What I Read or Listened to This Week
Posted on August 18, 2019
| 2 minutes
| Darryl Blackport
Here is some non-basketball content I read or listened to this week that I found interesting:
Say No to the “Cashless Future” — and to Cashless Stores How a ‘NULL’ License Plate Landed One Hacker in Ticket Hell - “The ‘minimum viable product’ concept has pushed a lot of bad code through that doesn’t go through with the proper level of testing”
How MLS Gets Politics so Wrong - “MLS’s attempt to deny political discussion during soccer games is an inherently political act.
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What I Read or Listened to This Week
Posted on August 11, 2019
| 1 minutes
| Darryl Blackport
Here is some non-basketball content I read or listened to this week that I found interesting:
How Much Traffic Do Uber and Lyft Cause? Free Speech Is Not the Same As Free Reach - “That said, unconscious bias is a concern in any algorithm; this is why tech companies have investigated conservative claims of bias since the Facebook Trending News debacle of 2016. There hasn’t been any credible evidence. But there is a trust problem, and a lack of understanding of how rankings and feeds work, and that allows bad-faith politicking to gain traction.
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What I Read or Listened to This Week
Posted on August 4, 2019
| 1 minutes
| Darryl Blackport
Here is some non-basketball content I read or listened to this week that I found interesting:
Things I Learnt The Hard Way (in 30 Years of Software Development) - “Solve the problem you have right now. Then solve the next one. And the next one. At one point, you’ll realize there is a pattern emerging from those solutions and then you’ll find your ‘solve everything’.”
Range - This book will go on my list of books I re-read every couple of years.
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What I Read or Listened to This Week
Posted on July 28, 2019
| 1 minutes
| Darryl Blackport
Here is some non-basketball content I read or listened to this week that I found interesting:
Chris Arnade on Dignity ESPN Backs Itself Into a Corner - “ESPN clearly believes in the notion that sports should be a refuge for fans. But unfortunately, sports don’t take place in some alternate universe where real problems can’t interfere. The only people who comfortably pretend sports is just an escape are those who don’t have to worry about being told to go back to where they came from.
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What I Read or Listened to This Week
Posted on July 21, 2019
| 1 minutes
| Darryl Blackport
Here is some non-basketball content I read or listened to this week that I found interesting:
The Bias Inside: A Conversation With Psychologist Jennifer Eberhardt What does it mean to be working class in Canada? - “Put bluntly: if living the same life as your parents and everyone you grew up around is somehow a failure, how are you supposed to feel about that? How are they supposed to feel about that?
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What I Read or Listened to This Week
Posted on July 14, 2019
| 1 minutes
| Darryl Blackport
Here is some non-basketball content I read or listened to this week that I found interesting:
Digital Jail: How Electronic Monitoring Drives Defendants Into Debt - “Across the country, defendants who have not been convicted of a crime are put on “offender funded” payment plans for monitors that sometimes cost more than their bail. And unlike bail, they don’t get the payment back, even if they’re found innocent.” Basically, people are being put in jail for being poor.
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SQL Queries for PBPStats Database
Posted on July 8, 2019
| 5 minutes
| Darryl Blackport
I’ve created a Docker image with a PostgreSQL database with 2018-19 NBA data I use for pbpstats.com. It is queryable in a web browser using pgadmin. The instructions for getting started are in the github repo. I’m sharing some queries to show what types of things are possible. The main table is the possession_details table, which has a row with data for each possession. Here is the schema, it should mostly be self-explanatory:
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What I Read or Listened to This Week
Posted on July 7, 2019
| 1 minutes
| Darryl Blackport
Here is some non-basketball content I read or listened to this week that I found interesting:
What I Read or Listened to This Week
Posted on June 30, 2019
| 1 minutes
| Darryl Blackport
Here is some non-basketball content I read or listened to this week that I found interesting:
The BS-Industrial Complex of Phony A.I. - “If our senators couldn’t understand that Facebook makes money through selling advertising, how can we ever hope they’ll understand the technical realities and limitations of A.I.? With potentially tens of millions of jobs in the balance, “A.I.” will become whatever the highest paid lobbying firm convinces our politicians it is.
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My Favourite Features on pbpstats.com
Posted on June 29, 2019
| 3 minutes
| Darryl Blackport
I didn’t really have a plan when I started building pbpstats.com other than to make it easier to find stats that either weren’t available anywhere or weren’t easy to find on other sites. The site has been up for almost two years and here are the features I am most proud of.
Wowy Combinations [On/Off –» Wowy Combinations]. I think this is the only place where you can get net ratings for all on/off permutations for a group of players.
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What I Read or Listened to This Week
Posted on June 23, 2019
| 2 minutes
| Darryl Blackport
Here is some non-basketball content I read or listened to this week that I found interesting:
The Most Popular Kids’ Video Site in the World Isn’t for Kids - “Four people at Google privately admitted that they don’t let their kids watch YouTube unsupervised and said the sentiment was widespread at the company. One of these people said frustration with YouTube has grown so much that some have suggested the division spin off altogether to preserve Google’s brand.
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What I Read or Listened to This Week
Posted on June 16, 2019
| 1 minutes
| Darryl Blackport
Here is some non-basketball content I read or listened to this week that I found interesting:
7 absolute truths I unlearned as junior developer How Misinformation Can Spread Among Scientists - “Worse, once they find an action they all agree on, they will keep performing that action regardless of any new evidence. They will do this even if all the scientists come to believe something else is actually better, because no one is willing to buck the consensus.
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What I Read or Listened to This Week
Posted on June 9, 2019
| 2 minutes
| Darryl Blackport
Here is some non-basketball content I read or listened to this week that I found interesting:
Canadian Conservatives Are Having a Bad Time at the Online Hate Hearings I left the ad industry because our use of data tracking terrified me - “I realized that my industry had changed. Advertising had ceased to be about connecting with consumers—it was now about finding novel ways of extracting evermore personal information from computers, phones, and smart homes.
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What I Read or Listened to This Week
Posted on June 2, 2019
| 1 minutes
| Darryl Blackport
Here is some non-basketball content I read or listened to this week that I found interesting:
David Epstein on Mastery, Specialization, and Range Behavioral Ad Targeting Not Paying Off for Publishers, Study Suggests - Hopefully we can do more studies like this.
Cops Around The Country Are Posting Racist And Violent Comments On Facebook - “This blows up the myth of bad apples, by the sheer number of images and numbers of individuals who are implicated,” said Nikki Jones, an associate professor of African American studies at the University of California, Berkeley.
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What I Read or Listened to This Week
Posted on May 26, 2019
| 1 minutes
| Darryl Blackport
Here is some non-basketball content I read or listened to this week that I found interesting:
We Are Tenants on Our Own Devices - “How long before other devices start behaving as spies and taskmasters in our own home? Will the coffee maker let us have that seventh cup that the doctor advised us against?”
Who will answer the Christchurch Call? Nobody, if tech platforms continue ungoverned - “If we believe in the premise that society should be able to leverage public data for the public good, citizens should have far greater rights over the use, mobility and monetization of their data, and regulation must be matched with meaningful enforcement.
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What I Read or Listened to This Week
Posted on May 19, 2019
| 1 minutes
| Darryl Blackport
Here is some non-basketball content I read or listened to this week that I found interesting:
The Best Reason for Your City to Ban Facial Recognition A Multimillion-Dollar Startup Hid A Sexual Harassment Incident By Its CEO — Then A Community of Outsiders Dragged It Into the Light - “the perception of accountability is more important than accountability itself”
Inside the mysteries and missteps of Toronto’s smart-city dream - Whenever I see the term “smart city” all I think is mass surveillance.
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What I Read or Listened to This Week
Posted on May 12, 2019
| 1 minutes
| Darryl Blackport
Here is some non-basketball content I read or listened to this week that I found interesting:
IT runs on Java 8 - “What I’m worried about is that places like Hacker News, r/programming, the tech press, and conferences expose us to a number of tech-forward biases about our industry that are overenthusiastic about the promises of new technology without talking about tradeoffs. That the loudest voices get the most credibility, and, that, as a result, we are listening to complicated set-ups and overengineering systems of distributed networking and queues and serverless and microservices and machine learning platforms that our companies don’t need, and that most other developers that pick up our work can’t relate to, or can even work with.
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What I Read or Listened to This Week
Posted on May 5, 2019
| 1 minutes
| Darryl Blackport
Here is some non-basketball content I read or listened to this week that I found interesting:
Canada’s new far right: A trove of private chat room messages reveals an extremist subculture Think You’re Discreet Online? Think Again - “Such tools are already being marketed for use in hiring employees, for detecting shoppers’ moods and predicting criminal behavior. Unless they are properly regulated, in the near future we could be hired, fired, granted or denied insurance, accepted to or rejected from college, rented housing and extended or denied credit based on facts that are inferred about us.
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Basketball Stats I Wish People Would Stop Using
Posted on May 2, 2019
| 3 minutes
| Darryl Blackport
These are a few of the frustrations I have with commonly used stats during TV broadcasts of NBA games.
Field goal percentage. Some shots count for two points, others count for three points, so why are we counting them together? If someone has a 45% FG% is that good or bad? If they shoot only threes, it’s very good. If they shoot only twos, it’s not. This is why effective field goal percentage was created.
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How to Build a Browsable Web User Interface From a CSV File For Free Without Writing a Line of Code
Posted on April 29, 2019
| 2 minutes
| Darryl Blackport
These are the steps I used to take a csv file and turn it into browsable database for free using Datasette and Heroku . The data used is parking infraction data from the City of Waterloo Open Data .
Create a new directory and set up a python virtual environment. Download the data from here and save it in the directory as waterloo_parking_infractions.csv.
Install the Datasette and csvs-to-sqlite packages:
pip install datasette pip install csvs-to-sqlite Convert the csv file to an sqlite database:
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