May is over, already. Although I kept reading (paper) books and writing blog posts, I found myself leaving lot of RSS stuff behind. One of the reason is that I spent way too much time on Twitter or electronic newspapers in March — which I consult on my phone most of the time, so I decided to take a break with my iPhone in May. As a consequence, my RSS feeds exceed more than 200 posts on several occasion and it took me some time to consume most of them. Here is my selection as one the first monthly micro review published in June. And Long live RSS.

• I follow the Lispology blog (by David Johnson-Davies) since two months. Lot of nice stuff here. The latest post deals with the reduce whose result is the combined result of a given function’s being applied to successive pairs of elements of sequence per the HyperSpec manual. I use it a lot in Python or R.

• In the Ultimate Guide to Python Debugging, Martin Heinz discusses various ways to do some kind of logging, e.g. log files, decorators, stack traces. Debugging is an art, surely, but nobody will beat print statements, especially during the initial stage of program composition.

• Sorting Big Data: An interesting discussion of sorting algorithms (e.g., radix sort) and software stack (Python+Dask, SQLite, C++) in light of large datasets (≥ 20 Go). Multi-Core Radix-Sort performs quite good apparently.

• A review of John Sanford’s “Genetic Entropy” is particularly enlightening if you are versed into genetic stuff. I’m halfway this post that I discovered yesterday and I already learned (or was reminded of) a lot of stuff.

• I’m a long time subscriber to the Irreal blog. The author deals mostly with security-related issues and Emacs (with an emphasis on mail and GTD via Org mode) and there’s always something new to learn. TIL that websockets can potentially be harmful.

• Each time I read some Julia code, I want to try it right now, again. See Walk on Spheres Method in Julia to learn more about the boundary value Laplace equation $\nabla^2\phi =0$. On a related point, John Myles White is actually posting very interesting articles about Julia on Github.

• Latency in Asynchronous Python: Another technical discussion by Chris Wellon on software performace, this time using Python and its async framework. Example of async processes are common when building Electron-like offline apps.

• If you are interested in competitive prorgramming, Brent Yorgey is regularly posting his solutions in Haskell. The last one is deals with unordered trees.

• I resubscribed to Andy Wheeler’s blog some months ago. I was a regular reader when I was a Cross Validated user, and we had a lot of interesting discussions on factor analysis and multivariate analysis via the QA or comment system there. I am delighted to be able to read some of his posts after 10 years, not forgetting folks like Peter Ellis, Gavin Simpson, Dirk Eddelbuettel, or John D. Cook to name a few. Thanks for all those good years!

• Travis Hinkelman is doing an amazing work with Chez Scheme for statistical computing. While I regularly learn interesting things about Chez, I’ve come to appreciate Racket a lot more.