Recent submissions

Comment · 6 years ago
Comment · 6 years ago
Sorry about missing you were down under, I only checked after hitting submit. And thanks for clarifying, I had no idea Sweden moved to isolate nursing homes.

That said, I'm still hesitant to equate the risk level to the elderly from community-wide lockdown measures with isolation policies restricted to nursing homes. I don't have any data to support it, but I can't help but assume that lower community transmission overall correlates with fewer transmission vectors into nursing homes. Supposedly this would turn up in the proportion of those in nursing homes that's suffered coronavirus. In principle I agree with you; the hotel scandals in Vic bear that out, ironically, and sadly. But the difference in magnitude has to count for something, as bad as any toll is.

Comment · 6 years ago
True on your first point, but I imagine GP was considering a case where you've already got a backend in Python.
Comment · 6 years ago
Comment · 6 years ago
I can tell a story. I used to work for a HVAC installation company, pretty small in terms of staff but we subcontracted a lot. Initially brought on as a mechanical engineering intern, but moved on to sales engineering when I found an interesting statistical relationship.

A large factor in quotes to clients was the underlying cost of air conditioning equipment in our niche, and often a game of sales intel was played between suppliers and competing contractors (like us) for a given job site. Favorites were picked, and we could get royally screwed in a quote, losing the sale to the end-customer.

Fortunately, we had years of purchasing information. It turns out that as varied as air conditioners are across brands and technical dimensions, when you have years of accounts' line items and unused quotes, you don't get a dimensionality issue. Since we operated in a clear-cut niche, this was especially true. We could forecast, within a margin of error of two per cent, exactly what any of our suppliers would quote us (or our competitors!) for a job long before they could turn it around. Huge strategic advantage.

This was the watershed moment for me when I realized even basic multiple linear regression was a scarily powerful tool when used correctly.

Comment · 6 years ago
Consider adding a logarithmic y-axis to each graph, but otherwise, nice presentation!

Edit: also, perhaps y-axes of the form "Thousands of X", then increments can show "200, 400, 600..." and so on. Simpler to digest when lots of zeroes come into play, at least for me.

Comment · 6 years ago
Great point, and I think this is a next step for me. For what it's worth, this was to teach myself React and Redux and took a couple of nights of work. I was curious about ways to keep the canvas element fundamentally decoupled from the algorithm itself, which allows a couple of benefits out of the box. For example, varying the randomness or changing the color map mid-calculation, I kind of got 'for free', thanks to React re-rendering the canvas every time the algorithm is stepped through or the controls are changed.

It's also worth noting that the algorithm's speed here is tied to (I believe?) your monitor's refresh rate, since it's using requestAnimationFrame to loop without blocking the main thread entirely. I'd briefly considered a "complete" button which would run the whole thing in one go and render once, and that would enable reviewing for performance optimisation without hanging the page. But... I got too excited and wanted to share it first.

Comment · 6 years ago
Effectively, yes. It's a multiplier for the random displacement that's calculated for a point in the grid as part of the algorithm, which is added to the mean of the adjacent (diamond- or square-wise) points.
Comment · 6 years ago
Agreed. There's not much that will bake freshly learned theory into your brain more than realising just how far it could have taken you in hindsight. Over time, this starts to develop into foresight.
Comment · 6 years ago
Or if you're feeling risque, two connections to the same tmux session.
Comment · 6 years ago
Understanding an AWS stack for real time stream processing would be fantastic.
Comment · 6 years ago
This is fantastic, having looked through Martin's blog before and found some gems that really leveled up my process on managing code.

As an aside - beyond the coming installments of this series, can anyone recommend sources for setting up CI locally, or for small teams? DDG is giving me pages on GitHub Actions, Atlassian, and DigitalOcean blogs, but these are all process or product specific.

Comment · 6 years ago
Hi all, thought I'd bite the bullet and link a blog post to HN for the first time. Any feedback would be extremely appreciated; looking to learn and grow.

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