Hacker News Reader

saammon Ask HN: Self Hosting Your Podcast?

I wrote a bad Python script that I use to encode WAV files, upload to B2, and generate an RSS feed. I host my MP3 files on Backblaze B2 and the RSS feed on GitHub pages. With my usage, I stay in B2's free tier.

saammon Climate models are running red hot, and scientists don’t know why

If you happen to be on Firefox, you can use this extension to get around it:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/temporary-con...

saammon There’s No Such Thing As ‘Ethical A.I.’?

While I agree that most technologies can be used in both ways that are good and those that are evil, some technologies "appear to require, or to be strongly compatible with, particular kinds of political relationships" [0]. I find it reasonable to say that a technology may be more or less moral/ethical depending on what it encourages.

0: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20024652

saammon Ask HN: Ways to use machine learning in banking risk?

Check out this paper for ideas: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1712.05840.pdf

saammon Ask HN: Dataset Cleaning Tips

https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.10811

There's some description in here you may find relevant.

saammon Ask HN: What things have richly rewarded the time invested in mastering them?

Poetry is great! To me, it seems like there should be more software folks interested in it. I definitely see a few parallels.

saammon Ask HN: How do I consciously improve my reading and retention skills?

For retention, I find making cards in Anki to be helpful.

saammon Ask HN: Where can I get a whole project reviewed?

I know of at least one person who offers a code review service (specifically for Python).

saammon Ask HN: How common are sign-on bonuses?

Small sample size, but in Austin I've seen 5k-10k.

saammon The Matrix Calculus You Need for Deep Learning

My ML professor used this book, and I loved it. Some presentations of ML make it seem like a bag of tricks; this feels like the opposite of that.

saammon An Easier Way to Build Alexa Skills Using Python

Yes! I recently adapted a project of mine to be available as an Alexa skill, and it only took ~40 lines to get it working [0].

0: https://github.com/ssaamm/pun-generator/compare/24188aceb3da...

saammon Ask HN: What is your knowledge toolchain in 2018?

Not exactly what you're talking about, but the most important tool I use for ingesting/remembering things is Anki: https://apps.ankiweb.net/

saammon Torus: A Toolkit for Docker-First Data Science

This is interesting! It sounds like this v1 gets your local environment up and running in a Docker container. I maintain something similar for analysts on my team, and we've seen success in terms of decreasing time spent on environment setup.

As another interesting use of Docker in the data space, I'm excited about Pachyderm [0] (though I haven't had the chance to use it in production). In particular, the data provenance story seems compelling.

0: https://github.com/pachyderm/pachyderm

saammon MIT 9.11: The Human Brain (Spring 2018)

Huh, TIL. Thanks!

saammon MIT 9.11: The Human Brain (Spring 2018)

Thank you for this! I used it to make a little script to download audio from each lecture:

  youtube-dl --get-id https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLyGKBDfnk-iAQx4Kw9JeVqspbg77sfAK0 -i > ids.txt
  while read id; do
      youtube-dl -f bestaudio https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=$id
  done < ids.txt

saammon Winds 2.0: It’s Time to Revive RSS

You may also be interested in Kill the Newsletter:

https://www.kill-the-newsletter.com/

(I think a fellow HN user made it? Can't remember)

saammon Ask HN: List of CS interview questions

Maybe this[0]? I'm unaffiliated but have found use in it.

0: https://www.careercup.com/page

saammon Ask HN: Which sites/platforms do you wish had an API?

For #1, it's not an API, but you may find this interesting: https://www.indeed.com/jobtrends/category-trends

saammon Ask HN: To which tech email newsletters do you subscribe?

Somewhat orthogonal, but if you prefer RSS, I highly recommend using this site: https://www.kill-the-newsletter.com/

saammon Ask HN: To which tech email newsletters do you subscribe?

I found this one after watching your talk at PyCon last year. Thank you for writing this!

saammon Ask HN: What's the best source to learn idomatic Python?

Seconding the recommendation on Chapter 3! Well-defined special/dunder/magic methods can make your code way more readable.

saammon The Corrosion of High School Debate

My experience of high school debate was dramatically different from that of the author, though I also did policy + engaged in spreading.

I learned a ton about research, writing, and effective argumentation.

saammon Interactive Vim tutorial

Closest thing I can think of is CodeMirror: https://codemirror.net/demo/vim.html

saammon Show HN: Play rock-paper-scissors against your computer via webcam, neural nets

If you'll suffer a shameless plug, a friend and I made an (imperfect) ASL learning project at TAMUHack one year. If you're interested:

https://github.com/ssaamm/sign-language-tutor

saammon Building a Music Recommender with Deep Learning

For internal/experimental/exploratory use, I like Jupyter [0].

0: https://jupyter.org/

saammon How I Hacked My University's Registration System with Python and Twilio

We thought about doing that but were scared of the repercussions from the school. We felt like it was much easier to argue for notification than for automatic sign-up. Luckily, we didn't get in any trouble, so we didn't have to argue it anyway.

saammon How I Hacked My University's Registration System with Python and Twilio

The nearest thing I can think of is Scrapy (https://scrapy.org/).

For airfare, I think there's already a few players in the "this flight got cheaper" space (Kayak and Hopper come to mind), but they don't have data on some airlines (because of the airlines' ToS IIRC).

saammon How I Hacked My University's Registration System with Python and Twilio

Apologies for the mislead! When I titled this, I imagined talking a lot more about stepping through the registration system in something like mitmproxy to find the exact requests to send, which feels a lot closer to hacking/reverse engineering. I ended up not really talking about that, but neglected to change the title.

saammon How I Hacked My University's Registration System with Python and Twilio

Author here--you're totally right. When we did this for our actual registration site, we spent hours inspecting requests in a proxy[0] to get to ~194 lines of PHP.

0: We used https://www.charlesproxy.com/

saammon Show HN: Monica, an open-source CRM to manage friends and family

I've been using Tinyblu [0] for this, which seems to be simpler/have fewer features.

0: https://tinyblu.com/