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Links for 2020-01-08

  • Modin: Speed up your Pandas workflows by changing a single line of code

    The modin.pandas DataFrame is an extremely light-weight parallel DataFrame. Modin transparently distributes the data and computation so that all you need to do is continue using the pandas API as you were before installing Modin. Unlike other parallel DataFrame systems, Modin is an extremely light-weight, robust DataFrame. Because it is so light-weight, Modin provides speed-ups of up to 4x on a laptop with 4 physical cores. We have focused heavily on bridging the solutions between DataFrames for small data (e.g. pandas) and large data. Often data scientists require different tools for doing the same thing on different sizes of data. The DataFrame solutions that exist for 1KB do not scale to 1TB+, and the overheads of the solutions for 1TB+ are too costly for datasets in the 1KB range. With Modin, because of its light-weight, robust, and scalable nature, you get a fast DataFrame at small and large data. With preliminary cluster and out of core support, Modin is a DataFrame library with great single-node performance and high scalability in a cluster.

    (tags: data parallel python pandas dataframes modin data-science)

  • IAmA: Reddit’s Own Vacuum Repair Tech

    some top tips on what to look for in a vacuum cleaner. Bottom line: bagless and stick vacuums are not the best

    (tags: reddit vacuum-cleaners shopping tips ama hoovers)

  • Buckle Up Twitter

    Listen up bitches, it’s time to learn incorrect things about someone you’ve never heard of:

    I am thinking of the response to February’s “Beau Brummell invented toxic masculinity” episode, in which the 19th-century English fancy man Beau Brummell, as infamous a dandy as one can be, was “taken down” in a grueling thread which neatly encapsulated all the worst qualities of Buckle Up Twitter: bewilderingly irate, laden with a combination of baroque linguistic flourishes and performatively subversive swearing, assumption of complete ignorance on the part of the audience, fondness for the word “gaslighting,” a powerful youth pastor-like eagerness to “meet people where they are,” high likelihood that it will be retweeted by people who refer to themselves as “Scolds” in their twitter bios, strong urge to lay the blame for the ills of the 21st century firmly at the foot of a basically random actor or event, total erasure of most things that have ever happened.

    (tags: twitter threads bores social-media funny)

  • Facial recognition for the public: Yandex

    not such much via, as from, Nelson:

    You can use Yandex Image Search right now as a pretty good facial recognition system for anyone who has labelled photos on the Web. I believe this is the first generally accessible facial recognition system with a large database. Yandex isn’t designed for this purpose. The trick is to upload photos cropped to a face and it’ll work more or less to find similar faces.
    this is really odd. Definitely seems like they designed the image similarity engine to support faces as a special case.

    (tags: privacy face-recognition yandex search similarity images web)

  • How “special register groups” invaded computer dictionaries for decades

    For some reason, a 1960 definition of [a computer’s] “central processing unit” included “special register groups”, an obscure feature from the Honeywell 800 mainframe. This definition was copied and changed for decades, even though it doesn’t make sense. It appears that once something appears in an authoritative glossary, people will reuse it for decades, and obsolete terms may never die out.
    Additionally, the “main frame” was a Honeywell term for the large physical frame which held the CPU. History!

    (tags: computer computing language history etymology mainframe honeywell cpu dictionaries)

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