Two network reads run unshimmed under Pyodide: inequality.md imports pyodide_http but never patches, short_path.md has no shim at all

[mmcky]

Found while auditing every static data read across the lecture series for QuantEcon/data-lectures#65. Both are live on main today and neither depends on that work — they are ordinary defects in this repo.

Under Pyodide, urllib and requests do not reach the network. pyodide_http.patch_all() is what redirects them through the browser's fetch API, which is why every other data-reading lecture here calls it. These two lectures do not.

1. inequality.md imports the shim and never calls it

Line 96 has import pyodide_http, and patch_all() appears nowhere in the file. The import is doing nothing.

The read that needs it is at line 251, df = pd.read_csv(url), against the SCF extract named at line 250. So the lecture looks shimmed, is not, and the import is exactly the kind of thing a reader would assume is load-bearing.

2. short_path.md has no shim at all

Lines 274-277 do a bare import requests followed by requests.get(file_url) against graph.txt, with no pyodide_http import anywhere in the file.

Fix

Add pyodide_http.patch_all() to inequality.md before the read at line 251, and add both the import and the call to short_path.md before line 277 — matching the pattern already used in long_run_growth.md and french_rev.md.

Worth knowing

inequality.md:250 reads via media.githubusercontent.com from high_dim_data. That is the LFS media endpoint, and the six high_dim_data datasets have since been folded into data-lectures, so this read is also a migration target. It is a separate change from the shim fix and should not be bundled with it — the shim fix is a one-line correction that can land immediately.

If the qeld package proceeds as planned in QuantEcon/data-lectures#65, importing it will install the shim automatically and both call sites lose the boilerplate. That is some way off, and these should be fixed now regardless.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

[mmcky]

Half of this is now resolved: short_path.md no longer makes a network call at all.

#63 replaced its requests.get of lecture-python-intro's committed graph.txt with a %%file cell that writes the data locally, matching the five sibling repos. import requests is gone from the lecture entirely, so there is nothing left there to shim — the unshimmed-read half of this issue is moot rather than fixed.

Worth recording why that matters beyond tidiness: because short_path had no pyodide_http.patch_all(), that fetch was plausibly already failing for readers. It was impossible to observe at the time, because the cell was nested inside {exercise-start} and never executed in the first place (#64) — so the read never got far enough to fail. Two independent faults on the same line, one masking the other.

inequality.md — which imports pyodide_http but never calls patch_all() — is untouched and remains the live half of this issue.