And then you have the ever changing ecosystem, that can take years so sort out on it's own and must be constantly studied.
E.G: if you arrive in Python right now, numpy is in version 2 and polars is stable. uv is all the rage, pydantic gained so much perf it's not even funny, toml is part of the stdlib and textual is looking very good. Type hints are much better than 2 years ago, htmx is used a lot in the web department, fasthtml is having a moment in the light and pyscript got a platform. Is any of those information worth acting on? Should you ignore them all for the sake of productivity? Should you carefully evaluate each proposition?
Now if you have to do that with rust and erlang as well, it's a lot of time you could spend on coding instead.
Instead of constantly trying to keep up with everything in an ecosystem (which is simply impossible), just keep up with the stuff you are using to get your product working. Keep a side eye on the rest of the ecosystem to see if something neat is developing that you might use, but no need to study every hyped package coming out. In the end they are all tools to get something that works.
We still use flask and it's been great all the way, and it still holds up really well, there's no reason to move to any of the other packages just because that's the next new shiny thing.
I would think the best option is to always be suspicious of hype, unless you understand why something is being hyped? I'd also argue its worth understanding where your stack falls down, so you know when you need to look for alternative stacks.
The other bit is it's worth understanding how your stack interacts with related stacks (to use your examples, does uv and pydantic using rust vs. being pure python cause issues), but your OS is also changing, are your tools still going to work?
First, you don't have to follow hype, but listening to it is how you know where your ecosystem is heading.
Second, there is way more to an ecosystem that hype. Api, compat, deprecation, new features...
If you never created an web api and have to do it now, you still have to make a choice, hype or not. This choice will have very different consequences if you know only about flask and drf, if you heard of fastapi, or if you get told about django-ninja.
It's the same for every single task.
And even without new things, just learning the old ones is work. In python you can encounter -o ir PYTHONBREAKPOINT, be put on a project with one of 10 packaging systems, have to deal with pth files, etc.
And it's the same for all langages. It's a lot of work.
Sure, languages have depth, and there is at some level some need to keep up with the Joneses (though to mix metaphors, different ecosystems have their red queens running at very different paces, and is it wise to be in or try to join the fastest paced race?), but I feel there is a distinction between following the latest hype blindly (and using the latest tool because of hype), and evaluating tools based on some criteria (and choosing the latest tool because it actually solves the problem on hand best). The latter is a skill that can be gained and taught in one ecosystem, and applied in another (and the former causes issues far too often).
I think this skill is very similar to what highly productive academics have, they evaluate and examine ideas, techniques and concepts from a wide variety of fields, and combine them to build new ones.
Python has _remarkably little_ ecosystem churn compared to a lot of languages. New packages come and go all the time but the older packages are very well maintained and nobody's forcing you to switch to the new ones.
I'm sorry to say if you can't google the difference between setup.py and pyproject.toml then it's a skills issues, because in 14 years of using Python that has never been an impediment to getting anything done in a timely manner.
IMHO, that's not part of learning the language. You don't really even need half of the packages you mentioned unless you don't know the language and, instead, rely upon third-party crutches.
Depends on what your goal is. If your primary purpose for learning python is to be able to use numpy and pandas, then you should probably start learning them from day 1. Learning how to inefficiently implement parts of pandas in pure python on an ad-hoc basis is a waste of time for most people compared to just spending that time learning how to efficiently use pandas.
I don't know if the issue is identity as much as it is the cost of making the decision. All of those things are difficult to change. It's sort of like the sunk cost fallacy.
When having sensitive conversations I think it's important to consider how much it would cost someone to shift their belief.
Mormonism is not hard to change, it takes 5 minutes to install, all the hardware is supported, and I never had any problem with it. Plus I lost weight.
There are people who have discovered that their parents lied about their baby stories and instead they were part of mass kidnappings/government schemes, like Liebensborn and the disappeared children in Argentina and Spain. Or more individual stories, like "My mom is actually my grandma". These days the professional advice is not to keep that secret from your adopted children precisely because the revelation itself can be much more damaging than the knowledge.
Have you seen the documentary "7 second memory man" on BBC.
It is about an intelligent person who is confined to live with only 7 second memory. He keeps a diary recording his entries. As he reads past entries, he realises the predicament he is in and considers that his case would be interesting to doctors. Then forgets all about that. Rediscovering the whole thing again in the next 7 seconds for himself anew.
Perhaps I worded that poorly. I was trying to express that there exist various psychological mechanisms specifically involved with isolating existentially destabilizing mental events from the conscious cognitive process to maintain it's integrity and ability to function, and what one of their names were. I tacked on the end the list of remedies applied traditionally when such mechanisms for whatever reason end up going awry. Those cases are undeniably a form of mental illness.
This instance of a poster's existential pondering is not mental illness. It's a valid question. The answer was yes. See repression, then research other cognitive distortions. It's part of building up a healthy meta-cognition.
Take the best of SCP lore, keep you guessing, make you root for the most deeply lost cause that can possibly be and still see hope because the characters and settings are awesome.
However, what do I know? This is my first day on HN.
I wish I could bind applications to slide out from left and right, I use slidepad on Mac which is a slide out web browser, and TotalFinder which has a visor feature for the bottom. Little things like this keep me on Mac to be honest
What EU-wide law requires it to be as easy to cancel as to sign up? I’m sitting in Germany right now and I’m unaware of any such law - though it might very well be recent and not fully transposed into German law, or might be situational or not widely complied with.
There is a law that requires that subscriptions can be cancelled online within "the click of a button" with automatic confirmation. (since 2022)
If no such option to cancel is implemented by the provider the minimum contract duration is void and you can cancel immediately.
We have the regulation in Germany, but afaik it's not EU-wide. The "Gesetz über faire Verbraucherverträge" basically says that if something can be subscribed to easily online, then the company also has to provide an easy unsubscribe. It goes into detail how such a button should look like, how labelled, what data the confirmation page has to list and how fast the confirmation has to be (immediate).
I believe the EU law sets the minimum required conditions for contracts (fair, not abusing the customer), but the individual EU-countries can implement more consumer friendly rules.
It's horrendus in Germany trying to cancel a mobile phone subscription, internet service, gym membership or the likes. You have to jump through hoops like sending a registered physical letter, 3 months before the end of the service period for it to be considered a valid cancellation ("Kündigung"). Without this, you're forced into paying for another year.
EU regulation is badly needed to cut out this anti-consumer nonsense.
This is no longer true, it is limited to a one month period (after a possible 2 year minimum contract to offer "special discounts") in advance and every contract can be cancelled online.
W13 had so much to love, but something was missing to make it stick.