raymondh

7 ms·

1.
by raymondh 4mo ago
In the 1990s, I briefly met Cleve while taking a two-week Matlab course in Natick. During that course that a classmate introduced me to Python, a language where I later became a core developer. Cleve's papers were an inspiration. I soo
2.
by raymondh 2y ago
For those who don't know the name, Tim Peters is the author of "The Zen of Python". He is the one who uniquely captured was Python is all about with this inspirational little poem: The Zen of Python, by Tim Peters
3.
by raymondh 2y ago
The reason Guido didn't want 3.6 to guarantee dict ordering was to protect 3.5 projects from mysteriously failing when using code that implicitly relied on 3.6 behaviors (for example, cutting and pasting a snippet from StackOverflow).
4.
by raymondh 2y ago
Thank you AnandTech. Happy ride in to the sunset.
5.
by raymondh 2y ago
Is there a simple R example for Rule 4?
6.
by raymondh 2y ago
We should probably get rid of that. It is old (predating numpy) and has limited functionality. In almost every case I can think of, you would be better off with numpy.
7.
by raymondh 2y ago
This is an impressive post showing some nice investigative work that isolates a pain point and produces a performant work-around. However, the conclusion is debatable. Not everyone has this problem. Not everyone would benefit from the same
8.
by raymondh 2y ago
We've had to contact the IRS a number of times. It was always difficult to get through. However once we did get through, the representatives were polite, professional, and really seemed to care about achieving case resolution.
9.
by raymondh 2y ago
Programming Pearls, Thinking Forth, The Little Schemer, and SICP
10.
by raymondh 2y ago
As described by Alan Kay, what OOP means is encapsulation, messaging, and late-binding. IIRC the inspiration came from multicellular organisms. A cell "encapsulates" complexity within a cell wall. The organism as a whole works b
11.
by raymondh 2y ago
Your nice work on the JS itertools port has a todo for a "better tee". This was my fault because the old "rough equivalent" code in the Python docs was too obscure and didn't provide a good emulation. Here is an up
12.
by raymondh 2y ago
Perhaps Google's AI included TheOnion in its training data: https://www.theonion.com/geologists-recommend-eating-at-leas...
13.
by raymondh 2y ago
Numeric towers are indeed a sore point. * There are more 64-bit integers than C floats/doubles. But in math, reals are a superset of the integers. * Because floats are rounded, `x < x + 1`, is not an invariant. * The possibility of
14.
by raymondh 2y ago
A lot of classic popular songs also had low information content: https://happyhollyproject.com/2014/04/27/flowcharts-and-song...
15.
by raymondh 3y ago
The Terminal Man by Michael Crichton
16.
Napkin Ring Problem(en.wikipedia.org)
2 points by raymondh 3y ago|0 comments
17.
by raymondh 3y ago
This is a red-herring. In the end, everything is run in machine language which is intrinsically unsafe. But that doesn't matter. High level languages can enforce constraints that eliminate or mitigate common programmer errors for me
18.
Tuple Spaces (Or, Good Ideas Don't Always Win)(software-carpentry.org)
2 points by raymondh 3y ago|0 comments
19.
by raymondh 3y ago
What counts as an innovation is in the eye of the beholder. Mark Rober demonstrated Gemini's creative ability by having it suggest a video, details of contents, and how to produce it. The results were impressive but far from world ch
20.
by raymondh 3y ago
FWIW, there is a recipe for this in the Python docs[0]. It was developed in collaboration with Alan Downey and Tim Peters: from random import Random from math import ldexp class FullRandom(Random): def random(self):
21.
by raymondh 3y ago
Note that this effect varies across builds and versions. For most of Python's history, we could give clear and invariant optimization advice (locals and nonlocals are fastest, global variable access was at least twice as slow, and bui
22.
by raymondh 3y ago
If you repeat the same word, it doesn't count as a rhyme ;-)
23.
by raymondh 3y ago
""" Ceausescu and his wife, Elena, outlawed bridge, popular with the intelligentsia, and shut down clubs where the card game was played. “They were worried that when too many intelligent people got together, it could easily d
24.
by raymondh 3y ago
From the abstract, "We also find evidence of a slow acceleration in the Martian rotation rate, which could be the result of a long-term trend either in the internal dynamics of Mars or in its atmosphere and ice caps."
25.
by raymondh 3y ago
In our case, the main push to accelerate is to get more knowledgeable teachers. While experimenting with number sequences in Excel, our child said, "I found e, 2.718281828". When he went to show off his discovery, his two math tea
26.
by raymondh 3y ago
For those who learn better from videos, here's a 37 minute Pycon 2017 talk that covers all of the major aspects of Python dictionaries including how they became ordered and compacted, how object dictionaries share keys, why full hashes
27.
Mississippi Is Offering Lessons for America on Education(nytimes.com)
4 points by raymondh 3y ago|0 comments
28.
by raymondh 3y ago
> Increasing rollbacks of various right and protections - labor, environmental, consumer - seem to be happening lately. I take issue with the "rights and protections" phrasing being used in the exact opposite sense of what they
29.
by raymondh 3y ago
From one point of view, this isn't a problem at all. If a candidate can use tools to generate, understand, demonstrate, and explain a solution in real time, that is likely what you want them to do on the job as well. Also, it is likel
30.
by raymondh 3y ago
How is charging for a blue checkmark any different from games that sell virtual merchandise for real world money? This is HackerNews. I would expect that more people would be interested on how a company like Twitter can monetize its servic

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