Top all-time · #6017
Naftali Harris
Personal blog · naftaliharris.com/blog · on HN as naftaliharrisprogrammingdata
Naftali Harris's personal blog at naftaliharris.com covers programming and data. Since 2012, 13 different Hacker News readers have linked it 35 times, most often “Why I'm Making Python 2.8”. The last post was in 2022, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (9) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Naftali Harris's posts on continuing Python 2 as 'Python 2.8' (later Tauthon) and on interactive visualizations of algorithms such as k-means, Voronoi tessellation and Stein's paradox.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 9 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Why I'm Making Python 2.85 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2016-12-10
- /blog/steinviz/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2017-04-05
What Hacker News says?
Are you referring to that "Python 2.8" thing [1] that happened some years ago? A comment from PSF [2] makes it clear that they don't have any issue with people continuing to develop their Python 2 codebase further. It is what their open source explicitly permits after all. They do have issue with people using a trademarked name and not making it clear that their work isn't endorsed by the Python Foundation. [1] http…
Comment linking /blog/why-making-python-2.8/
on “Sunsetting Python 2”Submitted Why I'm Making Python 2.8 as a story · 241 points
HN discussionIt looks like all Python 2.8 is missing is a new name: https://www.naftaliharris.com/blog/why-making-python-2.8/
Comment linking /blog/why-making-python-2.8/
on “Grumpy: Go running Python”Submitted How I Got a 2x Speedup With One Line of Code as a story · 216 points
HN discussion>Some corps may continue to do so https://www.naftaliharris.com/blog/why-making-python-2.8/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13144713
Comment linking /blog/why-making-python-2.8/
on “Removing Python 2.x support from Django for version 2.0”Submitted Incompetence as Encouragement as a story · 57 points
HN discussionFor those who want an alternative there is the community continuation of Python 2.8, called Tauthon: https://www.naftaliharris.com/blog/why-making-python-2.8/
Comment linking /blog/why-making-python-2.8/
on “Learn Python 3 the Hard Way”Submitted Visualizing K-Means Clustering as a story · 5 points
HN discussionYou might want to check out Python 2.8 https://www.naftaliharris.com/blog/why-making-python-2.8/
Comment linking /blog/why-making-python-2.8/
on “Python 3.6.0 released”Submitted How a Chess Engine Works as a story · 4 points
HN discussionI've made "proof graphs" with GraphViz, but honestly it was something of a challenge to make them look how I wanted them to. Compared to the time I spent drawing the graph on paper, (ie, collecting the statements and theorems), making the GraphViz version look okay took a long time. http://www.naftaliharris.com/blog/mc-graph/ http://www.naftaliharris.com/blog/mg-graph/
Comment linking /blog/mg-graph/
on “Why Don’t We Have a General-Purpose Tree Editor?”Submitted Memory Locality and Python Objects as a story · 3 points
HN discussionVoronoi tesselation is also a step in K-Means, which is one of the most well-known clustering algorithms (typically used for quantization). Here is a page with an interactive visual example for it: https://www.naftaliharris.com/blog/visualizing-k-means-clust... Note that the DataGenetics article talks about 2D Voronoi cells but they (and K-Means as well) can be generalized to a space of any dimensionality.
Comment linking /blog/visualizing-k-means-clustering/
on “Voronoi Tessellations”Submitted Why I've Liked Chess So Much as a story · 2 points
HN discussionA less popular but perhaps more influential phenomenon is Stein's Paradox [1]. Here's a provocative example often given to illustrate it: Say you have a baseball player, soccer player, and football player, and you wish to estimate the true mean number of home runs, goals, and touchdowns each scores per year. If you have their last ten seasons worth of data for each, then the obvious thing to do, for each player, is…
Comment linking /blog/steinviz/
on “Paradoxes of probability and other statistical strangeness”Submitted Visualizing the James-Stein Estimator: Stein’s Paradox as a story · 2 points
HN discussionOriginal author here. I built this a few years ago, and the main motivation at the time was that I'd heard people say that adding the new features in Python3 required breaking backwards compatibility, which I didn't believe. IMO the only feature that really required breaking backwards compatibility was the str/unicode consolidation and refactoring. This project was my way of proving that we could have gotten the oth…
Comment linking /blog/nonlocal/
on “Tauthon: Fork of Python 2.7 with new syntax, builtins, libraries from Python 3”Submitted Logistic Regression Isn't Interpretable as a story · 2 points
HN discussionHere are some links that might help visualize what is going on: https://www.naftaliharris.com/blog/steinviz/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cUqoHQDinCM (this video actually references the original post) My takeaway is that the volume of points which get worse as they are pulled towards point P exists in some region R. As the number of dimensions increase, region R's volume shrinks as a % of the total cloud volume,…
Comment linking /blog/steinviz/
on “Understanding Stein's Paradox (2021)”Submitted Python Subclass Relationships Aren't Transitive as a story · 2 points
HN discussionWell, in an actual system, this would be sandboxed and stuff. If this all sounds dubious, consider: In modern databases these days, most everything already lives in RAM, and CPUs are getting incredibly fast, meaning most of the time the CPU is sitting there doing nothing, and the bottleneck is bringing stuff up and down from memory into the CPU cache(s) and registers. There is orders of magnitude difference in the s…
Comment linking /blog/2x-speedup-with-one-line-of-code/
on “A practical relational query compiler in 500 lines of code”Submitted How to Solve Problems as a story · 2 points
HN discussionVery neat to see the how the centroids move to the equilibria. Also interesting to look at other point distributions to see what happens in more pathological cases. (For the interested, I once made a kmeans visualization http://www.naftaliharris.com/blog/visualizing-k-means-cluste... , there is one in the sibling comment to this, and many others can be found with a little googling).
Comment linking /blog/visualizing-k-means-clustering/
on “Visualizing K-Means equilibria”Submitted The Communication Loss Function as a story · 1 points
HN discussionI do not understand the ramifications, but how come nobody ever answers "Tauthon" to this discussions? https://github.com/naftaliharris/tauthon Background: https://www.naftaliharris.com/blog/why-making-python-2.8/
Comment linking /blog/why-making-python-2.8/
on “Python 2 is ending, we need to move to Python 3”Submitted Nontrivial: Exception Handling in Python as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Implementing “nonlocal” in Tauthon as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Visualizing DBSCAN Clustering as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Don't Double Major as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Zero Times Infinity Problem as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
