pak

Guido can repeat as many times as he likes that calling an instance method is morally equivalent to passing the instance as an additional argument. It may even be implemented that way. The reality is that nobody except compiler devs actually think like that--to everyone else it's an implementation detail. It also doesn't naturally explain why it would be shoved in as the first argument as opposed to appended as the last.

And the fact that self is an idiom, and not a keyword, just feels wrong to me. If nobody would actually ever use any other word in sane code, there is no point in preserving the flexibility of doing so by defining the same word over and over again.

I understand the desire to make fundamental language changes and why it's cleaner to make Python 3 backward incompatible. I don't agree that it was the smartest thing to prevent any kind of interoperability, though. The way people could begin using Python 3 is if you could still import Python 2 modules from Python 3 code. OK, there would be some tough nuts to crack to get the interpreter to switch contexts gracefully and translate objects from one side to the other. But at least people could start using Python 3 and then begin switching things over one at a time. To ask everyone to keep running 2to3 to maintain a second codebase that nobody uses is kind of silly and unrealistic, and causes this détente where too few people care enough to make a first move.

Also, gripe here. Why the heck is def method(self, actual_first_arg, ...) still all over the place in Python 3? They had a golden opportunity to kick that bizarre holdover from when Python couldn't do OO [1], and they didn't [2]. The only solid argument Guido has against it is about decorators, and it really only applies to @classmethod and @staticmethod, which arises primarily from the stodgy way Python implements these OO features and which could have been nipped in the bud with their own language changes.

[1] http://beust.com/weblog/2008/10/28/pythons-enigmatic-self/

[2] http://neopythonic.blogspot.com/2008/10/why-explicit-self-ha...

    awk -F '``' '{\
    
      # ... jibbery awk-ese ...
    
    }' `caller 1 | cut -d ' ' -f 3` | sed "s/^/S/g;s/$/E/g" | __tick_fun_parse | bash

    exit

This is legit hax.

Cancer is when certain cells in your body become "greedy" about their own survival without regard to the survival of the organism as a whole, and begin to literally compete with the rest of the cells in your body for resources. Normally there are regulatory switches that tell cells to kill themselves when they become damaged beyond the point of repair, but tumor cells have found a way to bypass these safeguards (either because of chance DNA damage at exactly the right sites, genetic susceptibility to malfunction of the safeguards, viral infection, or some combination of the above). As an example of how tumors compete with your other cells, they usually secrete growth factors to create new blood vessels feeding them at the expense of surrounding tissue.

The road to better health is paved with sweaty armpits. I for one would not mind a little workplace B.O. if it meant for happier, safer commutes and fewer billions spent treating the pandemic of heart disease and diabetes. But that's just me.

Which makes it all the more impressive--each page took considerable craft and attention to detail.

For more information on this, you'd have to get a book like this one--I can't find anything more online: http://www.worldcat.org/title/printing-of-mathematics-aids-f...

~20 min bike commutes shouldn't get you too sweaty unless it's above 85 outside and humid. If it does, lower the pace and catch more of the breeze! For those that need to wear business attire, you'd have to stash your wardrobe at work. But I wouldn't think a shower is a requirement for most, just a bathroom to switch clothes.

Hell, this makes the SATs, with its ragged edges and sloppy Times New Roman straight out of MS Word, look like carelessly produced junk.

He's using chipper sarcasm to illustrate the point that rewriting things "the Unix way" may produce a great troll fork on Github, but more up-front engineering is absolutely justified if you anticipate the need to scale.

To get more to the point, Unix pipelines in shell scripts are nifty but absolutely not designed to scale in the ways that a typical networked server process does.

I happen to agree with him; if the only point of hubot was to be a campfire bot with a plugin architecture, you could probably accomplish that in 5 lines of Ruby that would never see the light of day in a production environment.

http://www.fixyourownprinter.com/forums/laser/39806

Proud owner of a Brother laser printer here. My guess is that this is how they can afford to sell the printers for so cheap (usually underselling HP).

Even if the system were 100% efficient, if we assume that the rays from the sun are roughly parallel, you'd need as much solar dish area as the square footage of the park to pipe the same amount of light into it.

The closest thing I could find to a product is this [1] and at $8000 for a 4-foot dish, you're looking at a lot of money to harvest enough light to grow trees.

The whole idea reeks of gaga-green engineers/architects that don't understand how hard it is to grow plants; I don't think they're considering how you need to hit the tree from all angles with the light, otherwise parts of it will die. Also, lots of larger plants depend on the tracking motion of the sun to grow normally. Think about the last time you saw an indoor tree that looked like it was growing nicely: it almost certainly had a glass roof over it, because they really need that all that light to survive.

[1] http://pesn.com/2005/07/27/9600139_Fiber_Optics_Bring_Sun_In...

This will be a ton more expensive than the High Line, and probably a horticultural nightmare.

Plus, people go to parks to get fresh air and enjoy a view, right? Not to inhale canned fumes in the dark...

Depending on how much time you spend on the site, they probably also have profiled a sizable portion of your thoughts simply by tracking clicks and pageviews.

I guess they could generate PDFs from Word files with Acrobat and shoehorn them into the process, but any publisher that is actually satisfied with doing that is bonkers.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prepress

There is a beta 'microtype' package for XeTeX but it doesn't have all the features that LuaTeX has (font expansion?).

The only thing I can think of is that normal people, even book-lovers, don't care. We have been trained by reading webpages so much of the time that we have low standards. But the sad thing is, ebooks generally have worse typography than your average blog post read in a typical web browser. I'm looking at you, iBooks. Jesus.

Once you clearly distinguish the purpose of each variable with a well chosen name, as you did in your rewrite, the code suddenly lights up the room. Good variable names are important!

The linebreak to break up the three-way expression also helps to suggest the order of evaluation. For some reason, our brains do not appreciate nested ternary operators on the same line. It's the same problem as

    A==B ? C : D==E ? F : G;

    A==B ? C :
    D==E ? F :
           G ;

You are absolutely correct, in my haste to explain one misinterpretation of p-values, I stumbled into another gross oversimplification. The correct way of saying it must always involve some language about the deviation or extremity of the data being at least as great as observed.

It goes to show that proper reporting of p-value statistics takes a lawyerly craft with language; while writing the post I had to consider what the mathematical interpretation of "is a fluke" should be. I think the definition I chose is what most people will interpret it as. However, the word fluke just means "unlikely chance occurrence" on its own, so saying "there is a 1% chance the result is an unlikely chance occurrence" is uninformative if taken literally. It has to imply one of two things:

1. You are referring to the null hypothesis as the unlikely occurrence, i.e. "There is a 1% chance the null hypothesis is true [therefore making this data surprising]."

2. You are temporarily assuming it is true to make such a statement, i.e. "There is a 1% chance of seeing data at least this surprising [if the null hypothesis were true]."

Someone that does know what a p-value is might be generous and think you meant the latter, which is a correct statement. However, I think that most people hear it the first way.

The fact that p-value reporting (when properly done) involves thinking through double negatives and conditions that are easily ignored probably indicates that it's time for other measures of significance to become better accepted.

This is a very incorrect way of summarizing the result.

When will popsci writers ever get this right? Hypothesis testing cannot tell you the probability that a hypothesis is true. It also cannot tell you if the result is a "fluke." What it can tell you is the probability of seeing the data assuming the null hypothesis is true. Without knowledge of the prior probability of the hypothesis, you have no right to say anything about the probability of the result being a "fluke" or not.

This is commonly misunderstood. Perhaps I can illuminate it with an example.

Suppose I take a coin out of your pocket--a good old American quarter. I then proceed to flip it six times and egads, I get six heads. The chance that a fair coin flips the same way six times in a row is 2/(2^6), or 1/32--close to 3%. Whoo hoo, that's more than a two sigma result.

Does that mean there's only a 3% chance the coin is actually fair? NO! If you assume the coin is fair, there is a 3% chance the coin flips the same way six times in a row. There's a huge distinction in flipping the conditional. Going by the infinitesimal number of quarters in circulation that wouldn't flip fairly, we'd say before any experiment that there's an overwhelming chance the coin is truly fair. So there isn't a 3% chance the result "is a fluke," if by "is a fluke" we mean the coin really is fair AND the coin flipped in a surprising way. We KNOW the coin flipped in a surprising way, and if we know that at least 99% of quarters are fair, there's probably a near-100% chance that the data can be called a "fluke."

This is all to say, if the prior probability of your null hypothesis is high, one unlikely result should not impress. You are merely demonstrating that unlikely things happen--and with so many coins and people flipping them they should be, from time to time.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-value#Misunderstandings

http://invasiber.org/EGarcia/papers/MatthewsFinancialTimes.h...

tldr; what the article says --> P(Fluke|Data) != P(Data|Fluke) <-- what the statistic means

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Yorktown_(CG-48)

That is such a stretch from the four sentences before it. You are discussing 1) a prototype vehicle that is not available to consumers and requires supervision by a cadre of engineers and 2) a recent law in just one of the least populous states of the country. How about a few choice details from that article you cited:

"... with only occasional human intervention."

"Before sending the self-driving car on a road test, Google engineers [have to] drive along the route one or more times to gather data about the environment."

"...there are many challenges ahead, including improving the reliability of the cars and addressing daunting legal and liability issues."

You must have read it with unrestrained optimism. I also applaud your idealistic notion that statistics matter more than public opinion, but the country isn't run by scientists and mathematicians (that's actually a good thing in certain respects). The reality is the general public does have to support changes that affect society, like laws and the development of physical and legal infrastructure, and there are many ways of formulating reasonable policy arguments with or without statistics.