GrumpySimon

How's this: https://asmeurer.github.io/python3-presentation/slides.html

There's a great talk on this [1] by Raymond Hettinger where he argues that style guides (e.g. PEP8) are no alternative to thinking hard about the code. Blindly following rules (like a bot would do) just gives a false sense of security that it's good code.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wf-BqAjZb8M

"Jesse" not "Jeese"

Tried pandoc with markdown?

Exactly, and it's not like papers are collections of 'facts' that can be extracted anyway. Papers are long arguments based on some data choices, some analysis choices, and followed by interpretations --- none of which are 'facts', and all of which are debatable.

Having submitted to that journal before, I suspect the authors just ticked a check box that said something like "Relevant ethics approval was obtained for this paper".

Or flip it around - what if the next time Facebook sees you post 5 negative things in a row, it decides to positively skew what it shows you? i.e. trying to cheer up depressed people and stop suicide. It's creepy, eh?

Seconding the pandoc approach. I've written articles in markdown (+citeproc) and then used pandoc to convert to LaTeX or MS Word. Easy, clean and elegant. I think it provides all the things that these people want, without needing to reinvent the wheel or make yet-another-markup language.

Yes, words change meaning, especially when they're imported across language boundaries. Originally mana DID mean something like spiritual power, and is heavily linked to terms for thunder, lightning etc.

Currently it's used in NZ to mean prestige, but it's original sense was much broader - a tree that grows well has mana. Gods have mana. People get mana through (1) their heritage (i.e. high status families have more mana), (2) from other people i.e. we give a sportsperson mana because we respect their ability to kick a ball, and (3) via the group (e.g. if I'm part of a prestigious group, some of thir mana reflects onto me).

There's a good article on it here: http://www.justice.govt.nz/publications/publications-archive...

Absolutely. After messing around with various combinations of rsync/ssh/unison/s3/glacier/etc for a few years, I bit the bullet and paid for Crashplan. It's cheap - the family plan is ~150 USD/year for up to ten computers, unlimited.

It's a lifesaver. I've installed it on my parents/wifes/siblings computers and the piece of mind it gives me is immense - when I get the inevitable phone calls about the damn computer deleting that important file, I can either tell them how to recover it, or do it myself.

Awesome. I'll keep an eye on this, thanks.

I think this is an artefact of how science is taught: In 1953 Watson and Crick published a paper on the structure of DNA. Everyone smiled and nodded.

In my experience it's more like: Most scientists ignored it. Others were interested but had too much teaching to pay attention to it. A few people got pissed off and tried to prove it wrong. A few other people got excited and tried to build on it.

Absolutely. I see peer review as a way of - hopefully - filtering out the most egregious crap, and fixing the worst errors in papers while rounding them off.

I feel all these debates are kind of pointless, because no-one I know treats a published article as gospel. We make up our own minds about the paper.

I agree. Compare what happened in New Zealand when John Key and the National party ousted the long-term Labor government.

Despite some major missteps from Key/National, Labor's spent the last term and a half fighting amongst themselves about who will lead it. There just wasn't the talent or the public respect for the interim leaders that could compete with Key.

My money's on a few Liberal terms in government, I'm afraid. The scary thing is, the second time they get voted in, they'll treat it was a strengthened mandate to do what they want.

Don't go to Australia. We're mostly locking up asylum-seekers on small off-shore island detention centers. This is not a good thing.

Don't forget Bokeh[1] - a replacement for ggplot2

[1] https://github.com/ContinuumIO/Bokeh

The way things are is not necessarily the way things ought to be.

export EDITOR=/usr/bin/nano

I've been doing all my editing in plain text (vim if you must know) for about 6 months. Then I use the wonderful PanDoc [1] to convert it to anything I need (usually PDF, sometimes .docx).

Everything's much simpler and much more peaceful.

[1] http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/

From their website: "Fancy Hands can purchase things for you. Yep, if you ask us to buy toner cartridges, lunch, or tickets, we can handle it.

First off, security is our number one priority with this feature and it's totally baked in from the start. At no point, does your assistant, or anybody else at Fancy Hands have access to your credit card number. Not bad, right? You don't have to worry about a rogue assistant using your credit card information, they'll never know it (plus, we don't have any rogue assistants)."

http://www.fancyhands.com/help/payments

I wasn't aware that Sean Parker was a noted expert on privacy and the implications thereof.

The line graphs are ggplot2 in R (http://ggplot2.org/)

Yes, but calling it all "trolling" lumps it together. In the replies to your comment you can see people equating trolling to everything from slight teasing to serious harassment.

The problem with calling it all "trolling" is that it normalizes the seriously nasty things (e.g. threatening to kill someone's wife) by analogy to the less serious things ("I tease my friends all the time").

At some point, these are very different things. And they need to be treated very differently. Calling them different things (e.g. "harassment" or "hate speech" vs "trolling") helps set up that mental boundary in peoples' minds and helps them demarcate what's right and wrong.

Also known as Tall Poppy Syndrome: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tall_poppy_syndrome

It plays into the "apple-is-dying" schadenfreude that many people seem to like a lot. Apart from that, there's nothing much there beyond a laundry list of computers he's used.

Another important money quote:

    we trimmed out other personal data as, full names, cell     
    numbers, addresses, zipcodes, etc. not all devices have 
    the same amount of personal data linked. some devices
    contained lot of info.

It's elite (or 1337 if you will). It's supposed to sound cool. All the underground computer groups have talked like that since the early warez/cracking/phreaking scene.

I don't think I'd read a trend into that.

Emacs had a short burst of popularity that's reverted to the mean. Vim's had a little uptick in the last few months, but nothing to write home about.

Plot it on a different scale and you'll see that it's just noise; http://hntrends.jerodsanto.net/?q=vim%2C+emacs%2C+python

What are you doing that you need to alter your schema so often?!

No that's just programmer masochism. If a tool is easy to use, then I get whatever I needed it for done, and done quickly. I can then move on to doing more interesting things (e.g. programming) rather than wrestling with the tool.