Hacker News Reader

urschreion When the Revolution Came for Amy Cuddy

Cuddy wasn't fired, or even denied tenure, though it's probably not a coincidence that she's no longer (or not currently) on the tenure track at HBS.

urschreion Go vs. Rust? Choose Go

> If we're talking about strawmen, not sure how you differentiate the one true community from the false community.

I pointed out that there were multiple communities before you did.

> stevekalabnik and pcwalton show up in every Rust discussion for a reason

I agree completely; their calm, constructive engagement with the HN community has been a tremendous help to Rust's adoption.

urschreion Go vs. Rust? Choose Go

> but the spread of "write everything in Rust" or "Rust is the salvation of software" is crazy.

Sorry to burn down your straw man, but the overwhelming majority of "Rust evangelism" points out that Rust is not always the right tool for the job. The intersection between people who write both Rust and Go (for instance) is substantial, and people in the Rust community (more precisely: communities) go to great lengths to point out that it's not an either / or proposition. Most of the RIIR! hyperbole is something that happens to the Rust community, not on its behalf.

> As programmers we do tend to seek the one true language which doesn't really exist.

This seems somewhat at odds with your denunciation, mere sentences ago.

urschreion Humans of Simulated New York: an exploratory comprehensive model of city life

It's not completely fair to judge the quality of this paper by the first few references (8 and 25, in particular), but it does make me extremely dubious. It's not really appropriate to cite Ed Glaeser in an urban modelling paper (or anywhere, really, other than as a cautionary example), and that interpretation of Bettencourt and West won't bear much scrutiny either. I won't address the…contributions (I work in a department that does a lot of urban modelling and ABM – it's cited in the paper – but I'm not a modelling / ABM person myself)

urschreion Java Without If

You've qualified your approach in various ways downthread, but you can avoid ifs far more easily with two simple enums and two match statements. https://github.com/urschrei/rust_fizzbuzz/blob/by_reference/...

urschreion A Look at How Traders and Economists Are Using the Julia Programming Language

I would say they link to LAPACK/BLAS because there's nothing to touch the combination of speed and robustness they provide.

urschreion Python packaging is good now

The last three (cross-platform, Python 2 and Python 3) packages I published to PyPI have been Ctypes/Cython wrappers around Rust binaries. Yes, I'm a sample size of 1, but whatever, never let reality get in the way of your rhetorical blogpost, I suppose.

urschreion PostgreSQL Exercises

SQLAlchemy has, for a while: http://docs.sqlalchemy.org/en/latest/core/tutorial.html#wind...

urschreion How We Built Uber’s Highest Query per Second Service Using Go

Was just looking for an implementation last week. Is it public?

urschreion The anonymous Silicon Valley satire that has stumped tech world insiders

Postmodernism was never alive in the sense to which the parent refers. Now that we've neatly rejected the premise of that comment, let's move on: nobody cares or knows about transmodernism, or any other literary movement (be it imaginary, as — in the case of transmodernism — or otherwise)

The days in which a movement could be dominant are long past us. That's sort of the point.

urschreion Is Dublin Airport tracking passenger phones without their permission?

Considering that they're tracking time spent in queues, and (presumably) also recording video for security purposes, it's possible to associate a MAC address with a person's face, and possibly a person's passport (if they're leaving the arrivals area and passing through passport control). Doesn't this constitute the very conjunction to which the guidance refers?

urschreion A Cartographer Who’s Transforming Map Design

> Matlab is using a roughly perceptually linearly luminant colormap they call Parula now. Good job Matlab.

And Matplotlib is switching to a perceptually-linear default colormap called "viridis" with the 2.0 release (due early this month): http://matplotlib.org/style_changes.html

urschreion Getting started with maps in Python

I'm the author of http://sensitivecities.com/so-youd-like-to-make-a-map-using-... and make maps using Python all the time.

I'd love to switch to Cartopy, but its documentation isn't comprehensive or well-presented. I check back every six months or so, and then forget about it again.

urschreion Fist-sized 11M-to-1 gearbox

The application is obvious: DIY "Machine with Concrete" (http://makezine.com/2012/04/25/arthur-gansons-machine-with-c...) kits. I'm sure Arthur Ganson won't mind.

urschreion PEP 492 – Coroutines with async and await syntax

Considering that Numpy and Scipy are now Py3 compatible, and that there's no actual time constraint, I don't think the idea that it's rosier for others is particularly convincing. And, though neither are perfect, both 2to3 and Six exist to smooth the transition (particularly for smaller scripts and libraries).

urschreion Germany's trade surplus is a problem

Trillion. And those numbers look a little low.

urschreion Submarine Cable Map

Related: Submarine Cable Taps http://lifewinning.com/submarine-cable-taps/ (Source: https://github.com/lifewinning/submarine-cable-taps)

urschreion Visualising London Bikeshare Journeys Using Mapzen's OSRM Instance and Pandas

(Author here) This is sort of a follow-on from the previous Python mapping tutorial (http://sensitivecities.com/so-youd-like-to-make-a-map-using-...). Here, the London Bike Share Network is visualised, and journey times are shown on a histogram with an inset map.

urschreion Tilde.Club: I had a couple drinks and woke up with 1,000 nerds

I'm accepting pull requests for my tilde.club page (http://tilde.club/~urschrei) at https://github.com/urschrei/edit_my_tilde, if anyone wants to put some of their own content / JS /CSS / images up.

A merged request triggers a web hook that pings a heroku app that performs a git pull on tilde.club using Fabric

urschreion Euthanasia Coaster

Oh, you don't need it; your healthcare system is far more effective.

urschreion Flood Beacon warns of danger in real time

This is so low on detail as to be almost content-free, presumably in the spirit of the boondoggle "Flood hackathon" itself. If you're interested in a working application of sensor technology in this area, have a look at the Oxford Flood Network:

http://oxfloodnet.co.uk http://odec.org.uk/occupy-whitespace-the-oxford-flood-networ...

urschreion Brendan Eich Steps Down as Mozilla CEO

Erin's article is the least mob-like thing I can think of:

"I don’t see there’s much to gain by asking Brendan to resign."

And then: "Beyond that I guess I only have one more thing to say, which is to Brendan, who is doubtless also having one of the most challenging weeks of his professional life.

Brendan, I grew up in a very conservative religious home and many of the people I love the most can still be described as very religious and very conservative. I think your views on this issue are wrong, and that your actions have done harm, but I can no more caricature you as a terrible person driven by homophobia and hatred than I can break off relations with my cherished family members because they take actions similar to yours."

Why are you completely mischaracterising her post (and, by extension, her)?

urschreion [dead]

Pandas + Statsmodels for linear regression / GLM / Discrete Choice, ARMA / ARIMA, and various non-parametric ops.

For GIS: Fiona (Python OGR operations); Shapely for geometric object manipulation, analysis, and set-theoretic operations; RasterIO (self-explanatory); Descartes and/or Basemap for drawing; PySAL for spatial analysis.

GeoPandas (an unholy, massively useful combination of most of the above) is also under heavy development.

urschreion Using Django for mostly static sites

Or, indeed, Pelican[1]

[1] http://docs.getpelican.com/en/3.3.0/

urschreion Choosing Go to implement the new GOV.UK router

A government entering a market with an already solved problem is wasteful at best. If they'd contributed time to Nginx or mod_proxy then they would have a net positive social effect.

Is this some sort of Markov-chained free-market/El-Reg-at-its-most-prolix/libertarian experiment in satire? Well played!

urschreion So You'd Like to Make a Map using Python

Yep, I'm very interested in exploring the (Geo)pandas / Vincent / Vega intersection.

urschreion So You'd Like to Make a Map using Python

A) The article's (quite clearly) not geared towards concision.

B) Personally, I'm delighted that there are various ways to do this. It's good for innovation.

urschreion So You'd Like to Make a Map using Python

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_plaque

urschreion So You'd Like to Make a Map using Python

Doing the same thing using Cartopy is next on my list!

urschreion Machine Learning Notes - Linear Regression

Not bad, but I'd rather have seen statsmodels[1] (which is more intuitive to use, and gives you more data, as well as methods for displaying it) than sklearn used for the library. I understand the choice given that it's "machine learning", but as the comments are demonstrating, the distinction's not actually that clear.

[1] http://statsmodels.sourceforge.net/stable/gettingstarted.htm...