• 2 Posts
  • 94 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • The whitespace doesn’t bother me at all, but holy hell! Any time I’m trying to understand a Python program/library that’s anything above a couple thousand lines of code, I instantly feel a burning hate for dynamic typing.

    I love Python for scripting- in large part because of dynamic typing. IMO it’s just not a language made for building large infrastructures.


  • Sorry, but I honestly don’t get it. I I were to point out the crown jewel of open source, it’s gcc. gcc is the backbone and survival condition for so much modern industry that it’s not even remotely funny.

    Take away gcc, and the world will likely burn for a substantial amount of time until people start making in-house or proprietary alternatives.


  • Being a phd. myself, I would say it seems likely that the person in question wasn’t aware of the research/sweeps that had been done, and was searching through literature with the express purpose of finding out what kind of work had been done on the subject, when they came across this data.

    The way I usually find out about a research campaign is by reading articles from said campaign. It’s very rare that I’ll need to reach out to the authors to ask for more data than what is available in their publications.




  • I’m honestly just thinking that at some point they must have pushed it too far. The media is calling this a “retaliation strike” but fail to mention that the missile exchanges with Iran started when Israel “assassinated” a Hamas top in Iran using a bomb last year, with a bunch of collateral casualties.

    Like… what does it take to convince all their neighbours to start a ground war in Israel, and for the west to simultaneously look the other way? It looks like they’re trying their best to find out.




  • *Breaks the law

    *Is convicted

    *Refuses to pay fines

    *Stops receiving funds

    *shockedpikachu.jpg

    At this point I really can’t understand what is driving Orban anymore. He obviously must have known this would happen, and is likely doing it on purpose so that he can point at the EU as the “bad guy” back home, but like… what does he gain from this? Isn’t it better to just get a shitload of free money from the EU that you can funnel to your friends and family than to not do that? If he legitimately dislikes the EU he can just leave.

    Maybe he’s just sticking around as long as he can grab cash? It kind of seems like he’s going for the “see how far you can push it before you’re kicked out” play. Essentially trying to find out how much of an obstructing, law-breaking, corrupt asshole he has to be before the rest of the EU finally has enough and kicks him out, at which point he can peace out to some safe-haven (I’ve heard there are spare rooms in some of Putins palaces).



  • For someone starting out, I would say that a major advantage of Python over any compiled language is that you can just create a file and start writing/running code. With C++ (which I’m also a heavy user of) you need to get over the hurdle of setting up a build system, which is simple enough when you know it, but can quickly be a high bar for an absolute beginner. That’s before you start looking at things like including/linking other libraries, which in Python is done with a simple import, but where you have to set up your build system properly to get things working in C++.

    Honestly, I’m still kind of confused that the beginner course at my old university still insists on giving out a pre-written makefile and vscode config files for everyone instead of spending the first week just showing people how to actually write and compile hello world using cmake. I remember my major hurdle when leaving that course was that I knew how to write basic C++, I just had no idea how to compile and link it when I could no longer use the makefile that we were explicitly told to never touch…



  • Yes, it’s a field. Specifically, a field containing human-readable information about what is going on in adjacent fields, much like a comment. I see no issue with putting such information in a json file.

    As for “you don’t comment by putting information in variables”: In Python, your objects have the __doc__ attribute, which is specifically used for this purpose.





  • In general I agree: ChatGPT sucks at writing code. However, when I want to throw together some simple stuff in a language I rarely write, I find it can save me quite some time. Typical examples would be something like

    “Write a bash script to rename all the files in the current directory according to <pattern>”, “Give me a regex pattern for <…>”, or “write a JavaScript function to do <stupid simple thing, but I never bothered to learn JS>”

    Especially using it as a regex pattern generator is nice. It can also be nice when learning a new language and you just need to check the syntax for something- often quicker than swimming though some Geeks4Geeks blog about why you should know how to do what you’re trying to do.


  • My test suite takes quite a bit of time, not because the code base is huge, but because it consists of a variety of mathematical models that should work under a range of conditions.

    This makes it very quick to write a test that’s basically “check that every pair of models gives the same output for the same conditions” or “check that re-ordering the inputs in a certain way does not change the output”.

    If you have 10 models, with three inputs that can be ordered 6 ways, you now suddenly have 60 tests that take maybe 2-3 sec each.

    Scaling up: It becomes very easy to write automated testing for a lot of stuff, so even if each individual test is relatively quick, they suddenly take 10-15 min to run total.

    The test suite now is ≈2000 unit/integration tests, and I have experienced uncovering an obscure bug because a single one of them failed.