Coding is to programming like typing is to writing

Quote by Leslie Lamport: 

Coding is to programming like typing is to writing

My generalization: IMHO, developers often start coding (i.e. typing) way too early.

Ranking using numpy.argsort

I needed to find a ranking of a large data set. Using Python, it makes sense to look at the numpy library for this. 

Numpy has the function argsort, which returns index positions [1]. One would think these are exactly the ranks we are after. Unfortunately, this is not the case.

>>> import numpy as np
>>> a = [3.0, 1.0, 5.0, 2.0]
>>> indx = np.argsort(a)
>>> indx
array([1, 3, 0, 2], dtype=int64)

Evil Sudoku

On sudoku.com[1] there is now an "evil" difficulty level. I found these very difficult to solve by hand (I usually give up).

Getting rid of non-linearities

In [1], an attempt was made to implement the following non-linear constraint: \[\frac{\displaystyle\sum_t \max\left\{\sum_i CF_{i,t}\cdot q_i -L_t, 0 \right\}}{\displaystyle\sum_t L_t} \le 0.015 \] Obviously code like:

 

cfm = quicksum( max(quicksum(cf[i][t] * q[i] - L[t] for i in range(I)), 0) for t in range(T) /  quicksum(L[t] for t in range(T)) <= 0.015

is really not what we want to see. It is best, not to directly start up your editor and write Python code like this. Rather, get a piece of paper, and focus on the math.

There are two non-linearities: a division and a \(\max()\) function. Note that I am not sure which symbols are variables or parameters.  I'll try to explain some possible cases below.