515 karma · joined February 17, 2008
My main project these days: https://togetherjs.com
My homepage: http://ianbicking.org
Blog: http://ianbicking.org/blog/
Projects: http://ianbicking.org/projects.html
A lot of Python in the past, mostly Javascript now.
For some reason I really want to understand what this sentence means. I don't know why it jumped out at me, maybe because it seems both accessible and arcane, I want some path to even just tour the arcane concerns of someone so deep into a (this) particular domain.
Of course it's all multiplication, and all essentially the same thing. I find the grid method the least notation-focused of at least these three, and so I think more accessible to assimilation. Maybe I'm biased, I didn't learn multiplication this way but found myself naturally doing it like this in my head and then was pleasantly surprised to find it had a name. It's also amenable to estimation.
But with a Doctest model you just develop a script, and if you change something rerun the script, starting where you left off (assuming the script reruns – if it doesn't then you probably want to start where it fails). You can extend the script without reloading still, but changing the past requires starting over... but it's just CPU cycles, assuming you aren't doing something computationally expensive. But even if so, you could have a kind of cross-session Pickling memoize function if you don't want to recalculate things.
These reloading tricks are fragile and break in weird ways, like it won't fix badly initialized data, or classes that can't be upgraded because of state changes. It leads ultimately to a distrust of the environment, until you throw your hands up and go back to the old restart-frequently model like everyone else. Recursive reloading certainly isn't new, but it's never satisfying.
Thinking about it more, in a place like New Mexico (and there are many similar states) this means rural voters will be systematically disenfranchised, as they the state ends up being divided into regions around the central city, and in each region the urban area is larger than the rural area. If combined the rural area could be at least a seat of its own, even if more overall seats went to urban/metro districts.
Well... thinking about it, it could also go the other way, depending on what the overall rural/urban divide is – if there is a larger but dispersed non-metro population then it could be the urban population that is lost in the rural population. This might actually be the case in someplace like New Mexico or Idaho.
New Mexico's actual congressional districts look very reasonable: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Mexicos_congressional_distr...
I'm kind of unimpressed. There are mechanisms to remove partisanship and political gerrymandering without making the whole thing into an algorithm.
It uses some random JSON data I found. msgpack is more compact (87% of the JSON representation), though not dramatically so.
json encode: 5.54msec simplejson encode: 8.27msec msgpack encode: 11.4msec json decode: 16.4msec simplejson decode: 4.06msec msgpack decode: 2.84msec
I'm confused about why json is faster at encoding and simplejson is faster at decoding. simplejson is fastest when you combine encoding and decoding.
You keep giving these pundit talking points – the talking points of pundits have been rehashed enough, we shouldn't be using them here, it's not a productive form of discussion. Are we men or are we pundits? I, sir, am a man! ;)
Given a system like that I'd be curious what the numbers might really look like. How high a tax would we need? What would the actual tax burden look like for different amounts of cash-back? Could we replicate something similar to the progressivity we have now?
But there's still distortions. Consider high Shipping & Handling fees – these are often done because S&H is considered a service, and so sales tax is not levied on that portion of the cost. But a $0.01 book with $7 S&H is clearly bullshit. But who is there to call the seller on that bullshit? Why are goods taxed but not services? I've never been clear on that.
By introducing variability of how much the government takes total it adds another question that is being used to persistently distract from the question of progressivity. When people say "the wealthy should bear a larger portion of the burden" a typical response is "we should be spending less on government!" – which is no response at all, just a distraction.
You said: "The notion that taxation should be predicated on whether the government or the person can 'better use' the person's money is damn scary." – which is EXACTLY what I was pointedly NOT asking. The degree of progressivity in a system does not determine whether a person or the government has the person's money, but WHICH people have how much money.
The degree to which taxes are progressive doesn't determine the total tax collected, or the amount the government expends, it determines how that burden is applied to people. What we should really be comparing is: does an individual allocate their first $100,000 of income with any different efficiency than their second, third, or fifteenth $100k of income? If you give $1000 to a person who makes $50,000 a year, and $1000 to someone who makes $1,000,000 a year, who will allocate that money better? I think most of us would feel intuitively that the person making $50,000 would use it "better", but there's fair arguments to the contrary as well (including figuring out what "better" means). But only when you ask that question are you asking about progressive taxation, not just tax burden as a whole.
Just avoid:
- Namespace packages. This is where you have one package that provides, say, mypackageset.thing1, and another package that provides mypackageset.thing2. If you really want to have a "brand" with many packages in it, just name it mypackageset_thing1 and save yourself a headache.
- If you have important non-.py files (e.g., templates) in your package, you'll have to learn package_data (http://docs.python.org/2/distutils/setupscript.html#installi...) and maybe MANIFEST.in. These are annoying, and you won't notice when you install from a checkout or with "pip install -e". You might need to study up more on this thing in particular (or just poke around until it works).
- Some people use requirements.txt instead of install_requires inside setup.py now. I often use both – but with install_requires just for the absolute minimum of what might be required.
(Maybe I'm just bitter because I'll probably never take a Virgin flight due to their route layout. Also I hate SFO.)
Have you seen code that uses .valueOf() for anything good or useful? new String()?
$ makeRequest({
> url: 'http://example.com/endpoint',
> data: 'foo',
> success: Spy('makeRequest', {wait: true}),
> });
makeRequest(...)
Still, supporting CoffeeScript shouldn't be a big task, it would just require abstracting out some of the parsing, and having a way to select the language (probably just another CSS class on elements, and/or the page body). The only parsing doctest really cars about is chunking the text by comment.
In regards to abbreviated examples: you can write your test in one big chunk, and I like to do this when I'm really testing and not explaining – doctest.js is not intended to just be a documentation tool. But if you are composing docs, then doctest will only test things that are explicitly marked to be tested. It's not as strict as Python's doctest, because it's using essentially invisible information to determine what's a test (a CSS class). You can also have it test things that aren't visible in the docs themselves, but are necessary to create a usable environment for the tests.
Of course a lot of things, like makeRequest, are only interesting if you handle the async aspect of the code. Spy() is handy for testing, but will look peculiar in documentation. It occurs to me that for documentation you might want:
makeRequest({
url: 'http://example.com/endpoint',
data: 'foo',
success: function () {
print('I got a response:', this.status);
},
});
// (later) => I got a response: 200
If you could just do:
```javascript;commenttest print(capitalize('some words')); // => Some Words ```
and if javascript;commenttest got translated into <pre class="commenttest">, then you'd be good to go right now, without any special support from doctest. I believe if the element is syntax highlighted that doctest will just ignore (and wipe) that highlighting, but it depends on the details, I've never personally tried it. If you could add multiple classes you could use javascript;commenttest.hidden for setup code that you want to run as part of the tests, but doesn't add to the narrative. (There's a class that makes setup blocks compact, but I suppose I could extend it to do hidden blocks too: http://doctestjs.org/reference.html#compact)
I don't think there's an advantage for doctest to parse the Markdown directly, as opposed to parsing what is rendered. And extracting just the code also seems unnecessary, as it is helpful to see the context of any failures.
The form of his argument only encourages the conflict. He clearly feels contempt towards creationists, and even towards those who sympathize with them. As soon as you've shown contempt you've given up on convincing anyone of anything, and are just cheering on your side.
A serious attempt at promoting evolution would emphasize how you can resolve the tension between the theory of evolution and a strong belief in Christianity and The Bible. (There's no reason to pretend this is a general issue, it's a Christian issue: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Level_of_support_for_evolution#...)
I'm not a Christian, so I can't write something more authentic than what Bill Nye might (though I damn well could write something less offensive). But I can imagine what the intellectual tensions are. I made an attempt (https://plus.google.com/104537541227697934010/posts/TnMt9Wgf...), something like:
To convince someone of evolution, as a Christian, I'd want to emphasize a reverence for the world as God created it, that He teaches us through the world around us, and that learning from and of that world could never be in contradiction with His word, in the Bible or as shown to us through our faith. The world is full of contradictory messages and lessons, we can't always expect to decide that one is right and another is wrong.
I'd want to probe how the person has chosen to resolve the tension between Bible-as-fact and Bible-as-historical-document. For example, the Bible in many places talks freely and without condemnation about slavery, and clearly this does not fit with a modern understanding of Christian morality. I would hope that the person has seriously considered this problem and come to a resolution. I would hope to find a way to fit evolution, and ongoing scientific discovery in general, into that intellectual template.
Some Creationists might claim, for instance, that something as complicated as the eye could not be made through the incremental changes of evolution – it had to be designed. But this is a terribly limited notion of God. Could not God create a mechanism that would lead to the design of His choosing? Is there a mechanism so complicated that He could not conceive of it and create it?
There is a story of creation in the Bible. It is not a recipe of how to create a world. It is a message given to us to explain the world, a world that we cannot ever fully know. We've found tensions in that story. Consider for instance dinosaur fossils. Some people have considered this and read Genesis, and decided that dinosaurs must have lived in the Garden Of Eden, or been wiped out by the Great Flood. Does the Bible say this? No. There is more in the world than is in the Bible. Does the Bible talk of electricity, or about germs? No. Would we try to create a Biblical basis for this phenomena? No. The Bible covers the entirety of the creation of the Earth in one chapter, would we expect it to be comprehensive? It is our burden to resolve the world we see with the Bible as written. Some decide to ignore the world. This is a lazy approach, God did not give us the world in all its fullness just for us to ignore it.