miniblog.

I see mypy more as a refactoring tool, but I'm always pleasantly surprised when it catches issues. It caught a bug here! demo.py:96: error: Unsupported operand types for >= ("int" and "Optional[int]") (In the code I've checked max_val is not None, but used min_val.)

When I look at tools like Tor and other strong anonymity tools, the complexity is daunting. Only one mistake and suddenly you've outed yourself. I used to suspect that strong anonymity is essentially impossible, but Satoshi Nakamoto has demonstrated otherwise. Remarkable.

What Developers Want and Need from Program Analysis: An Empirical Study https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/ase-2016.pdf Static analysis tools should have very few checks enabled by default, and great editor integration!

jq is an awesome tool for manipulating big blobs of JSON, which are increasingly common outputs from dev tools. Today I learnt that jq even supports TCO! Impressive!

How would you describe the architecture of real-world compilers? https://mrale.ph/blog/2015/03/29/browser-as-an-interactive-disassembler.html sums it up as a structure that should be treated as a black box until you know your way around!

Defining if, cond and progn in Rust in Remacs! https://github.com/Wilfred/remacs/pull/598 The lispiest code I've read in ages :)

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.

.@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?)

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!