My body is tense. I feel like a shaken soda can. Angry tears are starting to well. I'm trying to install pip by punching foreign commands into this cruel black hole, dimly aware I'm probably making a hundred glaring errors I cannot possibly know about. I don't know what pip is.
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Eventually I break and post on twitter. People are split between being unable to comprehend my brain is actually this stupid and insisting I must be doing engagement bait, and a series telling me confidently that I need to this simple thing, but each recommendation is different
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I try a few recs that look clear and easy, but each one turns into its own hellscape - the buttons they told me to click on do not show up, I realize I don't know how to do the "input" part of the "input command" they told me to do. I can feel days draining off my lifespan.
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Eventually I just make a telegram group for people to join (t.me/+vzmvyweMs49mO) where it's easier for me to upload screenshots of what I'm doing fast, to a localized/central place so everyone knows what's happening.
This is the breakthrough I needed
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It becomes chaotic, several people all clamoring what to do at once, but in Twitch Plays Aella type fashion, somehow something functional appears. They collectively get me to install Anaconda and open Spyder, both of which look like normal human computer programs thank god
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I spend three hours under rapid fire questions and answers, I ask a dumb thing and a cacophony of explanations barrage my face like a bukkake of knowledge. I get stuff like what libraries are. They try to explain REPL to me, and data frames. Light breaks through the clouds.
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It's a little hard to ask questions correctly; lots of my efforts are spent struggling to get people to give me the "level" of answer I want. There's a spectrum between deep conceptual explanation and shallow functional one, and I want different ones at different times.
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I find the learning strategy that works best so far is I blindly execute a step they tell me to, and then once it works, I go back and re-explain each part of the step, and ask about why we did each part the way we did - both installs and stuff like individual words in the code.
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I have a strong sense of what I need to know, and I'm curious if others do too - it felt like I had a god of curiosity possessing me, that honed beeping in around questions like a metal detector. I had strong senses of "no, explain that to me deeper" and "don't care let's move on
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Anyway I managed to upload a csv and even looked at a few correlations! This was day 1, I'm feeling encouraged about more days. I'm also super grateful to everyone who's helping me, it's a wonderful favor and yall are seriously doing my mental health a huge service.
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Update: End day 2, spent 2 hours learning from the telegram chat again. I learned how to get specific info from various columns (count x in a column conditional to y in another column), how to filter columns, delete empty columns, and delete targeted columns. This is kinda fun.
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Update, day 4, probably spent 12 hours in chat total getting answers done, have figured out how to do a lot more stuff with columns and correctly save/replace/export csvs and generate a correlation chart. i am starting to get extremely excited about all this, had trouble sleeping
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Someone may have suggested, but try Visual Studio Code for editing. Python is a fine language for what you're trying to do, but it isn't actually an easy language to learn. Producing some python that does things is easy. Producing a maintainable program of any size is hard.
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Sounds like you’re making good progress! Much more than I would have expected from two days working from scratch.
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Don’t know what lessons you are using but I think these are great for self study and may have you analyzing data quickly:
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I think you did well!
I understand your plight; a lot of assumptions are made. Even the beginner tutorials I found on python.org make a lot of assumptions.
Maybe you could write a real beginner’s tutorial, since you have perspective free of assumptions?
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Using google colab can take a lot of the headache out of setting up Python on your computer. I get that it’s hard now but once you get the hang of things it’s not too bad unless something goes wrong.
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Im actually pretty envious that you have your own personal army of people that can explain anything to you, while Im stuck to stackoverflow, documentation and google
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This thread was a rollercoaster of emotion. Sounds like you got yourself pointed in the right direction, good luck!
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Not to shill “yet another resource” to you, but the folks at QuantEcon (myself included) have some material that I think is reasonably good (and, if it isn’t, that feedback is also helpful 😅)
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