RobinL

30 ms·

391.
by RobinL 4y ago
Wow - benchmarks forbidden due to licencing arrangements - I didn't realise that's a comment practice. IMO an informed buyer should avoid buying any tool that prohibited benchmarking on this criterion alone! It'd be interest
392.
by RobinL 4y ago
At least in the UK, demand is consistently lower overnight (e.g. see https://grid.iamkate.com/ ) and wind output alone is close to meeting overnight demand on windy nights. So storing large amounts of cheap overnight energy
393.
by RobinL 4y ago
As soon as you recognise the word 'just' is problematic it can be very useful. As in, 'why don't you just'. If you find yourself about to say 'just', it's a great time to pause and think about why the
394.
by RobinL 4y ago
I wonder if anyone has tried to train an AI that can distinguish between meaningless gibberish and something with true information content. Obviously very subjective, but seems like a crucial question going forward. (This is a different pr
395.
by RobinL 4y ago
Worth a read, from a respected US economist, who argues it's all an overreaction. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-09-26/truss-... Not necessarily saying I agree, but useful to have an al
396.
by RobinL 4y ago
I'm having to adjust the energy use for heating fact some of that heat actually goes into hot water. So the calculator is figuring how much heat is needed to heat the water you use for washing, and subtracting that from the total amou
397.
by RobinL 4y ago
Absolutely. For many (perhaps most) people in the rich world, embodied energy in the stuff we buy is our greatest source of energy consumption. Very rough breakdown here: https://www.robinlinacre.com/energy-usage/
398.
by RobinL 4y ago
Lead author here. Feel free to ask any questions! Splink is a tool for deduplicating and linking datasets that lack unique identifiers. For instance, customer data may have been entered multiple times in multiple different computer systems
399.
Show HN: Splink 3 – multi-back end fuzzy record linkage at scale (FOSS/Python)(github.com)
4 points by RobinL 4y ago|1 comments
400.
by RobinL 4y ago
I think many users just see they can execute a query on huge data cheaply and incredibly quickly and are delighted. That's certainly my experience. It's one of the backends available in Splink, our FOSS record linkage software and
401.
by RobinL 4y ago
Good question. First, the SQL involves complex analytical queries on large datasets that need careful pipelining, caching and optimisation. I wasn't sure the extent to which this was possible in sqlalchemy. Second, it was important tha
402.
by RobinL 4y ago
SQLGlot is great. We've used it to extend our FOSS probabilistic data linking library[1] so that it is now capable of executing against a variety of SQL backends (Spark, Presto, DuckDB, Sqlite), significantly widening our potential us
403.
by RobinL 4y ago
I think that's part of the point of his current project: Arrow. Specifically, one of its goals is to implement the low level computations, whilst enabling more competition in the space of data analysis API design.
404.
by RobinL 4y ago
At least in the UK, electricity prices are (very roughly) 4x that of gas, but heat pumps are about 4x as efficient, so the two roughly balance out and you end up with similar heating costs. At least this is how it's worked out in prac
405.
by RobinL 5y ago
I live in the UK. Last September, I bought an air-to-air source heat pump for environmental reasons, to reduce our use of gas for central heating. I did the calculations and knew when we bought it it wouldn't save much money (you get
406.
by RobinL 5y ago
This is great. In terms of real-world uses, I'm currently working on enabling DuckDB as a backend in Splink[1], software for record linkage at scale. Central to the software is an iterative algorithm (Expectation Maximisation) that pe
407.
by RobinL 5y ago
Thanks. That's really helpful. Given what you've said, I think the interactive window can be iPython in VS Code. This may be a relatively recent development. I'm not sure what I did to enable this, but it may be because I ha
408.
by RobinL 5y ago
My default way of running snippets of Python code in VS Code is selecting code, and pressing shift+enter (mac) to execute the Python in an interactive window, which (I think?) is an IPython REPL. Does the PyCharm integration offer something
409.
by RobinL 5y ago
The Tyranny of Merit by Michael J. Sandel. Whether you agree with him or not, it gives you a lot to think about in terms of how to organise society in a way that helps people flourish. Also contains some deep insights into some of society
410.
by RobinL 5y ago
'Seek' by iNaturalist is really good. Point your phone camera at an animal or plant, and it'll try to ID it
411.
by RobinL 5y ago
> I don’t know anyone who runs their heating for shits and giggles. Heating isn't a binary thing - we want people to minimise their use of gas within reason. Most people I know could turn their heating down a couple of degrees and p
412.
by RobinL 5y ago
Most renters still have the option to turn down the thermostat though, so whilst the ability to respond to incentives may be dampened, they should still have an effect. Admittedly, there are some rentals with bills included. But if gas was
413.
by RobinL 5y ago
Does anyone know why quality e-bikes are so hugely expensive? I'd like one, but I wouldn't be comfortable leaving it anywhere due to risk of theft. A good quality ordinary bicycle is around £1,000. Spend much more and maybe it&#
414.
by RobinL 5y ago
Has anyone applied this to video (i.e. apply frame by frame)? A quick Google didn't turn anything up...
415.
by RobinL 5y ago
Pointless in what sense? The very reason I'd like to see it updated is to see whether the conclusions change materially when we take into account technological progress. As far as I understand it, whilst costs may be substantially lowe
416.
by RobinL 5y ago
As a data data scientist, I also found this pretty confusing so I spent some time trying to understanding it better. I wrote it up as a blog post: Demystifying Apache Arrow https://www.robinlinacre.com/demystifying_arrow&#x
417.
by RobinL 5y ago
Yes - the main source is a 2020 EU report. The hyperlink has changed since I published the above, but you can find it here: https://op.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/1f4... If I remember c
418.
by RobinL 5y ago
See my post above - I built a calculator, here: https://www.robinlinacre.com/carbon_electric_car/ The main source is a 2020 EU report. The hyperlink has changed since I published the above, but you can find it here:
419.
by RobinL 5y ago
Not that long. For a fairly typical UK car, it's about 25,000 km (15,000 miles). You can see the calculation and play with the assumptions here: https://www.robinlinacre.com/carbon_electric_car/ The average UK car
420.
by RobinL 5y ago
What set of technologies would be capable of achieving our green targets if we retained gas boilers and shunned nuclear?

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