skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The problem is the overloaded "some_data" / "some_error" return value. It's arguably worse semantics than just using exceptions.

try:
data = foo()
except SpecificException as err:
...
except BaseException as err:
...
except Exception as unhandled_exception:
...

It doesn't really look that different than your code above.

Further:

return (False, some_error)

Would be arguably better to write:

raise NoBarError(f"Bar wasn't found in file {f}")

> match requests.get(...):

Speaking of requests I actually like the requests API here. It always gives you a response object, but allows you to do this:

resp = requests.get(...)
resp.raise_for_status() # raises an exception on 400 and above.

It doesn't force you into exceptions, but allows you to choose how you want your errors. The reason is because resp.content may still be meaningful even if resp.status_code is 500.

Further it gives you:

resp = requests.get(...)
if resp.ok:

Error and data are not overloaded on the return value. They are a part of the same class.
That’s a pretty ridiculous scenario - there are plenty of emergency frequencies he could have used. He used active ones being used in an emergency because he wanted the attention and to feel important, not because it was actually helpful or necessary to save any lives.

Which is why he got fined so heavily. If it was a real life and death emergency, that isn’t what happens.
> not be met due to an erroneous estimate in a SEC filing.

I've seen this mentioned elsewhere also, but I really need help here. From my understanding, Twitter's entire business model, and existing revenue stream, is people paying them to show content/ads to other humans. If some unknown percent of users are not human, doesn't that have a pretty extreme, direct, influence on the possible revenue?

If someone wants to buy Twitter, I assume their first question would not be, what percent of users that you're currently showing ads to are bots. Rather, it would be what percent of users are real, so I can show ads to all of them. Which bring up the question, why isn't Twitter showing ads to some users?
I think it's a character thing for Musk, he's simply the kind of person who does things like this because he can.
The branch splitting technique here is how I always used to doodle pictures of trees in the margins of my notes when I was listening to lectures at uni. (Also at school and work but not so much there as I'd often get scolded for doing so - which is why I never remembered any of that stuff but did remember uni lectures... sigh)
Apple is about removing options and providing a simple way for the less computer savvy computer user. For many removing headphone phone jacks and removing functionality is going backwards for others making a computer simple onboards them into a world they could never grasp. There are a lot of rich people/kids who want simple.. and a lot more who want to be those rich kids.
> "and I’m currently working on a startup that is trying to add regulatory compliance capabilities to public blockchains."

(big sigh)
Awesome I appreciate the link! I do appreciate it when the link isn't to a pay walled news site and it goes directly to the paper they're citing from even more though. I believe this is the paper they were citing from[0] (correct me if I'm wrong, I couldn't access the site because of the pay wall, and I don't feel like going to my PC to get around the pay wall right now).

I would like to point out a few interesting tidbits from the data and inject my opinions after the citations.

> Most individuals who perpetrated mass shootings had a prior criminal record (64.5%) and a history of violence (62.8%), including domestic violence (27.9%). And 28.5% had a military background. Most died on the scene of the public mass shooting, with 38.4% dying by their own hand and 20.3% killed by law enforcement officers.

It's interesting that out of the 64% that had a prior criminal record, they somehow were re-released which allowed them to commit a mass shooting. Something is wrong here. It seems like we're holding people with less severe crimes in prison for too long, and the ones who should have stayed in prison are being released too early.

> Of the known mass shooting cases (32.5% of cases could not be confirmed), 77% of those who engaged in mass shootings purchased at least some of their guns legally, while illegal purchases were made by 13% of those committing mass shootings. In cases involving K-12 school shootings, over 80% of individuals who engaged in shootings stole guns from family members.

I'm not sure what this means exactly, but it's interesting to me that they phrased it this way "77% of those who engaged in mass shootings purchased at least some of their guns legally". This seems to indicate that of this 77% who purchased some of their guns legally, they may have purchased the guns used to commit the mass shootings illegally. I don't know why they phrased this this way, but it seems to indicate these individuals may have purchased guns farther back in the past legally, then been barred from buying guns, purchased more guns illegally, and then used those illegal weapons.

> Nearly half of individuals who engaged in mass shootings (48%) leaked their plans in advance to others, including family members, friends, and colleagues, as well as strangers and law enforcement officers.

It's very sad to me that almost 50% of these cases could have been avoided! In some of these cases, law enforcement knew about it in advance, and it still happened.

When you actually read the data directly from the sources, and avoid a right wing or left wing propaganda outlet, and you form your opinions on your own, you may be surprised about the statistics.

But don't take my word for it, Google it yourself and read the actual papers that did the research. The proof is quite ambiguous, and it seems like there's lots of variables that could have changed these outcomes.

[0]: https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/articles/public-mass-shootings-da...
>If the scientific computing and research community (and plenty of physicists) had known a better language

The scientific computing and research community heavily used C/C++ for years/decades after the decline of Fortran.

Python came and solved their headaches by abstracting them away.
Why would this be perfect? It sounds like suggesting that in a perfect would everyone would grow their own food, generate their own power, process their own sewerage, etc to make sure they are not dependant on anyone.

But ultimately we can see that depending on others and centralising services gives us more. Yes sometimes those services fail and it’s out of your control, but you still lived a better life having relied on them. I get the feeling that HN users have a hard time feeling that they are not in total control of every aspect of their lives.
Can you expand on this? Are you describing areas outside that people walk in? Or some other area?
You don't need an account to read stories on Medium (?) I was never required to log in.

I mean it does say "You have 2 free member-only stories left this month." at the top but the counter never actually decrements.

(If you have cookies enabled on all websites by default maybe it would decrement, but you really shouldn't.)
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defer and finally are two different things.

finally may not be the last thing the function does.
Medium was pretty great when they started. Minimal layout with focus on reading content and generally good writers.

I think they either hired writers or at least only allowed people “good enough” to write on the platform.

They also did (and still do) an extremely good job at SEO.

But then they opened the flood gate and filled themselves with a lot of bad writers, who positioned themselves as if they mattered.

They piled on pop up and widgets and paywalls until the site was anything but focused on content.

The only thing they do well is SEO. My last company switched from self hosting to medium and saw a noticeable uptick in lead generation.

So I guess that’s why we are stuck with shitty medium.
Good pun in the title.
"credible neutrality" is a nice phrase for a concept I've struggled to articulate, thanks
You can't simultaneously be stable while also gaining in value. Remember the golden rule of trading: in order for someone to sell an asset for a price, someone else must want to buy that asset for that same price. Luna continually going up must destabilize Terra. The trick is that you moved all the instability to one side of the equation, trying to pretend it's not there.

It's a scam on its very face because it's promising a stable, perpetual motion machine.
I did read it. It doesn’t provide any significant detail of his alleged transgressions OR whether they were responsible for any damages. I’m inclined to believe that were there any hard evidence of a negative outcome it would be described in great detail.
Didn't someone just get a huge fine for something similar to this?
> Shouldn't there be a diagram of the complex plane so that people can see what it's the right half plane of?

Author here. Yes! Very fair criticism. I was trying to strike a balance between making the concept approachable for those who don't have a background involving complex numbers, but that certainly leaves the name of the concept more confusing. I should add it in a footnote at least.

And I did honestly not think about the potential for confusion between plane // airplane. An airplane was the most familiar example system I could think of to explain the concept. Oops!

> Perhaps the first lesson is that even if you know how a system works, you can't just take the inverse function to control what comes out.

That's a great point too. It probably even deserves its own article.
I thought the real death was when they started gating and paywalling things
Keep in mind: scarcity != quality either.

That’s not to say that the US can’t fill the void, I believe that they are reluctant to do so because of the cost of US employees.
> if too many people "steal", then there won't be enough revenue to even break even, let alone make a profit, and so no one will make movies anymore

At current budgets. To make a movie all you need is a camera, and we pretty much all got one in our pockets at this point.

Someone will make movies sans copyright. It just won't be a massive, entrenched studio on a billion budget.
Looking at the energy landscape the most significant area for innovation is with government relations.

There exist green energy companies, and their biggest barrier to growth is government policy. For example, when Green Mountain energy wanted to sell to customers in AZ in 2021, SRP, one of the states largest utilities, pushed the state to repeal the competition laws it had on the books for 24 years. HB2101 was introduced in January to do this and it was signed by governor Doug Ducey in April. This gutted the states policy to have a competitive energy market and stopped the expansion of Green Mountain into the state.

You need friendly environments to operate in. Existing players like their monopolies, and they have the political connections to use the force of law to shut down your energy startup. You may have to plan to spend most of your investors money on Lobbyists and Lawyers.

https://www.azcentral.com/story/opinion/op-ed/laurieroberts/...
> So, he could nix the deal if the number of bots was different than previously disclosed

Not just different but materially and verifiably different.

So the onus would be Musk to produce numbers that are significantly higher and just as accurate if not more than Twitter.
This is not correct. The TLD alone is a valid domain name, although in most cases it must be followed by a trailing dot. "ai." is valid, "ai" may not be.
>> Would it be worse than what we have now?

Point of view is everything. From at least one point of view the answer is yes.

Say I'm a small unsigned singer/songwriter, grinding along looking for a break. I write one good song. Elvis hears my song, and is free to just perform it himself. No copyright, no payment to me. His release is a smash hit, making him millions.

His performance of the song contributes a lot to his success, but the song itself is valuable too.

Of course elvis is signed by a record label, who pays him. The other record label buys one CD, and copies it (as they are entitled to do - no copyright remember.) they make millions selling it cheap (no need to spend on artists or marketing.) In fact they have a chain of stores where you can by any CD ever at half price.

So the real winner here is the person who sells to the customer, and pays not a penny upstream.

Musicians and song writers and audience builders upstream all work in construction doing their day job, and the cream of that crop can't afford to spend much time on creating. Their secret sauce is lost, and we are all poorer because of that.

Which personally, for me, sounds like a much worse system.
what you describe only happens to a "social network" where it's not a marketplace of content but of social credits instead. What you describe will not happen to substack same way it did not happen to youtube: people are here to sell content and make money, instead of selling their personal brand to make money elsewhere.
I want Twitter to embrace its true identity as a platform for rich people / companies to broadcast their brand to the masses.

If you have > 2,000 followers, you pay $0.01 per 10,000 followers per tweet. At current follower counts, Elon Musk pays $97/tweet. CNN pays $58. McDonalds pays $4.50.

Pay the same amount to reply to a tweet/thread of an account with that many followers.

Bot problem solved. No need for an ad platform, ad targeting, etc.
The whole thing is just paid ads.
Even if that was always the case (I'm confident it won't be), compare it to, say, coal fly ash. In my country, coal ash is 1/5th of all waste generated (by weight, I think) over a year. 12 million metric tonnes per year [1]. And that's before even thinking about CO2 and other air pollutants.

Wind turbine waste is almost nothing compared to that. Still worth fixing, but perspective is important.

1. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-03-10/coal-ash-has-become-o...
The main source for the current China's nuclear-building plan is a Bloomberg article ( https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-11-02/china-cli... ) which states that the boss of Chine General Power corp. announced his plans 200GW for 2035.

Admitting that it is an official governmental announcement (it doesn't seem so(?)) and given that China already has 50GW, that's maybe 100GW new (way less than 150 standard reactors).

Compare with renewables: 790GW already running (26% of the gridpower), and 1200GW planned for 2030. In 2020 China added 71,6GW windturbine power. Even considering the load factors the picture is pretty clear.
Your link 0 there indicates the trademark was suspended or is in the process of being suspended. Their other attempt at registering a trademark [0] also seems to have failed (status "Final Refusal - Mailed")

[0] https://trademarks.justia.com/900/03/it-s-about-90003004.htm...
Banks started out unregulated, and I believe it won't be long until crypto custodians are heavily regulated too. The legislative system just needs time to react.
At this point with the market in a drawdown, you don't think that the board wants to close the deal? It would seem to me that it's their fiduciary duty to try to close a deal at well above the current market price, and probably any price they'll have in the far foreseeable future also.
> that's vastly different than the rich evading paying back into a society that enabled them to being wealthy.

Given that you're talking about people earning a middle-class-US money, likely putting them in at least the top percentile or two, I think it's actually exactly the same thing. Even millionaires will tell you they're not rich and point to people who are richer than them to justify why they feel that way, but you shouldn't believe them.
Actually the installments are a great way to think about purchases.

I have a budget of 500€ for sports per year. I use this on gyms, running shoes and what not.

I wanted to get into skiing so I bought some skis this year. It was about 700€.

Normally this doesn’t fit my budget. But I’m gonna keep these skis for at least 4 years.

Now the price is 175€/year. And I still have a bigger portion of my budget left for other sports.
Congrats for the launch!! I did an interview some months ago with the founders, they are certainly very talented.

Looking forward to trying it out, I'll download the extension as soon as I'm back at the desk.

Best of luck!
> Python's community is one of the greatest and worst parts of the language.

If you come from a Ruby background, and you are now doing Python, you may find yourself on Stackoverflow looking up how to do X idomatically in Python (something you did all the time in Ruby). Or you may ask colleagues who know Python but do not know Ruby.

A common answer from the Pythonista community is, "Why would you ever want to do that?" (or Why would you need that?)

Ternary operators? Who needs that. Ok sure, here, but let's make it awkward. Where did Python get the model to do "x = 1 if y else 2"? But ironically, unlike Ruby where you can say "x = 1 if y", in Python you cannot do that. Oh, but you cannot say "x = 1 if y else return". That's not allowed.

Python has finally, as of 3.10, added a switch statement. This is something that many other languages have had for ages. You should see the contortions people have gone to to approximate a switch statement in Python... https://stackoverflow.com/questions/60208/replacements-for-s...

The Python community may have some good, helpful, and friendly people; but most programming communities have that. That is not a plus for any language, because it should be a given.
Agreed.

And to reference the idea of flexibility- the ideal scenario in my mind is to love the problem, and possibly just as important, love the customer you're going to be serving for years, and be very dispassionate about the solution until you find a way to solve the problem in such a way that your ideal customers value it highly.

It's completely possible to simply be interested in finding a solvable problem with a good "market" and a clear path to making money, but I think really great companies typically reflect at least some level of passion for the problem space they are in (or were in as they became a success). If there are counter-examples, I am interested.
I've tried it but it keeps throwing this cryptic error. I'm not sure what this means. Can you help?

> Module not found: Error: Can't resolve 'friends' in '/creakingstairs/people/`
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31689996
I'm sure there are many owners out there that hate the fact physical media is resellable. I'm sure this is at least part of the reason everything is becoming more restricted by copy protection, streamed, proprietary downloads, etc. Everything is becoming harder to own and share without "pirating".
because Musk isn't some technical genius with amazing domain knowledge, he's the world's best salesman with a unique talent of attracting followers.
It still does. I download 30GB 4k movies in a minute or so, consistently, from Usenet.
...right, so remove the ability for anyone but people with fuck-you money to voice an opinion; much less criticise someone else's opinion?

Don't get me wrong, Twitter is a garbage fire, but this idea is just... bad.
Medium, the platform that has somehow figured out the miracle of how to make plain text take 30 seconds to load.
I would argue that the decentralised nature is a crucial aspect of the value proposition. It's part of the mythos of why crypto is valuable/worth investing in/going to the moon.

The way it's actually used completely destroys that part of its value, but don't let reality get in the way of a good investment opportunity. I think if you set up a coin that doesn't use a distributed ledger, and instead uses an SQL database, you wouldn't get buy-in from the ~tulip~crypto fanatics because it doesn't line up with aforementioned mythos.
Are you planning to create a Firefox extension?
Yep. Law == fact. Always. 100% of the time. If the ruling says it's so. It's 100% so. Let it be written.
Asia's largest cell-cultured chicken facility to be up in Singapore from 2023
Hyundai's self-driving taxis roll out on the streets of South Korea
Reliability and composability are two reasons.

With a blockchain architecture, the app can't go down unless the entire blockchain goes down. And apps can be built piecemeal by many teams/hackers who add small bits of functionality here and there through standardized interfaces, rather than top-down by trusted agencies - "money legos".
That, and good English writing.
You can copy them to a computer over USB, no?
I like the possibilities of solar energy. I like the possibilities of decentralized energy. I am a conspiracy theory type of guy. Here's what I really think about all the state and corporate SDG campaign sloganing I see on the streets every damn day:

The reasonably accessible domestic solar panels that do come out will most likely be IoT devices. It will be energy as a service. They will gather information in a way you might not be happy about, and have an off-switch listening for a signal from a remote, centralized hub. The solar panel's use will be governed by a TOS about what you use the electricity for. An automated system will sometimes cause random power outages for any kind of citizen, but it will also get disproportionately used against political enemies, as requested (perhaps sometimes with plausible deniability) by admins that we will never get to see, and never get to reach. It will be a corporate system, ergo the noble platitude of "electricity as a human right" will be sidestepped or shouted down, along with other things. To "manage carbon", alternative generators will be kept out of the hands of the people. Victims will either need to steal electricity or covertly depend on jury-rigged, borderline medieval sources of power to get by.

It will be an exacerbation of the status quo where service access is hydraulic state/corporate despotism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic_empire

As far as I can tell, the despots hate us because they know we desperately want this system to not get further created and we speak as able against the segments of it that exist. These people as a political unit behave sort of like Roko's Basilisk that way - a hyper powerful technological system that punishes you for trying to prevent its creation.

To gain the trust of people like us and help work together on this energy crisis, I recommend you and others campaign as hard as you can against a political system that allows this kind of abuse in energy policy management - and indeed in any place you can agree it is wrong. An alternative is to decide we are so stupid, paranoid and useless that a system like this should be created and should lock us out, because we are a doomed strain of ideological mutants holding the human team back, and our co-operation on energy would be a net detriment anyways. The final, safest, most comfortable alternative is to flatly deny such a system will exist, when stuff like it already happens in other parts of our lives and the means and motive are clearly present. The alternatives will keep dragging humanity into a sterile, upside-down world that feels less and less worth living in, no matter how many gigawatts of whatever kind of power we seem to benefit from.
In France the budgeted total cost of building the EPR reactor (at Flamanville) was 3.3 billions €. Work began in 2007 for a 2012 delivery

It is not yet completed and the cost is already 19.7 billions €.