etal

13 ms·

61.
by etal 16y ago
Lee Kuan Yew, modern Singapore's daddy, has spoken and written a lot of interesting things about his philosophy in making the country the way it is (politically and culturally) and how it should relate to the rest of the world. Here's a gre
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by etal 16y ago
Not nearly as many Singaporeans drive, though, and a pretty substantial proportion of the cars on the street are taxis. So, given that taxi drivers are generally good drivers but prone to the occasional stunt to get a passenger somewhere on
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by etal 16y ago
There's one more nice side effect of having ~1 open space on every block -- drivers don't need to circle around the neighborhood multiple times looking for spaces, so the streets clear up a bit.
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by etal 16y ago
I was going to say that Python fixes in programming languages whatever Markdown fixes in other plain-text markup syntaxes. But thinking about it, you're right -- it fixes the tendency of other languages to invent special syntax to represent
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by etal 16y ago
When was this written? I don't see a date, but the phrasing suggests he's discussing slides printed on transparencies, rather than PowerPoint/Keynote/etc. To the author's credit, almost all of this advice is still relevant, but here's a nit
66.
by etal 16y ago
An office can get nearly the same effect by installing an automatic espresso machine someplace not too close to close to the desks. Unlike the default American coffee, it's not quite enough liquid to be worth taking back to your desk; you d
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by etal 16y ago
Somewhat surprisingly, Revolution's enhancements have been packaged for Ubuntu since sometime last year: http://packages.ubuntu.com/karmic/revolution-r So it looks like they're committed to playing well with the open source community. Get
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Open source R in commercial Revolution(theregister.co.uk)
2 points by etal 16y ago|1 comments
69.
by etal 16y ago
I had thought the main difference was indenting with 2 spaces instead of 4, but this style guide says 4 spaces, too. I guess Google deliberately brought themselves in sync with the Python mainstream. This style guide looks like a superset o
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by etal 16y ago
Some text editors have a function for sorting text in-place. Vim does, and I assume Emacs does too. Sorting makes it easier to recognize a common grouping of imports (e.g. some recurring functionality that requires three particular modules)
71.
by etal 16y ago
KDE has had the option of a global menu bar for awhile: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:KDE_Global_menu.png It's not very consistent across applications, though. Hopefully Ubuntu's work here will also help more applications work with ot
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by etal 16y ago
Thanks for that. A project I contribute to recently had a discussion and policy change about what the right threshold is for adding someone to the official list of contributors (which also means a mention in the release notes and blog post
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by etal 16y ago
It's cool how many of these kludges are fixed in more recent Pythons, especially Python 3 (and its features backported to 2.6 and 2.7): Q3. Polymorphism, and the lack of sequence and number types -- there are now abstract base classes for
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by etal 16y ago
Maybe so, but first we need to consider the requirements: - There's a reference implementation, because the whole point is that the asset specification is executable - At least one implementation is open-source, so it can be validated indep
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by etal 16y ago
This viewpoint seems to go against the HN zeitgeist -- a lot of programmers are self-taught, especially in the sciences. Just by necessity, students in molecular biology and genetics learn some scripting and how to push data around on the c
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by etal 16y ago
Slide 6 shows a college-age girl who doesn't match the CS stereotype uploading her brain to the great interbot -- it shows that tech is for everyone, not just unattractive and friendless geeks. Slide 13 compares CS at MIT to steak at a stea
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by etal 17y ago
The organelles they use for anaerobic respiration are found in other unicellular eukaryotes (single-celled organisms that aren't bacteria, like some fungal pathogens). The interesting thing here is that they're multicellular, not that their
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by etal 17y ago
They use hydrogenosomes, or something similar, instead: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogenosome It looks like the metabolic reaction is somewhat similar to the aerobic one used by mitochondria, but uses hydrogen ions instead of oxygen
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by etal 17y ago
I think it's just hydroponics, but DIY with used plastic containers.
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Judge Invalidates Human Gene Patent(nytimes.com)
1 points by etal 17y ago|0 comments
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by etal 17y ago
The definitions are from the Cold War: industrialized capitalist nations in the West, communist nations in the East, and none of the above, where the proxy wars were fought. So the definition is fixed by history, and also somewhat obsolete.
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by etal 17y ago
When I moved to Georgia, I was surprised by how many dialysis clinics there are. Like, half the strip malls in my current town have one. Obesity is the main risk factor for adult-onset diabetes; diabetes and high blood pressure are the main
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by etal 17y ago
Other than Bazaar. But Mercurial might be the only one to support both styles fully -- each changeset gets a hash and also a revision number for the branch.
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by etal 17y ago
It would cause quite the housing/employment bubble at first, and I wouldn't want to be there when the immigration flood stops and the bubble bursts. Slow, incremental changes are easier to adapt to (in a lot of relevant ways), and that's
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by etal 17y ago
Well, depending on what you want from it -- the curses UI and autocomplete implementation are very nice, but ipython has a lot of additional features that bpython isn't interested in implemented. I miss the ?? function_name feature in ipyt
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by etal 17y ago
Word on the street is that the 2to3 tool is magical. Just run the Py2.6 interpreter with the "-3" flag for warnings, fix the warnings, and run the 2to3 tool to get your port.
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by etal 17y ago
Overcoming Bias gets the gist right: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/11/its-news-on-academia-n... The links from that post are other reasonably unemotional commentaries.
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by etal 17y ago
Physics and math software is usually fine, sure, since the performance and reliability of the code matters in the experiments. I mean traditional biology and the less computer-oriented sciences, where they tend to just use scripts to filter
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by etal 17y ago
Only if it's used casually as a generic term. Keeping it uppercased proper noun (Frisbee) respects the trademark as far as the law is concerned, so that was the Associated Press guideline. Adding [TM] lets the owner emphasize that the trade
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by etal 17y ago
Notes: 1. The fudge factor is flat after 1970. The hockey stick we care about is after 1980 or so, sharply increasing in the 1990s and 2000s. 2. The fudge corresponds to problems with recent tree-ring data that were discussed in previousl

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