zachwill

- We mostly use notebooks as scratchpads or alpha prototypes.

- Papermill is a great tool when setting up a scheduled notebook and then shipping the output to S3: https://papermill.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

- When turning notebooks into more user-facing prototypes, I've found Streamlit is excellent and easy-to-use. Some of these prototypes have stuck around as Streamlit apps when there's 1-3 users who need to use them regularly.

- Moving to full-blown apps is much tougher and time-consuming.

This is a pretty poorly written article — even for Saturday night Hacker News.

“Simplicity hides complexity, and Marie Kondo sucks, and 2010s minimalist blogging sucked, and Apple sucks for removing the headphone jack, and the internet cables in the sea are messy.”

C’mon. This is just poorly written and a bunch of scattershot ideas.

It’s always a tug-of-war between owning too much and not enough — and I’m a big proponent of purges every 18 months. The half-life for most of the stuff we own is much less than a decade. Did Marie Kondo market her book? Yeah. Does she have some good ideas? Yeah. Should you be a minimalist zealot? No.

I found The First Law books to be fantastic: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/944073.The_Blade_Itself

(You can tell The Blade Itself is a first novel — but the following novels are A+.)

I had given up on fiction for a few years, but tried it out after coming across a thread on Reddit. The audiobooks in the series are incredibly good — in fact, I've recently just been reading anything that the narrator (Steven Pacey) has done in the past.

Wow, awesome work on this!

I'm a huge fan of Listen Notes!

1. It is confusing. I agree with you there.

2. Nope, the file is modified itself.

3. One thing that the documentation does a poor job of: all fields need to be filled out for GitHub integration.

4. Here's my settings in TiddlyWiki: https://i.imgur.com/MqbO28t.png

I've found setting up the Git integration to be the best way: https://tiddlywiki.com/static/Saving%2520to%2520a%2520Git%25...

Thank you for posting this. One of the best comments I’ve read on HN! (We had kids at 29 — and I completely agree with your takeaways.)

Scraping Blinkist and PodcastNotes!

Very cool! I’m still using buggy versions of Skitch and Annotate (both basically unmaintained nowadays). Looks like this could be good enough to make me finally switch.

Good article, Elliot!

That’s awesome! Any more info on the libraries you’re using for it?

LOL, admitting is the first step towards change, Chris.

Awesome work, Eugene!

I had almost the exact same experience going from a psychology degree, to coding in SF, to heading up analytics for the Trail Blazers. Luck, self-study, and Kaggle! Really cool to hear that someone else also took the psychology to data analysis route.

Built a simple `PyMC3` model based on your comment: https://github.com/zachwill/covid-19

I actually prefer SQLite's take on type affinity: https://www.sqlite.org/datatype3.html

Where's the best place to read through the collected works of Jim Berger? (Thanks!)

    Very frequently, the right answer for a MVP is something
    like an e-mail newsletter, or a Salesforce extension, 
    or a CSV file, or an IDE plug-in, or throwing a pizza 
    party for your target market and performing the service 
    for them yourself.

    I’ve seen startups charge $10K+/month to dump a CSV file 
    on a client’s FTP server. Go where the user can most 
    conveniently make use of your product; for a lot of 
    businesses, that is neither app nor website.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18826554

I completely agree. Tools like shap are really useful for peering into tree-based models.

https://github.com/slundberg/shap

I hardly ever comment, but this is a really cool idea. Could you elaborate a little more? (On technical aspects, not political obstacles.)

Wow, had no idea about this. Thanks for sharing!

Similar to @nyolfen, would love to read about your experience more in-depth.

I've jailbroken a couple and given a few more away to family that otherwise wouldn't have paid to upgrade.

Would love to run little servers and other dumb stuff on them, but I never have. Always felt like it'd be fun to run a server/Python process on my older phones.

Not your usual answer for HN, but the best online courses I've ever taken are Chris Orwig's photography stuff on Lynda.com. Most local libraries have a free subscription with Lynda, and the way he teaches photography/Photoshop/etc was so useful to learn during college. It's not math or machine learning, but the guy is an absolute master at his craft -- and offers some of the clearest explanations on his line of thinking when working on projects.

I agree 100% with this viewpoint. I would much rather sit down with a potential hire and go over some scripts and projects they've written than go to the whiteboard. I don't care how big the project is, I think it's just much more pragmatic to share ideas and stories over code than algorithmic gotcha questions.

One of the pieces of code I read through that helped me the most: Beautiful Soup. If you're a Python developer, I wholeheartedly recommend you read through it -- although I do think Leonard has removed some of his more disdainful comments from BS2. When I originally read it, I loved how you could really feel how much he hated all the XML/HTML parsing gotchas. I think it's the only time I've laughed out loud reading through code because of humorous comments and TODO notes to self.

I think a lot of us feel your same pain.

Has anyone had success with sticking to Dokku for small side projects on DigitalOcean/Linode/etc?

Portland Trail Blazers | Portland, OR | Full-time | On-site

Our analytics staff is looking to hire a full-time programmer to work in the front office (on the basketball side). We are primarily looking for a generalist that mostly feels comfortable on the web/database side of things, but is also interested in mobile. Feel free to reach out via email (analytics AT trailblazers DOT com)

Essential Functions:

    *	Develop basketball applications for use by the front office and coaching staff
    *	Maintain and support existing basketball applications
    *	Other duties as assigned

Qualifications:

    *	Demonstrated web development experience (PHP/Python/Ruby)
    *	Experience working with relational databases (SQL)
    *	Ability to use version control (Git, Subversion, etc.)
    *	Ability to work in Mac OS X and Linux environments
    *	Familiarity with JavaScript/AJAX
    *	Experience developing iOS applications, preferred
    *	Experience designing APIs and visualizations, preferred
    *	Familiarity with advanced basketball statistics, preferred
    *	Collaborate with the team, and also possess the ability to work autonomously
    *	Demonstrated high standards of confidentiality
    *	Excellent interpersonal, communication, and organization skills
    *	Ability to work flexible and longer days, including nights and weekends

Portland Trail Blazers | Portland, OR | Full-time | On-site

Our analytics staff is looking to hire a full-time programmer to work in the front office (on the basketball side of things). We are primarily looking for a generalist that mostly feels comfortable on the web/database side of things, but is also interested in mobile. Feel free to reach out via email (analytics AT trailblazers DOT com) or apply online: http://blazers.teamworkonline.com/teamwork/jobs/jobs.cfm/Inf...

Essential Functions:

    *	Develop basketball applications for use by the front office and coaching staff
    *	Maintain and support existing basketball applications
    *	Other duties as assigned

Qualifications:

    *	Demonstrated web development experience (PHP/Python/Ruby)
    *	Experience working with relational databases (SQL)
    *	Ability to use version control (Git, Subversion, etc.)
    *	Ability to work in Mac OS X and Linux environments
    *	Familiarity with JavaScript/AJAX
    *	Experience developing iOS applications, preferred
    *	Experience designing APIs and visualizations, preferred
    *	Familiarity with advanced basketball statistics, preferred
    *	Collaborate with the team, and also possess the ability to work autonomously
    *	Demonstrated high standards of confidentiality
    *	Excellent interpersonal, communication, and organization skills
    *	Ability to work flexible and longer days, including nights and weekends

Great post, OP. I really love stories like this on HN — feel like I wouldn't come across them through other channels. Thanks for sharing.