The Definitive Guide To Syntax Highlighting. Nice to see some good old posts about Emacs. It makes me want to activate the paren-face mode to change a little. #emacs

  ECM: Keith Jarrett.

Explorable multiverse analyses. What a talent this guy has! (via @mjskay)

It looks like Statistical Rethinking will have a profund impact on bayesian statistical computing. There’s now a Julia package to complement the R one. (via @zerology) #julia

According to BSAG, Doom Emacs has been polished a little in recent months. I’m still on Spacemacs–probably for a long time to come–but I remember how pleasant the experience with Doom Emacs was. #emacs

Mathematics for Machine Learning is finally out. (via @ChengSoonOng)

RMS is now taking care of Apple. Now, I can’t help but smile at the idea of this picture where we see RMS carrying his laptop on his shoulder. Surely he wasn’t listening to music on iTunes. Note too that the list of criticisms made of Microsoft is much shorter (fair enough), but the same is true for Google who only gets two dozzns of bad marks! #apple

Commit Often, Perfect Later, Publish Once. This reminds me of Stack Overflow motto circa 2010 (“Vote early, vote often”). Anyway, this recommended best practices with Git are very well done.

Don’t let tomorrow’s beauty stop you from performing continuous commits today.

How about generating figure name using MD5 hash? I’ve long been wondering how to store unique file names for all documents that I happen to write from day to day. The last few years, I decided to prefix all such file names using either fig- or img- depending on the context (i.e., whether it has been generated by a computer program or in the case it’s just an illustration grabed on the internet), followed by a short but meaningful description, e.g. img-emacs-screenshot.png. When it is a series of figures, I usually append an index (“a”, “b”, …; or zero-padded numbers). Still I have lot of duplicates file names on my HD. One way to circumvent this issue is to generate random hash, or I believe so since we all have the md5 utility on Un*x systems. Here we go:

current master ✗ 74db262 22h25m ✖ △ ◒  md5 -s "emacs-screenshot"
MD5 ("emacs-screenshot") = 65c9ef7d939db96dd290adcf9597d65b

Small Sharp Software Tools. Together with Vince Buffalo’s Bioinformatics Data Skills, I believe this combo should provide the very best technical exposition to practical Unix. You may want to add Learning Unix for OS X if you’re interested in Mac-specific tools. (Disclaimer: I haven’t read Hogan’s book yet).