sdrabing

I've always thought it was strange that so many people just watch TV for noise. Any love for silence anymore?

Something about comparing the US to other rich nations rubs me the wrong way when, in my opinion, servicing a country as large as the US is very different from servicing a small island like the UK. The post talks about difference in margins and regional squeezing, etc. However, how much of the cost difference comes from transporting the goods? The post also mentions how large stores are, and how large of a selection there is, in US stores. That seems like it'd drive up the cost, but I don't hear Americans complaining about too many options. Honestly, I think it's an achievement that an American can eat as healthy for the same price as the French, they are very different countries geographically!

Looked into scraping some data from this, here are some URL templates worth mentioning:

https://naldc.nal.usda.gov/download_image/master_image/POM00...

The link above will give you full-sized images, but only for download (just change the POM ID to view a different image). Also:

https://naldc.nal.usda.gov/download/POM00007435/screen

The link above will give you thumbnails that you can view in browser.

I'm considering making a taxonomic tree (and then forget formal phylogeny and include the varieties) with the thumbnail images. Similar to another pet project of mine.

Built off of NCBI E-Utilities, this currently only works for citations found on PubMed. I would love to find a way to make this more general, have it work for Google Scholar or the like, but I don't know of any free API access to larger citation databases.

You obviously don't live in a place with harsh winters.

I love Graphviz, here's a citation graph tool I build with it:

https://github.com/shanedrabing/gref

I was thinking the same thing! I 3D model would be really neat to watch and pick apart.

Blood Meridian (or The Evening Redness in the West) by Cormac McCarthy. Quickly became my favorite book after reading it a second time. I've never read a book with more effective language.

This is a tangent, but the "utility monster" scenario only makes sense if the utility gained from an activity remains the same with how many resources are put into it. This doesn't make sense with how people actually work, almost all goals or resources or pleasures have diminishing returns, or homeostasis. Do negative feedback loops exist in this philosophy? Perhaps I'm misunderstanding the point.

What about the usage of capitalization?

I've been a weirdo with my Python code recently, and tend towards a more functional programming style. So, the `operator` module is essential for doing some cools things with maps.

For instance, I'm writing a library to simulate the behavior of vectors in R, and that means vectorized operators (the operators runs the length of two paired vectors). All you need to do is make a special tuple subclass that maps the operator along another tuple (vector) and returns your vector subclass:

https://github.com/shanedrabing/pyrat/blob/e0049213152f615e4...

Anyways, this is all to say that I love `operator` and try my best not to use lamdbas much anymore (except where they are honestly simpler).

I had no idea a patent existed for this type of software, I figured this current program out through trial and error and a couple of iterations.

How can a developer protect themselves from publishing patented software? Is there any way of knowing if a certain type of program is patented?

Still working on some bugs, but it's easy to use already.