jackmaney

Yep, this is clearly the superior theme. The text is much more readable.

I fail to see an actual problem with this.

> why is atheism making people worse off?

Care to put forth any evidence that this might possibly be the case?

There are plenty of people who don't affiliate with any religion but who are not, in fact, atheists. Not that it wouldn't surprise me if atheists, as a group, were growing.

So...how is this evidence for a social movement towards atheism? Honest question.

> the move towards atheism

Care to explain that? Atheism may be growing--in fact, Wikipedia gives an upper bound of the US atheist population at ten percent[0]--but I've never seen anything resembling what I would call an actual cultural movement towards atheism.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_atheism#United...

> There'd probably be a higher chance of someone with bad credit running off with the stock.

Do you have anything resembling evidence to back up that assertion?

Here's an idea: turn off ALL notifications by default. Make any notifications opt-in only.

I know that an anecdote is not data, etc, etc, but I can't read that garbage. I may as well be trying to decrypt it.

> At some point in their careers, almost every data scientist has written code to perform a series of steps, and thought, “It would be great if I could build these transformations visually rather than by writing code.”

I have been in a data science career for nearly six years, now, and I have never thought this. Not once. Further, I don't know of a single colleague or associate who has thought such a thing.

I was about to write much the same thing... Last year, I found a hard copy of my dissertation (which I defended in 2004). I skimmed through it and had absolutely no problem whatsoever understanding what I had written 11 years prior. And I've been out of academia since 2008.

Nitpick: The area should be in units of pixels^2. Other than that, this is awesome.

Two important lessons:

1. Coworkers are coworkers and friends are friends, and never should the twain meet.

2. HR does not exist to protect you or provide you with any services. HR exists as a policy-enforcement branch of the company. Period.

The author and I are in very different fields, but this article echoes a lot of the reasons why I left my tenure track position and ultimately ended up in industry.

The final nail in the coffin was an email sent out by some middle-administrator schmuck to all of the faculty, encouraging us to think over the winter break about how to "provide excellent customer service" to our students (or some such horse shit...this was several years ago, so I don't remember the exact words).

The author is a non-tenure track faculty member. Expressing his criticism of his university--not to mention a whole class of similar universities--is taking an enormous risk, as he could be fired (aka his contract won't be renewed) for any reason.

He was even threatened with just that for expressing his complaints in a colloquium:

    I tried to illustrate this old-style understanding for colleagues and 
    administrators at a colloquium at my university a couple of years ago 
    by offering a pictorial representation of the university as I thought 
    it should be. First I drew a very large building named “Students,” 
    then another of comparable size named “Professors,” then a still 
    larger one named “Library,” and finally a tiny shed well off to the 
    side named “Administration.” I wasn’t attempting to insult 
    anyone by this, but simply to make a serious point in a mildly 
    amusing way. In the event, my meaning was not lost on one 
    administrator, who, noting the disparity in proportions and considering 
    it necessary to match wits with me, suggested that come time for the 
    renewal of my contract, I would not be found in any one of my 
    fictitious university buildings. How is that for real university 
    debate? Suggest a deficiency in university governance and it’s a 
    pair of cement galoshes for you.

> Now the writing is on the wall, humanities "uselessness" is almost unanimous. That's a shame, but maybe that causes things to change for once.

The wrong perception of humanities being useless is so embedded into today's culture that it would take a cultural change to fix it. And even changing the culture within a university is prettymuch an impossible task for one person.

You're very welcome.

And ehhh, I've been downvoted and bitched at about evangelizing pyenv before. Just thought I'd preempt that. But yes, it's an amazing piece of software. :)

FYI, I've put together a bash function for my .bash_profile that adds an indicator to my prompt showing the current Python version/virtualenv in use[1]. That's saved me a bit of frustration when going into a directory where a local pyenv version overrides the global version.

[1]: https://github.com/jackmaney/bash-profile/blob/ddb57091aab44...

> And finally...well, I have to admit it, but I use Python like a goddamned moron in that I still don't know how to use virutalenv/venv to do proper dev isolation.

I was the same way for quite a while, until I bumped into pyenv-virtualenv[1]. Just install that plugin, and you can do, eg,

    pyenv virtualenv 3.5.1 my-project

to get a virtual environment called `my-project` based off of Python 3.5.1 (assuming that you've installed 3.5.1 via pyenv, of course). Or, you can just do

    pyenv virtualenv my-project

to make a virtualenv called `my-project` based off of the current version of Python that you're using.

Once you do that, pyenv treats `my-project` just as another installation of Python. In fact, `my-project` will show up in the list of installed versions (`pyenv versions`), and you can switch to it:

    pyenv global my-project

(Or you can switch at the local or shell levels. Whichever.)

And voila! You have your own virtual environment that can contain its own list of libraries.

And no, I'm not a shill for the creator of pyenv, I just really like the software.

[1]: https://github.com/yyuu/pyenv-virtualenv

Yep, on Windows, Anaconda is a godsend.

While there are certainly advantages to Anaconda, I've never encountered any troubles installing Pandas, NumPy, SciPy, or scikit-learn on any OS X or linux system. In my experience, getting GCC up and running is far more of a pain in the ass (and it usually isn't even that bad).

I use pyenv[1] and pyenv-virtualenv[2] to easily keep track of Python versions and virtual environments. I keep one virtual environment for each project I'm working on, and things prettymuch Just Work.

[1]: https://github.com/yyuu/pyenv

[2]: https://github.com/yyuu/pyenv-virtualenv

I wouldn't really trust the "Python 3 Wall Of Superpowers", as it doesn't appear to be anywhere near current. The first listed example of a 3.x incompatible package is requests[1], which is not only compatible with 2.7--3.4[2], but has been 3.x compatible since 2012-01-23[3].

[1]: http://docs.python-requests.org/en/latest/

[2]: http://docs.python-requests.org/en/latest/#feature-support

[3]: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/requests

Some of the first code I ever wrote outside of a classroom was in Mathematica to generate examples that would later fuel the results in a set of two papers (in pure mathematics).

> doesn't MIT require that you at least include the license in any modified or redistributed code?

Yep[1] (emphasis mine):

> Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

> The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

[1]: http://choosealicense.com/licenses/mit/

> Can Science Explains Everything

[cringe cringe twitch]

These things look neat, but wouldn't this be teaching programming at scale? The phrase "learning programming at scale" leads to the idea of someone trying to learn how to program who is also able to repeatedly enlarge the amount of stuff that s/he is able to learn at once. That's...not really what's going on here.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: I'm glad I'm no longer in academia.

This belongs in /r/thathappened

That sounds almost magical. I'd almost give my left hand to have a rule system like that here.

Exactly. One can opt out of literally any interview question by simply ending the interview.

That's a terrible question. You may as well just ask "Hey, can you please slip up and say something incredibly stupid and/or offensive, so that I can have an excuse to end this interview? It'd be great if you could just walk right into this trap that's not-so-cleverly-disguised as a question whose answer isn't even vaguely my business. Thanks!"

EDIT: Oh, and I skimmed further and found this gem:

> I never let people opt-out of the question

What a pile of arrogant crap. You're interviewing a candidate, NOT interrogating a prisoner. Get over yourself.