> SMR (also mentioned in the article) doesn't make sense. Nuclear plants are better when they're bigger.
I have always found this an odd argument. Granted, thermodynamically, nuclear plants' efficiency scales with size. But allegedly fuel only makes up 10% of the lifetime cost of a plant. Even more if you think construction costs overrun.
So let's say you make a plant that is smaller and requires 50% more fuel, but is also 10% cheaper to build. You're already ahead by 4%. And SMRs at least promise far more than 10% savings.
The argument that SMRs could be cheaper due to economies if scale is often dismissed as pie in the sky - and maybe it is - but this is also precisely what brought down the cost of renewables. Germany bought their wind turbines a mere few years ago and paid way more than they would have done today.
The article starts well, on trying to condense pandas' gaziliion of inconsistent and continuously-deprecated functions with tens of keyword arguments into a small, condensed set of composable operations - but it lost me then.
The more interesting nugget for me is about this project they mention: https://modin.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html called Modin, which apparently went to the effort of analysing common pandas uses and compressed the API into a mere handful of operations. Which sounds great!
Sadly for me the purpose seems to have been rather to then recreate the full pandas API, only running much faster, backed by things like Ray and Dask. So it's the same API, just much faster.
To me it's a shame. Pandas is clearly quite ergonomic for various exploratory interactive analyses, but the API is, imo, awful. The speed is usually not a concern for me - slow operations often seem to be avoidable, and my data tends to fit in (a lot of) RAM.
I can't see that their more condensed API is public facing and usable.
The pandas API is awful, but it's kind of interesting why. It was started as a financial time series manipulation library ('panels') in a hedge fund and a lot of the quirks come from that. For example the unique obsession with the 'index' - functions seemingly randomly returning dataframes with column data as the index, or having to write index=False every single time you write to disk, or it appending the index to the Series numpy data leading to incredibly confusing bugs. That comes from the assumption that there is almost always a meaningful index (timestamps).
I hate to be the "you're holding it wrong" guy but 90% of "Pandas bad!" posts I find are either outright misinformed or mischaracterizing one person's particular opinion as some kind of common truth. This one is both!
> That comes from the assumption that there is almost always a meaningful index (timestamps)
The index can be literally any unique row label or ID. It's idiosyncratic among "data frames" (SQL has no equivalent concept, and the R community has disowned theirs), but it's really not such a crazy thing to have row labels built into your data table. Excel supports this in several different ways (frozen columns, VLOOKUP) and users expect it in just about any table-oriented GUI tool.
> having to write index=False every single time you write to disk
If you're actually using the index as it's meant to be used, you'd see why this isn't the default setting.
> functions seemingly randomly returning dataframes with column data as the index
I assume you're talking about the behavior of .groupby() and .rolling()? It's never been random. Under-documented and hard to reason about group_keys= and related options, yes. But not random.
> appending the index to the Series numpy data leading to incredibly confusing bugs
I've been using Pandas professionally almost daily since 2015 and I have no idea what this means.
I think the commenter you are replying to might well understand these nuances. The point is not that Pandas is inscrutable, but instead that it‘s annoying to use in many common use-cases.
> but it's really not such a crazy thing to have row labels built into your data table.
Sometimes you need data in a certain order. Sometimes there is no primary key. And it is nuts how janky the pandas API is if you just want the index to mean the current order of the dataframe and nothing else. Oh you did a pivot? I'm just going to make those pivot columns a row label now if that's alright with you. I don't do that for all functions though, you're going to have to remember which ones. Oh you want to sort a dataframe? You better make damn sure you reindex if you're planning to use that with data from another dataframe (e.g. x + y on data from separate dataframes), otherwise I'm going to align the data on indices, and you can't stop me. Also - want to call pyplot.plot(df['column'])? Yeah I'm giving it the data in index order obviously I don't care about that sort you just did. Oh you want to port this data to excel? Well if your row labels aren't meaningful and you don't want "Unnamed: 0" you're going to have to tell me not to. You need to manipulate a multi-index? You're so cute. Have fun with that buddy.
There is a reason no other dataframe library does this - because it's confusing and cognitive overhead that doesn't need to exist. I've used pandas since ~2013, had this chat with colleagues and many recommend just giving in and maintaining an index throughout. Except I've read their pandas and it sucks because now _you_ need to reason about what is currently the index - because it actually needs to change a lot to do normal things with data. I just use .reset_index copiously and try to make it behave like a normal dataframe library because it's just easier to understand later. Pandas has not earned the right to redefine what a dataframe means.
At the absolute least, index behaviour should be opt-in, not something imposed on the user.
I've looked at Polars. My sense is that Pandas is an interactive data analysis library poorly suited to production uses, and Polars is the other way around. Seemed quite verbose for example. Sometimes doing `series["2026"]` is exactly the right thing to type.
With some of the newest 3.x changes like copy-on-write, I find pandas getting quite verbose now as well.
In a world where AI is writing the code, I guess I shouldn't complain, but when I am discovering something the ai of choice yet again missed, both pandas and polars still feel verbose and lacking sugar.
> Pandas is clearly quite ergonomic for various exploratory interactive analyses, but the API is, imo, awful.
Having previously inherited (and now dispossessed) an un-disentangleable pile of Python, pandas, and SQL hacks reminiscent of a spreadsheet rammed with inscrutable Excel formulae, I have no idea how data scientists collaborate on anything with this technology. It's like when bioinformatics was full of write-only Perl code that was maybe executed successfully once for the purposes of a study or paper, and was kept around for future archaeologists to hopefully one day resuscitate when the need may arise again.
If programmers are expected to just throw garbage like this at the next asshole with the misfortune to have to maintain code that was never designed to be maintained, it's not a surprise that the industry is once again moving towards write-only code, this time produced at scale by LLMs.
It's like we're back to Visual Studio Ultimate slopping out 10k lines of XAML in response to your dragging and dropping in the WYSIWYG. There is a reason nobody does this any more.
The article seems to stop short of a bit of logic. I'm certainly no expert but have been reading extensively on the topic.
TLDR, once you have the uranium, it is still hard to build a bomb that's light and small enough to be fired in a ballistic missile. The Hiroshima bomb (Little Boy), of gun type, is about the simplest thing you can build, and still it weighted 4 tonnes, was 3 m long and 70 cm wide (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Boy). Not because Americans were stoopid, but because it takes a lot of effort to make these things small. It also was very inefficient with it's use of the fissile material - it needed 64kg of highly enriched uranium, most of which didn't react at all, and it's a fundamental limitation of this design. So if Iran really has 600kg of highly enriched uranium, that's enough for 10 of those puppies. 10 too many of course...
The next step up is an implosion device, where conventional explosives compress a blob of fissile metal. That was Fat Man of Nagasaki, and was about as big/heavy as the Little Boy. But used only 4kg of fissile metal for the same bang, roughly. But to make this work is a lot of science that Iran would either need to figure out, or dunno, but from Pakistan or North Korea. And even then it's massive and heavy and doesn't fit on the tip of a ballistic missile. For comparison, modern US warheads weigh around 200-300kg while delivering 20-30x the boom of the WWII bombs.
All of which is to say, just having the uranium is clearly necessary, but far from sufficient from having a weapon you can use.
Still... It seems taking it away by force isn't working, and if anything, confirmed to Iran that it needs it. So... Good luck to the rest of us. And in any case their main target Israel has its own nukes, I'd imagine plentiful, well researched and efficient, bringing us back to MAD, which somehow safely saw us through Cold War.
I don't trust MAD among religious fanatics, and while I concede that there are various possible places to draw the line, I think "having enough weapons grade uranium to build a bomb" is probably on the wrong side of the line. No matter how hard it is to actually fabricate and deliver a real bomb.
While I agree with you, I do not expect that Hegseth has the ability to unilaterally launch nuclear weapons.
Trump is probably not actually religious, just mentally incompetent. Which is its own concern... but I would like to believe there are better humans in the launch loop.
When I first read the headline, I thought it's about a woman who had sex with her own identical twin (and somehow that means their father cannot be identified).
So I was almost disappointed when I read it properly.
I'd take it further/slightly parallel direction. Medicine is at the same time a science and a weird "feel and experience" area.
On the one hand it's a science: controlled experiments, calculated dosages, all based on an understanding of low level biology, fancy imaging methods, measuring currents in people's bodies and so on.
On the other hand, there seems to be plenty of "he seems fine to me", "tests came back fine but something seems off to me so let's try another test", "doesn't seem to be responding to this drug, let's try the other one", "in my experience this drug works better than that one". It seems like a pretty big chunk of subjectivity is actually a part of the field.
While I agree it is very suspicious, needs investigating and far, far greater oversight in general, I'm not sure there is enough to conclude this definitely is insider trading. Markets are weird. People trade for weird reasons, sometimes gently and in small size, sometimes aggressively and all at once. We're zooming in at a short window just before the tweet. If you look at random windows you'll find these too. 6.49 am is around lunchtime in Europe, and people exist there too. Crude oil liquidity isnt at its peak at that time but certainly not "thin". It's really not that uncommon for traders to accidentally send a "fat finger" trade, much bigger in size than intended or appropriate for the market conditions.
I'm not trying to split hairs here. There's been plenty of weird coincidences and each should be investigated, and on the balance of probability at least one may well be insider trading at the highest echelons. And in any case, in any financial job you need pre clearance for trades, often justifying why you're doing them if they are odd enough. There are minimum holding periods, day trading is not allowed, and the full record auditable by regulators. It is insane to me that politicians are not subject to such rules and it must change.
But to conclude that a weird trading pattern is definitely insider trading is IMO cheap. It's like TV drama where the unemployed, wife-beater-wearing husband definitely killed the wife, end of story.
The real tragedy IMO is that this is really avoidable. It would take very basic, very standard regulation to stamp this out, and we wouldn't be debating this in a technology forum.
The quantity makes it more than weird. This is not just price change or manipulation. Prices can move big amounts for weird reasons without significant changes in trade volumes. The volume of sales makes it significant.
$580 million sales of oil futures and probably similar amount of buys in stock futures means $1T quick billion move.
Nobody makes half trillion __trades__ for weird reasons and this was too short to be movement of sellers in general.
It is very weird and suspicious but not out of the realms of possibility. And I don't say it because I'm vouching here for the honesty of this administration. Crude oil contracts (WTI and Brent - both same size) traded roughly 3m contracts that day. 6,200 quoted by FT is about 2% of that. It's a lot - crazy much. But not crazy-crazy-someone-is-defo-a-crook crazy.
It's not even a given at this point that all these trades come from one person. In fact I doubt they do - because most brokerages would simply not allow you to put this trade. It could well be a huge trade, but a fraction of the 6200 that changed hands, then HFT algos jumping in in the action.
Which is all investigable, and should be investigated.
Notional. Those contracts have between 8-15x leverage. Looking at the CNBC graph linked you can see the volume better (though not the actual lot sizes). The likely at risk dollars was probably closer to 10M across both.
Sure, I believe that. But not 580 Billion. (I sometimes wonder how much damage has been done to the United States political system by naming them million, billion and trillion. Would we all budget carefully and precisely consider the relative impacts of different scales of expenditure if a thousand thousand was a woozle, a thousand woozle added up to a brillig, and a thousand brillig was a fearsome vogon?)
I agree the article could include more data around the frequency and size of these kind of trades around other events and for a longer period.
However as the article notes the time and size of this particular series of trades makes it look suspicious and that’s all one can say with certainty at this point.
I'm happy with "very suspicious". But IMO you need more to title an article "Treason in the Futures Markets: People close to Trump are trading based on national secrets" based on "very suspicious".
> I'm not sure there is enough to conclude this definitely is insider trading. Markets are weird.
This was 6-8x the size all the existing trades on market combined, with zero other publicly available information early on a Monday morning 15 mins before an announcement that significantly moved the market.
Not even the biggest hedge funds in the world with coked up yolo traders go make 1.5 billion dollar bets like that, it simply doesn't happen.
It's egregious and blatant insider trading. The position got closed not long after the news came out.
To be clear when people quote the billion dollar number they are quoting the notional value (of the entire market move of at the announcement).
Those contracts have between 8-15x leverage depending on margin rules.
This doesn’t remove the corruption problem but it brings the number down into realistic values. And while the volumes were odd for the overnight they aren’t that strange for normal hours trading.
Maybe a naive question: those transactions are traceable. But we assume this admin will not turn itself in. However, such transactions in other nations would be investigated. Are there cases of similar transactions before the US presidents tweets in i.e. Europe?
There's plenty of very suspicious trades in US politics, and presumably European ones too. Actually on both sides of the aisle. Senators putting trades in sectors that overlap with their committee memberships, or these trades appearing in their "blind trusts", with "no input" from the senators. There is so much of it that I am sure there is plenty of insider trading. On average, if you blindly follow their trades, will you make money? The evidence is mixed, and made worse by the fact that the disclosures can be made on paper (pen and paper is allowed!) and the records not all electronified. You can imagine the juiciest trades are probably "disclosed" on a napkin if at all.
There's no doubt it's very dirty business. I just find it lazy thinking to say, hey this one is very suspicious therefore definitely criminal.
I'm sorry but I'm finding it hard to believe this is a real comment.
How's this a coincidence?
Trump has boasted about this, that's the point we're in.[0]
They're announcing in a newsletter a fund raising where they will share national secrets with donors.[1]
This is literally people paying to get access to privileged information, in a fund raising for what?
Like it's openly being said that if you pay enough money, you will make a lot of money, this is unprecedented.
Trying to normalize it by saying "it's not corruption because it's done out in the open", or to bend reality to make an excuse for this, like it's a coincidence... it's insanity.
This could very well be the end, if the game is rigged at this level - and people trying to get as much out as possible while it lasts, while acting like no one understands what's going on, it's one of the scariest things I've witnessed. It's like we're falling off a cliff and people are shoving money in their pockets while saying "we're not falling, it's just the wind".
At least open the video lol he literally said it's an individual who made money lmao:
"This is Charles Schwab. It's not just a company... It's actually an individual... He made 2.5 billion today. And he (points at another individual) made 900 million".
Now the contents of the newsletter: "you'll receive my private national security briefings..."
It's like a low effort trolling, so I'll just flag and disregard your comment.
Early FB was bad enough when it was your actual friends posting the best (or made up) bits of their lives - and you were only scrolling when you had nothing better to do. Did you know kids, there was a time when the feed was ordered by time and you knew the people who posted stuff?
It's a shame we can't have nice things. An actual non-abusive social medium for people to share things like this - I'd use it. But I see that as soon as there is money on the table, it's a race to the bottom, sooner or later.
It's a collection of indeed ironic events. I haven't read closely enough to see how many I agree with, but some good points for sure.
But what is really not funny is the scale of human suffering that is happening and will follow. Civilians killed in Iran, Lebanon - and what the hell, even in Israel, maybe they aren't in the 90% who support this war. Completely pointless material damage. All the people in Tehran who will get cancer from breathing in crude oil fumes - and according to Trump himself, 85% of Iranians oppose the regime. The damage to GCC economies, who didn't want this to happen. The damage to global economy from the spiking oil prices, unpredictability - and the very real poverty this will push people into. The weakening of arsenals against other adversaries, including Ukraine's defence against Russia. The boost to Russia's budget from spiking oil prices and indefinite-looking suspension of sanctions.
And all this assuming this doesn't turn into WWIII.
> The damage to global economy from the spiking oil prices, unpredictability - and the very real poverty this will push people into.
To expand on that - the southern hemisphere harvest is over, now it's edging into seeding time to get the next round of crops started.
More than one farm is struggling to secure the volume of fuel required to seed.
With significant refineries offline for ~ 5 years, impacted fertilizer (agriculture) and sulphar (mineral processing) production deeply impacted ... this "little excursion" is set to cast a long shadow across the entire globe for quite some time.
> And all this assuming this doesn't turn into WWIII.
If Trump is truely insane and his plan "to bomb the living shit out of Iran's energy infrastructure" includes the Bushehr NPP, mainly operated by Russian nuclear scientists and engineers, the world will likely face even bigger problems than they are facing now.
I have always found this an odd argument. Granted, thermodynamically, nuclear plants' efficiency scales with size. But allegedly fuel only makes up 10% of the lifetime cost of a plant. Even more if you think construction costs overrun.
So let's say you make a plant that is smaller and requires 50% more fuel, but is also 10% cheaper to build. You're already ahead by 4%. And SMRs at least promise far more than 10% savings.
The argument that SMRs could be cheaper due to economies if scale is often dismissed as pie in the sky - and maybe it is - but this is also precisely what brought down the cost of renewables. Germany bought their wind turbines a mere few years ago and paid way more than they would have done today.
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