gn

> `sys.excepthook` is how you can do that.

Awesome. Thank you kindly.

> error: tracebacks too long

I like your style.

> It would be nice if you could provide an example

For me personally the main source of unhappiness is error messages. In C I can say

if (!(f = open(name, "r"))) die(name);

where die is a tiny function that prints name, followed by whatever strerror has to say to the subject, formatted in the usual fashion. One line, done with it. The obvious, conventional Python equivalent is four lines long because both try: and except: insist on a line of their own. Since I cannot tell Python to produce succinct unixy error messages instead of rambling stack traces I have to catch and examine more or less every plausible exception. Some exceptions I can deal with close to the base level of my call stack in a butt-ugly fourty-line catch-all clause but a large proportion of my syscalls end up taking three lines extra each. I know it's a trivial problem, but I agree with pg you tend to get the more productive the more of your actual application logic you can see.

> I do a lot of coding in common lisp

We did experiment with clisp a while back; it turned out not to be a natural fit for problems that involve a lot of pathname, datetime, and stat info manipulation. If there was a reasonably modern Lisp that let me say things like (localtime (nth 9 (stat "/foo"))) I would go looking for it this very afternoon.

http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

I second that, for what it's worth. Everybody complains about the lack of women in computer science. Every now and then some clumsy dork prances by and runs a batch of softcore porn slides with his Ruby talk so we have someone to use as a scapegoat. Actually, though, it's not really the occasional high-profile fuckup that keeps women out of coding. It's the constant rain of low-profile casual dismissiveness.

I do not join a community that keeps telling me more or less daily people with my chromosomes don't really belong and everything was better when you didn't run into my kind all the time. Even if I knew that very few of them actually dislike me; that even the really boorish ones are mostly just harmless losers trying to hide their insecurity: I just wouldn't feel welcome.

(Edit: typo)

He thinks he is talking about sex, but there are some important point he overlooks. Most people would usually want their button pressed by members of the other sex. Most people naturally close to you (parents, siblings, cousins) would be out of the question as pushers of your button.

Also, over millions and millions of years, certain aspects of hominine reproduction (large heads, long gestation times, preposterously long childhood, staggering maternal mortality) and simple statistics would have conspired to make women very, very picky about when and by whom they want to press their buttons. At the same time they would have conspired to make men want their buttons pressed as often as possible, and by pretty much any girl with a neck pulse.

The availability of people of the desired sex willing to press your button would be your default main source of serenity and self-respect. It would take experience and hard work for you to create other sources of fulfillment for yourself. It would be natural for immature, stupid, or bitter people to spend enormous amounts of energy trying to control access to other people's buttons.

If you could press your neighbor's button without risk of adverse side effects (killing months of their productivity, having them lose one of their four of five shots at producing healthy offspring, making them die in childbirth) offering someone to pleasure of a press of their button would be as harmless as offering them the pleasure of a smile, or of a glass of drink. There would be certain rules of etiquette, but there wouldn't usually be much debilitating drama.

They seem to be reasonably well known in Europe, thanks mostly to Negri. A number of my biologist/geneticist friends have read them, but that may be coincidence. I, personally, find them irritating.

Very well put, except for the largely inexplicable penultimate paragraph, and except in that Deleuze and Guattari aren't really worth your while. Thanks much for posting this.

I can't think of too many things less hacker-like than "today we try very hard to be funny in a really formulaic way because that's what everybody else does".

April Fools' stories are like lolcats. If you saw one of them for every fifty or so sites you visited they'd be kinda cute; if you see them ABSOLUTELY EVERYWHERE they're just really stupid spam. Also, most of them are a lot less funny than the originator believes; it's almost as if there were an annual blonde joke festival.

I think it would be nice if there was ONE aggregator without any April Fools' crap on it. If you want April Fools' stories you do know where to find them.

The idea that people other than Americans are real consumers with real money to spend is inherently funny; the idea that it might make good business sense to not put gratuitous hurdles between them and your checkout is practically hysterical. It's not like the US has an external trade deficit larger than the GDP of Taiwan or anything.

Not every aspect of this is easy, true, but that's no reason not to tackle the ones that are. It's trivial to simply not require a state or a postcode or try to verify a phone no if the user selects a country other than the US.

There should be a library for this. We have libraries that can handle the insanely capricious details of DST for all countries and subnational entities on the planet; we should have no problem providing one list of states and two regular expressions per nation.

(I know it's more or less impossible to reliably catch (e.g.) invalid UK postcodes, but we wouldn't have to. We'd mainly want to catch obvious typos without making things needlessly hard for customers overseas.)

Like it or not, Eric S Raymond is to the hacker community what Louis Althusser is to French philosophers. Or Stanley Aronowitz to pomo sociology. Or Mark Foley to the Republican caucus. Or Crystal Gail Mangum to feminist bloggers. Every time an outsider first realizes how this guy was universally accepted as one of our leaders once we've taken a collective kick in the gut. The sooner people forget about this clown the better.

Your parent is an unsupported personal insult, you're not wrong about that, but if it discourages others from advertising esr essays it's legitimate and meaningful.

I see. Thanks for answering.

I didn't mean to be insulting, it's just that I don't see how this particular instance of blurb-cum-comment page adds a lot of value. I'd have thought it would have been more helpful and polite to skip the intro and link to the full article straight away... but then again I'm new here, which is why I asked.

Does HN encourage this kind of redirection so that the blurb linked to may serve as an executive summary or tl;dr or whatever you want to call it? Does HN encourage this kind of redirection to elicit submissions from people with blogs to draw attention to?

Shouldn't this entry link to one of the original articles instead of to some random, er, symbiont? Sorry if I'm missing something here; I'm the new kid.

I second yanowitz: this is wicked cool, thank you very much; it would be even more awesome than it already is if we had a choice of language. Do you think you could find the time to include Javascript and sh?

You do have a point there; trains are a lot easier to stop than planes or ships and the visa thing can be a pain here, even with a very good passport. Consider, however, that most countries in this region have a +lot+ of experience with commercial land passenger vehicles going across multiple borders.

I'm in Sofia, Bulgaria right now. There is a daily direct bus connection from here to Tehran. It does take 48 hours but it's safe, it's clean, and it gets me there.

I guess what I'm trying to say is, yes, there will be problems and setbacks, but more likely than not they will find a way eventually.

I've personally been to Iran, Russia, and a handful of other ex-USSR countries, and I can't see any real obstacles here. Even those countries in this region that suck at stable government tend to be fairly good at reliable infrastructure; California-style rolling brownouts or Manhattan-type shitty metro cars would be more or less unthinkable here. I'm pretty certain people and politicians alike are ready to embrace this project. In the former Soviet block and in the Middle East alike, especially in Turkey, rail networks still symbolize progress and prosperity like nothing else.