greg_data

Free ebooks are every day. Normally it's something older. No Email notifications for the freebies normally. Worth checking up on occasionally though.

Really? How so?

The fact that he got his diagnosis whilst writing the thing makes it even more poignant for me.

There are parts where you can tell that what your reading is his personal reflections on his own situation.

I always found his latter day fiction to be a bit dull, but Quarry is kind of an exception.

I'm gonna go ahead and assume it's "The Quarry".

If so, it's well worth a read. Intensely poignant and personal, but brilliant Banks as ever.

Yo, I'm actually the Data Analyst who worked on this. Turns out a poorly constructed regex put all of C# and C++ into C. We've addressed this and will be putting out a revised edition of the report by the end of the week.

that's an absolutely fascinating way to think about it.

Nothing currently, really. However, when I first joined the company I work at (as a Graduate Data Analyst) I wrote a recommendations engine in VBA.

It took about 5 minutes to chug through 3 months of sales data and produce a list of content -> content pairings & weights.

Then I discovered Python, cursed my manager, and the same algorithm ran in <1s on the same data.

Second Lubuntu. Installed to breathe life into an old af Toshiba laptop. Stable, fast, no bloat.

Graphs are fun, CHARTS are boring.

Should've been called Diatomic!

Interesting counterpoint to this is jQuery. Their jQuery book came out very early in the game and was authored by people very much involved in the project. Some of the jQuery API docs are actually based on the book.