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piqufoh

1,216 karma · joined November 28, 2012

Code scientist experimenting with latest gojobbies and wotnots.

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/danodonovan; my proof: https://keybase.io/danodonovan/sigs/of9WtG4MLtR30sYvWN3MZ9ECettU0bEpRiJtwqyhSr4 ]

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piqufoh··on Roald Dahl's writing shed (1982) [video]
> You can quote Oscar Wild and say "When I am gone, I hope it will be said: that my sins were scarlet, but my books were read"
piqufoh··on Ask HN: Carrier “lost” my number in a port request
I don't have such a rich source as OP, but Ofcom have some information

https://www.ofcom.org.uk/phones-telecoms-and-internet/inform...

https://www.ofcom.org.uk/phones-telecoms-and-internet/inform...

piqufoh··on Ask HN: How to raise funds for rare disease research?
Hello!

> How to raise funds for rare disease research?

I'm not a marketing expert (though I do work with rare diseases). But a good starting point might be to checkout https://www.rarebeacon.org/ There certainly is help and there are options, but as you understand finding and accessing them isn't always easy. Good luck on your journey

piqufoh··on 1Password Has Raised $620M
Great for 1Password - I love the tool and I'm a strong advocate. But ...

Why such a large round? Why not go for an IPO?

piqufoh··on Yamaha RA-100 Rotating Speaker Organ Amp
But what about how it _sounds_ ?!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mB3RkjgRQ9c

piqufoh··on Why I Use Nim instead of Python for Data Processing
Python sometimes runs slowly, because it's not designed to run fast. It's designed to be readable and easy to write, which in turn makes developing python faster.

It's a compromise, but I always prioritise _my_ time over my computers time, so if I can write something quickly and just go and get a coffee while it runs - I will do that. I won't spend twice as long writing a single-run script just because it'll finish before the kettle has boiled.

piqufoh··on Michelin's airless tires are scheduled for market launch in 2024
Airless tyres for bikes are quite common (our kids bikes are all airless). Here are some grownups airless tyres! https://tannus.co.uk/tyres
piqufoh··on CircleCI outage: Workflows queued and builds not running
> Our teams are continuing to work on a resolution for this incident. In an effort to resolve this incident, our UI may become unavailable. Additionally, any Insights for workflows may show stale data for the duration of this incident.

Sounds pretty serious if the UIs go down too

piqufoh··on Fsspec: Filesystem Interfaces for Python
First: hi, and thanks for all the dask :waves:

Conda - yes, because it has less strict versioning for setuptools based packages. pin-ing versions, no - because you end up with fsspec[s3fs] requiring a version incompatible with any other recent package requiring boto3.

piqufoh··on Fsspec: Filesystem Interfaces for Python
Just a heads up - fsspec has an (optional) dependency on s3fs which has a requirement on aiobotocore, which in turn is currently locked to an ancient boto3 version. Versioning fsspec[s3fs] in projects with other boto3 dependencies is a nightmare.
piqufoh··on Missing Covid-19 test data was caused by the ill-thought-out use of Excel
... Yeah, but if you have an automated script compiling the reports into one file, and you forget to add correct error handling .... you end up with this mess :-(

I suspect that wherever this foul up happened there wasn't someone sitting and clicking through sheets ignoring errors (I hope).

piqufoh··on Car seats as contraception
> saving 57 children in a single year is a lot

Yes, but I think this figure was proposed in order to be contrasted with the reduction of 8,000 births that same year.

piqufoh··on Gpumlib: Open-Source GPU ML Library
In an already crowded space, what does this bring me that other libraries don't?

(Reading between the lines, is it something to do with avoiding NVIDIA CUDA? In which case performance comparisons would be really helpful)

piqufoh··on Windows93
Grah - I had checked for previous posts, but only by pasting the URL into HN search (no hits). I'll try harder next time, apologies for the noise.
piqufoh··on Home Office tells man, 101, his parents must confirm ID
I thought this part was interesting; > It then skipped the face recognition section which is what it does with under-12s

I'm aware that the passport photo conditions for young children are more relaxed (under 1 don't need their eyes open, under 6 don't need a 'neutral' expression) but I didn't expec that they would just skip the whole under-12s photo part.

piqufoh··on Harvesting LinkedIn data for fun and profit
> For the past 15 years I’ve been leading the evolution of startups and enterprises to achieve the highest level of security and compliance.

... serving up over unsecured http

piqufoh··on The First Sony Walkman Was Released 40 Years Ago
I was wondering this too - google found this

> a "hotline" button which activated a small built-in microphone, partially overriding the sound from the cassette, and allowing one user to talk to the other over the music.

and as the other poster remarks

> When the follow-up model, "Walkman II" came out, the "hotline" button was phased out.

Was there ever an actual use case for this, or is it pure gimmick?

piqufoh··on Mathematics all-in-one cheat-sheet (2013) [pdf]
Fermat wrote that in the margin of his book Arithmetica that a proof existed, but there wasn’t space in the margin to write it. It took Wiles 385 years to find a proof, and it won’t fit in a margin. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermat%27s_Last_Theorem

That’s the allure of the theorem; that a simple unknown proof may exist.

piqufoh··on A Sealed Garden That Was Watered Once in 53 Years (2017)
I've heard good things about this company https://botanicalboys.com/
piqufoh··on Name one thing in this photo
I suspect it's been generated from the generator part of a GAN (Generative Adversarial Network); you get two ML algorithms - one to pick real from fake pictures (a classifier) and one to generate fake pictures (the generator) - and then pit them against each other. I wonder if this image is possibly a high quality generative example that the classifier failed to identify as 'fake'.

Also - the generator probably uses an autoencoder to generate the images, which might explain the 'how' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoencoder.

I hope that explanation wasn't too dull!

piqufoh··on Please Don't Say Just Hello In Chat (2013)
Another non-obvious, but good reason for doing this;

Often I get as far as typing out my actual question and I work out what the answer is before hitting send. Sometimes forcing yourself to layout the problem in a structured way helps you understand it and solve it - rubber ducking. If you've not hit send, you can save yourself the embarrassment of

"Hi!", "Hello", "... Oh - never mind, sorry to bother you!"

piqufoh··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (April 2019)
Healx | Scientific Programmer, Full-stack developer | Python, R | Cambridge UK | Full-Time, REMOTE, ONSITE

At Healx, we're finding treatments for the 350 million people that are affected by rare diseases. We are a fast-growing Cambridge UK startup, combining AI, computational biology methods and deep pharmacology expertise to identify existing drugs that may treat rare diseases, enabling treatments to be found at a fraction of the time and cost of traditional drug discovery.

We're looking for a Scientific Programmer and Full-Stack Developer to help develop our data driven drug repurposing workflow. You’ll work closely with people from other disciplines across the company who are passionate about making a difference for rare disease patients, allowing you to see the impact of your work first-hand.

Details at https://healx.io

piqufoh··on A small notebook for a system administrator
Plenty of enterprise grade hardware (I'm looking at Cisco) provide telnet access over a serial interface - which is dead handy when the thing is running but stops responding to SSH connections.
piqufoh··on A small notebook for a system administrator
It's specific (US Letter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_(paper_size) ) - half of which is reasonaby close to A5, but I'm not sure why the "odd" qualifier.
piqufoh··on Inside the booming business of background music
I have the same question, but I'm now wondering if it's just a pun - as in 'booming' music etc.
piqufoh··on Show HN: B2blaze – A Backblaze B2 library for Python
This feels like a handy tool! The first thing I read when opening new code is the test suite - it's worth getting that right at the start. Would you consider deeper unit testing? S3 (and aws) have the indispensible `moto` boto mocks, I think something similar would be dead handy here.
piqufoh··on Ask HN: As a data scientist, what should be in my toolkit in 2018?
> what tools should be in my arsenal

A sound understanding of mathematics, in particular statistics.

It's amazing how many people will talk endlessly about the latest python/R packages (with interactive charting!!!) who can't explain the student's t-test.

piqufoh··on Did Ancient Greeks Sail to Canada?
Further FTA:

> Greek historians and maritime archaeologists are wary, however. Several people contacted for this story say Liritzis’s claims are unfounded, and unlikely at best.

piqufoh··on Under River, Outside Time: The Woolwich Foot Tunnel Anomaly
Ah, but if you work a whole 'tunnel' day every day, you still work the same number of days - you just have extra spare time each day (?!). I expect the delay in re-opening is partially due to confusing scheduling ... ahem
piqufoh··on Ask HN: Is there a fitness wristband that is hackable?
The was the "angel" on indiegogo - but they tanked before delivering any of the "perks" (product). I lost $249 there - still a bit sore!
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