Hacker News Reader

postgeographicon “Python's batteries are leaking”

Not who you asked, but I work for a large international company, a big 4 professional services firm. I wanted to install anaconda and Jupyter on my machine (data science is not a part of my 'official' job description, but I wanted to see how much of my data exploration workflow I could speed up or automate). I had to go up three separate hierarchy ladders to get sign off. First, my own team, then IT, then our risk and quality team (thanks to our audit practice and a few historical issues with whistleblowers and leaks, the risk guys are pretty much the final arbiter of... Everything)

After about 9 weeks of emails, meetings, and pitches, I finally got Anaconda up and running. A week later, I tried to upgrade the 3rd party packages.. No dice. Blocked by the corporate VPN. I'd need the sign off every time I wanted to `pip upgrade` anything

Needless to say, I do not bother anymore.

postgeographicon How London thieves exploit organisational silos

so where does the line between a crime being small enough not to warrant police attention and being big enough to warrant it get drawn? seems pretty arbitrary to me

postgeographicon Why Germany Still Has So Many Middle-Class Manufacturing Jobs

By ignoring things like this I suppose - https://econoblog101.wordpress.com/2015/09/15/income-inequal...

postgeographicon “Banks are no place for coders”

You've clearly not spent any time in London. Your ignorance is showing.

postgeographicon Uber’s vice president of product and growth Ed Baker has resigned

Information cascade does not necessarily mean no nefarious actor or actors. While I'm not saying there IS a vast conspiracy to take down Uber, I too have felt that there is a concerted push for negative PR on Uber, with the timing of the releases of bad news a bit too neat. Uber's troubles have been on top of the news cycle for a few weeks now for various things.

postgeographicon Game theory in practice (2011)

You need game theory to realise people are shitty?

postgeographicon LastPass Multi-Device Access Is Now Free

Yeah, have we gone from paying for the product to being the product, as the saying goes

postgeographicon Skypeopensource2 – Skype client based on reversing Skype 5.5

That's a pretty bullshit generalisation about Russians. Or as it's. More colloquially known, racist.

postgeographicon Apollo Global is buying Rackspace for $4.3B

Yeah, that's called a buy-and-build strategy, or a bolt-hole strategy. A large number of industries or market segments that are fragmented end up consolidating this way. For example, Lumison is a data center business here in the UK, and they got bought out by Bridgepoint Development Capital. Subsequently BDC and Lumison went on to buy a few other data centers, making one larger data center with the attendant economies of scale