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Just going to plug a book here that was an awesome read in my undergrad on that topic, and the history of quant finance over the 20th / early 21st centuries: https://byjustinfox.com/myth-of-the-rational-market/

Sorry about missing you were down under, I only checked after hitting submit. And thanks for clarifying, I had no idea Sweden moved to isolate nursing homes.

That said, I'm still hesitant to equate the risk level to the elderly from community-wide lockdown measures with isolation policies restricted to nursing homes. I don't have any data to support it, but I can't help but assume that lower community transmission overall correlates with fewer transmission vectors into nursing homes. Supposedly this would turn up in the proportion of those in nursing homes that's suffered coronavirus. In principle I agree with you; the hotel scandals in Vic bear that out, ironically, and sadly. But the difference in magnitude has to count for something, as bad as any toll is.

True on your first point, but I imagine GP was considering a case where you've already got a backend in Python.

As an Australian, your second point is hard to vindicate. The total death toll in Australia is 106 as of one hour ago as reported by the state-funded ABC[0].

While it's true that just one of those was a person under the age of fifty[1], and unfortunately I live in the _one_ state that's experiencing a second wave via community transmission and sadly expect these numbers to grow, this isn't comparable with the numbers seen coming out of Sweden.

In fact, it's an order of magnitude lower, for a country with more than double Sweden's population, so to suggest that at-risk groups are experiencing a similar level of risk is baffling to me.

[0]: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-07-06/coronavirus-australia... [1]: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-03-17/coronavirus-cases-dat...

I can tell a story. I used to work for a HVAC installation company, pretty small in terms of staff but we subcontracted a lot. Initially brought on as a mechanical engineering intern, but moved on to sales engineering when I found an interesting statistical relationship.

A large factor in quotes to clients was the underlying cost of air conditioning equipment in our niche, and often a game of sales intel was played between suppliers and competing contractors (like us) for a given job site. Favorites were picked, and we could get royally screwed in a quote, losing the sale to the end-customer.

Fortunately, we had years of purchasing information. It turns out that as varied as air conditioners are across brands and technical dimensions, when you have years of accounts' line items and unused quotes, you don't get a dimensionality issue. Since we operated in a clear-cut niche, this was especially true. We could forecast, within a margin of error of two per cent, exactly what any of our suppliers would quote us (or our competitors!) for a job long before they could turn it around. Huge strategic advantage.

This was the watershed moment for me when I realized even basic multiple linear regression was a scarily powerful tool when used correctly.

Consider adding a logarithmic y-axis to each graph, but otherwise, nice presentation!

Edit: also, perhaps y-axes of the form "Thousands of X", then increments can show "200, 400, 600..." and so on. Simpler to digest when lots of zeroes come into play, at least for me.

Great point, and I think this is a next step for me. For what it's worth, this was to teach myself React and Redux and took a couple of nights of work. I was curious about ways to keep the canvas element fundamentally decoupled from the algorithm itself, which allows a couple of benefits out of the box. For example, varying the randomness or changing the color map mid-calculation, I kind of got 'for free', thanks to React re-rendering the canvas every time the algorithm is stepped through or the controls are changed.

It's also worth noting that the algorithm's speed here is tied to (I believe?) your monitor's refresh rate, since it's using requestAnimationFrame to loop without blocking the main thread entirely. I'd briefly considered a "complete" button which would run the whole thing in one go and render once, and that would enable reviewing for performance optimisation without hanging the page. But... I got too excited and wanted to share it first.

Effectively, yes. It's a multiplier for the random displacement that's calculated for a point in the grid as part of the algorithm, which is added to the mean of the adjacent (diamond- or square-wise) points.

Agreed. There's not much that will bake freshly learned theory into your brain more than realising just how far it could have taken you in hindsight. Over time, this starts to develop into foresight.

Or if you're feeling risque, two connections to the same tmux session.

Understanding an AWS stack for real time stream processing would be fantastic.

This is fantastic, having looked through Martin's blog before and found some gems that really leveled up my process on managing code.

As an aside - beyond the coming installments of this series, can anyone recommend sources for setting up CI locally, or for small teams? DDG is giving me pages on GitHub Actions, Atlassian, and DigitalOcean blogs, but these are all process or product specific.

Hi all, thought I'd bite the bullet and link a blog post to HN for the first time. Any feedback would be extremely appreciated; looking to learn and grow.

Let me preface everything I'm about to ask with the fact that I only have one vinyl, so take it with a grain of salt, but I'm curious:

I always figured that the lure of vinyl music was the physical possession, and as someone once described to me the "richness" of analog sound. If your app lets someone preview a record, but really proxies it with digital sound, it seems like it defeats that purpose. Is that the case, and if so, where's the value add?

As an undergrad (I'm going to go ahead and assume that there aren't many here, proportionally) I primarily track my studies, since my manager tracks my efforts at work, and I have apps to handle tracking my progress in the gym.

So the conscious "tracking" boils down to maintaining a spreadsheet, with each university subject as its own sheet. My uni forces unit coordinators to publish a guide at the beginning of the semester with all of the structure therein; when assessments are going to be due, how they're expected to be handed in, what the weekly schedule is, what marking criteria there will be, et cetera.

This makes it really easy to set that up as a simple checklist - I just make a table for each subject's sheet, with the columns as regularly occurring tasks (e.g.: submitting worksheet problems) and the rows as weeks. Actually I just used it today to see what was slipping through the cracks, since this past week has been heavy in terms of assignments and the week-to-week busywork fell by the wayside.

Although when it comes to the quality of the work, that's more of maintaining the right perspective and frame of mind moving into it. I can't put a number on how many problems I should solve, for example, but I can qualitatively picture the fluency in expression and recall I'll have when I'm successfully answering those problems. That image in my mind helps me motivate myself way more, and it keeps me sharp.

I think it's safe to say these are concepts best expressed via charts for the author.

Sarcasm aside, this is a great opportunity to bring up the work of Bret Victor again. Specifically, pushing the boundaries of how we're communicating fundamental concepts with intelligent design - it was a real eye opener for me seeing ideas that were on the verge of nonsensical in a medium (say, English) expressed effortlessly in another. I know it comes up here often but frankly it's something that everyone should be aware of.