are quoting are so bad they probably aren't correct in the first place.

Clarifying a few days later: single-threaded performance in the normal ABI with the GIL does not have the same performance degradation. You only see the performance hit if you’re testing the experimental 3.13 free-threaded release.

We had a developer meeting to discuss what should go into 2.0 in April 2023: https://github.com/numpy/archive/tree/main/2.0_developer_mee...

Teeny nit, the sun produces light well into the x-rays (mostly from the corona though). You're probably talking about sunlight making it through the atmosphere.

I'm talking about the blackbody radiation of the sun's surface, which accounts for almost all of the light. The X-ray flux at earth is 11 orders of magnitude lower than the blackbody-related flux.

The owner, tod sacerdoti, is using it to scrape top stories from lobste.rs and submit them to HN as a karma arbitrage pump. Search todsacerdoti on https://gerikson.com/hnlo/ to see what I’m talking about. Judging by the amount of HN karma he’s accumulated it seems to work very well.

TIL. Cross-posting breaks silos

Wow. Gaslight much?

Consider setting a delay of a few days before reposting, sometimes people post their own stuff on lobste.rs, want to also post on HN and you've already done so. It can be perceived negatively.

It’s a screenshot from Cosmic Osmo and the Worlds Beyond the Mackerel.

Yeah, thanks! Found the name of the game at around the same time you answered me, and was able to access the actual screenshot with Web Archive. The original includes a small spaceship which is missing on the KolibriOS version.

If you like the art you should try and play Cosmic Osmo! It was my favorite game to play on the Performa PowerPC macs my elementary school had. It’s a very short and silly game made with hypercard. The creators later made Myst using the same technology.

I should, yeah, just saw that it's available on Steam :) Would probably be the oldest game I've ever played. Well, except Pong, Tetris etc.

> The creators later made Myst using the same technology

Tried to play Myst as a 10 year old, but wasn't smart enough to figure it out. Maybe Cosmic Osmo is more on my level ;) Really want to try it out this weekend, according to Wikipedia it was a pretty revolutionary game. Also never heard of Hypercards before today (the last Hypercard update was released the year I was born).

It’ll be guarded by a fine-grained mutex, so it won’t seg fault. They’re using a performant mutex based on webkit’s wtf::lock.

Fun to see an open source project I contribute to (numpy) used to commit some light fraud.

I'd guess numpy has been used for lots of fraudulent accounting! Congratulations, I guess?

At least it's _efficient_ fraud!

It’s getting a single random number. It would be easier, and probably similarly efficient, to use the `random` module instead.

Forgot to put the “Use for good, not evil” clause, ey?

https://web.archive.org/web/20130203112329/http://dev.hasenj...

But that’s not GPL compliant, what about respecting user freedoms?

I thought it was obvious.

But it poses a larger question: OSS can be used for war and pedophilia.

It is very refreshing and surprising compared to cloud platforms being adamant that they ought to deplatform people who hold even slightly wrong views.

Is it the same programmers holding very different philosophical views?

"light"?

I find py-spy really useful in python, it would be neat if you integrated with that somehow.

I’m working on adding missing data support for strings as part of adding a UTF-8 variable-width string type to NumPy. Not a general solution but should help with a lot of use-cases. https://numpy.org/neps/nep-0055-string_dtype.html

The current memory use of string arrays is another major issue, glad to see this being worked on!