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metakermit

236 karma · joined October 13, 2015

Building apps with a kick!

https://punkrockdev.com/

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[ my public key: https://keybase.io/metakermit; my proof: https://keybase.io/metakermit/sigs/6P-L40Lhkwye8k9S3okdQ9_BS1zJjcKaLtpN1ea665I ]

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metakermit··on Podcasts are my new Wikipedia
Another podcast player I quite enjoy discovering new shows is Breaker:

https://www.breaker.audio/

(though it can get a bit unstable at times…)

metakermit··on Bayesian Data Analysis, Third Edition [pdf]
If someone wants a more interactive companion-book targeted more towards Python developers, check out "Probabilistic Programming & Bayesian Methods for Hackers":

http://camdavidsonpilon.github.io/Probabilistic-Programming-...

Relevant quote:

> "I ... read this book ... I like it!" - Andrew Gelman

metakermit··on A guide to freelancing in Finland
Yes, definitely. I started doing something similar (though much more narrow in scope) while I was freelancing in Austria:

https://punkrockdev.com/accounting-austria

Ideally, we would have crowd-sourced instructions and spreadsheets with taxes, pension calculations etc. – like a Wikipedia for entrepreneurs.

metakermit··on Schoolchildren in China work overnight to produce Amazon Alexa devices
"Alexa, how many children worked to build you?" :(
metakermit··on Is a smart electricity tariff worth it?
A 15% cost reduction – not bad.

Possibly interesting – I'm working on developing a similar battery - solar panel off-the-shelf system that would be suited for people who live in cities (e.g. if you want to put a solar panel on your balcony):

https://www.craftstrom.com/

metakermit··on Beware the data science pin factory: The power of the data science generalist
Wow, this is a cool "interactive whitepaper" website :)

https://algorithms-tour.stitchfix.com/

metakermit··on Foundations of Animation
If you’re interested in this topic I really recommend The Animator’s Survival Kit by Richard Williams (the director of animation in Who Framed Roger Rabbit):

https://www.amazon.com/Animators-Survival-Kit-Richard-Willia...

Most of the points from the article seem to be derived from the stuff the book covers in more details.

metakermit··on Responder: A familiar HTTP Service Framework
I suggest you check out this development in Responder then –released in v0.1.0 40 minutes ago :)

https://github.com/kennethreitz/responder/issues/53

I'll continue helping Kenneth with this, cause that's a pain point I also want to solve for myself.

On a related note, I tried to build something similar for Django in the past. (it worked, but it's somewhat under construction again due to changes in Django 2)

https://github.com/metakermit/django-spa

metakermit··on Model-Based Machine Learning Book
Looks really well written – the fun & practical examples look very inviting.
metakermit··on Elsevier demands unacceptable for Germany’s academic community
I hope to see more open source online journals like https://distill.pub/ in the future. With hosting being so cheap (basically free for anything remotely open source), I really don't see a need for private publishing companies.
metakermit··on Why punk keeps connecting people across space and time
A beautiful sentiment :) I believe this should apply to tech as well – it shouldn't be an exclusive field and building logical apps should be simple. That's kind of why I chose to brand my freelance business as Punk Rock Dev.

https://punkrockdev.com/

metakermit··on Show HN: B2blaze – A Backblaze B2 library for Python
That would be great – it's always good to have some competition ;)

Regarding feature requests I'd love to see a well-maintained B2 Django Storage. I'm currently using an existing implementation, but it's not that well maintained:

https://github.com/royendgel/django-backblazeb2-storage

metakermit··on Show HN: B2blaze – A Backblaze B2 library for Python
BTW, the Backblaze team themselves officially support a Python implementation of the API wrapper (the B2Api and Bucket classes):

https://github.com/Backblaze/B2_Command_Line_Tool/blob/maste...

As these are used internally in their CLI, there's probably a higher chance that they'll continue to work in the future.

metakermit··on Ask HN: What is the first thing you implement at a new company?
Lately I've been adding prettier.io to all the new projects I join. Great helping tool :)
metakermit··on The Trouble with D3
If you're looking for a good high-level abstraction, I really recommend the open source Plotly.js library:

https://plot.ly/javascript/

(similar to HighCharts, but without the commercial license mumbo-jumbo)

Yeah, I see D3 itself as more of a tool tailored towards DataVis geeks developing new visualisation methods.

metakermit··on Why undertakers are worried
The Big Lebowski said everything that needs to be said on this topic :)

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vKjBFsyYC0g

metakermit··on Show HN: A site that makes Spotify playlists of bands coming to town
We maaaay have started talking about building an open events API on Reddit… :)

https://www.reddit.com/r/MusicEventsHackers/comments/880nc3/...

metakermit··on Show HN: A site that makes Spotify playlists of bands coming to town
It's a shame you decline any apps with monetisation ideas. I think it would be better to offer a paid API service a la Google APIs than to have so many engineers reinvent the wheel. Oh well, I guess the music industry and logical business models never did go hand in hand :/
metakermit··on Show HN: A site that makes Spotify playlists of bands coming to town
Thanks, yeah I posted it to different music subreddits, so I thought I should try and make it eye-catching :)
metakermit··on Show HN: A site that makes Spotify playlists of bands coming to town
Cool, thanks. Yeah, I work on https://twitter.com/posterbat (real site down momentarily – Facebook broke my scraper :/ )
metakermit··on Show HN: A site that makes Spotify playlists of bands coming to town
I started such a crowdsourcing effort some time ago :)

https://www.reddit.com/r/MusicEventsHackers/comments/87ui5l/...

metakermit··on Show HN: A site that makes Spotify playlists of bands coming to town
OK, I just create that group :)

- on Facebook

https://www.facebook.com/groups/2016318755302445

- and on Reddit

https://www.reddit.com/r/MusicEventsHackers

metakermit··on Show HN: A site that makes Spotify playlists of bands coming to town
Hey, I love this idea and am working on something similar (an alternative events discovery and promotion tool for cities). I see that a lot of you folks here are also working on similar stuff.

How about we chat more about these topics? Integration with APIs like BandsInTown, Facebook, apps like Spotify, SoundCloud, YouTube, music metadata collection from MusicBrainz, Discogs… If these topics sound interesting, join the public group on Facebook I created just now:

https://www.facebook.com/groups/2016318755302445/

or this new subreddit:

https://www.reddit.com/r/MusicEventsHackers

metakermit··on Show HN: A site that makes Spotify playlists of bands coming to town
Yeah, just wanted to ask if you use an API to get events?

I've been working on something in a similar direction for Vienna. Tried to get SongKick API access, but they declined me. I also used BandsInTown on a project, but it's a bit limited. These days I'm just using Facebook Events, which is ok, but not perfect – can't get all the events in a particular city automatically. Managed to manually overcome this though.

But great work! Tried the app out and I really like it. Followed you on Twitter if you want to keep in touch. Would be nice to have some MusicEventsHackers group to discuss these topics :)

metakermit··on Storyboarder: free, cross-platform storyboard tool
Awesome product – really looking forward to playing with this! Love the website copy too :). As I was scrolling through the endless list of cool features, the expected price tag in my head was just rising and when I got to the "Why is Storyboarder free?" had such a good laugh. Kudos!
metakermit··on Kaggle Datasets – Discover and analyze open data
Wonderful, thanks for sharing this! It's useful that the kernels people have submitted are there as well and that there is a HN-style upvoting mechanism.

As an aside – I'm really curious to explore the datasets with "fake" in the title :)

https://www.kaggle.com/datasets?sortBy=relevance&group=publi...

metakermit··on Propel – Machine learning for Javascript
Wonder if JS notebook environments like this one, Observable and runkit.com will eventually all consolidate and (hopefully) integrate with Jupyter Notebook / Lab

https://jupyter.org/

metakermit··on Propel – Machine learning for Javascript
I guess it's still work in progress, but they are probably aiming to achieve something in the direction of the scientific Python stack (i.e. Jupyter, TensorFlow and the like). Maybe starting with a subset of methods useful in ML.

It will be interesting to see how this scientific JS toolchain evolves. Would be fun to get a more feature-complete Propel ML working with Mike Bostock's Observable project:

https://beta.observablehq.com/

metakermit··on Lessons from Optics, the Other Deep Learning
I like the parallel between optical lens systems and deep learning. I'm also kind of disappointed by the "arcane lore" status hyper-parameters have in different ML domains. I think it would be healthier for the community to make it a habit to explicitly document why a certain topology and layer sizes were selected. It's like providing documentation with your open source project – yes, it would be possible for knowledgable people to use it without it, but much more difficult and beginner unfriendly.
metakermit··on The Real Adam Smith
Nice article – gives a bit more background on Smith's ideas and why it's wrong to flag him as an absolute free market advocate.

TL;DR – The invisible hand doesn't symbolise the problem of state intervention, but of state capture (i.e. merchant elites lobbying governments to protect their monopolies). On the other hand, merchant elites are a "necessary evil" and the art of good governance is balancing over- and under-regulating them.

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