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johnmarinelli | 6 years ago | on: Congolese doctor discovered Ebola, but didn't get credit until now

The core of the issue is the problem of colonial mentality. I suppose we would all like to brush it under the rug by saying it's difficult to pin down who really "discovered" Ebola, but I think this only perpetuates and helps internalise colonialism. I think a more clear cut case on the issue how the music industry ripped off Chuck Berry and repackaged him as Elvis Presley.

The more we ignore and "justify" the issue with intellectualism, the farther away we all get from a real solution.

johnmarinelli | 6 years ago | on: It's time to switch to a four-day working week, say two experts

A few months ago, I requested a 32 hour work week at my job. I took the appropriate paycut (I'm a single bachelor that doesn't spend much anyway). Instead of a 4-day workweek, I do ~6.5 hours for 5 days. It's been great and I couldn't recommend it more.

edit - I should add that I started the job at 40 hours/week, and after 1 year of being there I asked for 32 hours/week.

johnmarinelli | 7 years ago | on: SQL: One of the most valuable skills

I'm a frontend web developer, but for a year I worked on a custom ETL system and wrote lots & lots of SQL. I still find myself using knowledge I learned back then and applying it today - for example, being able to review BI's queries is immensely useful. I'm also much less intimidated when I look at backend code, since a lot of it is interfacing with a database in some way.

I think SQL is one of those essential "secondary" skills for developers.

johnmarinelli | 7 years ago | on: Datashader: turns even the largest data into images, accurately

I suspect marketing Datashader as an "accumulation buffer" wouldn't have the same effect on its target audience (data visualisation developers) as presenting it simply as a way to "Turn data into images".

I'm also curious (as a fledgling graphics programmer) - what leads you to believe that Datashader uses an accumulation buffer internally? I would think that they use some magic to draw all the points in a single draw call using instanced rendering, but I am very naive :)

johnmarinelli | 7 years ago | on: Datashader: turns even the largest data into images, accurately

Looks like a really cool project. One thing that I would be interested in see would be using Datashader as a dynamic visualisation library - for example, generative art projects. Probably not the main interest of data visualisation practitioners but hey, if you've got a sweet pipeline to render all those points, why not?

johnmarinelli | 10 years ago | on: Sqlize: Command line utility to uppercase your SQL

hey all! here is a quick little gem I made to transform my SQL/PostgreSQL scripts to uppercase. I also had a lot of fun with the README. In fact, I probably had more fun with the README.

I'm a Rails dev turned data sherpa so I spend a lot of time writing SQL now, and am too lazy to constantly shift my pinky over to the caps lock, so I wrote this.

Contributions are always welcome - I would love to add more PostgreSQL (and any other DB system)'s keywords. This is pretty easy; all it takes is a json array in sqlize/keywords directory and a simple class.

johnmarinelli | 10 years ago | on: Show HN: Prof – Self-contained C/C++ profiler library for Linux

Should I be able to simply #include "prof.h" and use it? I tried the first example, but I'm getting this error:

# prof.h:274: PROF error (Invalid argument) Aborted (core dumped)

running through gdb gives me: Starting program: /home/john/Documents/c++/tmp/prof/a # prof.h:274: PROF error (Invalid argument)

Program received signal SIGABRT, Aborted. 0x00007ffff7745cc9 in __GI_raise (sig=sig@entry=6) at ../nptl/sysdeps/unix/sysv/linux/raise.c:56 56 ../nptl/sysdeps/unix/sysv/linux/raise.c: No such file or directory.

On Ubuntu 14.04, gcc 4.8.4.

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