Persuasion, Adaptation, and the Arms Race for Your Attention: superb article discussing how culture adapts to people trying to monopolise attention (remember Farmville?)
https://locusmag.com/2018/01/cory-doctorow-persuasion-adaptation-and-the-arms-race-for-your-attention/
miniblog.
Yes, highly optimising compilers can be less predictable. But given the choice between two compilers, where one is easier to reason about but the other produces faster overall code, I'd pick the latter every time.
Only ~15% of the stories on HN are interesting to me. It's a little higher on lobste.rs and subject-specific subreddits, but still <50%.
Is it worth building an ML based RSS reader/aggregator? This seems like a classic classification problem, but I worry about filter bubbles.
It's funny how much 'everyday coding techniques' varies by field. I've only ever used dynamic programming or min-heaps in programming puzzles.
By contrast, the (obscure?) hare and rabbit technique for linked lists -- pretty well known in lisp implementation circles!
I'm coming to the conclusion that CS papers need to be printed.
They don't suit ereaders (PDFs don't reflow), they're too small on smartphones and I find a laptop less portable.
I suppose the clue is in the name!
Python's yield keyword is rarely useful for laziness. I've only taken advantage of lazy computation a handful of times, e.g. dealing with paginated APIs.
The main advantage is syntactic sugar for producing iterables. Yield is much nicer than appending to a list and returning it!
Emacs lisp isn't really a lisp-2. It's more of a lisp-3: the variable namespace, the function namespace, and whatever has been dumped in the symbol plist.
Emacs is the only API I've seen with a bit of french in it. For example, file-name-sans-extension.
Langsec after Spectre may push us towards more of a 'basic science to figure out how things work' model: https://wingolog.org/archives/2018/01/11/spectre-and-the-end-of-langsec
Regular interruptions leading to an increase in procrastination!
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/technology/your-smartphone-is-making-you-stupid/article37511900/ (the article is partly fearmongering, but makes some nuanced points)
This is wild: compiling SMT problems to C++ then using coverage guided fuzzing to find solutions!
https://github.com/delcypher/jfs
If you someone made a concerted effort to put malware in a low level npm package, how hard would it be to detect?
Worryingly, it would be really difficult.
https://hackernoon.com/im-harvesting-credit-card-numbers-and-passwords-from-your-site-here-s-how-9a8cb347c5b5
Lovely talk from @strangeloop_stl showing Black, a Scheme where you can recursively make changes to evaluation!
In the picture, Nada is demonstrating adding a special form (not macro!) for instrumentation. Mind bending.
I find mypy very helpful for refactoring Python codebases. It sometimes finds bugs before I run my refactored code, but a large percentage of the time it's just helpfully pointing out where I have the wrong number of args.
Pareto principle strikes again.
Blogged: The Emacs Guru Guide to Key Bindings
https://www.wilfred.me.uk/blog/2018/01/06/the-emacs-guru-guide-to-key-bindings/
'Component-based Program Synthesis in OCaml' is a nice 2017 paper on program synthesis in OCaml. https://www-scf.usc.edu/~zhanpenl/prog_syn.pdf
Some impressive examples, but programmatically generating friendly variable names remains a hard problem. JSNice is the only nice solution I've seen.
Interpreters are a great example of software tools where it's easy to settle for something that's easy to implement.
Many interpreters don't have native support for displaying result data types as images. I've only seen Racket and Smalltalk offer this.
Emacs has a wonderful mode called dired, which is great for viewing or bulk renaming the contents of directories.
Apparently, there's a C program of the same name, and it's unknown which came first! https://invisible-island.net/ded/
Thoughtful article on a trend of building smaller, kinder online communities: https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/28/16795090/internet-community-2017-post-mortem-tumblr-amino-drip-tinyletter
Traditionally we distinguish between 'plaza' and 'rabbit warren' designs of social media, but perhaps there are interesting designs between those extremes.
Dramatic post arguing that 'IO type' is far better for explaining Haskell than 'IO monad': https://blog.jle.im/entry/io-monad-considered-harmful.html
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