Oil, copper and other commodities came under heavy selling pressure today and that's a good thing because it's mounting evidence that inflation may be peaking.

Gather round, Gentle Readers. It is time I tell the story of the worst decision I ever made in an office. Some of you have heard this. Some have not. Whatever you do in your office today, this week, the rest of this year, you can console yourself by recalling this tale.

A long time ago, I was a talent agent. I worked for a woman named Susan Smith, who had her own small boutique agency. She was known for three things:

1. She had fantastic taste in clients. If there is someone you admire, odds are good that at some point, she was their agent,

2. She could negotiate a deal like few who have ever trod the earth. Casting would give her all the money they had budgeted for that part, plus a little more, plus promising to get her dog Barnaby groomed. She was magnificent to watch.

3. She was insane.

I'm sure you're thinking, "Quinn, it's the entertainment industry, they are all insane." Yes, many are. So consider this; if you told someone you worked for Susan, people who worked for insane people would look and you and whisper, "I hear she's insane."

🎉🎉 PHP 7.3 is here!

Here are the things I'm excited about.

🚂 Trailing commas in function/method calls!

This will certainly be a required styling choice for me. Same delightful benefits of trailing comma in multi-line PHP arrays, and JavaScript objects.

🧵 Less disgusting heredoc syntax!

Inlining heredoc strings in any way right now is grrrosssss. Now we get sensible capabilities. Everything that was wrong with it is now fixed!

(Ignore the bad syntax highlighting)

☠️ Finally, not-so-silent json_decode error detection!

This really sucked before, now it just sucks a bit less (who wants to pass a 4th param and pass 2 default params first? (helper function anybody?)

📜 Not horrible functions for getting the first and last item (or key) from an array!

Before you either strung a bunch of functions together or messed with internal array pointers. This is a much-needed improvement.

Thread A History lesson for the MOAB:
1. The United States of America is not and has never been a Democracy, we're a Federal Republic tied together by the capital Laws of the Constitution.

Everyone in the country is about to get a harsh lesson on what this really means...

2. In 1871, February 21: Congress Passes an Act to Provide a Government for the District of Columbia, also known as the Act of 1871.

With no constitutional authority to do so, Congress creates a separate form of
government for the District of Columbia.

3. A ten mile square parcel of land (see,
Acts of the Forty-first Congress,” Section 34, Session III, chapters 61 and

4. The act — passed when the country was weakened and financially depleted in
the aftermath of the Civil War — was a strategic move by foreign interests
(international bankers) who were intent upon gaining a stranglehold on the coffers and neck of America.

5. Congress cut a deal w/ the international bankers(Rothschilds of London) to incur a DEBT to said bankers. Because the bankers were not about to lend money to a floundering nation w/out serious stipulations, they devised a way to get their foot in the door of the United States.

THREAD:

80 Films with the biggest Plot Twists that will blow your mind.

1. Fight Club

2. Predestination

3. Seven

4. Requiem for a Dream

This post is pretty bizarre, but it manages to hit on so many false beliefs that I've seen hurt junior data scientists that it deserves some explicit

(1) The notion that R is well-suited to "building web applications" seems totally out of left field. I don't feel like most R loyalists think this is a good idea, but it's worth calling out that no normal company will be glad you wrote your entire web app in R.

(2) It is true that Python had some issues historically with the 2-to-3 transition, but it's not such a big deal these days. On the flip side, I have found interesting R code that doesn't run in modern R interpreters because of changes in core operations (e.g. assignment syntax).

(3) "Most of the time we only need a latest, working interpreter with the latest packages to run the code" -- this is where things get real and reveal some things that hurt data scientists. If this sentence is true, it's likely because you don't share code with coworkers.

(3) Really is a broader issue in data science: people only think of what they need to do their work if no one else existed and code was never maintained. Junior data scientists almost always operate on projects they start from scratch and don't have to maintain for long.