John Stilley john-science

Government on GitHub

What is GitHub? Is GitHub right for your government agency?

What is Git?

Git is a command-line tool that helps people who write software in several key ways:

Git is a place to store all your code.
Git tracks all your changes.

CUDA-based Deep Learning on an AWS EC2

If you're intersted in software you've probably heard about deep learning and even done some reading or played around with it. But unless you have a desktop for high-end gaming you've probably found that running all these new CUDA-based parallel-GPU computing tools is just painfully slow.

That's what happened to me. So, it's time to spin up an EC2 on AWS and use someone else's hardware. This is just a basic introduction into how I did that, from creating an AWS dev account to installing some fun Python deep learning projects on GitHub. If you follow along, you'll be in a good position to install whatever other tools you want (Caffe, for instance) and get deep.

Set up AWS Account

If you haven't already, you need to set up your Amazon AWS profile:

Reading & Writing GZIP Files in Python

I have been testing various ways to read and write text files with GZIP in Python. There were a lot of uninteresting results, but there were two I thought were worth sharing.

Writing GZIP files

If you have a big list of strings to write to a file, you might be tempted to do:

f = gzip.open(out_path, 'wb')

for line in lines:

What makes a person happy?

I'm mortal and want to enjoy the little time I have in existence. A young waitress once asked the Dalai Lama what the meaning of life is, and he replied "happiness". I'm not sure how she felt about that answer, but it feels right to me. Though it turns out he wasn't advocating complete hedonism (see Existentialism vs Nihilism).

I want to spend a little time once in a while cultivating a collection of discusssions on what makes people happy.

Do I think I will find the answer? No.

I just think it is worth a little time every now-and-again considering my own happiness, fullfillment, or peace-of-mind.

Software Reading List

This is just a place for me to keep links that I've found interesting on various topics I've been interested in lately.

Blogs

MEWO2 - Machine Learning, Twitter Bots, & Game Dev
Climate Change - Only a little software talk, but looks interesting.

A BS in CS

Poker, the Ultimate Data Science Test

If you could solve poker with data science, you could make a lot of money any time you want.

Modeling a Deal

If we want to model poker, the first step is to model a single deal of the cards. Now, casinos might deal from more than one deck. But let's start by modeling a single deal from a single 52-card deck:

def sample (n, m):

s = []

Machine Learning - Neural Networks - Deep Learning

Where to Start?

There is a lot of information available out there. The hard part seems to be figuring out where to start. For example, see this recent thread on HackerNews that generated quite a lot of nerd.

Online Resources

neuralnetworksanddeeplearning.com - Online Book. Introductory. Seems well-written and well-recieved.
TensorFlow & Deep Learning without a PhD - Short 5-hour class, on YouTube

Portrait Artists

I have always been afraid of portrait photography, but think it's one of the best things when done really well.

Mark Seliger

His Personal Website
2017 Oscar Party - maybe just a single, large soft box
FStoppers Interview - find a moment, find the person, build trust, people are impatient
Profoto Lighting Inteview

	" NERDTree for file viewing:
	" https://github.com/preservim/nerdtree
	" Taglist for Python-awareness
	" https://github.com/yegappan/taglist
	" https://sourceforge.net/projects/vim-taglist/
	" apt-get install ctags
	set linebreak
	set textwidth=200
	set showmatch
	set hlsearch


	from matplotlib.font_manager import FontProperties
	import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
	import matplotlib as mpl
	mpl.style.use('ggplot')


	def main():
	# make plot objects
	#fig, ax = plt.subplots(figsize=(8, 9), facecolor='white') # 800px-wide version