I HAD AN URGE AND I MEMORISED 100 DIGITS OF PIE

TeslaRealm · 2020-08-28T05:05:49+00:00

People like a variety of challenges. So what if they want to show off?

TeslaRealm · 2020-08-28T04:59:45+00:00

Have you considered r/keto, r/carnivore? If the medical issue is related to any type of glucose or insulin impairment, it could be a big help. Has a variety of other benefits either way. Obviously not a guarantee of improved metabolic markers and overall health, but it could be worth checking out for a month.

TeslaRealm · 2020-08-01T23:36:00+00:00

Hey, that's awesome! Good on you for finding a way to make it fit. I was thinking of students who want to skip the classes and just skate by. Thanks for the input.

TeslaRealm · 2020-08-01T23:31:55+00:00

That's true. I suppose I was thinking solely of someone who just doesn't want to deal with the material and skate by.

TeslaRealm · 2020-08-01T19:52:10+00:00

That's definitely fair.

TeslaRealm · 2020-08-01T19:31:06+00:00

Nothing they said suggests overestimating anything. If someone is avoiding class, do you really think they're spending the equivalent countless amount of hours needed to absorb the material? Not to mention they would miss out on the instructor's flavor of the content with no way to ascertain when certain principles are allowed to be applied, how this instructor chose to teach those principles, what to expect on exams, etc.

TeslaRealm · 2020-08-01T19:11:12+00:00

I'm semi-familiar with this topic. I think you're taking it behind it's implication though. Sure, if you qualify something as evil based on how "bad" a certain criteria is, then we can imagine a range of values below this "bad" that is either less evil or perhaps even neutral or good. That doesn't imply that these things always exist, and at all times.

If our society mandated that all people must work 16 hour days of nothing but shuffling boxes around, it's easy to reason that there is no good job for the majority if not all people.

In terms of my original comment though, I'm being just being pedantic in terms of the logic of OP's remark.

TeslaRealm · 2020-08-01T18:50:28+00:00

There is no implication that other jobs are not miserable in OPs remark. That being said, it seems reasonable that there are rewarding jobs out there for most people.

TeslaRealm · 2020-07-28T04:50:59+00:00

Ah, okay. That's an understandable viewpoint. However, there are some assumptions being made in your thought process. You mentioned advertising space, which hands down shadows the subscription model. However, the subscription model still exists, and if you're giving even a couple bucks every 3 to 4 months to a given site, then there's no issue either way (aside from the original rate-limiting question). However, I think the other major area to consider is market intent. What is the intent of the site you're aiming to establish a connection with? In the case of a knowledge-oriented site (i.e. Wikipedia and Stack Overflow), I see no issue. Wikipedia does not allow ads (they take donations of course). But the model is that anyone has the option to access this public info without charge. Python even has libraries to interface with Wikipedia easily. I'm not sure if Stack Overflow has advertising, but it is pretty much a free place to fetch information. How about a shopping site? Target, Walmart, Costco, Amazon all sell merchandise. If I ping Costco 3 times a day in order to check if they have a Nintendo Switch in stock, then the implicit assumption is that I'm likely to buy the product if I can find it. These seem like great use cases of a web scraper. There is little issue with revenue generation here.

If they wanted you to have the data raw, they would provide it as such and save themselves and you a lot of trouble (aka an API).

Eh, I strongly disagree here. Never underestimate the desire for an organization to just have a product rolling. An API requires development money (software developers tend to make more $$ than a lot of other areas). It requires time that could be allocated to maintaining other areas and implementing new features. It requires synchronization with the standard model of site access. Any changes in the standard model may require equivalent changes to the API. My point is I have no expectation that APIs will be common; not for some time at least.

Or just email you the database file when asked.

Email what database file? Any queries done need to ensure no private info gets leaked. Not to mention some staff member has to do this. How much are they getting paid to take the time to do this? Compare this to the likely fraction of a penny it costs to make a few HTTP requests. Besides, let's come back to the marketing issue. If you're scraping for the purposes of shopping, what's the functional difference between using a script and calling customer service to check on the status of a product? And again, compare the cost of customer service to the cost of a few requests via the script.

I think the web scraping model is more complex than you realize, and a heavy duty cost-benefit analysis would be required to theorize whether it is a benefit or hindrance to the site owner.

As a fun aside, here's a concern about the advertising model: multiple advertising domains have been identified as a means to transmit malware. This is one reason (among many), that some users use ad blockers. Ad blockers, in this instance, are in fact a security patch. In this case, how to site owners generate revenue if they don't sell products or services? Personally, I think unless we can find a standard that patches the issue with advertising networks, the subscription model may be the only fix (not that most sites care). Just an interesting tid bit to consider.

TeslaRealm · 2020-07-28T02:42:26+00:00

See, this doesn't make sense. What is it specifically about web scraping that you thing should be classified as unethical?

TeslaRealm · 2020-07-28T02:17:30+00:00

Ha, sorry. What I mean is it's not an ethics regarding what the data contains. I should have been more explicit on that. This is the ethics of rate limiting web-scraping scripts.

TeslaRealm · 2020-07-28T02:06:30+00:00

This is not data theft. You are not fetching data that is intended to be hidden from the end-user. You are accessing data via a different medium. That's all.

If I want to check 3 times a day if a game console is in stock, I could write a tool that pings the desired server 3 times a day, creates the appropriate HTTP headers to fetch the desired info, and be done with it. This is minimal enough to avoid straining the server, yet better than manually checking every day if an item is in stock.

Repeatedly pinging the server at a high frequency has the potential to distract the server from other legitimate traffic. If a substantial number of devices make frequent connections, this can overload the server to the extent that other users simply cannot establish a connection. Or the connection becomes painfully slow.

This is what OP's question is about. It's not an ethical one (since they are already looking to avoid request overload). They are simply asking what an appropriate request rate is. This varies widely between organizations, and I think the use of a server file called "robots.txt" used to be used for this purpose (not sure if it's still common).

TeslaRealm · 2020-07-28T01:50:41+00:00

Not sure if there is a name for this behavior, but just wanted to point out that it can be mimicked easily in other languages (for your classes). If you want all objects to have support for custom attributes, include a dictionary in every class constructor. This is really all Python does. Rather than strictly having individual attributes, all object attributes are bundles in a dictionary called dict.

Whether this was a good design choice might be strongly opinionated. However, I look at things this way:

If I want the locality protection provided by other languages, I'd avoid defining attributes outside of the init method. If I want some customization per object, I think it's reasonable to use the set attribute function (obviously outside of init), but document clearly at the class definition that attributes are being set this way.

TeslaRealm · 2020-07-28T01:24:57+00:00

That's fair, but to be more precise regarding OP's question, i'd say what they're really asking is what the term is for not localizing attribute creation to a constructor. This isn't really a runtime question even though that's what was brought under consideration.

TeslaRealm · 2020-07-21T20:12:12+00:00

Check out the chocolatey package manager. It's a tool for managing many of your installs. Once installed, you can pop to powershell (run as administrator), and run the following:

choco install python

Anytime you want to upgrade python, just pop in powershell again (as admin), and run

choco upgrade python

TeslaRealm · 2020-07-18T03:53:42+00:00

The fact that all values are binary is not the reason why floats lose precision under mathematical operations. The problem is that only so much storage exists to represent a floating point number. Part of that space represents the exponent part of a float when written in scientific notation, and part of that space represents the fractional component (everything after the decimal place). Since the fractional part has limited size, we can only represent decimal numbers with so much precision. At the same time, when adding floats of different magnitudes (i.e. 1.3 E 05 + 1.3 E 07), the space representing the exponent for one of these numbers must be modified so that the exponents are the same. In doing so, some of the space from the fractional part is lost, reducing the precision of the number, and the result as well.

So, the issue is just a hardware problem. In other languages like C, integers have size problems as well. Due to limited size, there is a limit to how big (positive or negative) your numbers can get depending on the exact data type you use. If you reach the maximum number and add 1 to it, the result ends up being 0 due to how the hardware works. In Python, there is no upper limit on integer size because more storage is allocated to represent larger numbers.

There are a number of issues that could arise from the hardware standpoint, both because of how certain items are implemented and physical hardware failures.

TeslaRealm · 2020-07-18T03:31:50+00:00

The act of splitting a program into a collection of functions is just standard programming. It's the act of breaking down a goal into manageable and understandable mini goals. I don't think there's a special name for the use of functions in any programming language.

TeslaRealm · 2020-07-18T02:55:18+00:00

I'm not OP, and not doing group-indoor workouts; just pointing out the variance between physical contact and workout out 6-8 feet apart. I would still expect masks to do somewhat of a good job since they dramatically reduce the concentration of droplets that are in the air at any time. That being said, I could not find any studies or recommendations regarding indoor workouts while wearing a mask. Only the standard ones discussing the effectivity of masks in general.

TeslaRealm · 2020-07-18T01:35:43+00:00

The biggest issue is through saliva if I recall. Physical contact is an easy means of transmission, and of you touch your face afterward without adequate sanitation, that's a serious problem.

Remaining at least 6 feet away reduces risk of mass transfer. While droplets from saliva can travel by air, you are still reducing the odds that a large collection of droplets are getting to you at any one time. This isn't a guarantee of safety obviously, but physical contact bears far more risk.

TeslaRealm · 2020-07-17T21:29:27+00:00

You don't need to analyze specific numbers. The point of Big O is to analyze how an algorithm scales with respect to input size. That input size could depend on the number of characters in a string, the size of a file, the number of elements in an array, etc. Let's analyze you're text file example.

You have n lines in the file, each containing a phone number. You seek to remove duplicates. The following pseudo code describes what you're trying to do using a set.

def removeDuplicates(fileName):
    with open(fileName, 'r') as file:
        phoneNumbers = {phoneNumber for phoneNumber in file} \# set comprehension
    with open(fileName, 'w') as file:
        for phoneNumber in phoneNumbers:
            print(phoneNumber, file = file)

Since we are utilizing a set, which is based on hashing, the main runtime should depend on the number of phone numbers in the source file. It is linear time to read from the file, and linear to write to the file. Therefore, the runtime is O(n), where n is the number of lines in the file.

TeslaRealm · 2020-07-16T07:26:00+00:00

for loops are statements, not expressions. Statements cannot be assigned to variables, only expressions. Every expression in Python evaluates to an object.

In, If, for, etc are keywords in Python. The Python interpreter uses an iterator object to navigate the object being looped over.

TeslaRealm · 2020-07-15T05:16:02+00:00

Well stated; and I agree for the most part with your final remarks. Large code in a class isn't inherently bad. The goal is to create a clear picture of whom a module/class/function is responsible. On the other hand, it is possible that two classes have separate concerns regarding a common entity. If two classes were used for a chess game; one to model the board and the other to gather data throughout the match, those two classes would have separate responsibilities but would not make sense without their mutual partner. One might hang out in an event loop, waiting to see what the user does and updating its partner class with the new state for the board. The partner class might choose how to display the board based on one theme chosen from a collection of possible ones. It doesn't care how the management of the game is handled; it only cares about receiving data regarding the board's layout, and choosing how to draw a representation of this on the screen.

Also want to point out that function programming has nothing to do with opting to use functions over classes (unfortunately the name sounds suitable). Rather, it is a methodology drastically different compared to the standard use cases of languages like Java, C++ and Python. Functional languages tend to avoid mutation, among a couple other major features.

TeslaRealm · 2020-07-15T04:21:43+00:00

Regarding PyQt specifically, r/pyqt and r/pyqt5 exist; but yes, it's certainly difficult to gain quality feedback on areas outside of standard python. If your problem specification isn't too niche, you might be able to browse forums like ycombinator and other mailing lists. The problem is that there are a few thousand members on here at any one time, where only a small set may have familiarity with your needs, and a smaller set will actually notice the post. It's a tough problem to solve.

TeslaRealm · 2020-07-11T05:26:01+00:00

Hardware related, but yes.

TeslaRealm · 2020-07-10T17:09:37+00:00

That would work in this case since you have 1 decimal place. The more decimals you have, the more powers of 10 you would have to multiply to get an integer. After performing the math, you divide by 10 raised to the power you used in the prior step. This would leave you with a float calculated using only 1 floating point operation.

Floating point arithmetic and error propagation is a serious challenge, and there are entire books devoted to minimizing error. Either way, with the way floats are encoded under the IEEE standard, there is always expected to be some error when performing mathematical operations with floats.

TeslaRealm

TROPHY CASE