2020-01-01: Can someone explain to me why on earth macOS devs thought it would be good to fetch again and again software updates instead of storing them in a hash list? I start to be really annoyed by those perpetual reminders to update my Mac, notwithstanding the fact that I need to wait for the pref pane to be up and ready. Each time. #apple

2020-01-01: Happy new year 111 11100100!

2020-01-02: > Deadlines are bad and if you have those in your company you should probably go ahead and remove the “customer obsession” bullet from your leadership principles. Because believe it or not, your users don’t care about a missed sprint. — who are you trying to impress with your deadlines?
2020-01-02: Modern C for C++ Peeps.
2020-01-04: Notes on Technical Writing.
2020-01-06: Github has become a large repository of PDF books. Here’s a new one, by fogus.
2020-01-06: Yet another intro to the tidyverse, FWIW: Statistical Inference via Data Science: A ModernDive into R and the tidyverse. I don’t really understand why there need to be a rep_sample_n() function in chapter 7 (which is just imported from the infer package by moderndive, see the signature of the function) which does nothing more than what could possibly be done easily with base::sample. This drives me crazy sometimes. #rstats
2020-01-06: Ask HN: Are books worth it?> A well-written story, be it fiction or non-fiction can have a long lastig impact and even an emotional connection that I have personally never experienced with anything ‘online’.Many related threads, e.g., Is RSS still worth the time?.
2020-01-06: The Lisp curse. #lisp
2020-01-07: https://flowmap.blue: Lovely.

2020-01-07: > Most languages do a whole lot of other crap other than printing out “hello world”, even if that’s all you asked for. — Hello world
2020-01-07: A nice discussion of colour schemes and templates by Paul Tol.
2020-01-07: Freely Available Software for Linear Algebra (September 2018).
2020-01-07: Learn Haskell Now!. And for French readers, Introduction à la Programmation Fonctionnelle avec Haskell. #haskell
2020-01-07: Opioid Atlas: Explore country-level consumption trends by hovering over different geographic location in the Opioid Map. #dataviz
2020-01-07: Parallel computing with R: A brief review, by Dirk Eddelbuettel. #rstats
2020-01-07: handbook on statistical distribution for experimentalists (PDF, 202 pp.).
2020-01-08: Finding unique items - hash vs sort?
2020-01-08: The sum of a geometric series is all you need!
2020-01-09:   Ben Monder, Oceana.
2020-01-09: > A modern day pull request is so much more than a version control tool operation or even a simple request to pull or merge a branch: it is a nexus to track the integration of a proposed change before during and after that change is integrated. — Problems with Pull Requests and How to Fix Them
2020-01-09: > All the cool kids are doing micro-services these days. (…) It is a time-honored tradition in computer programming to take any idea that offers some advantage, give it a name, elevate it to a “principle” and use it to the exclusion of any prior good idea. — Micro-services
2020-01-09: > If you remember good old days, it was a pretty easy thing to make a website. You edit an index.html page till it looks fine, then you copy it to a cheap hosting with any tool you like and you’re done. — Complexity tower and a holy grail of web developmentI clearly remember those days where I was maintaining my website using handmade templates and single HTML pages edited under Emacs. How come I became so lazy over years?
2020-01-09: A few days ago, I watched Anna (in two stages since I’m so exhausted these days because of the strike!). I found it so bad that I thought I would be better watching Nikita again. Much better indeed, and this confirmed my original idea that Anna is just a pale copy. Until I realized they were produced by the same guy…
2020-01-09: Adding string matching to chez-docs.
2020-01-09: Dive into Deep Learning (numpy edition). #python
2020-01-09: How to exit vim.
2020-01-09: Introduction to Functional Programming.
2020-01-09: Using Emacs 63 ClojureScript. #emacs
2020-01-10:

2020-01-10:   Bill Evans, You must believe in Spring.
2020-01-10: A Compiler Writing Journey.
2020-01-10: Copying data is wasteful, mutating data is dangerous. #python
2020-01-10: scalene: a high-performance CPU and memory profiler for Python. #python
2020-01-13: 9999999999999999.0 - 9999999999999998.0. See also Subtracting large floating point numbers in different languages.
2020-01-13: A tour of probabilistic programming language APIs.
2020-01-13: Collections of papers and books about Haskell, Type Theory and Category Theory. #haskell
2020-01-13: Elasticsearch meets BERT: Building Search Engine with Elasticsearch and BERT.
2020-01-14:

2020-01-14:   Cigarettes After Sex, Cigarettes After Sex.
2020-01-14: CleverCSV is a Python package for handling messy CSV files. #python
2020-01-14: Making Python Programs Blazingly Fast. #python
2020-01-14: Mercurial’s Journey to and Reflections on Python 3. String literals are so fucking awesome in Python.> In Python 2, a ’’ string literal is a sequence of bytes. In Python 3, a ’’ string literal is a sequence of Unicode code points. These are fundamentally different types. And in Mercurial’s code base, most of our string types are binary by design: use of a Unicode based str for representing data is flat out wrong for our use case.
2020-01-14: Paris Museums Put 100,000 Images Online for Unrestricted Public Use. So nice…

2020-01-15: > I haven’t personally found any use for Dark Mode on my Mac. — The Dark Side of Dark Mode and Night ShiftNor did I, which is why I long deactivated it on my Macbook. Yet I like dark themes for Emacs and iTerm, despite all they say about dark theme mode for text editing.
2020-01-15: > If Lisp’s great insight was that code is data that programmers can take advantage of that with metaprogramming, then git’s great insight is that code changes are data and programmers can take advantage of that with metachanges. — The Communicative Value of Using Git Well
2020-01-15: OMG, 2,3,4 movies in a day… I remember the time when I was able to read 2 to 3 books a day, but I never watched 3 or 4 movies a day. Our best strike with my son was 4-5 episodes of GoT or Walking Dead last Summer.
2020-01-15: Palindromes, redux, and the Sufficiently Smart Compiler. #lisp
2020-01-16: > In the LATEX world, we must acknowledge the fact that endosymbiosis is not as widespread as it should be. What we usually observe is the opposite phenomenon: the proliferation of a multitude of dif- ferent packages that are meant to work together, or do more or less the same thing, instead of becoming one single and bigger animal. — Classes, styles, conflicts: The biological realm of LATEX (PDF)
2020-01-17: > I will give mathematician’s credit for thinking about edge cases perhaps more than a computer scientist would. It can be easy to be a bit complacent with edge cases because the computer will likely do something even if you don’t think too hard about what it ought to do. But a good computer scientist tries to reduce the number of edge cases or at least make them coherent with the non-edge cases. — Math is hard, let’s go shopping
2020-01-17: A guide to Minimalist Web Design: I really like the vertical progress bar. Also,> you don’t need more space. you need less stuff.
2020-01-17: Build your productivity tools with org-mode. (via Irreal) #emacs
2020-01-17: Computation structures.
2020-01-17: Groups, semigroups, monoids, and computers.
2020-01-17: The (Unofficial) Apple Archive.

2020-01-20:   Jack DeJohnette, Ravi Coltrane & Matt Garrison, In Movement.
2020-01-20: > Emotions cut both ways. For anyone who has released and maintained some moderately popular piece of software, you will have invariably made contact with other humans. The impact that another person can have on your emotional state can be staggering. A positive gesture or comment can really brighten your day. It’s that feeling: yes, sharing my code was so worth it just to help that one person. But as anyone who has been a FOSS maintainer can attest, positive comments are almost always dwarfed by negative comments. — My FOSS Story
2020-01-20: > On lui donne 8000 euros en tout, et avec interdiction de l’utiliser pour payer des salaires, et obligation d’utiliser la totalité avant la fin de l’année fiscale, parce que sinon les gestionnaires du ministère n’arriveront pas à reporter les sommes sur l’année suivante… (…) D’ailleurs il paraît que les lauréats américain et japonais n’ont pas encore compris que les 8 000 € qu’on leur avait envoyés constituaient la totalité de leur financement, et ils les ont utilisés pour acheter leurs billets d’avion et réserver leur hôtel à Paris. — Make our galaxy great again, Les dessous de paillasse.
2020-01-20: Interesting use of recursion to split a time-series dataset for immediate consumption, which could certainly be applied when dealing with genetic data.
2020-01-20: Yet another enlightening post by Alexis King, that I will have a hard time to digest.> The flaw is in the premise: static types are not about “classifying the world” or pinning down the structure of every value in a system. The reality is that static type systems allow specifying exactly how much a component needs to know about the structure of its inputs, and conversely, how much it doesn’t.
2020-01-20: pdoc is a library and a command line program to discover the public interface of a Python module or package. #python
2020-01-20: xsv is a command line program for indexing, slicing, analyzing, splitting and joining CSV files. #rust
2020-01-21:   Peter Erskine, Palle Danielsson & John Taylor As It Was.
2020-01-21: > Another reason for the bias toward over-engineering is asymmetric risk. If an over-engineered approach fails, you’ll face less criticism than if a simpler approach fails. As the old saying goes, nobody got fired for choosing IBM. — Scaling up and down
2020-01-21: > Your souvenirs are the return value. (…) Tail recursion aficionados realize that the journey itself is the important part of the function call, and that a vacation includes two journeys. — Afraid of tail recursion
2020-01-21: Some obfusctaed Vim code.
2020-01-21: A brief summary of why I’m less enthusiastic about Apple than I used to be. #apple
2020-01-21: Every macOS wallpaper from Mac OS X 10.0 Cheetah to macOS 10.15 Catalina combined.

2020-01-21: High level C, by the author of Build your own Lisp.
2020-01-21: Overly Optimistic Prediction Results on Imbalanced Data: Flaws and Benefits of Applying Over-sampling.
2020-01-22: This is it. #emacs
2020-01-23:   Wolfert Brederode Quartet, Post Scriptum.
2020-01-23: As I’m no longer good for anything at night, all I have to do is go see the latest episode of American gods. Let’s make it so.
2020-01-23: I would love more concrete Git tips when using tldr.
2020-01-23: On my way to reduce my Bibtex file a bit. Around 300 entries removed so far — WIP.
2020-01-23: Reeder 3 is no longer upgrade on iOS, sadly. It looks like it is now v.4 or nothing. Time to switch back to Elfeed I guess.
2020-01-24: > By 2030 we can hope that about half of the top 100 packages will have some measure of documentation. — Haskell Problems For a New Decade
2020-01-24: > I love that the whitespace reveals more of a city than just roads. — Maps of Every Single Street in Any City
2020-01-24: JetBrains Mono looks like a nice new monospace font, with support for ligature (like Fira Code). Yet, it is far less condensed than Inziu Iosevka, and after more than one year of using Iosevka in Emacs and iTerm I became quite used to it. Here it is, from left to right: Menlo, Iosevka, and JB Mono. (Click to enlarge)

2020-01-24:

I've learned that Apple engineers have internal tools which allow them to delete macl xattr as well as to bypass other Catalina privacy and sandbox protections without rebooting and disabling SIP.

Inside Apple they don't suffer the same problems as external users and developers. https://t.co/UGcwVZ9XF4

— Jeff Johnson (@lapcatsoftware) January 20, 2020

2020-01-27: Although I’m quite happy with Biopython for processing (D|R)NA files, I’m interested to see if there’s something really interesting in the Julia ecosystem, e.g. BioSequences.jl.
2020-01-27: TIL there’s something like a plain text database called GNU Recutils.
2020-01-28: > When you think power-law, think skew: the vast majority of customers contribute negligible revenue, a small proportion of customers contribute almost all the revenue. — Beware the mean
2020-01-28: A great (re)read: A CEO’s Guide to Emacs.> For those who haven’t used Emacs, it’s something you’ll likely hate, but may love. It’s sort of a Rube Goldberg machine the size of a house that, at first glance, performs all the functions of a toaster. That hardly sounds like an endorsement, but the key phrase is “at first glance.” Once you grok Emacs, you realize that it’s a thermonuclear toaster that can also serve as the engine for… well, just about anything you want to do with text. When you think about how much your computing life revolves around text, this is a rather bold statement. Bold, but true.
2020-01-28: If you are in a nostalgic mood, go read Installing NextStep OS (OpenStep) in VirtualBox, at least to enjoy the screenshots.
2020-01-28: Lovely.

2020-01-28: Org-mode features you may not know, by Bastien himself. #emacs
2020-01-28: The happinesses and stresses of full-time FOSS work.
2020-01-30: > To learn a new language or system you must choose a suitable problem and use the environment to implement, test, and debug the problem. — The Joy of Coding: ObservableOn average, with a standard deck of cards, how many cards do we have to draw to get four of a kind? I believe this is basically the pigeonhole principle, right?
2020-01-30: Accelerating Analytics with Apache Arrow.See also: Apache Arrow and the “10 Things I Hate About pandas”.> Pandas rule of thumb: have 5 to 10 times as much RAM as the size of your dataset.
2020-01-30: An Unreasonably Deep Dive Into Project Euler Problem 4. #rust
2020-01-30: Fancy Clojure REPL.