Why did the numpy core size shrink from 1.14.0 to 1.14.1?
It appears that the difference is in the debug symbols.  Perhaps one was built with a higher level of debug symbols than the other, or perhaps the smaller one was built with compressed debug info (a relatively new feature).  One way to find out more would be to inspect the compiler and linker flags used during each build, or try to build it yourself.
When creating an AWS lambda package I noticed that the ZIP became a lot smaller when I updated from numpy 1.14.0 to 1.14.3. From 24.6MB to 8.4MB.
The directory numpy/random went from 4.3MB to 1.2MB, according to Ubuntus Disc Usage analyzer. When I, however, compare the directories with meld they seem to be identical. So I had a closer look at this and found that only one file (mtrand.cpython-36m-x86_64-linux-gnu.so) differs that much. I guess it is a similar reason why the core became smaller.
Could somebody explain why this became so much smaller?