jackschultz

It's tough to avoid complaints when you're a bigger company, but when I hear StockX, I'm forced to think about the multiple complaints of fake selling through them.

https://old.reddit.com/r/Sneakers/comments/9tqfv6/i_received...

https://old.reddit.com/r/Sneakers/comments/9uqafs/stockx_sen...

https://old.reddit.com/r/Sneakers/comments/9jaj4r/exposing_s...

Can't be a good thing for people to think that about a company.

Interesting timing, because I just started Notes from Underground yesterday. I have to say, I'm a really big fan of Russian literature for some reason.

Crime and Punishment, to me, seemed pretty straightforward, where we knew the problems Raskolnikov was having, and pretty sure of the ending where he'd confess and be punished (clearly from the title). Whereas The Brothers Karamazov if I remember, was somewhat more of a non straightforward plot. Where the characters were slightly less straightforward. I checked on wiki and said that Crime and Punishment was fourteen years before Karamazov, 1866 to 1880.

Besides Dostoevsky, I really liked a few of the Checkov short stories, and then Master and Margarita, which was written in the somewhat early 1900s. Not sure if those related to the existentialism you're talking about, but all unique.

I think my main like of both of these, and books in general, is the ability to see how similar humans are from centuries ago, and in different cultures. With the feeling of desire to be punished, or in a Checkov story, falling out of love with a woman and not really knowing how to end things. Being able to see relationships and similar thoughts from completely different people is very comforting. Otherwise we all could be stuck in our heads thinking about how everyone is different from you, where we're all more alike than we think.

It would be these events were I'd get the deja vu, the feeling of having a memory of experiencing something before, then tingling from the right shoulder down my arm to when it hit my fingers I'd feel a little hit in the head and lose words. That part is the seizure. I didn't know that was a type at all before looking it up online.

These episodes grew over time too. That first I remember on a bike, the next was when reading a book and I was so confused where the words went and why I could only see symbols. Since it's the temporal lobe, only words. Though I talk to multiple people, like my mom, she says there were times in the past where, when talking to her, I'd have to say hold on and sit in silence for 30 seconds before being able to comprehend again. Eventually got to an every other day frequency before being told that those events could be seizures and I should get it checked out.

In terms of seriousness, it's hard to say when that happened. I was told it looked like the benign DNET tumor and baby seizures that stopped with some drugs and I thought that was pretty funny how that happened to me. But then side effects from the first drugs kicked in and I had to switch. And then side effects from that drug kicked in and said screw it and have the surgery to get ride of the tumor and hopefully the part causing the seizures. Well that didn't work out, I still have different drugs and problems with those, and turns out it's a cancer tumor. Quite the turn.

The seizures themselves aren't too serious, because there are drugs to stop them, but the side effect problems are the big part.

What are the symptoms you've been having?

Story time, as is often the case when "studies" talk about medical risks.

Couple years ago I started noticing these events, deja vu flashes, tingly right arm from the shoulder all the way down to my fingers, and then the inability to comprehend words for a few minutes. Never issues with coordination, because the first one I remember distinctly was riding a bike. Eventually was told they could be seizures, got an MRI and EEG and poof, there's a brain tumor, told was a DNET, in my left temporal lobe.

After issues with anti-seizure meds, which are really annoying with so many side effects, I went with surgery to get the tumor yanked with the hope of them snagging the part causing the seizures, which apparently aren't caused by the tumor itself. A few weeks after the surgery, I was called back and told the tumor wasn't a DNET as expected, but a low grade glioma. Not the GBM as talked about in the article, but a regrowth where I'm on the schedule of MRI every three months to check to see how if it's growing back yet.

I'm left handed, holding the phone to my left ear where the tumor was / is, which would fit along with what they're trying to show here. I'm 27 now, I never talked on the phone much, and I'm not going to sit here and try to find something to blame. Like casually mentioned at the end of the article, I'll go with saying it could be from "fallout from atomic bomb tests in the atmosphere", or, you know, bad luck.

I've written a bunch of tech blog posts over the years over a bunch of different topics, with the main intent of being able to actually show employers that I'm able to produce rather than only talk about it. It's worked out for me, and through cycles, I get a few hundred views per day through search engines on all the different posts.

The one thing I will say is that there are stories out there like your co-worker's or some others here are those that write articles and strike it off super rich with new job opportunities or contract work. Plenty, the vast majority, don't make it that far. So before you start writing articles, make sure you want to do that because you like the topics and projects rather than only trying to put yourself out there.

I'll throw this in here since you were reminded of another Players' Tribune article. It has to be because they use of ghostwriters all the time. Every single one of their articles have the same form, same word selection, same pacing.

Has anyone else noticed this? I'm not saying it's bad bad, but tough to take seriously if all of them are so similar. It'd be fun to go through and do some text analysis to see if it's provable.

BeautifulSoup. The difference is that lxml can run a little faster in certain cases for a huge scrape, but you'll very very very if ever need that. It's interesting and probably worthwhile to try both and know the difference, but bs BeautifulSoup is definitely where to start

I've actually wrote about this! General tips that I've found from doing more than a few projects [0], and then an overview of Python libraries I use [1].

If you don't want to clock on the links, requests and BeautifulSoup / lxml is all you need 90% of the time. Throw gevent in there and you can get a lot of scraping done in not as much time as you think it would take.

And as long as we're talking about web scraping, I'm a huge fan of it. There's so much data out there that's not easily accessible and needs to be cleaned and organized. When running a learning algorithm, for example, a very hard part that isn't talked about a lot is getting the data before throwing it in a learning function or library. Of course, there the legal side of it if companies are not happy with people being able to scrape, but that's a different topic.

I'll keep going. The best way to learn about what are the best tools is to do a project on your own and teat them all out. Then you'll know what suits you. That's absolutely the best way to learn something about programming -- doing it instead of reading about it.

[0] https://bigishdata.com/2017/05/11/general-tips-for-web-scrap...

[1] https://bigishdata.com/2017/06/06/web-scraping-with-python-p...

Whenever anyone asks:

Catch-22 East of Eden Remains of the Day Surely You're Joking Mr Feynman

These threads where people suggest multiple books are good to run through. If you see one in a comment that someone else liked, probably try to read the others they listed.

Well yes. That's why I put at least 6 characters of 0 in front of the index of a block,so the filenames were 000001.json, and used glob rather than list_dir. But that didn't work for Linux.

Ahh yeah, on a Mac, using os.list_dir leaves 10.json ahead of 2.json. I heard from someone else on Linux that had that problem. If you have the code that works would you make a pull request and I'll throw that in?

Hah yeah that's not gonna happen. If it were, you'd get to give it a name though. Maybe something to do with Master and Margarita, one of the better books people have said I should read.

Thanks, really like hearing people like what I wrote. And definitely trying to write more in depth than some of the other posts on this topic. Hopefully more to come.

Hey guys, I'm actually the one who wrote this. Really glad to see it here and that people think it's worthwhile.

I mention this in the post, but the reason I started this is to learn more about how blockchains operate. I've never been that into them, I don't invest in the coins that the big ones operate with, but am more interested in how they work and other use cases. As with everything, the best way to learn is to write one yourself. I definitely don't consider myself an expert, but when I go back and read the Satoshi paper and Ethereum's white paper, it makes way more sense than before.

Let me know if you have questions, or if you don't agree with something I wrote. Want to make sure people reading this can get more info out of it than many of the other articles on this topic.

I've been half torn on whether in office or work from wherever is better for me. Everyone has opinions and they all seem to differ. I like how the article had back to back paragraphs linking papers that claim one is better than the other.

It'll be interesting for me coming up when I start a new job in a little over a week where I'm remote in a different city for three of the days, and then taking the hour and a half Amtrak down to where the company is based. When talking to the head of the group, the first thing I said is that I wouldn't be moving to where their office is. He was totally fine with that.

I like working on things from random places, but I'm also more than familiar working in an office with others. We'll see how this goes.

I really like the format of the question and how responses are. Giant header where everyone can scroll down quickly and easily see their advice. Other big factor is that each response can only have one piece of advice. Often in threads like this you'll get comments where people list a bunch of tips and people upvote because they agree with only one of those tips.

A big one in my opinion is the "Stay off the Internet when you're writing". When I type on a compute writing anything, not fiction, I always get a tiny bit tired and look on other sites. I'm even sitting here forcing me to not open another tab while writing this comment.

On that note, I have to say how great having a typewriter is. I don't use it for writing fiction or anything, but I know how great it to be forced to sit forward, not be able to unfocus, and have a physical output rather than a shiny screen everyone's so used to. Obviously you'll can't sent it quickly or edit it, but it's great to use and know the results.

Why doesn't he mention what he thinks interviews should be about? Does he think that asking a bunch of dry-erase-board-questions about algorithms is better? What about just a company going with their gut?

It's tough to agree with a post that doesn't offer an alternative. All I get from this is that he wants to talk about how his life is more balanced and hobbies are better than ours, and that alone should be enough proof that he deserves every job he wants.

1000% percent this. I write about Python web scraping a lot and the big one is that there's two parts. First is gathering the pages you need to scrape locally, and the second is scraping the pages you've saved. You need need to separate those two to avoid hitting their servers over and over when you're tying to debug the scraping code. My way is to write the first in a file called gather.py, and then the other in scrape.py. Have that in mind before doing and heavy scraping.

Since my scrapes aren't always the biggest, feel free to just save the html in a local folder and then scrape from there. This part of the project depends on how many pages you need to scrape, the size of the files, whether you need to store the data, whether it's a one time scrape or croned, etc. Either way, save the files, and scrape from there.

Here are some of the posts I've done on the subject if people reading the comments want to see more about scraping.

- https://bigishdata.com/2017/05/11/general-tips-for-web-scrap... - https://bigishdata.com/2017/06/06/web-scraping-with-python-p... - https://bigishdata.com/2017/05/11/general-tips-for-web-scrap...

Very much agree. Hard fork has the implication of people disagreeing to the point where two things go in the opposite direction. Whereas this is just improvement for the future. Using the term hard fork is fine, but throw "update" in the phrase to make it sound positive.

There are a lot of comments here about their depression, so I thought I'd throw my experience in here since it's slightly different.

Last year, after having these episodes that I didn't recognize for a while that were seizures, I went to the doctor, had an MRI, and was started on the anti-seizure drug Keppra. The seizures went away, and I thought it was half funny this whole experience. Time ticked on for a month or so and things started going downhill. I have a programming and a golf blog, and I didn't have the energy to keep writing. I loved going to the gym and I just stopped being able to go. I love watching the Brewers every night on tv, but I half stopped being able to do that. It got to the point where for a few days in a row, I'd get back at around 5 and just sit in my living room chair in the dark until 9 and then I'd feel legit going to sleep.

I knew I was having issues, issues that I thought were "natural", so I'd force myself to get out of the house. The biggest point was when I told myself to go out and buy some tea or something. So I took the train down there, made myself be friendly to the person working, and then decided to walk back. About halfway to the house I lived in I couldn't move, didn't have any of the energy, so I sat on a stoop for over an hour just unable to get up.

There are so many side effects of anti-seizure pills which list everything you can think of mentally. And at some point I figured the pills could be the cause. I contacted the doctor who said stop taking the pills and made an appointment for a few days after to get a new drug.

The morning after I didn't take the nighttime dose, I woke up and I could feel the depression going away. It's impossible to describe the feeling of knowing the issues were evaporating. I was out in the sun and felt happier. I could move. I could stand. The desire to do things was coming back. Three days later the depression was completely gone.

It's tough for me to know if my feelings exactly match other people's depressions. I've never been the person to give advice to people with depression; It's obviously impossible to relate if you haven't experienced it yourself. There still isn't any advice I'd be able to give because it's just sitting there, being in control of you, and even when your head knows that you need to be active, knows that sitting there isn't the right thing to do, depression will still win that battle. I was so lucky that my issues were caused by a drug that I could stop taking, and that the issues vanished so quickly. I think back and can't imagine how difficult a life is when your actions aren't causing the depression, but be stuck with the depression thing caused by nature.

How can you claim that people's neighbors had different opinions than the people themselves? How can you say that about strangers at a bar? People then could be the same as people now who don't want to talk about politics and would rather call people with different opinions trash.

Who's to say that people these days are less exposed? That's incredibly difficult to research. And I can just claim that people see different opinions all the time, and are able to look up which well known people agree on each side?

This whole thing is all claims and not proof. So many people never respecting the opposite side's opinions, but that could easily be because of how humans evolved and not because of culture and tech.

The first in the list is about echo chambers. How was life not an echo chamber with not phones? I'm guessing people in a town would all agree with each other because they couldn't get any opinions on the opposite sides. In a city, this could be the case as well, where people would gather and trash people with the opposite views. For the rest, I'm sure I'd be able to come up with convincing examples of why that was an issue in the past.

It's incredibly difficult to understand what society and politics from the past. History books aren't able to get us fully emerged in what life was like then. I guess I'm saying that there have always been threats to democracy, but it's shifted more towards social media these days.

I'm always very skeptical with studies like this.

> [R]esearchers recruited a pool of twenty sedentary commuters... These commuters were then asked to shift their transport to work to the e-Bike fleet

> After a month, volunteers revisited the lab and had the very same tests conducted again. Notable improvements to the 20 subjects’ cardiovascular health were evident, with improved aerobic capacity and blood sugar control noted in all cases.

Twenty subjects and a month of testing? They don't mention how notable the improvements are other than "improved". They don't necessarily take into account that them being studied for health benefits might have made them more active overall not just in commuting. There are so many other reasons that could have changed them into having more healthy results. With all those possibilities, I cannot see how twenty participants and one month of changes can be considered confirmed.

In these types of threads people always jump in and suggest their favorite books of the author. In my case, it's Remains of the Day and An Artist of the Floating World, the two novels they talk about in the article. I've been such a fan of Remains of the Day after reading it a couple years ago that I've bought it a couple times and shipped it to friends to make sure they read it. I read An Artist of the Floating World earlier this summer and that stuck with me as well. Fantastic fantastic. I've also read Never Let Me Go but it didn't quite do it for me, something felt off in a way that's difficult to express and not worthy of talking about here.

I'll say this though, make sure to read Remains of the Day and then move to Artist of the Floating World. Both about WWII and people's opinions and feelings from what happened in their world. Not the longest of novels, so reading them back to back is the way to go.

I always see posts like this, talking about the negativity of long working hours, but I do get curious the percentage of jobs in each of the categories. Categories like:

- Forcing only 40 hour work weeks - Not forcing, but expecting 40 hour work weeks - Not forcing, but expecting overtime work weeks - Forcing (or talking positively about) over 40 hour work weeks

All the blog posts and comments talk about how necessary those standard weeks are (I absolutely agree), but knowing the commonality of both would be great to see.

In my case, I'd guess forcing of 40 hour work weeks is more common than we think.

The fact that the author wrote a sizable post about how big Python is and is growing, but then says he's more of an R type of person instead of Python. Obviously that's interesting to see when authors aren't giant fans of what they're trying to promote.

The most interesting part of the post is the conclusion where the author says that he's a data scientist who uses R and doesn't feel the need to switch to Python!

He also has very good thoughts, and very important for beginners to know, about how there isn't a single right way to learn programming.

> In any case, data science is an exciting and growing field, and there’s plenty of room for multiple languages to thrive. My main conclusion is to encourage developers early in their career to consider building skills in data science. We’ve seen here that it’s among the fastest-growing components of the software development ecosystem, and one that’s become relevant across many industries.

Someone pointed out below, but in a comment way down in the thread, but CNN is actually who's behind this:

https://twitter.com/CNN/status/906821174805630976

I'm not sure if the reason behind this is because of possible weak phone connections or that the hurricane is a good way to promote the text only site, but either way, huge shoutout to CNN for going forward with this themselves.

I've thought for a while about scraping news sites to just show their text, or something like classifying articles based on their subjects from different ones. On this front, they did it first.

Wow, all these comments seem to be about all the different environments to use -- new suggestions, and talking about what makes others not the best.

For those just starting Python, I'd say just go with virtualenv. It works, it's common, and there are tons of tutorials about it. Don't feel bad about using the old mediocre libraries. And in general, learning basics isn't embarrassing.

That bothers me on basically every stat on a news article. They just come up with a number and expect people to believe it. But they don't talk about how it was calculated so people can't confirm it themselves, and very often, if multiple "experts" are the ones calculating the stats, they just pick the biggest outlier to strum up more controversy.