If you own the cluster, do you actually need to apply the patch? It seems like your security exposure would be far small than, say, Amazon's multi-tenant hardware.

You can safely turn off the style stuff. That said, it's there for a few reasons:

• It's nice when everyone formats their stuff similarly. You can open a file from Joe Stranger and expect it to look a lot like something you've personally written. This reduces the cognitive overhead of coming up to speed with new code.
• Although it's generally not possible for Python formatting bugs to invisibly change the code's meaning, it's easy enough to be consistent.

In Python, static checkers like pylint and flake8 are astoundingly useful for finding the low hanging fruit you've described. I have both wired into Emacs so that potential errors are syntax highlighted. If you're writing Python and not doing the same, you're doing yourself a disservice.

I have a hard time describing the cop as unfortunate when he was the one who pulled the trigger on an innocent person who was acting like an innocent person. He clearly thought he was doing the right thing, but the only unfortunate part of him was his phenomenally bad judgement.

I always laughed at Birkenstocks until a foot doctor convinced me to try them. Now at the end of the day I can't wait to take off my work shoes and slip into my sandals. Even better is that I've realized that wearing socks with sandals is both comfortable and sharp looking, which my kids absolutely hate and embarrasses them to no end.

Thanks for reporting in, Bruce, and congratulations!

Fetus, not baby. Historically, the idea of confusing the two is a very, very recent development.

LMAO. Trends come and go in all religions. The Islamic Golden Age was a time of amazing scientific and philosophical progress, but they gave it up. Catholics rejected science, then eventually came to embrace it. Protestants loved science, then modern evangelical sects came to despise it.

I was raised Southern Baptist, but wholly abandoned it because of their insane insistence that reality was wrong. When a man tells you the sky is green and Jesus rode a dinosaur, it's awfully hard not to laugh at his opinions on anything else. Whatever else I might think about their organization, the Catholic church seems to be pretty good about science these days. I don't hear anything bad about the scientific beliefs of mainstream protestant groups (that is, ones that aren't American extremists). That said, Hindu and Taoist countries are doing lots of amazing science, and the OECD says that lots of barely religious countries are beating the US in science education.

Maybe that's the workaround: describe everything like "bases its recommendations on science, not that faith-based bullshit, in consideration with scientific community standards".

Quick, give me a single context in which it makes sense for CDC to avoid the words "science-based" or "evidence-based".

Time's up. I know that wasn't long, but I thought I'd save you the wasted effort of spending more than 2 seconds looking for something that doesn't exist. If the CD-freaking-C writes "For science-based work" in the memo field of your paycheck, it's appropriate because that's the whole reason they exist.

Any restrictions on this are nothing but political posturing. That Slashdot, WaPo, NYT, or any other group would be calling it out doesn't mean they're wrong.

Absolutely. I have a standing order to buy $50 of BTC each week, because it's fun. If it goes to $1 next week, I'll be slightly bummed but not hurt in the slightest (but I'd also be scooping them up in case their price ever recovers). I play with BTC exactly the same way I'd play with a weekend in Vegas or betting on sports with my friends: it's fun to participate in a wild ride, but only to the level where you're willing and able to lose everything and still be OK with it.

Here, let me help:

A workstation is a special computer designed for technical or scientific applications.

It's fun to call our Chromebooks a "workstation", but traditionally that's not remotely what it means.

If a workstation costs less than $250, it ain’t a workstation in the computing sense.

...but called Scala. I don't see a lot of bare Java in the big data stores I'm around.

...which had its first public release 26 years ago. Python can rent cars and it would buy a house if it wasn't a millennial. Its kid sister, Java, just turned 22.

But yeah, I see way more Python than (again, plain ol') Java in big data. JVM languages other than Java are pretty popular, and Spark/Hadoop are often coordinating efforts behind the scenes, but the software running on the cluster is probably going to be Python/NumPy/SciPy/scikit-learn or Scala.

Admittedly, the datasets I work on aren't bigger than a small number of petabytes, so maybe we're not big data by some standards.

Read the charts again that show how much they send to the government for each dollar they get back. Blue states overwhelmingly donate a lot more to red states. The numbers are right there in the links I gave you.