Not everyone is aware of the details of AI/ML, "transformer" is actually a specific term in the space that also overlaps with "transformer" in other fields adjacent to Software Development. This is when we all need to wear our empathy hat and remind ourselves that we exist in a bubble, so when we see an overloaded term, we should add even the most minimal context to help. OP could have added "AI/ML" in the title for minimal effort and real estate. Let's not veer towards the path of elitism.
Also, the majority of developers using version control are using Git. I guarantee the majority of developers outside the AI/ML bubble do not know what a "transformer" is.
Fair enough! Bubble or not, I certainly have very regularly (weekly?) seen headlines on hn about transformers for at least a few years now. Like how bitcoin used to be on hn frontpage every week for a couple years circa 2010 (to the derision of half of the commenters). Not everyone is in the crypto space, but they know what bitcoin is.
Anyhow I suppose the existence of such questions on hn is evidence that I'm in more of a bubble that I esteemed, thanks for the reality check :)
(also my comment was in defense of parent who linked the wiki page, which defines transformer as per request, and is being downvoted for that)
I, too, haven't seen the word "transformer" outside an ML context in months. Didn't stop me from wondering if the OP meant the thing that changes voltage.
I don't snore. What do you mean by "post-nasal drip"? I do have allergies to environmental stuff like dust and hay fever, and my nose is running / sneezing from this. Some weeks more, some weeks less. But it's not new, I've had that for years. Do you think this could be related?
I am not an anything, but allergies can cause inflammation in your nasal passages, which results in post-nasal drip. Post-nasal drip is where you get a lot of mucus being produced that drips down the back of your throat, which can make you cough or get a sore throat. It's pretty bad when you're lying down and asleep.
For me, when I have to deal with seasonal allergies, if I am feeling particularly bad that night, I will take an allergy pill to make sure I don't wake up with a sore throat.
> coupled with all other stuff like illegal border crossing
I've seen a few comments talk about this, but this doesn't affect my day-to-day literally at all. This never crosses my mind because there aren't illegals I come across or maybe just don't ever cross paths with. Is this primarily a border state thing? If so, wouldn't that limit it to just CA, TX, NM, AZ? And only one of those is a swing state.
Impossible to say, but as someone who lives in Texas and has actually lived on the border, it's simply not a real problem. Nobody notices, or cares, about it. What happens is people attribute seemingly random events to illegal immigration.
Higher prices? Immigration! (never mind that immigrants are cheap labor, which should lower prices). Crime? Immigration! (never mind crime continues to go down and has been for decades). Your shoes untied? Immigration!
It's just such a stark disconnect from reality. They're just used as scapegoats, enemies of the American people.
The housing crisis is caused primarily by middle class and rich domestic white people. The problem is we're not building affordable housing, the reason being housing is the primary and most effective investment for the middle class. People who already own property have the highest incentive imaginable to NOT build more housing. Affordable housing means your investment depreciates.
No, the housing crisis is caused by an imbalance of supply and demand.
Immigration (legal or otherwise) increases demand for housing. Your argument that immigrants are poor doesn’t change that, immigrants still live somewhere, and that drives the demand for housing up.
Increasing the housing supply is a solution, but allowing demand to increase is also exacerbating the issue
Yes, that's what I said. Housing isn't being built due to low supply - and immigrants actually RAISE the supply, not lower it, because they are cheap labor.
Demand has not been the issue nor is it solvable. You can't make people go away, you can only increase housing (supply).
We're not increasing supply enough because domestic Americans are greedy. We've set the incentives up in such a way to maximize the amount of friction to building new houses. Nobody with a house wants more homes built.
The math isn't this simple, because immigrants are willing to work jobs domestic people won't, and they're willing to do it for a low wage. Sometimes, even a wage below the federal minimum.
But even past that, what I'm saying isn't "demonstrably false". I'm not sure how you came to that conclusion.
Suppose I work for a contractor, and it typically takes a crew of 20 to build a house. I'm being incredibly generous to your argument here, because in the neighborhoods I've seen it's done with 5 people. But suppose 20.
I would only need to be involved in 21 jobs across my career to produce more than I've used. Really, it's even less than that, because homes house multiple people.
To me, that not only seems achievable, that seems obvious.
This is a misunderstanding of the US housing crisis. The problem with housing in the US is that it's an investment, so there's a real cost to Americans when it comes to building affordable housing. That's why nobody would do it - it's bad for the people with capital, and the people with capital matter more. The people with hypothetical future capital don't matter much.
Net change in the amount of known immigrants who live in the US in 2023: 1.6M
% of immigrant workers in construction, natural resources, and maintenance industries in 2023: 14%
If we can generously attribute that 14% of the new housing supply is because of the immigrant labor force, then that’s 190k housing units attributable, to house an increased population of 1.6M.
Again, you're simply blaming the wrong people because it's easy and intellectually lazy.
New housing isn't being built not because we don't have the workforce. That is not the limiting factor on new housing.
New housing isn't being built because local governments DO NOT APPROVE new housing. They purposefully limit it, because the residents do not want their investments to go down in value. They go so far as to put laws in place to prevent affordable housing being built altogether. In many cities, you can't even put more than 1 unit on a lot and you need a special approval process to build apartments. Duplexes, triplexes, townhomes, dingbats - these are straight up illegal to build in a most areas.
You're talking about demand because you won't acknowledge the supply side part of the problem!
You're not making an argument; you're being purposefully dense. Talking about demand and then straight up ignoring supply makes no sense, you gain absolutely no information from that.
I don't know why I continue to argue with dishonest people. This is exhausting. If you won't even begin to touch the core of my argument then why even bother?
There're two solutions here. One works and the other just doesn't.
We can reduce demand by getting rid of immigrants. This will be extraordinarily expensive and will backfire - this is a bad, bad non-solution.
OR we can increase supply by building more housing, which we will be required to do no matter what. We can't keep up, we need more affordable and middle housing.
I'm sure you've heard of renting. It doesn't matter whether the people seeking housing can buy or only rent -- either way if there's more demand than supply, costs must go up. I wrote "housing costs" earlier rather than "prices" precisely because of this. I'm rather shocked that you ignored rent in your reply.
I didn't ignore rent, rather I did not fall into the intellectually lazy trap of blaming whatever poor and exploited minority of the day for economic struggles.
I'll say it again - new housing isn't being built to keep up because domestic people, that means you and me, do not want it to be built. New housing is purposefully limited by local governments in order to preserve the value of existing housing.
In most cities it's illegal to build more than one unit on a lot. You also typically require a special approval process to build apartments. If you look at the states, HUGE cities will often approve only half a dozen or so new apartments a year. Duplexes, triplexes, dingbats, townhomes - these are straight up illegal in most of the country.
You can't have a city that gets ~100 new units a year and expect prices NOT to go up.
If you want an example of what to do right, look at Austin Texas. Austin built 100,000+ new units in the past couple years and average rent actually decreased ~10% between 2023 and 2024. Yes, you heard that correctly - decreased.
The reason why this works should be obvious, but Americans suffer such severe cognitive dissonance around housing they refuse to admit it. They'd rather blame random poor brown people. We require more housing, particularly dense affordable housing. And yes, that includes in your neighborhood. The sooner people admit this reality the sooner we can fix the housing crisis.
You have people looking out for your future regarding topics you don’t know to watch out for. This happens all the time everywhere around you, that people are fighting silent battles so you don’t have to.
You are clearly not representative, as so isn't most of HN, of the average demographic that has to worry about their blue collar jobs (whether that be a real risk or not)
People who worry about immigration, have their own job security in mind, rather than worrying about crime, you're saying?
(Makes sense to me I guess, just sounds different from what Trump seemed to be taking about: crime and eating people's pets. I'm in Europe and don't know much.)
Outsiders coming in and changing the society. People who don’t speak English sending their kids to their schools. Moving into their neighborhoods and making it more competitive for their friends and family to move into their neighborhoods. Creating “bad neighborhoods” and increasing crime.
The university could even setup their own private self-hosted Gitlab and use it as part of assignment submission.
10 years ago, my no-name college had a CS degree that required us all to take a "Software Engineering" course that covered the fundamentals needed once you graduated, including Git. We did group-style large coding projects where teams had to submit their GitHub repo at the end.
The prof was able to review who committed what and then hammered us on good commit messages, clean coding style, testing, etc.. I feel that a large part of my career success was due to the early start I had from that course.
I think that this would be a great idea, and could also help combat students not doing anything in group projects.
I lone wolfed most of my group projects in college, and don't have any regrets, but, of the projects that I didn't loan wolf, most people didn't write a single line of code, or only contributed in relatively inconsequential ways.
I think that adopting distributed version control systems in higher education would be mostly good.
I'm in the PNW and the gray gloomy weather is a delight for me. I love mushroom foraging, love being surrounded by trees, the beautiful waterfalls, the wet hikes, the moss everywhere, the berry picking, everything! I used to live in a VERY sunny state, I found it depressing. Sun irritates me. I never realized how uncomfortable it made me until I moved to a rainy cloud region and felt at home for the first time. Really shows there's something for everyone!
Hot take here, but as someone that doesn't code daily, I prefer those sites over the actual docs in most cases.
If I need to get something done quick, those sites will give me a quick 5 second refresher with clear examples.
Actually, in the doc you described as "obviously the correct hit", all I see is
> str.endswith(suffix[, start[, end]])
> Return True if the string ends with the specified suffix, otherwise return False. suffix can also be a tuple of suffixes to look for. With optional start, test beginning at that position. With optional end, stop comparing at that position.
Meanwhile, the first hit in Google for me is Programiz, which has actual real examples without any additional clicking around or trying to understand how the information is structured.
Besides, I know the docs exist, I don't need a google search for it. I'll click on the content farms every time because they've consistently been the fastest way for me to get what I need.
That seems a bit disingenuous on your part. I picked the top 3 hits on Google and they are all very helpful and to the point - Programiz, W3Schools, Tutorialspoint. Granted, I have ublock origin, as most people should have anyway.
This got a chuckle out of me, but plenty of content farms for programming are extraordinarily useful. One could make the case W3schools is a content farm, and that's raised a whole generation of programmers for their knowledge.
It's really surprising how awful the official Python docs are, considering how much the language has grown of late. If I need to reference core Python docs these days, I almost always go to this version on devdocs.io[1].
Thankfully most of the reference documentation I have to look up are the popular data science libraries like pandas. Their documentation[2] is so much cleaner than core Python.
Except those farms don't do any original research and just copy off each other. They're littered with mistakes and you will see the same mistake pop up across all of them.
These days for obscure terms, you don't even get the luxury of reading garbage written by people who barely understand the topic at hand, instead you get meaningless fluff generated en masse using LLMs.
Honestly, I'd rather spend time parsing whatever doxygen spits out than try to figure out what the needlessly verbose yet inaccurate LLM output is trying to get at.
> Actually, in the doc you described as "obviously the correct hit", all I see is
>> str.endswith(suffix[, start[, end]])
>> Return True if the string ends with the specified suffix, otherwise return False. suffix can also be a tuple of suffixes to look for. With optional start, test beginning at that position. With optional end, stop comparing at that position.
> Meanwhile, the first hit in Google for me is Programiz, which has actual real examples without any additional clicking around or trying to understand how the information is structured.
I'm sorry, but what examples could you possibly want that the official documentation doesn't make clear? It's written as concisely as can be, describing the possible inputs and the expected outputs of the particular function, no? I don't see how sifting through tens of lines explaining what the docs say in two short sentences is preferable.
When you get good at it, it is much easier to skim through 10 lines of fluff to find the answer (that is usually visually distinguished in a code block) then it is to parse through 4 really dense, terminology filled sentences.
If I need to know exactly how all the options work, sure the docs are the place to go, but 90% of the time I just need a quick example to go off of.
I'm not trolling. From my perspective mastering a language includes mastering its included library (for things like python where its standard library is indeed what everyone is using). Thus, it is always preferable to read the complete documentation for some functionality and pick up every detail along the way instead of having an idea in your head how to do the thing you want and picking only the exact use case you wanted from an example.
> If I need to know exactly how all the options work, sure the docs are the place to go, but 90% of the time I just need a quick example to go off of.
You will almost never get to the point where you'd need to know "exactly how all the options work" because if your routine is "search example, copy example, continue", you won't even know what options exist and that there is a way you could do things different (maybe more efficient? simpler?).
Agreed. For all of the hate PHP gets, the state of their respective docs was a big pain point for me in trying to learn Python after years of writing PHP.
However, the PHP docs, especially for older, less-used functions, are riddled with subtle errors and inconsistencies related to the typing of arguments and handling of edge cases. But the way they're structured is fine! I particularly enjoy how you can type php.net/sprintf and land directly on the doc page you're looking for.
Official python docs are awful. Same with MSDN. Docs should be more than just the auto-generated pydocs which just parrot the function signature—which I can easily infer because I can, you know, read.
For any sufficiently complex function that requires me to actually look up the docs, I want example usage. Not all arguments are obvious. Not all return types are obvious. This is especially bad for overloaded functions. Worse is when docs requires a circular graph traversal of clicking endless links to more documentation.
Needless to say, I prefer content farms and blogs to the official docs.
Humans are much better at inferring rules from examples than at deducing an example from a concisely stated rule. The official python docs are the latter.
I get your point for vanilla Python docs. Content farm pages can be more helpful for quick look ups here.
But if you use Pandas, Numpy, Scipy, etc., you know how fantastic the official docs are. They are much better than content farm crap. And, yet, in these cases, too, Google ranks those sites higher.
I use DDG a lot more, and it has almost replaced Google for me.
I use Google now only for local uses- gas stations near me, restaurants near me, and so on.
I also highly encourage you to try code.you.com and phind.com. I have been very happy with them.
> Actually, in the doc you described as "obviously the correct hit", all I see is
> > str.endswith(suffix[, start[, end]])
> > Return True if the string ends with the specified suffix, otherwise return False. suffix can also be a tuple of suffixes to look for. With optional start, test beginning at that position. With optional end, stop comparing at that position.
What exactly don't you understand from that concise and official documentation?
>It's also not their fault for being mean to you for legitimately ruining their game.
It is 100% their fault. Whatever circumstances befall someone, it doesn't give them the right to act toxically and insult and degrade others. There's a difference between being angry (an emotion), and channeling that anger into a negative interaction. They're perfectly capable of controlling themselves and not throwing a tantrum like a child.
It's not about helping out the noob, it's about being civil.
Also, the majority of developers using version control are using Git. I guarantee the majority of developers outside the AI/ML bubble do not know what a "transformer" is.