Sundry Links for November 12, 2014

Amazon Picking Challenge: Kiva Systems (where I interned in 2011) is setting up a robotics challenging for picking items off warehouse shelves.

contexttimer 0.3.1: A handy Python context manger and decorator for timing things.

How-to: Translate from MapReduce to Apache Spark: This is a helpful bit from Cloudera on moving algorithms from Mapreduce to Spark.

combinatorics 1.4.3: Here’s a Python module adding some combinatorial functions to the language.

Special methods and interface-based type system: Guido van Rossum explains (in 2006) why Python uses len(x) instead of x.len().