All posts

So apparently almost all of the developers in the world are using stackoverflow. However many developers just use StackOverflow to lookup answers, and rarely to ask their own questions. Answering other people’s questions is of course rarer still. Up until recently I was the same: I wrote a few questions in StackOverflow, and even answered…

So apparently my last blog post was from 2012. That’s quite a bit of time. Since then I’ve: Had a son Sold my startup Desti to HERE Moved with my family to Boston Moved back to Israel, join Cymmetria, first as VP R&D and later as CTO Had another son Left Cymmetria and joined Flytrex…

While working on my new startup, we are doing a little bit of reasoning using implications. One of the more curious forms of implications is the negative form: consider the following exaggerated example: a place being kid-friendly implies that it is not romantic. a place being a strip club implies it is not kid-friendly If…

For the latest project I’m working on, we’re using Django with Postgres. I was writing some code that had to find a list of objects that weren’t processed yet. The way they were stored in the DB is like so: class SomeObject(models.Model): #some data   class ProcessedObjectData(models.Model): some_object = models.ForeignKey(SomeObject, db_index = True) #some more…

So here I was, trying to write some Django server-side code, when every once in a while, some test would fail. Now, it is important to know that we are using any_model, a cute little library that allows you to specify only the fields you need when creating objects, and randomizes the rest (to help…

Some months ago, I was facing a problem of having to deal with large amounts of textual data from an external source. One of the problems was that I wanted only the english elements, but was getting tons of non-english ones. To solve that I needed some quick way of getting rid of non-english texts.…

A few days ago a friend (x) of a friend (y) showed me and my friend (y) a small app he was developing, that had photos from flickr and picasa. We suggested adding photos from Wikipedia as well, but he (x) said that the photos were too big, and it was too much trouble resizing…

Here are the top 30 “base modules”, ordered by number of PyPI projects importing them. These results are based on 11,204 packages download from PyPI. Explanations, full results and code to generate them are available below.

When I look back at various mathematical courses I took, most have at least one theorem that I really liked. Usually I like it because the proof has a surprising trick, sometimes it’s because of the unexpected conclusion, or maybe the unintuitive feel to it. In other cases it’s just the elegance of the proof,…

A few days ago, @edensh mentioned in Facebook beautiful code, and many people gave examples of assembly, while I was thinking of Python. That got me thinking: what is beautiful code for me? So here are my criteria for beautiful code: Readable (also visually pretty) Concise Does something non trivial (usually in an unexpectedly short…