Assorted links from 2016

See also: 2014 / 2015 / 2016 / 2017 / 2018 / 2019 / 2020 / 2021 / 2022 / 2023

January

The epic story of bringing the awesome book “ARM Assembly Language Programming” back to life
The Easiest Way to Lose 125 Pounds Is to Gain 175 Pounds. I’ve enjoyed Bill Barnwell’s writings on Football. This line --- “My compulsive eating had little to do with hunger and was almost never enjoyable. Instead, it was like trying to chase a vague, indefinable comfort, some satisfaction that never arrived --- or even could arrive. ” is also a good way to explain information addition/crackberry/twitter mania/facebookitis etc.,
Anti-Education by Friedrich Nietzsche review — why mainstream culture, not the universities, is doing our best thinking
Example of Cap’n Proto defn file.

February

cheerp is the C+\+ compiler for the web write a web application, or port your existing one, all in C+\+. cheerp will generate JavaScript code that can run on any browser. Performance benchmark
Visual Information Theory
So You Still Don’t Understand Hindley-Milner? Part 1
So you want to write a package manager in depth analysis of issues around package management.
Robert Caro Wonders What New York Is Going To Become
Microsoft Research - Exploding Software-Engineering Myths (article summarizing findings of MS research on code coverage, TDD, assertions, etc.)
The Seven Habits of Highly Depolarizing People

April

Rococo or “Late Baroque”, is an 18th-century artistic movement and style, affecting many aspects of the arts including painting, sculpture, architecture, interior design, decoration, literature, music, and theatre. It developed in the early 18th century in Paris, France as a reaction against the grandeur, symmetry, and strict regulations of the Baroque, especially of the Palace of Versailles.[1] Rococo artists and architects used a more jocular, florid, and graceful approach to the Baroque.
http://www.filmlinc.org/films/the-ballad-of-cable-hogue/; Movie. Following the film society on twitter and it’s been a good way to discover interesting movies.
V Vinay’s tweets about unveiling of Aryabhata’s bust and speech by Field medal winner Manjul Bhargava.
Functional Kafka; Bachelor thesis by Marc Juchli and Lorenz Wolf; Spring 2015. From first looks, dives into how Kafka works with an implementation in Haskell, hence the “Functional” part. Authors appear to be not proficient in English. Still I am intersted to re-read it carefully.
Reading for busy people --- essentially using “Trello” for managing what to read. Using trell to organize material for research (I’m reading Umberto Eco’s “How to write a thesis” currently…) may be an Excellent idea.

May

The Quiet Crisis unfolding in Software Development
A pair od pie chart papers
Letters between Backus and Djikstra (1979) discussion on HN, including a comment from Alan Kay. Actual blogpost
static typing for python --- pyCon 2016 talk slides.
Measuring GC latencies in Haskell, OCaml, Racket
Detecting Malicious URLs using vowpal wabbit
Deploy an interactive data science environment with JupyterHub on Docker Swarm
How to read a mathematics textbook

August

Porkaround:

“porkaround” is a subtle neologism I use for describing deployment of a rather sloppy and clumsy solution as a workaround (portmanteau of pork + workaround, alluding to the rather socially awkward properties otherwise lovable swine may have at times) --- /u/irrequietus

August 07, 2016

August 18, 2016

https://glyph.twistedmatrix.com/2016/08/python-packaging.html[Deciphering

Glyph

: Python Packaging Is Good Now]

Today, if you want to get a sensible, up-to-date python development environment, without administrative privileges, all you have to do is:

$ python -m ensurepip --user
$ python -m pip install --user --upgrade pip
$ python -m pip install --user --upgrade virtualenv

Then, for each project you want to do, make a new virtualenv:

$ python -m virtualenv lets-go
$ . ./lets-go/bin/activate
(lets-go) $ _

Need a C compiler? OS vendors have been working with the open source community to make this easier across the board:

$ apt install build-essential python-dev # ubuntu
$ xcode-select --install # macOS
$ dnf install @development-tools python-devel # fedora
C:\> REM windows
C:\> start https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=44266

Want to upload some stuff to PyPI? This should do it for almost any project:

$ pip install twine
$ python setup.py sdist bdist_wheel
$ twine upload dist/*

Want to build wheels for the wild and wooly world of Linux? There’s an app for that.

Books | FlowingData. One of the books “Visualise this” written by Nathan Yau looked very interesting in print.

August 19, 2016

August 22, 2016

Pitfalls in Haskell

August 23, 2016

Ronald Coase is dead. Here are five of his papers you need to read. - The Washington Post

August 30, 2016

Learn Difficult Concepts with the ADEPT Method — BetterExplained. Beterexplained.com is one of better, useful sites on the internet.

August 31, 2016

Rewrites vs. refactoring: 17 opinions and resources

September

September 1, 2016

Why Luck Plays a Big Role in Making You Rich - Bloomberg. “He wants us all to know how fortunate we are”. A bit of gratitude everyday goes a long way.

September 2, 2016

AMONG OTHER THINGS — Keerthik Sasidharan @https://twitter.com/ks1729\[ks1729\]‘s blog on literature, history of India and the world cultures.
Apache Community Development - A Maturity Model for Apache Projects. Update: Sep 13, 2016. Netbeans, the IDE has opted to become an Apache project, part of the reason was that Apache has a strong and proven model to run open source projects.

September 3, 2016

Elliot Chance - Automatically Locate When and Where Bugs Were Introduced with git bisect This is a good introduction to what is often mentioned in hushed tones as a advanced command. Pretty easy actually.
Rough Consensus and Maximal Interestingness

September 5, 2016

Raghuram Rajan, India’s Departing Central Banker, Has a New Warning - profile piece on RRR by NYT.

September 6, 2016

Reflections on trusting trust by Ken Thompson of C fame. In this Turing lecture he talks about the trojan he introduced in the C compiler that went undetected for many years.

BB To what extent should one trust a statement that a program is free of Trojan horses? Perhaps it is more important to trust the people who wrote the software.

September 7, 2016

Python Packaging at PayPal. Paypal has found success in using Anaconda Packaging for their deployments. This is something to keep in mind for the next python deployment.

September 8, 2016

A bite of Python — some gotchas while programming Python you have to keep in mind.
Easy Parsing with Parser Combinators; another hit blog post by Li Haoyi, the creator of many scala libraries (eg: Ammonite). His blog post on link:[Scala.js] convinced me to look at Scala.js next time I have to scala at $work, where we already use Scala.
‘Freddie Mercury was a prodigy’: Rock star’s Panchgani school bandmates remember ‘Bucky’; a decent interview with Freddie Mercury’s Indian school mates in Pune.
Live asynchronously. Understand the cost of interruptions while working espeically for focus-intensive tasks like Programming.

September 9, 2016

Kalzumeus Software | Greatest Hits Blog posts of long time HN luminary Patrick McKenzie.
Lisp Machine Manual by Richard Stallman etc., from 1984. The introduction has one of the earliest mentions of GNU by RMS.

September 11, 2016

Review of Stephen Wolfram, A New Kind of Science by Cosma Shalizi (TL;DR. he is not a fan of the man or the book) via 2012 update

September 12, 2016

kelseyhightower/kubernetes-the-hard-way — Bootstrap Kubernetes the hard way on Google Cloud Platform or Amazon EC2. No scripts.

September 13, 2016

Swift Playgrounds on the App Store. Siri has been waiting for this! She has asked me multiple times when this is going to be available. Time to ditch the 6 year old iPad and get a new 12 inch iPad, I guess.

September 15, 2016

Why I’m dropping Rust (I wonder how the issues faced by the author can be resolved using D. My initial guess it wouldn’t be much different than C’s solution because D’s OOP is similar to C’s in many ways).
Why Do Tourists Visit Ancient Ruins Everywhere Except the United States?. (Cahokia Mounds is the name of the place referred in the article)

September 16, 2016

Microservices — Please, don’t by Sean Kelly of Basho.
Paul Chiusano: The advantages of static typing, simply stated
Investing For Geeks by patio11.
Two articles on MS Subbulakshmi by TM Krishna — MS Understood - The Caravan; October 2015 and Let’s Not Succumb to Misremembering M.S. Subbulakshmi; October 2016. Via Abhishek Sāmal

September 18, 2016

Thimble by Mozilla - An online code editor for learners & educators. — (what makes the difference from many other online editors are the nice “remix” examples.)

September 19, 2016

Why have classroom discussions anyway? (Smart, relatable discussion on people who learn by hearing vs reading vs talking.)
A Step by Step Backpropagation Example — Matt Mazur

September 20, 2016

Video killed the radio star (“How games, phones, and other tech innovations are changing the labor force.” This essay is adapted from the speech given at the 527th Convocation at Booth this past June — Erik Hurst)
OKREAL - JAZMINE HUGHES
Dr. Fox effect - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
I am Anthony Bourdain and I’m really good at finding cool shit. AMA. : reddit IAmA (My takeaway: try Oaxaca (ವಹಾಕ) food).

September 21, 2016

https://www.quora.com/session/Hadley-Wickham/1?srid=hdj[Hadley Wickham
- Session on Sep 20, 2016 - Quora]
The Little Idea of Functional Programming --- Jack Hsu

There are three concepts that capture the essence of functional programming.

Data in, data out
Code as data
(Function) Composition all the way down

Other functional programming concepts and techniques can be built upon this little idea.

The Most Expensive One-byte Mistake - ACM Queue (NUL-terminated text strings. `‘Thus, the costs of the Ken, Dennis, and Brian decision will keep accumulating, like the dust that over the centuries has almost buried the monuments of ancient Rome.” — Poul-Henning Kamp)
/dev/lawyer The MIT License, Line by Line. See also Field Guide to United States Intellectual Property

September 22, 2016

The Building Blocks of Japanese Cuisine - Lucky Peach

sa-shi-su-se-so	ಸ-ಶಿ-ಸು-ಸೆ-ಸೊ
sa=sato	sugar
shi=shio	salt
su=su	rice vinegar
se=shoyu	soy sauce
so=miso	miso

September 23, 2016

Flow vs TypeScript — This presentation is a good comparison of Typescript vs Flow. However, slide #34 makes good points about dynamically-typed languages vs statically-typed languages. Statically typed language zealots would like you to believe that Strong, Statically typed language is the only way to do anything, (especially if they are only exposed to Java).

The author says, you should consider typescript or flow:

if your project does not live for long: no

if your project is really simple: no

if there is a chance you will need to refactor the thing: yes

if your system is very important or even crucial for the success of your company: yes

if people enter or leave your team frequently: yes

This reminds me of Ousterhout’s dichotomy.

If you have short-lived, simple, narrowly-scoped codebase that is produced and maintained by a small team, dynamically typed languages are probably OK. But, if one is dealing with churn in development team, your best bet is to settle for a popular, not-too-sophisticated language (ie., Java, Typescript) and hope for the best.

In my experience, it is more acceptable for a humanities person to say “I’m not a science person” or “I don’t like math” than for a scientist to say something similar about literature, art, or music. The latter person is thought, silently, to be a Philistine; the former, an educated person with a specialty.

In general, Dr Wallingford’s (@wallingf](https://twitter.com/wallingf)) blog is excellent.

Beautiful Racket: index.html via this presentation.
SVG has more potential some fun uses of SVG.

September 27, 2016

adding a new comment type to nim. This is really cool. Have to find out what exactly the #? line does in the example.

    #? replace("--", "#")

    # this is naturally a comment

    -- This is a comment too now

    echo "this is not a comment"

LMS: Program Generation and Embedded Compilers in Scala

September 28, 2016

How to Crash Systemd in One Tweet

September 29, 2016

What we collectively refer to as “containers” and software like Docker are just …

tools that take advantage of various facilities provided by the OS which allow one to isolate/restrict various resources like CPU, memory, network, visibility of other processes, filesystem access, fs layering and namespacing, provide traffic shaping, etc.

These isolation features go back a really long time in various OS’s, but only in the last few years have they seen mass adoption, which, alas is running a bit ahead of any effort to make it a formal standard or anything even close to that.

And so the way you would create a “container” on Linux is very different from the way you’d do that on FreeBSD or Solaris or Windows. Docker was one of the first pieces of software to facilitate that on Linux (where it was and still is far from trivial), along with the whole docker image dockerhub ecosystem, etc. But ultimately what Docker does amounts to the right commands (or system calls) done, and you can have the same effect without Docker (there’s even a nice Docker talk on youtube somewhere that shows how to do what Docker does without it from the command line).

IMHO in the developer community at large few people care to understand the operating system intimately, and even fewer people know stuff like cgroups or the tc command on Linux, and that’s primarily why Docker is so popular - you don’t need to know any of it.

I think it’d be nice if people stopped using “Docker” and “container” interchangeably, and if a set of tools emerged which would be more part of the OS distribution and less a separate concept/brand/company/whatever and was more or less uniform across, at least the Un*x-like OSs.

October

October 1, 2016

Signal/Collect - Parallel Graph Processing (scala library to process large graphs). Related: Revised Report on the Propagator Model and DSpace@MIT: The Art of the Propagator

October 2, 2016

David Dean Shulman - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (Indologist; esp Tamil; via @ks1729 )
Vigorous Public Debates in Academic Computer Science — Embedded in Academia (a good way to reduce bloat)
The Accidental DBA — charity.wtf (don’t mess with Databases unnecessarily; test extensively before making changes — upgrades, engine changes! see Maslow’s Hierarchy of Database Needs and Upgrading databases: without losing your data, your perf, or your mind)
Consensus Protocols: Two-Phase Commit : Paper Trail (understand 2-PC , 3-PC before attempting Paxos)
John Gray (philosopher) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (to read more)
Thonny, Python IDE for beginners (works pretty neat on mac; uses Tk)
Deep-Fried Data (Maciej Cegłowski’s talk)

October 3, 2016

ACM Queue Home page (Don’t wait for someone to link to a ACM queue article; add it to your list of sites frequented).
Edward O. Thorp (Mathematician, trader, used probability to win at blackjack etc., Published books on the topic. NNT’s foreward for his book (PDF))
Next generation configuration mgmt (intro to the mgmt system. Don’t know if i’ll ever use it, but interesting piece on config mgmt.)
How it feels to learn Javascript in 2016