hadley

I think the two most important messages that people can get from a short course are:

a) the material is important and worthwhile to learn (even if it's challenging), and b) it's possible to learn it!

For those reasons, I usually start by diving as quickly as possible into visualisation. I think it's a bad idea to start by explicitly teaching programming concepts (like data structures), because the pay off isn't obvious. If you start with visualisation, the pay off is really obvious and people are more motivated to push past any initial teething problems. In stat405, I used to start with some very basic templates that got people up and running with scatterplots and histograms - they wouldn't necessary understand the code, but they'd know which bits could be varied for different effects.

Apart from visualisation, I think the two most important topics to cover are tidy data (i.e. http://www.jstatsoft.org/v59/i10/ + tidyr) and data manipulation (dplyr). These are both important for when people go off and apply

zacstewart

import os
import numpy
from pandas import DataFrame
from sklearn.feature_extraction.text import CountVectorizer
from sklearn.naive_bayes import MultinomialNB
from sklearn.pipeline import Pipeline
from sklearn.cross_validation import KFold
from sklearn.metrics import confusion_matrix, f1_score

NEWLINE = '\n'

maxim

In Rails 3

NOTE: This post now lives (and kept up to date) on my blog: http://hakunin.com/rails3-load-paths

If you add a dir directly under app/

Do nothing. All files in this dir are eager loaded in production and lazy loaded in development by default.

If you add a dir under app/something/

garybernhardt

This document has moved!

It's now here, in The Programmer's Compendium. The content is the same as before, but being part of the compendium means that it's actively maintained.

hadley

If you were to give recommendations to your "little brother/sister" on things that they need to do to become a data scientist, what would those things be?

I think the "Data Science Venn Diagram" (http://drewconway.com/zia/2013/3/26/the-data-science-venn-diagram) is a great place to start. You need three things to be a good data scientist:

• Statistical knowledge
• Programming/hacking skills
• Domain expertise

Statistical knowledge

bearfrieze

Comprehensions in Python the Jedi way

by Bjørn Friese

Beautiful is better than ugly. Explicit is better than implicit.

-- The Zen of Python

I frequently deal with collections of things in the programs I write. Collections of droids, jedis, planets, lightsabers, starfighters, etc. When programming in Python, these collections of things are usually represented as lists, sets and dictionaries. Oftentimes, what I want to do with collections is to transform them in various ways. Comprehensions is a powerful syntax for doing just that. I use them extensively, and it's one of the things that keep me coming back to Python. Let me show you a few examples of the incredible usefulness of comprehensions.

briantjacobs

Storytelling from Space: Tools/Resources

This list of resources is all about acquring and processing aerial imagery. It's generally broken up in three ways: how to go about this in Photoshop/GIMP, using command-line tools, or in GIS software, depending what's most comfortable to you. Often these tools can be used in conjunction with each other.

Acquiring Landsat & MODIS

Web Interface

• USGS Earth Explorer - Browser and data access (create a login)
  http://earthexplorer.usgs.gov/

• Landsat archive

pixeltrix

When should you use DateTime and when should you use Time?

It's a common misconception that [William Shakespeare][1] and [Miguel de Cervantes][2] died on the same day in history - so much so that UNESCO named April 23 as [World Book Day because of this fact][3]. However because England hadn't yet adopted [Gregorian Calendar Reform][4] (and wouldn't until [1752][5]) their deaths are actually 10 days apart. Since Ruby's Time class implements a [proleptic Gregorian calendar][6] and has no concept of calendar reform then there's no way to express this. This is where DateTime steps in:

>> shakespeare = DateTime.iso8601('1616-04-23', Date::ENGLAND)
=> Tue, 23 Apr 1616 00:00:00 +0000
>> cervantes = DateTime.iso8601('1616-04-23', Date::ITALY)
=> Sat, 23 Apr 1616 00:00:00 +0000

chrismdp

# You don't need Fog in Ruby or some other library to upload to S3 -- shell works perfectly fine
# This is how I upload my new Sol Trader builds (http://soltrader.net)
# Based on a modified script from here: http://tmont.com/blargh/2014/1/uploading-to-s3-in-bash

S3KEY="my aws key"
S3SECRET="my aws secret" # pass these in

function putS3
{
  path=$1

Andygmb

; The official HD AI
; An Artificial Intelligence Script written by Archon and Promiskuitiv
; Get in contact with Promiskuitiv by sending a mail to neuernamae@web.de


; List of taunts it reacts to:

; Standard taunts.
; 33 - Stop slinging resources. If slinging is requested early and is immediately canceled it may mess up the strategy.
; 38 - Sling Resources. Human player only, stops any unit production except for civilian units.