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tburmeister

54 karma · joined April 30, 2015

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tburmeister··on Why are so many athletics records falling?
Ethiopians and Kenyans have been dominant in track and field since the 90s, that's not exactly a recent change; both countries, btw, train fairly differently from each other, and I would contend that "gaits" differ far more between individual athletes than they do between continents. The ascendance of Uganda in the past few years has been interesting.
tburmeister··on Why are so many athletics records falling?
The article is specifically about the sport of athletics, better known as track and field in the US; it has nothing to do with basketball.
tburmeister··on I Was the Fastest Girl in America, Until I Joined Nike
Thinner is faster, up to a point, but as noted in the article if you take it too far it leads to injury. I suspect a lot of the grey area stuff NOP was infamous for, i.e. abuse of prescription drugs and therapeutic use exemptions, allowed Salazar to be more successful with this approach with other athletes. For most runners, the short term speed gains of losing weight ultimately do not outweigh the lost training from injury, but if you can get a shady doctor to help with the negative side effects then the calculus changes.

Also, I wouldn't say Salazar is incompetent, but he was supposed to be this distance running genius and it seems more and more like he was no better than the dozens of crappy DI college coaches out there who get a lot of talented athletes, grind them up, and see who survives, leaving a trail of injury and burnout in their wake. Salazar just had access to better talent and drugs.

tburmeister··on The latest trend for tech interviews: Days of unpaid homework
If you currently have a job then you likely can't accept payment without violating your employment contract, so you wind up having to do all this extra work for free anyway.
tburmeister··on C as an intermediate language (2012)
Cython is another Python-like language that gets compiled to C; it's a great tool for getting big performance bumps for very little effort.
tburmeister··on Ask HN: Is your company (job) family friendly?
Maybe more men should consider it, "especially if their [wives] make a living wage."
tburmeister··on Nike’s Vivid Shoes, and the Gray Area of Performance Enhancement
There's a big difference between shoes and blood doping. No athlete should have to jeopardize their health, e.g. death from blood clots, in order to be competitive.

Personally, I draw the line at what's readily available to all competitors without requiring them to compromise their health. So, I have no problem with runners taking moderate doses of caffeine before races - anyone can afford a cup of coffee - and I don't have an issue with shoes that are expensive but within the range prices of high-end running shoes, but I do have a problem with steroids and blood doping.

tburmeister··on An introduction to Tmux
This is the big thing for me. I used to work almost exclusively on a remote dev machine, using my laptop as a terminal, and tmux meant I could pick up in the morning where I left off the day before. Now, I work on a desktop, but I've gotten used to using tmux and using it locally means I can ssh to my work machine from home and, again, pick up where I left off.
tburmeister··on GNU Gneural Network
It doesn't have quite the same feature set, but I wrote a simple, and I think "clean" neural net library for Python but with a pure C engine under the hood - could be pretty easily adapted to use directly from C.

https://github.com/tburmeister/pyneural

tburmeister··on Pyrobuf: A Cython Alternative to Google's Python Protobuf Library
Try now - I just merged in some changes to make it Python 3 compatible.
tburmeister··on Show HN: PyNeural – simple but fast neural network library for Python
I posted this earlier on datatau, but thought I would try a larger audience as well. This is a project I've been working on in my spare time, mostly as a learning exercise for myself. I've been using it with some success on the Kaggle digit recognizer challenge, and from what I can gather from reading the Kaggle forums and some preliminary tests on my own, the performance is pretty good compared to OpenCV and code that other people are writing on their own. Anyway, I would love to get feedback on the code and I thought others might find it fun or useful to play around with.