danohuiginn

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by danohuiginn 19y ago
They're the best thing since sliced lists. That said, I've started to consciously cut back on my use of list comprehensions. They are powerful, but there's a temptation to cram too much into one line - which makes debugging harder, and redu
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by danohuiginn 19y ago
Unless I'm missing something, they currently aren't letting people create new accounts. So whatever free data they have (and they charge for most things, apparently) is unavailable for now anyway.
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by danohuiginn 19y ago
This is a discussion that always happens, in just about every context. It also depends massively on perspective. Take somebody who codes java and haskell, does database admin and web design, and hacks the linux Kernel: I'd call her a genera
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by danohuiginn 19y ago
nod I've thought about this a fair amount, too. You can do a lot to, say, figure out which pages contain recipes, even identify the structured information like ingredient lists (they're just lists full of foodstuffs and quantities). But I
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by danohuiginn 19y ago
http://theinfo.org/get/data http://www.ckan.net/package/list And Freebase, as mentioned by dood
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by danohuiginn 19y ago
Ben Goldacre's 'bad science' column in the guardian has been going after this for years. It's good, old fashioned campaigning journalism, and after five years might actually be having some effect. As he puts it: 'The very same person who te
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by danohuiginn 19y ago
Not a bad list. Strong Anglo-American bias, and no religious books (both understandable). The 'books that changed your world' feels like a dumping-ground for recent UK bestsellers that'll be forgotten in 50 years (Schott's miscellany; Eats,
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by danohuiginn 19y ago
"things like novels" Only if they're bad novels. When I read (good) novels, I'm constantly trying to slow myself down - to the point of literally mouthing the words or forcing myself to linger five minutes on a page. It takes so much longer
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by danohuiginn 19y ago
Given how many people here are philosophy majors (lots), it can't be an entirely bad thing. And provided you treat it as 'figuring out how to argue rationally about difficult topics' rather than 'being able to namecheck dead philosophers',
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by danohuiginn 19y ago
I always find these articles on mathematics pretty dissatisfying. It's just not possible to describe the math, except through metaphor and hand-waving. It's a pity: things like this look fascinating from the outside, but I have neither the
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by danohuiginn 19y ago
You think? Sounds pretty good to me - provided you're able to listen to your date explaining why s/he _does_ like novels, and to convey something of the joy you get from reading non-fiction. But then I have a fairly naive concept of a date
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by danohuiginn 19y ago
Occam's razor? You mean "entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity"? So <i>every</i> account here is pg?
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by danohuiginn 19y ago
'learn to write' should include 'learn to write simple prose that can be read by non-Native English speakers'. Personally, I find this much harder than writing elegant prose for people who speak English fluently.
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by danohuiginn 19y ago
No, you aren't going to watch some videos and come out of it a skilled python programmer. But lectures can be good as an overview or introduction, or to help getting your head round difficult concepts. For instance Shai Simonson's Theory of
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by danohuiginn 19y ago
Even very simple text classification can get you somewhere. Last year a couple of economists, Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse Shapiro, published a wonderful paper in which they did something similar. Take a look at it: http://home.uchicago.edu/
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by danohuiginn 19y ago
Comments, like anything to do with writing maintainable code, take a while to learn. You only really figure out which comments are useful when you come back to something you wrote a couple of years ago, and try to make sense of it. So, new
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by danohuiginn 19y ago
That's an impressive number of philosophers. And of replies in general; turns out we do all like to talk about ourselves ;) My degree is in sanskrit. Programming was as obvious a detour as any after that, once I figured I wasn't cut out to
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by danohuiginn 19y ago
True or not, this is a persistent rumour, going all the way back to the 60s. Wikipedia, naturally, has the full rundown ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_space_program_conspiracy... ). But in brief: this is just one of a range cosmonaut
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by danohuiginn 19y ago
use beautiful soup (best python scraping system I know of). Maybe combine it with mechanize for navigating between the pages. Don't try to create your own pattern-matching file. Write a generic crawler class, subclass it for each site. In t
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by danohuiginn 19y ago
OK, what am I missing here? What is the advantage of doing this in a poorly-featured browser page rather than a word processor or text editor? The dictionary feature seems to be 'write your own dictionary' - so I'm still going to need an a
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by danohuiginn 19y ago
clearly html links are the wrong way to go around here ;)
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by danohuiginn 19y ago
Googling turns up a few lisp-in-python implementations: <a href=" http://www.biostat.wisc.edu/~annis/creations/PyLisp/ ">Pylisp</a>, <a href=" http://www.xs4all.nl/~yduppen/site/psyche.html ">psyche</a> and