Whilst nil and t are rather strange as booleans, they're wonderfully easy to type.
I've finally relented and written a yasnippet for Python because True and False are just too many keystrokes.
miniblog.
.@rgrinb I really enjoyed your blog post on load-path in Emacs! https://rgrinberg.com/posts/emacs-search-load-path/
I'm impressed and intrigued to see you use el-search. What kind of searches have you done with it?
As a developer, what affects your reaction to new libraries or tools?
When do you react "ooh, this is new and neat!" and when do respond "argh, this is new and different"?
I wish I'd started using autopep8 earlier. It works really well integrated into an editor.
I've tried yapf but it breaks lines in bizarre places so I can't use it in a 'fire and forget' manner yet.
A programming question in an interview is often seeking to be novel (in case candidates share past questions) but not too difficult. This makes me wonder: could they be procedurally generated?
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/
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)
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