Top all-time · #17095
Florian Wilhelm
Personal blog · florianwilhelm.infodataprogramming
Florian Wilhelm's personal blog at florianwilhelm.info covers data and programming. Since 2018, 4 different Hacker News readers have linked it 5 times. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-22, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (2) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Florian Wilhelm's blog for a talk-based take on exceptions versus typing in Python and a guide to YAML config management with Hydra and OmegaConf.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 2 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Florian Wilhelm's blog
What Hacker News says?
Author here. Especially in Python, I think exceptions are not evil in any way but when it comes to typing they are a pain. Once gave a somewhat provocative talk about this that exceptions are gotos in a way :-) https://florianwilhelm.info/2025/04/evolution_of_goto/
Comment linking /2025/04/evolution_of_goto/
on “Much Ado About None: Sentinel Values in Python”Submitted Much Ado About None: Sentinel Values in Python as a story · 73 points
HN discussionFor managing configs of ML experiments (where each experiment can override a base config, and "variant" configs can further override the experiment config, etc), Hydra + Yaml + OmegaConf is really nice. https://hydra.cc/ I admit I don't fully understand all the advanced options in Hydra, but the basic usage is already very useful. A nice guide is here: https://florianwilhelm.info/2022/01/configuration_via_yaml_a...
Comment linking /2022/01/configuration_via_yaml_and_cli_with_hydra/
on “The YAML Document from Hell”Submitted Working efficiently with JupyterLab Notebooks as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Data Science in Production: Packaging, Versioning and Continuous Integration as a story · 2 points
HN discussion