Ben Frederickson
benfrederickson.com · Personal blog · on HN since 2013
Ben Frederickson writes about data analysis, recommender systems, visualization, and Python projects, such as Venn diagrams and GitHub developer locations.
What HN saysCommenters recommend it for Python and recommender systems and link its posts on Venn diagram code, developer locations, and Rust extensions.
46HN people shared it
13linked it in comments
47stories submitted
1.3Kstory points
5 months agolast shared
2013people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1All mainstream languages marketed as functional are losing market10 people · 44 points · first shared 2018 · 20 comments on HN
- 2Finding Where Do the World's Developers Live via GitHub Data5 people · 11 points · first shared 2018 · discussion on HN
- 3Interactive Numerical Optimization Tutorial4 people · 152 points · first shared 2016 · 9 comments on HN
- 4Don't Pickle Your Data4 people · 63 points · first shared 2019 · 76 comments on HN
- 5Finding Similar Music Using Matrix Factorization3 people · 144 points · first shared 2016 · 29 comments on HN
- 6Building a ‘People Who Like This Also Like’ Feature3 people · 122 points · first shared 2015 · 17 comments on HN
- 7A Better Algorithm for Area Proportional Venn and Euler Diagrams3 people · 9 points · first shared 2015 · discussion on HN
- 8An Analysis of the World's Leading Robots.txt Files3 people · 5 points · first shared 2017 · 1 comments on HN
- 9Writing Python Extensions in Rust Using PyO33 people · 4 points · first shared 2018 · 1 comments on HN
- 10GitHub Won’t Help You with Hiring2 people · 224 points · first shared 2018 · 178 comments on HN
- 11Python as a declarative programming language (2017)2 people · 140 points · first shared 2018 · 44 comments on HN
- 12Why Python needs to be paused during profiling – but Ruby doesn't always2 people · 86 points · first shared 2021 · 12 comments on HN
- 13Unicode is Kind of Insane2 people · 34 points · first shared 2015 · 6 comments on HN
- 14Python, Catastrophic Regular Expressions and the GIL2 people · 7 points · first shared 2013 · discussion on HN
- 15Profiling Native Python Extensions2 people · 6 points · first shared 2019 · 1 comments on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
Arnie0426 · 2020-02-08
I love reading these two for Python/Recommender Systems:
1. Ben Frederickson: https://www.benfrederickson.com/blog/
2. Erik Bernhardsson: https://erikbern.com/
And for pure ML:
1. Ferenc Huszár: https://www.inference.vc/
2. John Langford: https://hunch.net (although he hasn't written a technical post in a while)
arcticbull · 2019-05-07
Check out the Rust python bindings too; specifically PyO3. If you're starting from scratch it's worth exploring. [1]
[1] https://www.benfrederickson.com/writing-python-extensions-in-rust-usin…
benfrederickson · 2016-11-26
For the venn code, I wrote up the approach here : http://www.benfrederickson.com/better-venn-diagrams/
Basically though, I'm using the non-linear CG method - so it doesn't require a positive definite matrix. The loss function is a little funky with handling the disjoint set/ subset relationships in the euler diagrams appropriately (defines the loss/gradient to be 0 if these constraints are satisfied), but this approach still works pretty well.
That venn diagram post has a couple interactive demos of how this works, and also a randomized test showing overall performance.
I actually believe its the best known algorithm for laying out area proportional venn diagrams. I benchmarked against the code from the venneuler paper here: http://benfred.github.io/venn.js/tests/venneuler_comparison/
abirch · 2024-01-11
The majority of software engineers live in California, Washington, Massachusetts, New York, and Texas.
https://www.benfrederickson.com/github-developer-locations/
Just curious, what's the latest software startup that's in your words in a flyover state compared to an openai or databricks
jollybean · 2021-12-20
ObjectiveC is slowly dying [1] I think it will flatten out and not go away for a long time but it's going to eventually become and adjunct to Swift 'outside' of Apple.
Within 5-7 years Swift will rival ObjC within Apple, and from then on it's hard to tell.
There are no foreseeable plans to rewrite the OS, and so ObjC has to stay around, but that's in a clearly limited capacity.
[1] https://www.benfrederickson.com/ranking-programming-languages-by-githu…
tyingq · 2021-03-18
Was surprised to learn that it's used in ML models. I was under the impression that it's pretty slow[1]. Maybe it's used here because it's Python aware, and doesn't have trouble saving complex data structures?
[1] https://www.benfrederickson.com/dont-pickle-your-data/
guessmyname · 2019-11-10
More statistics over here (if anyone else is interested).
• https://octoverse.github.com/#top-languages
• https://madnight.github.io/githut/
• http://pypl.github.io/PYPL.html
• https://www.benfrederickson.com/ranking-programming-languages-by-githu…
WillPostForFood · 2019-09-27
Is it growing? It is a difficult metric to quantify, but looking at thing like Github, or Reddit, it seems flat or declining. Clojure initially benefited as the preferred Java escape path, but it seems like that has been supplanted by Kotlin.
https://github.com/oprogramador/github-languages#most-failing
https://www.benfrederickson.com/ranking-programming-languages-by-githu…
jcelerier · 2018-12-30
> I would think (or at least hope) that there are not many new projects being started in c++ these days.
At least on Github it's growing : https://www.benfrederickson.com/ranking-programming-languages-by-githu…
I'm pretty sure that given the overall large increase in the amount of programmers, there are more new C++ projects being created this year than there were new software projects overall when c++98 was standardized. Consider that in the US alone, there were ~600k developers in 2002, and nowadays the estimates are at ~4.5 million.
waterhouse · 2018-11-19
Regarding the similarity function used: I haven't studied it myself, but read this a long time ago:
http://www.benfrederickson.com/distance-metrics/
hyperpape · 2018-10-01
It's unclear how important it is today, but historically analyses that used Github heavily favored Ruby: https://www.benfrederickson.com/ranking-programming-languages-by-githu…
tejinderss · 2018-01-27
Python surpasses java according to github statistics
http://www.benfrederickson.com/ranking-programming-languages-by-github…
ja30278 · 2013-04-17
In this case, you really should care. http://www.benfrederickson.com/2013/04/09/python-catastrophic-regular-…