Michael Yang themichaelyang

'Users hate change'

This week NN Group released a video by Jakob Nielsen in which he attempts to help designers deal with the problem of customers being resistant to their new site/product redesign. The argument goes thusly:

Humans naturally resist change
Your change is for the better
Customers should just get used to it and stop complaining

There's slightly more to it than that, he caveats his argument with requiring you to have of course followed their best practices on product design, and allows for a period of customers being able to elect to continue to use the old site, although he says this is obviously only a temporary solution as you don't want to support both.

Monads for the Rest of Us

by Bruce Pascoe - 1 May, 2019

"A monad is just a monoid in the category of endofunctors. What's the problem?" ~James Iry[^1]

The problem... is that there are several problems.

It's been said that monads bear a dreadful curse. Once you finally understand what they are, you begin to see them everywhere--but somehow become completely incapable of explaining them to anyone else. Many tutorial writers have tried to break the Great Curse--the Web is lousy with bold attempts and half successes that attest to this--and just as many have failed. Well, I'm here to address the elephant in the room[^2] and tell you that I intend to break the Great Curse once and for all.

There are basically two ways a monad tutorial tends to go. One is a paragraph or two of minimal descriptions of one or two common monads (Haskell's Maybe in particular is very popular), followed by a lot of intimidating Haskell syntax trying to explain--precisely--how it all fits together. This is well

I've been deceiving you all. I had you believe that Svelte was a UI framework — unlike React and Vue etc, because it shifts work out of the client and into the compiler, but a framework nonetheless.

But that's not exactly accurate. In my defense, I didn't realise it myself until very recently. But with Svelte 3 around the corner, it's time to come clean about what Svelte really is.

Svelte is a language.

Specifically, Svelte is an attempt to answer a question that many people have asked, and a few have answered: what would it look like if we had a language for describing reactive user interfaces?

A few projects that have answered this question:

UPDATE: I have baked the ideas in this file inside a Python CLI tool called pyds-cli. Please find it here: https://github.com/ericmjl/pyds-cli

How to organize your Python data science project

Having done a number of data projects over the years, and having seen a number of them up on GitHub, I've come to see that there's a wide range in terms of how "readable" a project is. I'd like to share some practices that I have come to adopt in my projects, which I hope will bring some organization to your projects.

Disclaimer: I'm hoping nobody takes this to be "the definitive guide" to organizing a data project; rather, I hope you, the reader, find useful tips that you can adapt to your own projects.

Disclaimer 2: What I’m writing below is primarily geared towards Python language users. Some ideas may be transferable to other languages; others may not be so. Please feel free to remix whatever you see here!

The history of hyperHTML followed by lit-html

While many remember the epic hyperHTML: A Virtual DOM Alternative post I've published the 5th of March 2017, the first official implementation of the library was working as hyperHTML.bind(node) function for tagged literals the day before, and it's been in my experiments folder already for a little while.

The hilarious reaction from the skeptical community

At first glance people couldn't believe performance of the DBMonster demo shown in that article,

A step-by-step guide how to use Python with Tor and Privoxy

Latest revision: 2021-12-05.

Tested on Ubuntu 18.04 Docker container. The Dockerfile is a single line FROM ubuntu:18.04. Alternatively, you can simply run docker run -it ubuntu:18.04 bash.

NOTE: stopping services didn't work for me for some reason. That's why there is kill $(pidof <service name>) after each failed service <service name> stop to kill it.

	<?php
	// half-hearted CSS minification
	$css = preg_replace(
	array('/\s(\w)\s{\s/','/\s(\S:)(\s)([^;])(\s\|\n);(\n\|\s)/','/\n/','/\s}\s*/'),
	array('$1{ ','$1$3;',"",'} '),
	file_get_contents('linked.css')
	);

	// embed as a data: uri
	$base64css = rtrim(strtr(base64_encode($css), '+/', '-_'), '=');

	#### MATPLOTLIBRC FORMAT

	## This is a sample matplotlib configuration file - you can find a copy
	## of it on your system in
	## site-packages/matplotlib/mpl-data/matplotlibrc. If you edit it
	## there, please note that it will be overwritten in your next install.
	## If you want to keep a permanent local copy that will not be
	## overwritten, place it in the following location:
	## unix/linux:
	## $HOME/.config/matplotlib/matplotlibrc or

	import time
	import sys


	class ProgressBarPrinter:
	def __init__(self, width, step, stream, fname):
	self.width = width
	self.block_progress = 0
	self.current_progress = 0
	self.start_time = time.time()

	#!/usr/bin/env python3

	from PIL import Image
	import numpy as np
	import tensorflow as tf
	import tensorflow_hub as hub

	# smooth values from point a to point b.
	STEPS = 100
	pt_a = np.random.normal(size=(512))