vishbar

That is really interesting! I never had an ant farm, and I'm glad I didn't given what you've said.

Are ants similar to bees in that there's one egg-laying "queen" that you have to gather, or can you just gather a collection of individuals from a colony?

Your kid probably already knows about this, but have him check out the YouTuber AntsCanada. I'm not particularly into ants but I find his videos fascinating.

Is there not an autoformatter available? We use linting as part of our Python workflow and it works pretty well along with black. There's really not much linting work: just write your code, run black, and it's good to go.

Leaving aside commercial methods or more...shall we say, exotic methods like explosives or elecroshock, bait fishing is generally more effective.

I do both: I trot bait when the river I fish is unsuitable for the fly.

Due to the physical architecture of CPUs/etc., data structures that have "worse" asymptotic performance are often quite a bit faster than those with "better" performance. For example, iterating through a small array to find an item and test for existence is often quite a bit faster than using a hash set for the same operation.

Sure, so now instead of just having a source control remote, you’re now looking after a publicly accessible box in the cloud with all the security headaches that brings. Plus you’ve got to manage credentials essentially manually, make sure people have the right access permissions to repos, look after backups, etc.

I worked at a company that started out with a setup like this for the dev team. It felt like a massive burden was lifted when we moved to Github Enterprise. We weren’t using the project management features at all, just the source code hosting stuff.

I've studied there for an MSc in Computing. It was good. The classes are a bit business-schooly but I got some good support from tutors. Obviously it depends on the individual tutor--the one for my project module wasn't as clear and supportive--but some are really fantastic.

Realistically, how well will someone with a nonspecialist knowledge of biology be able to contribute to these projects?

That statement's not intended to pass judgement; I'd really like to know as it'd be great to contribute to a good cause.

Hey, are you OK with UK passport holders?

Scala's for-comprehensions (and Haskell's do-notation) help quite a lot as well.

I'm doing a masters in Computing with them now. I'm enjoying it quite a lot, and it is definitely rigorous (though more on the management side rather than the technical side).

There's definitely a different style of development, in my experience. After a few beers or when very sleep-deprived, I find myself avoiding "analysis paralysis" and just getting something written, even if it's not super elegant. There can definitely be a benefit to doing that, though I wouldn't recommend slamming shots at 9am before the workday starts!

Astrology and machine learning just seem so different. One is a poor attempt at prediction using dubious, shoddy, poorly understood methods that generally amount either to general wooly vagueries or completely wrong conclusions that are no better than random chance, and the other deals with planets.

How does machine learning apply to something like astrology?

I almost always skip the intro of books like this. I didn't skip this one. The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness are two of my favorite books of all time.