cessor

You are right, feedback should contain constructive comments, but I couldn't be bothered to go into further details when I wrote my response. Here is a short video that I made showing what it really sounds like on my machine:

https://vimeo.com/97857232

I can't affort to "nerd into" the actual problem right now. Hence the whitty and non constructive comment. Apologies.

I checked out the solution on github, but my results were not like advertised in the video. On my laptop it sounded like a dying cat of some sort.

I am not sure there is a generic answer to your inquiry. If you want to understand python itself you would be best off checking out the source code, building it yourself and then try to change some language features for fun.

Other than that I'd recommend that you find a domain you are particularily interested in and get some books on the specific aspects of that, for example Python for Data Analysis. http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920023784.do

This allows you to focus on what to do with python and the eco system of frameworks and so on.

If you want to learn how to use Python effectively, I believe you should decide what domain to apply it in. Python is no end in itself, as is the case with most other tools...

I was confused by this, too. Also there are absolutely no imports. This leaves me really confused, wondering why why why anyone would ever do such a thing.

I have two benevolent, understanding and sympathetic explanations: The author is from yesteryear and hasn't worked with other people in a while.

The other one is: He is a genious hacker and knows how to social engineer most of hn. Since Most links point to the same rtf document it might just be a way to spread a very delicate RTF reader exploit..

Let's ask this question in a more general fashion...

I believe I share this view on maths and cs. There appears to be a gap between computer science and software-making (writing, coding, engineering, "bricklaying", "applied cs"). The first thing is academic and scientific, the second is a craft. I know educated computer scientists who couldn't program to save their mothers and I know programmers in the industry who never went to CS class and taught themselves, and they keep reinventing the wheel over and over again (poorly). I believe these are different disciplines, although they are related. The academic part surely benefits from understanding maths, but for the "making" part, where people write rails apps, rest apis or websphere portlets, these skills aren't necessary (although I'd say one always benefits from deeper knowledge).

I am making the same experience in another field: Psychology. Most of my costudents wish to become Psychotherapists. Yet the bachelors degree is mostly limited to scientific examinations of the field. There is a gap between "psycho-science" and psychotherapy as well. I believe one can become a very good, practical, experienced and effective therapist without reading hundreds of papers from all different fields such as social, cognitive, work. Instead they could specialize in the things that require treatment such as depression etc. Again, knowing the science behind the practical stuff might help a therapist to gather deeper insights, but aren't always necessary.

The seats to study Psychology in Germany are scarse and limited to students with the very best grades. Most students appear to get very bored by the scientific aspects but have to go through the whole system in order to get a degree, which is required if you wish to work as a therapist. Therefore they keep blocking the spaces for people who are genuinely interested in the scientific aspects.

There - at what point in time may a practical discipline emancipate itself from its scientific origin, thus freeing up resources and gaining through specialization? Should programmers really have to study cs, or whould a new "software crafting" subject be sensible?

I wonder if the process can be improved by using long exposure pictures. You might know the effect from long exposures at night: the lights of the cars are in the frame, but the cars themselves have vanished. During daylight a similar effect could be achieved - apply a strong neutral density filter to the lens, so that the exposure can be increased to a couple of minutes maybe. The moving people, cars and so on are not still enough to make the sensor react.

I was astonished when I saw this video (at approx 4:57 minutes in) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T24_uq0AY6o where the stream of people has almost vanished.

I wonder if the results could be the same but with less data, when you just take a couple of long exposures and merge them, removing all things that are too soft (-> movements) in the process.

However this is a really cool idea for a photo project :)

There is a nice book by Terence Parr on "The Pragmatic Bookshelf" called "Language Implementation Patterns". I found this to be a perfect introduction to compilers with a very practical point of view. Rather than talking about grammars for ages he dives right into some (java) code and shows you what problems come up when parsing code and how compilers solve them in different cases. I followed along in python and managed to write my own c-like compiler with it. I believe it is a perfect introduction for students that shows them that writing compilers is not dry, theoretical and boring, but interesting and fundamentally effectful. Terrence is by the way the author of Antlr (reference just for his street cred)

You are absolutely right, I didn't think about this when I wrote my comment. LOC is in itself a very poor metric, therefore "Changed LOC" doesn't improve any interpretation. Including the number and sizes of repos would be better, since LOC pushes verbose languages. Java and C# code usually features a lot of empty or hollow lines (in C# for example, one opens the curly brace for a function in a new line).

I mean, yeah, most of the comments indicate that we agree that this kind of graph or "false statistic" is flawed.

But can we find any value in it? How do we interpret this graph, despite its basic problems? What good stuff can we do with it?

I feel that these popularity indices are pretty flawed and most often used as arguments under a confirmation bias. Defining "Popularity" is no good measure in my opinion. This graph just shows that with many lines changed many questions arise, it does not say whether people enjoy doing so. I would be much more interested in spots like "Logos" in the bottom right - 160 Mio Lines changed, only 38 questions of StackOverflow. So what does that mean? Is everything about the language crystal clear? Beat that, JavaScript.

Github is a reliable source but I am not sure whether it is representative. At least it appears to be very popular with web folk. Other sources are missing such as bitbucket, especially since it allows for free of charge private repositories. Like this, the only thing this says is that github use correlates with the lines of JavaScript. Not sure whether this is a good measure for popularity. Much like a kid in kindergarten, who shows up every day and talks to everyone. Yes, his presence correlates with the presence of others, but what if he is just a jerk and nobody really likes him?

Took me a while to thing about it! True dat :D

Around agile software development, since lean as the "Toyota Way" originated from Japan, a lot of Japan's folklore diffuses into modern agile dev- lingo, such as Kanban, Kata, Dojo, Kaizen. I found another term that I liked:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsujigiri

In my mind this is isomorphic to the metaphor of the hammer. A samurai with a new sword will go out and cut up the first person he sees.

This is a cautionary tale, you might end up hurting somebody. If, for example you get a new katana(e.g. python decorators) you might decorate everything that looks like a function, but you would actually suffer casualties in readability and structure; debugging becomes a mess. Therefore you should also understand when and who needs to be cut up.

I like the "free" style of the article. Here is another conclusion: In my professional life I have heard many, many excuses in the name of performance. "We don't need the third normal form, after all, normalized databases are less performant, because of the joins". Optimizing for performance should not mean to make it just as fast as it could possibly run, but to make it just fast enough.

Julia's article shows a good example for this. Of course, the goal appears to generate a feeling of what tends to make a program fast and slow and get a feeling for how slow it will be or how fast it can get; yet I'd like to point out that this...

https://github.com/jvns/howcomputer/blob/master/bytesum_intr...

... might be 0.1 Seconds faster than the original code when started as "already loaded into ram" which she claims runs at 0.6 seconds. Yet this last piece of code is way more complicated and hard to read. Code like this

Line 11: __m128i vk0 = _mm_set1_epi8(0);

might be idiomatic, fast and give you a great sense of mastery, but you can't even pronounce it and it it's purpose does not become clear in any way.

Writing the code this way may make it faster, but that makes it 1000x harder to maintain. I'd rather sacrifice 0.1 seconds running time and improve the development time by 3 days instead.

Getting feedback on an application would be really valuable. My girlfriend got rejected by an acting college in London just last week - they didn't tell her why or how she could improve. She was really disappointed. Everytime I had an interview and was rejected I was told the reason why and got a suggestion where to improve. Some people actually told me to go look somewhere else and mentioned places, companies and people where I could offer my services instead. I value this kind of feedback in general, even though I have no idea who these Andreessen people are.

I'd like to stress what the article says about the difference to other caffeinated drinks. I drink coffee a lot, since it is more easily available, but I prefer club mate if I can get some. For work it is much better than coffee. I tend to get very shaky and restless from coffee, my leg will start bouncing after a lot of programming (i.e. concentrated work periods in front of a computer). With mate the caffeine rush is much better, I stay more focussed and can concentrate more easily. I am not as restless. Yet it is possible to overdose. One bottle can last for hours, I bet the guy in the article could look through time after 10 bottles a day. If you can get it, try it!

Thanks, I'll give it a read! I don't have a definite stance on the topic but I am aware that a lot of people are making a lot of points on this - indeed - very philosophical topic. I often lean back and enjoy the discourse, it is very good entertainment :) I am far away from pointing it out as fruitless but I can definitely understand why many cog-sci folk would thinks so (often depending on their background, really). I particularly liked what Tim van Gelder wrote on dynamicism, although I don't agree with it and he appears to have a poor view on the connectionist perspective.

In cognitive sciences there is a dispute about the nature of cognition and what scientific tools to apply. Some say cognition is computation, others say its just behavior of a dynamic or connectionist system. A good sumary of aspects can be found in Fresco, Nir, 2012 - The explanatory Role of Computation in Cognitive Science, Minds & Machines, 22, 353-380.

The discussion is quite interesting, because computation is very hard to define. Understanding what makes a system compute can yield useful insight for understanding cognition.

Thank you for your clarification. Yet I wish more app creators would understand how I feel about these things (others might think so too):

You don't ever need to contact me unless it is for confirming accounts, which you don't have to, because I just oauth-handled you one. Username collisions could be handled by suggesting mangled or decorated names but aren't really the issue here. I am way more concerned about my email address.

It is not to be treated as a commodity and I hate the follow-up emails that I immediately receive, each and every one of them.

I understand the concerns that cause this behavior and believe it can be quite hard on today's market, so "hooking" in users by getting their email address might seem necessary. Yet I feel strongly about the whole thing. I don't want to give out email addresses and oauth is an appropriate way of handling identity and access. Not only is asking for an address redundant but it's encroaching. Maybe without this barrier you could improve the bounce rate.

I can't be the only one who gets annoyed by the following: I wish to try services and tools, for example the disqus commenting function under some blogs or the mentioned IDES. When I click on the "Signup with..." button for an oauth access via twitter, facebook or, in this case github the software will asks me to create a username, password or email address. Then what is the point of oauthing in the first place? This leaves me baffled and angry and I immediately lose interest.

Oh, good. Vic, please make sure that a) you don't miss the door and b) you take away the comment function of youtube with you.

Thanks for pointing it out, all the fun and irony aside I bet someone might not get it, so I think we should be responsible and make it explicit that you should never, EVER post your private key anywhere. If you click "Check" it says:

"Why on earth would you post it here? Now it's surely not."

SERIOUSLY. THIS IS A JOKE. DONT POST YOUR PRIVATE KEY ANYWHERE.

Love this guy :D

http://privatekeycheck.com/no/

In my opinion there is just no good use for Comic Sans, except for speech bubbles in a comic (and even for that there are better fonts).

Important memo or note at a pediatric ward of a hospital? Well, you are still communicating with adults, so you don't need to use a "childish" font. Funeral? Nope. Childs Birthday? Nope.

I find the qualification of "appropriate for the situation" somewhat disturbing in the example of comic sans. Just like wearing a clown costume to a job interview is hardly ever appropriate (except when you are applying for a job as a clown, then it could bear bonus points for bringing your own).

That is true, it all leaves a certain aftertaste. I am not sure what to make of all this.

A German saying goes like this: "The wiser mind gives in". But sometimes, that might leave an area ruled by idiots. So yeah, we (a hypothetical "us") won for accepting gay marriage but became bullies in the process.

People change. I believe that he could be a good person in a role for Mozilla, despite being against gay marriage. The fact that he steps back from this important role both shows that either Mozilla or Brendan himself are sensitive to the topic. I would like to believe that Brendan has changed (some people tend to do that over the years) and resings as a sign of admitting that he was wrong about the gay marriage thing. This makes the whole situation kind of paradox - him stepping back indicates a kind of sensitivity that I would like in a leader for an organisation like this.

I strongly disagree with the article. The engineer (in the video) shows good skills in communicating with the other people and takes their obviously silly requests seriously. At one point he has to explain that geometry itself is rendering the request impossible. Many problems could be resolved if businesspeople were forced to understand some technical aspects of what they are in control of, rather than forcing engineers to dumb-down complex technical solutions for people who don't really care what is behind it.

Being a software developer in an enterprise is often like being Top Gear's James May when he has to explain something to Jeremy.

This might me really nerdy but the name reminds me of the Farscape Episode "DNA Mad Scientist" (1x9 or so). A lab rat with increased intelligence enslaves the original scientific staff, and keeps the original chief scientist as an assistant, called... wait for it... "Cornata".

This is a very good question and it is a hard one. I tend to have a standard set of problems that I use to take my first steps with a language.

A very simplistic thing to do is to generate a "signature survey": http://c2.com/doc/SignatureSurvey/

This generates a simple metric over c-type language code and includes walking a project folder structure and print out all {} and ; (blocks and statements) to get an overview over the complexity of the project.

Another one is "Folder Cleanup". I am a compulsive (Windows-) desktop hoarder. After a while my desktop gets so crowded with symbols that I move them into a certain folder, which I usually name after German dumpsites for nuclear waste. The script sorts files by their types and puts them into certain folders.

This one helps one to explore basic syntax, code structuring, modularity, fs access, working with data structures (recursive descent into dir trees), blacklisting of certain filetypes and so on.

These are very simple generic problems that one can do that in any language; it helps to compare the learing effort for the language and its syntactic and semantic power, for it is a very controlled, well understood problem. Beats hello world, but I am aware that these are not specific to show off what "side" a language "is on".

With python anything will do, but writing a webserver in r can be quite tedious I believe. If a langauge claims to be a general purpose language (as do f# and haskell) the aforementioned problem could do the trick.

I totally agree with you. April 1st renders my local, personal experience of the internet completely useless. This goes on almost for a week, because people will repost the clever 'jokes' for a couple of days. April fools day on the internet is, as it feels to me, a Marketing Department Slack-Off Day. Every company feels they have to contribute, because the others are doing it.

Some tech sites will do the same with ridiculous stuff. 04/1/14: Python 2.8 to lose the GIL. HAHAHAHAHAHA DO YOU THINK THIS IS FUNNY?! It doesn't even make sense.

I would like to point out that this issue extends to other, especially North American happenings. As soon as Haloween, the super bowl or "the Oscars" are up, the internet becomes almost unusable because all the sites with user-"shared" (let's be honest, it is rarely really generated by them) content have no other topics and half of the news sites appear to have nothing better to do then to comment on the obvious real life events; even worse, the European news sites will start commenting on the American stuff as well. It is times like this when I get out old 90's PC Single Player games just to be away from people for a while.

I have the dumbest sense of humor and will laugh about almost anything but April 1st is just gear-grindingly annoying...

I tried it with 10 writings from documents, books, printed ads, papers and so on. Even crystal clear text with only one character yielded only /"////,,,// gibberish. I found that it doesn't work very well...