Twas the Night Before Christmas — A Coder’s Dream

If you are involved with any kind of coding at all, I’m sure you’ll enjoy this remake of the “A Visit from St. Nicholas” poem.

He opened my laptop, and first installed Node
Who knew that old Santa had learned how to code,
His fingers were flying, his typing was quick,
How will I ever, repay ol’ St. Nick

ISO-8601, YYYY, yyyy, and why your year may be wrong

Erica Sadun blog post goes into details of the difference between ‘YYYY’ and ‘yyyy’ when formatting dates. Remember to add a few unit tests to your application to make sure you are using the correct format.

We’ve recently seen this issue at work and it was a pain in the butt to troubleshoot.

Living conditions in Europe – material deprivation and economic strain

Share of population living in households that have difficulty or great difficulty in making ends meet, 2016 (%)

Eurostat published the results of the survey studying the living conditions across European Union. The numbers are a couple of years outdated, but I don’t think things have changed dramatically during this time.

Cross-country comparisons (see Figure 5) reveal that in 2016 more than half of the population in Croatia (51.4 %) and Cyprus (59.8 %) reported having difficulty or great difficulty in making ends meet, while this share rose to more than three fifths of the population in Bulgaria (61.7 %) and to more than three quarters of the population in Greece (76.8 %); more than half the populations of the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (55.5 %; 2015 data) and Serbia (63.9 %) also faced difficulty or great difficulty in making ends meet.
On the other hand, less than 1 in 10 persons in Sweden (7.6 %), Germany (6.9 %) and Finland (also 6.9 %) reported facing difficulty or great difficulty in making ends meet; this was also the case in Norway (5.4 %).

Found via In-Cyprus.com.

Data Science Cheatsheets

Here’s a good collection of cheatsheets for anyone involved with Big Data and machine learning. Whether you are already well versed in the subject, or just starting, I’m sure you’ll find something useful.

And while we are on the subject of machine learning, check out this repository for examples in Python, theory and math explanations behind many algorithms involved.