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xenophonf commented on Influential study on glyphosate safety retracted 25 years after publication   lemonde.fr/en/environment... · Posted by u/isolli
xenophonf · 12 days ago
CGMthrowaway writes:

> Trust the science.

Science is a process, not a result. Retractions like this promote the integrity of scientific research and evidence-based medicine.

> When Dr. Oz in 2015 spoke out against glyphosate...

Oz also promoted MLM dietary supplements, antimalarial drugs as COVID treatments, gay conversion "therapy", colloidal silver, and vaccine skepticism. He has zero credibility and cannot be trusted.

xenophonf commented on Python Data Science Handbook   jakevdp.github.io/PythonD... · Posted by u/cl3misch
crystal_revenge · 15 days ago
Pandas is generally awful unless you're just living in a notebook (and even then it's probably least favorite implementation of the 'data frame' concept).

Since Pandas lacks Polars' concept of an Expression, it's actually quite challenging to programmatically interact with non-trivial Pandas queries. In Polars the query logic can be entirely independent of the data frame while still referencing specific columns of the data frame. This makes Polars data frames work much more naturally with typical programming abstractions.

Pandas multi-index is a bad idea in nearly all contexts other than it's original use case: financial time series (and I'll admit, if you're working with purely financial time series, then Pandas feels much better). Sufficiently large Pandas code bases are littered with seemingly arbitrary uses of 'reset_index', there are many times where multi-index will create bugs, and, most important, I've never seen any non-financial scenario where anyone has ever used Multi-index to their advantage.

Finally Pandas is slow, which is honestly the least priority for me personally, but using Polars is so refreshing.

What other data frames have you used? Having used R's native dataframes extensively (the way they make use of indexing is so much nicer) in addition to Polars both are drastically preferable to Pandas. My experience is that most people use Pandas because it has been the only data frame implementation in Python. But personally I'd rather just not use data frames if I'm forced to used Pandas. Could you expand on what you like about Pandas over other data frames models you've worked with?

xenophonf · 14 days ago
I initially considered using Pandas to work with community collections of Elite: Dangerous game data, specifically those published first by EDDB (RIP) and now by Spansh. However, I quickly hit the maximum process memory limits because my naïve attempts at manipulating even the smallest of those collections resulted in Pandas loading GB-scale JSON data files into RAM. I'm intrigued by Polars stated support for data streaming. More professionally, I support the work of bioinformaticians, statisticians, and data scientists, so I like to stay informed.

I like how in Pandas (and in R), I can quickly load data sets up in a manner that lets me do relational queries using familiar syntax. For my Elite: Dangerous project, because I couldn't get Pandas to work for me (which the reader should chalk up to my ignorance and not any deficiency of Pandas itself), I ended up using the SQLAlchemy ORM with Marshmallow to load the data into SQLite or PostgreSQL. Looking back at the work, I probably ought to have thrown it into a JSON-aware data warehouse somehow, which I think is how the guy behind Spansh does it, but I'm not a big data guy (yet) and have a lot to learn about what's possible.

Deleted Comment

xenophonf commented on Python Data Science Handbook   jakevdp.github.io/PythonD... · Posted by u/cl3misch
sschnei8 · 15 days ago
Interesting choice of Pandas in this day and age. Maybe he’s after imparting general concepts that you could apply to any tabular data manipulator rather than selecting for the latest shiny tool.
xenophonf · 15 days ago
What's wrong with Pandas?
xenophonf commented on CBP is monitoring US drivers and detaining those with suspicious travel patterns   apnews.com/article/immigr... · Posted by u/jjwiseman
riffic · a month ago
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xenophonf · a month ago
That's easy to say when you aren't the one under pressure.
xenophonf commented on Winamp clone in Swift for macOS   github.com/mgreenwood1001... · Posted by u/hyperbole
dang · a month ago
Ok, we've cloned the title above.

(Submitted title was "Winamp for OS/X")

xenophonf · a month ago
Thanks, Dang. You're the bestest.
xenophonf commented on Winamp clone in Swift for macOS   github.com/mgreenwood1001... · Posted by u/hyperbole
xenophonf · a month ago
Pretty misleading headline. This isn't actually Winamp. It's someone's attempt at a clone.
xenophonf commented on Yt-dlp: External JavaScript runtime now required for full YouTube support   github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/... · Posted by u/bertman
tedivm · a month ago
For the last two days I haven't been able to watch youtube videos on Firefox without disabling uBlock.
xenophonf · a month ago
I had the same problem. Make sure you're running the latest version of uBlock Origin. By that I mean you should explicitly check for updates and install the latest version. That fixed it for me.
xenophonf commented on Reviving Classic Unix Games: A 20-Year Journey Through Software Archaeology   vejeta.com/reviving-class... · Posted by u/mwheeler
vejeta · a month ago
Author of the article here, I encourage you to do so, and share the results!

I started this journey in 2006, doing the same as you, crawling old usenet archives in the newsgroups interface taht groups.google.com provided. Finding the code was troublesome, because I lost track of it, when moving from floppy disks, to different storage systems, until it has finally been preserved on github.

I find it fascinating that your father had a VT220, did he have it at home or in his office. I thought that kind of terminals were more like a thing of labs.

xenophonf · a month ago
Regarding that VT220, I misremembered. My dad's workplace loaned him a 1200-baud modem and a C. Itoh terminal, maybe a CIT-101 because [this picture](https://terminals-wiki.org/wiki/index.php/File:C._Itoh_CIT-1...) matches my memory. He was a software engineer and occasionally worked from home.

We also has a Wyse 50 terminal. It's how we used the IMS 5000SX, which had both a 10-MB hard disk drive (I think it was called a Winchester) and a 5.25" floppy disk drive. I have a huge stash of 5.25-inch floppy diskettes from back then, including copies of TurboDOS (for the 5000SX) and Apple II games and little BASIC programs us kids wrote, but I've all but given up on recovering anything. The IMS 5000SX and the Wyse 50 terminal are long dead and buried. I've made some half-hearted attempts to boot TurboDOS up under simh, but it isn't the same. If they aren't all corrupt, I suspect my Apple diskettes have a virus of some kind on them, too.

Around 1991-1992, I helped a dentist install an electronic medical record system using a multi-user DOS variant called PC-MOS. We connected Link MC5 terminals via serial to a 386 running SoftDent, if I'm remembering it correctly. I got one of MC5s when that system was decommissioned. Unfortunately, I lost it in a house fire. Then, a few years later, I got another of the MC5s when the dentist was doing some housecleaning. I still have that one, and I'd use it more often if there wasn't something wonky with its serial interface's flow control that causes corrupted I/O.

xenophonf commented on Reviving Classic Unix Games: A 20-Year Journey Through Software Archaeology   vejeta.com/reviving-class... · Posted by u/mwheeler
xenophonf · a month ago
Stories like these make me want to give modernizing vtrek another try. I'd originally played it on my cousin's 3B2 in the late 1980s after being introduced to the CP/M port of classic trek, which I played on my family's IMS 5000SX. (Oh, how I wished at the time that we'd gotten an Apple II! But that's a story for another time.) I have distinct memories of playing vtrek on my dad's VT220, dialed into my cousin's BBS over Tymenet at 1200 baud. Whereas classic trek, having been written in the era of the ASR-33, was line-oriented like a text adventure, vtrek was a full-screen interactive terminal app, like vi. You'd issue movement commands using the 3x3 block of keys of the left side of the keyboard—Q, W, E, etc. Other keys controlled the ship's scanners, shields, weapons, and warp drive. Those inputs drove the game's event loop and updated the display accordingly. It was great fun, especially for a video game starved kid like me. I was forever pestering friends and cousins to play on their Ataris or Nintendos or Apples or Tandys. I didn't get my hands on a proper gaming computer until the early 90s, when we replaced the 5000SX with a 386.

So I'm sure you can imagine my excitement when I stumbled across an archive containing XENIX ports of a bunch of Unix games, including vtrek. (Thank you, Vince!) I'm not even sure how I managed to find that. Nowadays, Google only returns two search results for vtrek, the XENIX game port archive and a munged version of the original release to net.sources.games, and that's only if you know to include the "duncel" insult the game uses in the search terms. Google Groups searches of net.sources.games will lead you to a series of posts from the fall of 1985, but how would anyone other than an old fuddy duddy like me even know to look there? (Also, Google Groups doesn't have the original Usenet posts, so formatting is all screwed up. It's a vexing problem for the modern programmer archeologist.) Now imagine, if you will, an eager and not inexperienced nerd trying to compile a System V-era game on Linux and FreeBSD circa 2005. This Star Trek quote seems appropriate:

PAIN!

I mean, even the Real Hackers back in 1985 had problems getting it to compile, so I don't know why I thought my experience would be anything other than worse. The termios code in glibc just didn't work. At all. Neither did the sgtty code, which had been broken since at least 4.4BSD. After a good long while beating my head against vtrek, even going so far as to trying to build it on OpenStep 4.2 (from 1997) and FreeBSD 2.0 (from 1994), I gave up. Maybe it's time to give it another go for nostalgia's sake.

The 1985 release per Google Groups:

https://groups.google.com/g/net.sources.games/search?q=vtrek

For an example of how Google Groups screws up posts, here's a patch to vtrek:

https://usenet.trashworldnews.com/?thread=241631

And here's Google's version:

https://groups.google.com/g/net.sources.games/c/Rx_u0q5V5iE/...

The XENIX port (thanks again, Vince!):

https://svn.so-much-stuff.com/svn/trunk/cvs/trunk/games.d/vt...

Hints at how I might get vtrek to work:

https://comp.unix.programmer.narkive.com/KP4z3Ge2/problem-wi...

God bless Thomas Dickey, who's been maintaining vttest this whole time!

https://invisible-island.net/vttest/

u/xenophonf

KarmaCake day3785November 24, 2010
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