This will obviously leave me continuously trying to access hacker news while preventing me from doing so. My continued attempts will block all other operations

This will obviously leave me continuously trying to access hacker news while preventing me from doing so. My continued attempts will block all other operations [i.e. work] hence creating a race condition. Far preferable is the event-driven technique whereby I make a cursory attempt at doing some real stuff until the HN bot tweets something of fleeting interest, at which point I defer said real stuff to a background thread to be completed in an asynchronous fashion.