TimSAstro

Hi, HN!

Author here. A friend mentioned this was on the front page so I wanted to stop by and make explicit that this advice is OUT OF DATE as far as I'm concerned. It's way too much hassle (I work in a much larger team now than I did then!) and doesn't play well with rebase etc.

These days I either recommend the jupytext approach (not tried it but seems sensible) or personally I just use Sphinx-gallery.

Advantages:

* Plain python files play well with IDE refactoring, Black formatter, etc etc.

* You now have a readymade 'tutorial' page for your docs.

* Files are run with every docs build, so you can configure things to alert you when they're broken.

Disadvantages:

* You end up editing a throwaway notebook file. If you forget to copy-paste your edits back to the source, and rebuild, you have lost your edits. However, this forces me to keep the 'temporary, exploratory' nature at the front of my mind and not allow the notebook code to grow too large before performing some clean-up.

Things are changing, slowly but surely. Those of you interested in this sort of work should check out http://rse.ac.uk/, and also https://software-carpentry.org/ (Run a workshop! Improve the software environment around you!)

Very Von Neuman! http://www.primepuzzle.com/leeslightest/howfar.html

This is something I've been giving some thought to recently. I came to the conclusion that the best way to go currently is git-clean filters built using jq. It's still a bit hacky though. Gentle write-up here: http://timstaley.co.uk/posts/making-git-and-jupyter-notebook...

Have you tried turning on pipelining in ansible.cfg? Details here: http://docs.ansible.com/ansible/intro_configuration.html#pip...

See also (if you're happy working in Python): https://flask-restless.readthedocs.org/

I call Poe's law!

While I see what you're saying, I doubt you would claim to 'use' assembly when writing a C++ codebase - because (unless you're doing very low-level hand optimizations of the kind that get ever rarer), someone else has done the hard work of creating a compiler to do the translation for you. Same thing with NumPy et al, except one level higher up the abstraction stack.

Interesting dilemma. I had assumed that re-writing in another language basically meant you were copyright free (as long as you're not literally transcribing or automatically translating), but it appears it's not that simple: http://imranontech.com/2006/12/04/are-algorithms-copyrightab...

It'll be a bit more expensive than your local store, but you could try ordering (decaf) beans online. Weirdly this seems to be a much bigger thing over here in the UK, but I did find this: http://dailygrind.com/index.php?cPath=22_27

tl;dr: A competitor to Virgin Galactic (space tourism) using what appears to be a more traditional booster rocket / parachute pod arrangement - except that the booster rocket self-lands after separation. Interesting to see another competitor in the space industry!

I disagree about this being worse for beginners - if we're teaching a new programmer about functions, surely a basic print function is a great introduction? Whereas before it was a one-off special case.

'Deep Six' (short story anthology) and 'Wind-up Girl' by Paolo Bacigalupi.

While I'll be interested to see how the blockchain gets exploited for new tech, there are a couple of problems with your statement. First, right now there is a problem with how we generate energy, and a centralized banking system should be a lot more efficient in that regard, for all its other flaws - Bitcoin relies on the calculations being difficult and therefore compute/energy intensive, after all. Second, even if we had perfectly clean energy generation, there is a limit to how much we can use unless we get into really crazy future tech like exhausting energy into space via refrigerant/laser system: see http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2012/04/economist-meets-.... (also the `Sundiver' sci-fi!).

For anyone else who was wondering about their Nalgene, they're BPS free, apparently: http://nalgene.com/why-nalgene/ (funny smells aside)

Minor correction on income tax: 0-10K: Untaxed, 10-40K: 20%, 40K+: 40%,

Well, mostly: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/30/science/30manh.html?pagewa...

Interesting, I wondered if anyone else was playing with XFCE config this way. I have the important parts of my .config/xfce4 folder under git and replicated across 3 machines, which a branch for dual-screen tweaks on the desktop, etc. etc. I thought it was so cool that you can just figure this stuff out and get on with it!

Steuard is right, and astronomers have good reasons to expect this behaviour - wave dispersion. The best link I can find from a quick google is this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dispersion_(water_waves) -which refers specifically to dispersion of water (typically, ocean) waves, but the concepts are the same. (Edited to add) We expect dispersion effects in the case of fast radio bursts due to effects of propagation through the interstellar medium. Not my area of expertise, but see http://arxiv.org/abs/1310.8316 if you want a properly referenced starting point.

The raw representation is a somewhat cluttered (to the untrained eye, anyway) json file - especially if you have checkpointed images which are bascially base64 encoded blobs! So as far as I know it's pretty much the web-editor or nothing at the moment. Obviously a JSON-aware plug-in for something like PyDev or Pycharm would be pretty neat, but I think we're a ways off that. See also http://nbdiff.org/ which solves the issue of comparing version-tracked notebooks.

+1 For the Dell Precision, although it's very much a 'portable workstation' rather than a truly mobile laptop. Think of it as something you will use with a docking station in place of a full tower.

Also, you'll probably want to know about this fix: http://askubuntu.com/questions/50491/detect-touchpad-as-touc...

I addition to the psychology of large numbers, there is a technical reason - the Doge network confirms transactions faster. (Arguably not a necessary feature for tipping, but again, the aesthetics are more pleasing.)

Not when they choose a different pseudonym for each site. You only have one real name (usually).

I also found the namespacing to be a bit weird, and it took quite a while to grok the documentation. In case anyone wants a working example, I implemented a wrapper to drop the namespacing (resulting in simple objectify attribute access) for one particular XML schema here: https://github.com/timstaley/voevent-parse/blob/master/voepa...

I'm sorry to be snarky, but this gives me absolutely no concrete guidance on things I can do. It's a platitude.

I don't quite buy your argument - yes these professions may work long days, but generally the upkeep of skills falls into those allotted working hours. Programmers should do this too, when it is helpful to their work. But suggesting that someone should add a whole new project to their resume on the weekend is akin to saying a lawyer should take on a pro-bono case just to buff their CV. If they want to do that, more power to them, but it shouldn't be expected of everyone.

As to academia... don't get me started. That is a strange and unusual profession which lies somewhere between 'hobby as job' and 'slave until you're tenured'.

Well, to name my personal favourites: William Gibson. Neal Stephenson. Paolo Bacigalupi. Ian M. Banks (sadly no longer with us as of late). I'm sure I've missed a great deal more fine authors.

That may be closer than your think (except for the moon bit, space is hard). See LOFAR: http://www.lofar.org/about-lofar/about-lofar "LOFAR is the first telescope of this new sort, using an array of simple omni-directional antennas instead of mechanical signal processing with a dish antenna. The electronic signals from the antennas are digitised, transported to a central digital processor, and combined in software to emulate a conventional antenna. "

Just to throw another point into the discussion - to some extent, brain power is fungible. I say this speaking as someone who has a clear and ongoing choice between academia and industry. However, currently, academia is a world of hurt for most post-docs (several articles on the topic have passed HN, they're out there if you're interested). So, maybe the reason people aren't curing cancer is because curing cancer doesn't pay even half as well as selling ads, and it comes with a whole lot of other issues (short term contracts, high pressure, long hours, etc). I really believe that if there was a higher financial incentive / more funding support for science, we could keep more of the brightest, and things would progress faster. But in a recession, we get austerity measures, and half the kids move into strategy consulting / finance. Anyway, that's another conversation. </rant>

This seems like something of a PR stunt, I would much prefer a serious re-investment in science and acknowledgement that the UK economy could be driven by a knowledge economy. Good recap here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/occams-corner/2013/mar/11/...