Here is the monthly newsletter from the Micro blog.

2019-08-01:   Banks, III.
2019-08-01:   Tindersticks, The Hungry Saw.> Ah, those nights, those nights they tiptoed by,> they crackle under our pillows> and they’re here.
2019-08-01: About to finish Season 3 of Morden i Sandhamn. Looking forward to watching the next Seasons, of course.
2019-08-01: Be sure to check https://www.dailyminimal.com if you like minimalist digital art, mostly black and white, lines and stripes and the like. Reminds me of the great Vera Molnar.
2019-08-01: Give me some more color, please.

2019-08-01: Want to approximate a factorial using Stirling formula? Here is a nice trick: How is Gosper’s approximation to factorial derived?.
2019-08-01: A philosophical difference between Haskell and Lisp. #lisp #haskell
2019-08-01: Common Lisp implementation of (grid restrained) Nelder-Mead. #lisp
2019-08-01: Programming Algorithms: A Crash Course in Lisp. #lisp
2019-08-02:   Kate Bush, The Red Shoes.
2019-08-02: This guy… and the beauty of TEX: A computational proof of Huang’s degree theorem (PDF, 1 p.). See also this related post.
2019-08-02: (How to Write a (Lisp) Interpreter (in Python)), by Peter Norvig. #lisp #python
2019-08-02: Big O Notation: Using not-boring math to measure code’s efficiency.
2019-08-02: Evolving Lindenmayer systems.
2019-08-04: Beautiful street drawing: https://mapgen.glitch.me.
2019-08-04: Hopefully, I have a lot to read in my RSS queue for today!

2019-08-04: Build Your Own Text Editor, in C. And if you’re more versed into Rust or Racket, you are welcome too: In both cases, it is called remacs.
2019-08-04: Gerbil Scheme, a meta-dialect of Scheme with post-modern features. No idea what to do with another Scheme implementation, but the website looks gorgeous. #scheme
2019-08-04: Killing a process and all of its descendants. There’re some subtleties to learn regarding nohup and exec and how UNIX systems handle sessions and processes.
2019-08-04: Not everything is an expression, and a way to implement pattern matching in CL. #lisp
2019-08-04: Writing a Scheme to x86 compiler. The original paper written by Abdulaziz Ghuloum is available as a PDF. #scheme
2019-08-05:   Little playlist feat. Joy Division.> Joy Division raised desolation to the level of high art, and they covered plenty of stylistic ground while doing so. They could be severe: “Warsaw” is punishing, three-chord punk, bitter and mean. They could be chilly: “Heart and Soul” dwells in an ice cavern of echo. And they could be desperate, as on “Something Must Break”–a harrowing glimpse into the darkness that would be the band’s undoing.
2019-08-05: A Stratification Approach to Partial Dependence for Codependent Variables: code and paper.
2019-08-05: TIL how to get proper ligatures with Iosevka font in Emacs when running in GUI mode (which we get for free in iTerm for basic ligatures, like <-). See the instructions at the end of this issue. #emacs
2019-08-05: Want quick tips and tricks for using Git efficiently? Try http://gitready.com!
2019-08-05: A Pragmatic Introduction to Signal Processing. (via HN)
2019-08-05: Efficient Leave-One-Out Brier Score for time-dependent evaluation of Bayesian Survival Models. #rstats
2019-08-05: Free Book: Foundations of Data Science (from Microsoft Research Lab). We’re definitely going from surprise to surprise with Microsoft in the last few months. At least they are moving in the right direction with Github, VS Code and their open-source projects.
2019-08-05: Information Theory for Intelligent People (PDF, 15 pp.). (via HN)
2019-08-05: Learning Parser Combinators With Rust. #rust
2019-08-05: Memory management in Python. #python
2019-08-05: Speed matters: Why working quickly is more important than it seems.> Eventually you’ll be both fast and good.That’s where the bat hurts, sometimes.
2019-08-05: indextree: Arena based tree structure with multithreading support. #rust
2019-08-06:   Jan Lundgreen, Postdamer Platz.
2019-08-06: Another nice R4 article by Dirk Eddelbuettel on Debugging with Docker and Rocker. #rstats
2019-08-06: I didn’t read The Book of Why, but I heard of it a lot on Twitter lately. As you may know, I’m a big fan of Stephen Senn’s work, and I keep following his posts here and there even if I’m no longer being involved in medical statistics. Here is another nice dicussion of Lord’s paradox, where the author explains why neglecting random effects may affect the conclusions drawn from a study. If you’re interested in causal modeling of pre-post study, take a further look at this recent paper: Causal Graphical Views of Fixed Effects and Random Effects Models.
2019-08-06: TIL about “earmuffs” (I follow this convention but didn’t know it has a proper name!). #lisp
2019-08-06: If not SICP, then what? Maybe HTDP?.
2019-08-06: Ode.io: A simple personal publishing engine for the open web.
2019-08-06: Phabricator is a set of tools that help companies build better software, faster. May be a good alternative to self hosting a Git like platform?
2019-08-06: Pretext (formerly, Mathbook XML): An uncomplicated XML vocabulary for authors of research articles, textbooks, and monographs.
2019-08-06: Programming Algorithms: Data Structures. #lisp
2019-08-10: > Functional and scripting languages are more concise than procedural and object- oriented languages; C is hard to beat when it comes to raw speed on large inputs, but performance differences over inputs of moderate size are less pronounced and allow even interpreted languages to be competitive; compiled strongly-typed languages, where more defects can be caught at compile time, are less prone to runtime failures than interpreted or weakly-typed languages. — A Comparative Study of Programming Languages in Rosetta Code
2019-08-10: Already watched the first five Seasons of Morden i Sandhamn. I like this series a lot, and the format is definitely a plus (3x45’) for me.
2019-08-10: I love the design of Thomas Honeyman’s website. I yet have to find some more time to read (and grasp) his blog posts.
2019-08-10: Nice resource: Functional programming in Clojure. #clojure
2019-08-10: Should read: Inference of complex population histories using whole-genome sequences from multiple populations. #bioinformatics
2019-08-10: Basic Text Processing in Functional Style. #haskell
2019-08-10: Lisp Flavoured Erlang, or the best of both worlds for s-expr-based distributed systems?
2019-08-11:   Magnus Öström, Parachute.
2019-08-11: Happy meal, from some days ago.

2019-08-11: Since common-lisp-stat has been very quite the last years or so, I was very happy to find Gary Hollis’s CL data analysis library. Lisp still has a bright future ahead. #lisp
2019-08-11: Some interesting resources on Scheme by Philip Bewig, who you may know if you happen to spend some time on Programming Praxis. There are also nice Awk scripts lurking around on his site. #scheme
2019-08-11: Tonight I’ll probably end up watching the last episode of Morden i Sandhamn (Season 7). I’m not sure what I’m going to put on the list of things to look at next, but I’ll try to find something as entertaining as Swedish or Danish TV shows.
2019-08-11: Ease of learning vs relearning, by John Cook. Nice points, as always. I have just some minor concerns with the last paragraphs where the author says that the tidyverse is great beacuse of its consistency. First, pending some minor annoyances with the naming convention of formal arguments in base R functions–and recommended packages–, which I always called R’s language idiosyncrasies, I do not find base R that much inconsistent. Second, I disagree with the idea that the tidyverse comes with that much conceptual integrity, for what I used to see. Most importantly, there are so many dedicated functions in, e.g., dplyr, that it goes against the principle of compositionality that we use to like in functional and scripting languages. Finally, what used to be available in a short number of packages, but especially base, is now scattered throughout several packages (forcats, glue, etc.), so that I have a hard time believing that newcomers could find their way as easily as they would with base R only. Anyway, that’s my 2¢, and it is nowhere a critic of Hadley Wickham’s account to the R ecosystem. #rstats
2019-08-12: Compared to when I first restarted this site using Hugo, the number of static files has quite significantly increased:| EN+——————+——+Pages | 1548Paginator pages | 190Non-page files | 0Static files | 689Processed images | 0Aliases | 38Sitemaps | 1Cleaned | 0
2019-08-12: Hot off the kitchen (yesterady’s evening and today’s lunch):

I don’t know any borders, and in each case two or three products from different continents were mixed.
2019-08-12: If you’re interested in design of experiments and analysis of variance, this textbook is the latest available online I am aware of.
2019-08-12: Reading another of the excellent blog post by Alex Harsányi, More Timezone Lookup (loading and saving data), I thought it would be good if there were something like a “data.table” module available in Racket. #racket
2019-08-12: Doing Basic Ass Shit in Haskell: Nice resources on Haskell and functional programming. Each time I promise I will learn more Haskell than one-liner at the ghci prompt, but each time I find myself too lazy, as always. #haskell
2019-08-12: Doom Emacs tweaks: Org Journal and Super Agenda. Nice post on BSAG website, as always. I personally don’t use Org agenda, although I keep a list of TODO items and web links in separate org files. I once started to keep a daily workbook, but I stopped after a few months. Maybe I should try again. #emacs
2019-08-14: How many of you are still using or even knowing the APL language? I remember that Jan de Leeuw played a bit with R to resurrect it at the REPL several years ago, and that Nick Cox used to use J in addition to Stata. Never used any of those two languages, but the APL book contains a lot of useful information on designing PL.
2019-08-14: TIL about a lot if useful Lisp stuff on Paul Khuong’s old website: contents listed here. #lisp
2019-08-14: Racket 7.4 is out! #racket
2019-08-15: Season 1 of 12 Monkeys, done.
2019-08-15: TIL about Yack!: The Unified Community Browser.
2019-08-15: There is now a JS api for Vega-Lite, and it looks quite awesome (i.e., compared to writing raw JSON specs). #javascript #dataviz
2019-08-15: Trying the Fish shell right now. Looks good so far.
2019-08-15: The talk that wasn’t: Lisp is not based on the Lambda Calculus. #lisp
2019-08-16: And now you can have config files for VS Code as well, thanks to Bodil Stokke: vscode-use-package and vscode-init-script.
2019-08-16: Ok, Fish shell is great: fewer config files–all in a centralized location, btw–, clean syntax. And it works right out of the box without any plugin! Once I figured out how to setup the \$PATH variable, I knew I will probably not look back.
2019-08-16: Let’s Write an LLVM Specializer for Python!. #python
2019-08-17:   Jack White, Blunderbuss.
2019-08-17: Cosma Shalizi is about to teach a new (or revised) course on Data Mining (Fall 2019). Looking forward to reading the online material.
2019-08-17: If you are looking for nice color scheme, e.g., for your presentation or online demo, take a look at the following article: 100 brilliant color combinations and how to apply them to your designs. My preference goes to the “Subdued & Professional” palette (#90AFC5, #336B87, #2A3132, and #763626).
2019-08-17: Six useful Git tips (via Irreal) and 5 tips for numerical computing (by John Cook).
2019-08-17: Highlights from Git 2.23.
2019-08-17: sonic: Fast, lightweight & schema-less search backend. #rust
2019-08-18: The Nature of Lisp (via Irreal). #lisp
2019-08-18: tmux in practice: iTerm2 and tmux. I’m quite happy with iTerm only, since I don’t need to share my session across different computer for the moment. But if this were the case, sure I would come back to this nice post and the associated Github repo.
2019-08-19:   Jim Morrisson, An American Prayer.
2019-08-19: A very good discussion of CL vs. Scheme. #lisp #scheme
2019-08-19: I keep reading some nice posts written by Eli Barzilay on SO; that’s where I miss the SE network: You get so much information, cross-references, from passionate people who like to share their knowledge and experience. #scheme #racket
2019-08-19: Yesterday and the day before: Not bad actually.

2019-08-19: A bunch of good git tutorials.
2019-08-19: Algorithms, by Jeff Erickson.
2019-08-19: How to write a game in Haskell from scratch: Game programming is always lots of fun and it is often a nice first take with new PLs. #haskell
2019-08-19: Python vs Rust for Neural Networks. Such comparisons between general PLs (or worse, between a DSL and a mainstream PL) are often unfair, but it helps to appreciate the pros and cons of each language for a given domain (not a specific task).
2019-08-19: SICP Support for DrRacket. No need for planet anymore, just use #lang sicp. #racket
2019-08-19: The Adventures of a Pythonista in Schemeland. #scheme #python
2019-08-20: > Annotate the web, with anyone, anywhere. – hypothes.is
2019-08-20: Here is an Haskell library containing common graph search algorithms. #haskell
2019-08-20: Looks like Rust finally got async/await as well. #rust
2019-08-20: TIL about KeyCastr, an open-source keystroke visualizer for the Mac.
2019-08-20: Time to watch the last episode of Chernobyl (my son didn’t like it!).
2019-08-20: Brushing and linking for big data by @uwdata. #dataviz
2019-08-20: Simply Scheme: Introducing Computer Science. #scheme
2019-08-20: Smith-Waterman algorithm in Python. #python #bioinformatics
2019-08-20: Vim fugitive has been seriously updated: v2.5 -> v3.0. #vim
2019-08-21:   Micah P. Hinson, Micah P. Hinson and the Gospel of Progress.
2019-08-21: > Make each program do one thing well. To do a new job, build afresh rather than complicate old programs by adding new features; Expect the output of every program to become the input to another, as yet unknown, program. Don’t clutter output with extraneous information. Avoid stringently columnar or binary input formats. Don’t insist on interactive input. – Basics of the Unix Philosophy
2019-08-21: > The other option is to just live with Emacs. — The Emacs Problem
2019-08-21: I haven’t update Doom Emacs during the week, except for env variables because I switched to Fish recently. I know there are probably plenty of updates on (M)ELPA, but the Python LSP layer works quite nicely, and the same applies to functional languages I use to use these days. So why uopdating again and again? I probably reached the point where you no longer want to live in a ‘beta’ world, and just start to be more productive with the tools you have right in your hands. BTW, I uninstalled VS Code yesterday: I still think this is the best multi-OS editor I’ve seen so far, but too much noise for me, and so few plugins for functional languages that it makes me feel like I could just use TextEdit instead, or maybe Vim. #emacs
2019-08-21: Carbon dioxide concentration in atmosphere over last 800,000 years. #dataviz
2019-08-21: Metabase is the easy, open source way for everyone in your company to ask questions and learn from data.
2019-08-21: When I Sit Down At My Editor, I Feel Relaxed.
2019-08-22: A quick guide to Emacs Lisp programming. #emacs
2019-08-23: Such a nice treatment of Prime numbers on the Haskell community wiki. #haskell
2019-08-23: Some obscure C features. (via HN)
2019-08-23: Unix, R and python tools for genomics and data science.
2019-08-23: monolith: Save HTML pages with ease.
2019-08-24: Typed Lisp, A Primer. (Note that “Lisp refers to Common Lisp as supported by Emacs Lisp.”) #lisp
2019-08-25: Nice song cover of Une Sorcière comme les autres, by Anne Sylvestre.
2019-08-25: Sadly, a large number of blogs I used to follow some years ago are definitely down, e.g., wrathematics hasn’t posted for years.
2019-08-25: JavaScript: The Modern Parts: Nice historical take! #javascript
2019-08-25: Static type checking in the programmable programming language (Lisp). #lisp
2019-08-25: What is a 1x Engineer?
2019-08-27: A clean and minimalist theme for Jekyll: moving. It might provide a very nice template for GH pages.
2019-08-27: Streaming JSON parser for Unix: jwalk.
2019-08-27: A Very General Method of Computing Shortest Paths. #haskell
2019-08-27: Vectorization and parallelization in Python: Nice wrap-up of available solutions. The joblib module is really a must-have. #python
2019-08-28: Yesterday, I noticed a nice tweet by John Cook through one of his many accounts:

Here is a more detailed version of the above: Function vs Object.
2019-08-28: Best Practices for Using Functional Programming in Python. #python
2019-08-28: Monads for functional programming (PDF, 31 pp.).
2019-08-28: Variational Bayesian phylogenetic inference. #bioinformatics
2019-08-29: Well, I finally updated my config for Doom Emacs, which now relies on straight to manage all packages. The first upgrade was quite buggy, but once I figured out I could just delete my current .emacs.d and start from scratch again, I got a working install in a few minutes. Beware that the process of downloading and configuring all packages is quite long. You will also likely need to update your autoloads, e.g., doom refresh -f. Also, if you have a problem rebuilding the pdf-tools viewer, eval this before running pdf-tools-install: (setenv "PKG_CONFIG_PATH" "/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig:/usr/local/Cellar/libffi/3.2.1/lib/pkgconfig"). #emacs