Posts tagged "link":
Links #65
- Astral Codex Tex — Book Review Contest 2024 Winners
mentioned in the article: What if Marvel was real (I don't listen to podcasts, but this one seems original and fun)
“What would it be like to live through the original Marvel Universe as it was happening”. The hosts speak in modern vernacular, but otherwise live in the world of the early Silver Age of Marvel Comics. The first episode takes place in November 1961. The Thing and the Human Torch have just been spotted in the city, but no one knows who or what they are.
- Strava Segment Tutorial: Removing Suckage and Promoting Quality possibly outdated, but I love the level of detail
- Berlin to Copenhagen for Beginners: My First Bikepacking Adventure in 2024 great pictures, among the other things
- Multiplying matrices using functional programming I already knew
that (I think) rather famous expression of
transpose, but I've never seen the rest
Links #64
- Folding an A4 sheet into its own envelope
- arrived here reading these delightful weekly notes from the same author
- Penovác's Cats "Endre Penovác (Serbia, b. 1956) paints cats using a unique wet-into-wet technique."
- plot.awk
- an example by the author on X.com
- awesome-glsl Compilation of the best resources to learn programming OpenGL Shaders
- Atkinson Hyperlegible Font
Links #63
- visible earth A catalog of NASA images and animations of our home planet
- The Pentium as a Navajo weaving
- Ray Tracing in one weekend
- 88x31 Collection
Links #62
- Public Work Public Work is a search engine for public domain content. Explore 100,000+ copyright-free images from The MET, New York Public Library, and other sources
- My Org Roam Notes Workflow by Hugo Cisneros
- How I publish my digital garden to the web with org-publish
Links #61
Links #60
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For the last 10 years I have been able to draw around 1,753 stations from different European cities, motivated by the curiosity of understanding how engineers were able to fit underground stations comprising 4 or 5 lines under Place de la République in Paris or the Puerta del Sol in Madrid.
- Votes on the First Draft Common Lisp Manual with discussions about early Common Lisp
- Metacircular Semantics for Common Lisp Special Forms
- Data Manipulation in Clojure Compared to R and Python
Links #59
- Astral Codex Ten: Links for July 2024 "for anything that's sudden, reporting changes should always be your first guess!"
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That’s the risk of handbooks: though they pretend otherwise, they’re just as fantastical as fiction. They imagine perfect commitment, ample resources, and cooperative circumstances that just aren’t common in the world.
- The critical window of shadow libraries
At Anna’s Archive, we are often asked how we can claim to preserve our collections in perpetuity, when the total size is already approaching 1 Petabyte (1000 TB), and is still growing. In this article we’ll look at our philosophy, and see why the next decade is critical for our mission of preserving humanity’s knowledge and culture.
Links #58
- Forsp: A Forth+Lisp Hybrid Lambda Calculus Language
- Puzzlescript is an open-source HTML5 puzzle game engine.
- An Inverse Problem: Trappers Drove Hares to Eat Lynx [PDF]
Links #54
Links #53
- Shattered Landscapes (using R with Rayshader to create beautiful, abstract visualizations)
- Triplanar mapping
- Normal Mapping for a Triplanar Shader
- Running Open Genera 2.0 on Linux
Links #52
- Rayshader is an open source package for producing 2D and 3D data visualizations in R.
- EventCatalog is an Open Source project that helps you document your events, services and domains.
- How about some actual innovation (part of European Innovation & Technical Capabilities)
Links #51
- Annotations on Graham's ANSI Common Lisp
- Little Languages Are The Future Of Programming
- Huntington Digital Library
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is a Forth operating system and a collection of tools and documentation with a single purpose: preserve the ability to program microcontrollers through civilizational collapse.
Links #50
Links #49
Links #48
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We show that relational algebra calculations for incomplete databases, probabilistic databases, bag semantics and whyprovenance are particular cases of the same general algorithms involving semirings.
- How I draw figures for my mathematical lecture notes using Inkscape
- 3D Math Primer for Graphics and Game development
Links #47
Links #46
Links #45
Links #44
- My Fanless OpenBSD Desktop (I like this desktop case a lot)
- Data Structure Visualizations
- Modeling subscription revenue
- JAR on Object-Oriented
- Bicycle Germany Start Page
Links #43
Links #42
Links #41
Links #40
Links #39
- Counterexamples in Type Systems «a compendium of horrible programs that crash, segfault or otherwise explode.» (but please read on)
- Creating a random 2d game world map
- Emacs link scraping (2021 edition)
- Comparison of Common Lisp Testing Frameworks (31 May 2021 Edition)
Links #38
Links #37
Links #36
- A guide on disabling/enabling lsp-mode features
- Gerald Jay Sussman & Chris Hanson - Adventures In Advanced Symbolic Programming [videos] Google Tech Talk of Sussman & Hanson's Adventures in Advanced Symbolic Programming (6.945). This material should correspond to what is written in the book “Software Design for Flexibility (how to avoid programming yourself into a corner)”
- Desmos Graphic Calculator
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This website celebrates the 250th anniversary of the birth of Ludwig van Beethoven with a chronological exploration of his life and music.
The contents of this site were created during the year 2020 with daily posts on the Twitter feed @beethoven250. Each day focused on one or more compositions accompanied by YouTube videos of mostly live performances.
Links #35
Links #34
- Scicloj meeting #19: Alan Dipert: Common Lisp for the Curious Clojurian
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In this series of blog posts I'd like to go through some of the well known design patterns and make a comparison between the implementation in Scala and Common Lisp. Scala is a statically typed, multi-paradigm language running on the Java Virtual Machine. Common Lisp is a dynamically typed, multi-paradigm language running natively on many platforms.
- xeus-sql: a Jupyter kernel for general SQL implementations
- The History(s) of Video Games: "a list of games chronologically sorted in the year they take place in." (via ariis)
- Python Design Patterns
- Uncovering a 24-year-old bug in the Linux Kernel
Links #33
Links #32
Links #31
- 8086 microcode disassembled
- Mara Schema - Mapping of DWH database tables to business entities, attributes & metrics in Python, with automatic creation of flattened tables
- OpenLineage - OpenLineage is an Open standard for metadata and lineage collection designed to instrument jobs as they are running. It defines a generic model of run, job, and dataset entities identified using consistent naming strategies. The core lineage model is extensible by defining specific facets to enrich those entities.
Links #30
- Project Cambria - Translate your data with lenses
- We have met the Excelnemy and he is us
- Test-driven Web application development with Common Lisp
- Jo Walton reads Monthly reading list by author Jo Walton. I like she writes succinct yet enough-to-decide reviews, and the fact she uses the notion of "bath book" (although I'm not sure she and I mean the same thing with it)
Links #29
- The First Appearance of a Real Computer in a Comic Book
- Adding an OLED Display to the Atreus Keyboard
- Hugin - Panorama photo stitcher
- Algorithmic systems of Amsterdam
The Algorithm Register is an overview of the artificial intelligence systems and algorithms used by the City of Amsterdam. Through the register, you can get acquainted with the quick overviews of the city's algorithmic systems or examine their more detailed information based on your own interests
Links #28
- EuroVelo, the European Cycle Route Network
- Eureka Archive (Eureka is the journal of the Archimedeans, the Cambridge University Mathematical Society)
- Binder an Emacs minor mode influenced by Scrivener
- Studio Ghibli pictures collection "Feel free to use it within the bounds of common sense." (or, at least, this is what Google translate thinks it's written on that page)
The Muse
From Ron Gilbert's blog.
"The Muse visits during the act of creation, not before. Don't wait for her. Start alone." - Roger Ebert
One of my favorite quotes and one I keep needing to remind myself of. No matter how blocked or stuck I am, if I just force myself to start writing or designing, it's not long before the ideas start flowing.
Links #27
- Compiling a Lisp: Overture
- Lisp vs. Python: Syntax
- A place for us less messy data hoarders. (subreddit)
- Johnny Decimal A [filing] system to organise projects
- Energy Efficiency across Programming Languages (pdf)
Alfred Wainwright
A Pictorial Guide to the Lakeland Fells is a series of seven books by A. Wainwright, detailing the fells (the local word for hills and mountains) of the Lake District in northwest England. Written over a period of 13 years from 1952, they consist entirely of reproductions of Wainwright's manuscript, hand-produced in pen and ink with no typeset material.
Links #26
- Andyʼs working notes Andy Matuschak's notes are public. He developed a cool system to navigate them.
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Luhmann was famous for his extensive use of the "slip box" or Zettelkasten note-taking method. He built up a zettelkasten of some 90,000 index cards for his research, and credited it with making his extraordinarily prolific writing possible. It was digitized and made available online in 2019
Mines, from Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection
The first square you open is guaranteed to be safe, and (by default) you are guaranteed to be able to solve the whole grid by deduction rather than guesswork. (Deductions may require you to think about the total number of mines.)
A simple way to manage your household budget with Common Lisp and TravisCI
A cool hack
Links #25
- A web GUI for TikZ-cd
- Protesilaos Stavrou's Emacs configuration — I got several learnings from it, Protesilaos++ for spending time to do in a literate programming style.
Lunar Programming Language by David A. Moon
Lunar is my attempt to distill 40 years of programming language experience into the "best" language I can come up with. I hope that this will bring some forgotten ideas back into the spotlight of public attention.
- The Many Faces of an Undying Programming Language
Links #24
- The Rise and Fall of Commercial Smalltalk
- Surgical Reading: How to Read 12 Books at Once (the title is a bit over the top and I don't like it, but I appreciate the practical techniques illustrated in the article: like, deriving a sense of the structure and content of a non-fiction book using the index, then comparing it with the TOC)
Links #23
Links #22
Links #21
- How (some) good corporate engineering blogs are written
- Common Lisp and Docker
- Diagrams, a Python package to generate diagrams (based on graphviz)
- Bicycle Bike Noises, Clicks, Ticks, Creaks, Clunks, Knocks Repair by Jim Langley
Links #20
Links #19
- The PARA Method: A Universal System for Organizing Digital Information
- Access a IPython repl from pdb
- CLUI: Building a Graphical Command Line
-
One of the main motivations on writing such a list is that if you search online for bikepacking gear tips most of the times you find accurate descriptions of the gear used by ultra endurance bikepacking riders in epic self supported races like the Transcontinental race or the Silk Road race. These gear tips may be useful in general, but you need to keep in mind that the main goal of those riders is to win the race: their gears are very minimalist, ultra lightweight, and comfort is not the main priority. The main goal is to cover the most amount of km in the least amount of time, resulting in often sleep deprived nights of riding. If you’re travelling for fun, you’ll cover the same amount of km in much more time (often 3/4 times what those guys take), and probably comfort is one of the top priority. This results in different needs and different trade-offs regarding the gear you’re willing to carry.
- Power up Anki with Emacs, Org mode, anki-editor and more
Links #18
Links #17
Links #16
Links #15
Links #14
Links #13
- Incredible Real-Time Touch Controller for the Yamaha DX7 Synthesizer
- Python Notebooks for Fundamentals of Music Processing
- Recoll finds documents based on their contents as well as their file names
Lemonodor
I am going through old Lemonodor's posts, because why not. It's a treasure trove of interesting material (and also a testament to the fact Internet content is more ephemeral than one could think of)
Links #12
Links #11
Links #10
Links #9
Links #8
Links #7
Links #6
- Data Visualization - A practical introduction, via bactra.org: "This book is the best guide I've seen to (1) learning the widely-used, and generally handsome, ggplot library in R, (2) learning the "grammar of graphics" principles on which it is based, and (3) learning the underlying psychological principles which make some graphics better or worse visualizations than others"
- You’re probably using the wrong dictionary
- OOP Before OOP with Simula
- Lessons learned scaling PostgreSQL database to 1.2bn records/month
Links #5
- Kílta: "This is a personal language. By this I mean it is a step or two away from a heartlang. It is designed to express my own interests best, and few other considerations, apart from my own sense of linguisticesthetics, are in play here"
- Life Off the Grid, Part 1: Making Ultima Underworld
- About watercolor toxicity
Links #4
- The MAESTRO Dataset and Wave2Midi2Wave
- ISO 3013 is a standard published by the International Organization for Standardization (commonly referred to as ISO), specifying a standardized method for brewing tea
- Introducing Darkstar: A Xerox Star Emulator
- Grid Edges: "Games with grids usually use the tiles but there are also cool things to do with edges and vertices. For construction games the edges can be useful for blocking connections between tiles (walls, chasms, windows) and allowing connections between tiles (doors, pipes, wires)."
Links #3
- xcape: "Linux utility to configure modifier keys to act as other keys when pressed and released on their own."
- Introducing the baroque theorbo: a very interesting and well delivered introduction to theorbo (or chitarrone) by lutenist Elizabeth Kenny
- AI Winter is coming
- Laws of Tech: Commoditize Your Complement
Links #2
- Technology, ranked Ranked by importance, although it's not clear how they're defining "important" (electronic computer is #48, scissors are #44)
- Chess Steganography
- Looking back at Postgres
- English verb regularization in books and tweets
- Adding Glue To a Desktop Environment "In this article we will put
some light on a lot of tools used in the world of Unix desktop
environment customization, particularly regarding
wmctrl,wmutils,xev,xtruss,xwininfo"
Links #1
(I often encounter links that I think are interesting. I often forget them. So I'm going to try to collect and publish them regularly here).
- Forge: "Work with Git forges from the comfort of Magit"
- The best things and stuff of 2018: Annual restrospective post from Michael Fogus
- Writing a natural language date and time parser: parsing natural language date strings such as "7 hours before tomorrow at noon", in Lisp
- Emacs in 2018: My Year in Review
- It's Magit! - John Wiegley
- Best of 2017 in tech talks
Fun with Fonts
Quoted in a profile of Donald Knuth published on NYTJ.
Over the past decade, we have designed six typefaces based on mathematical theorems and open problems, specifically computational geometry. These typefaces expose the general public in a unique way to intriguing results and hard problems in hinged dissections, geometric tours, origami design, computer-aided glass design, physical simulation, and protein folding. In particular, most of these typefaces include puzzle fonts, where reading the intended message requires solving a series of puzzles which illustrate the challenge of the underlying algorithmic problem.
Capital Sharp S in German orthography
Mark Dominus points to an article from typography.guru: The Capital Sharp S in now part of the official German orthography.
I would be supposed to be learning German but as of today my exposure is still quite limited. I think the only times when I see the letter ß is when reading street signs.
The Utter Failure of Fictional Time Travel
The Utter Failure of Fictional Time Travel
Perhaps the reason is that no one has (ever) solved the spatial problem, and the cosmos is littered with time travelers adrift between the stars and galaxies.
USDA Pomological Watercolor Collection
USDA Pomological Watercolor Collection
The USDA Pomological Watercolor Collection documents fruit and nut varieties developed by growers or introduced by USDA plant explorers around the turn of the 20th century. Technically accurate paintings were used to create lithographs illustrating USDA bulletins, yearbooks, and other series distributed to growers and gardeners across America.
Kudos to my teacher from last summer watercolor lessons for finding this pearl.
Atreus firmware + Ragel logic
Excellent content on the Atreus mailing list. An user shows how he used Ragel state machine compiler to implement the logic of his Atreus' controller. Impressive and very interesting.
Why I (don't) hate LaTeX
(via ariis' stream)
I understand and I can sympathize with the nuisances the author mentions (the error messages!), but I do not hate LaTeX.
I use LaTeX for practically everything I need to print. Actually, for most of the things I use org-mode, using its exporter later to obtain a LaTeX or a PDF document – via LaTeX, again – when needed. When I don't need anything special, it's good enough. And it's all plain text, which is also good.
When I need something special, I can thrown in some packages doing the work for me. If I need something very special, well, it might lead me to swearing and tears and whatnot, but I know at the end I'll have something largely more manageable than any other system I know could give me.
Lisp is the greatest single programming language ever designed
Another insightful post by Alan Kay on Quora:
One of our many problems with thinking is “cognitive load”: the number of things we can pay attention to at once. The cliche is 7±2, but for many things it is even less. We make progress by making those few things be more powerful.
Why Catholics Built Secret Astronomical Features Into Churches to Help Save Souls
Why Catholics Built Secret Astronomical Features Into Churches to Help Save Souls
Quick, How Might the Alien Spacecraft Work?
IRCv3
The IRCv3 Working Group is a collection of IRC client and server software authors working to enhance, maintain and standardize the IRC protocol using backwards-compatible extensions.
A history of storage media
A history of storage media Kiran Bhattaram published a very interesting piece about how storage evolved in computing.
"Finding most frequent element in a list"
A question on Stackoverflow and a brief search led me to some thoughts I want to register to document my learning experience.
I've been searching for a while for a function that does this in (Common) Lisp. Does one already exist, or do I need to code it on my own? To be more specific, I'm looking for a function that if I fed it in something like
'(1 2 4 1), it would return1?
First of all, the request specifics are incomplete: what should the function return if there's more than one element that occur most frequently? What is the notion of sameness among the elements of the list?
As a beginner, I often find myself looking for idiomatic ways to do things: reusing code in a package is apparently the way to go, but I haven't found a clear path yet for such researchs: I usually look for something in Quicklisp package collection, then on github and the Clwiki. I suspect that, at least for these simple functions, CL makes it so easy to roll your own version that everybody end up writing a homemade solution.
Surprising reasons to use a syntax-coloring editor
Surprising reasons to use a syntax-coloring editor
Mark Jason Dominus on syntax higlighting.
Syntax highlighters should be highlighting the semantic content like expression boundaries, implied parentheses, boolean subexpressions, interpolated variables and other non-apparent semantic features. I think there is probably a lot of interesting work to be done here. Often you hear programmers say things like “Oh, I didn't see the that the trailing comma was actually a period.” That, in my opinion, is the kind of thing the syntax highlighter should call out. How often have you heard someone say “Oh, I didn't see that while there”?
Darius Bacon
Oh good lord I found again a web page I was used to peruse like 20 years ago. Many journeys started from there. It's the personal homepage of Darius Bacon.
Alan Kay's reading list
(reproducing it here for archive)
| category | title | authors |
|---|---|---|
| Technology & Media | The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man | Marshall Mcluhan |
| Technology & Media | Understanding Media | Marshall Mcluhan |
| Technology & Media | The Myth of the Machine | Lewis Mumford |
| Technology & Media | Technics and Civilization | Lewis Mumford |
| Technology & Media | Technology, Management,and Society | Peter Drucker |
| Technology & Media | Innovation and Entrepreneurship | Peter Drucker |
| Technology & Media | Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business | Neil Postman |
| Technology & Media | The Disappearance of Childhood | Neil Postman |
| Technology & Media | Conscientious Objections | Neil Postman |
| Learning & Creativity | The Psycology of the Child | Jean Piaget |
| Learning & Creativity | To Understand is to Invent | Jean Piaget |
| Learning & Creativity | Thought and Language | Lev Vygotsky |
| Learning & Creativity | To Understand Is to Invent | Lev Vygotsky |
| Learning & Creativity | The Psychology of Art | Lev Vygotsky |
| Learning & Creativity | Towards a Theory of Instruction | Jerome Bruner |
| Learning & Creativity | The Relevance of Education | Jerome Bruner |
| Learning & Creativity | Instead of Education: Ways to Help People do Things Better | John Holt |
| Learning & Creativity | Teach Your Own | John Holt |
| Learning & Creativity | Essays into Literacy | Frank Smith |
| Learning & Creativity | Lateral Thinking: A Textbook of Creativity | Edward De Bono |
| Learning & Creativity | Six Thinking Hats | Edward De Bono |
| Learning & Creativity | The Inner Game of Tennis | Tim Gallwey |
| Learning & Creativity | Nurtured by Love: The Classic Approach to Talent Education | Shinichi Suzuki |
| Learning & Creativity | The Secret of Childhood | Maria Montessori |
| Learning & Creativity | The School and Society | John Dewey |
| Learning & Creativity | Freedom and Culture | John Dewey |
| Learning & Creativity | The Act of Creation: A Study of the Conscious and Unconscious in Science and Art | Arthur Koestler |
| Learning & Creativity | The Ghost in the Machine | Arthur Koestler |
| Learning & Creativity | Mindstorms | Seymour Papert |
| Learning & Creativity | The Childrens' Machine | Seymour Papert |
| Anthropology & Psychology | Myths to Live By | Joseph Campbell |
| Anthropology & Psychology | The Masks of God: Creative Mythology | Joseph Campbell |
| Anthropology & Psychology | Language and Species | Derek Bickerton |
| Anthropology & Psychology | The Psychology of Literacy | Silvia Scribner & Mike Cole |
| Anthropology & Psychology | The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind | Julian Jaynes |
| Anthropology & Psychology | The Interpretation of Cultures | Clifford Geertz |
| Anthropology & Psychology | Beyond Boredom and Anxiety | Mihaly Csikszentmihaly |
| Anthropology & Psychology | Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience | Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi |
| Anthropology & Psychology | New World, New Mind: Moving Toward Conscious Evolution | Robert Ornstein & Paul Erlich |
| Anthropology & Psychology | Maps of the Mind | Charles Hampton-Turner |
| Anthropology & Psychology | Man and his Symbols | Carl Jung |
| Anthropology & Psychology | Modern Woman in Search of a Soul | Carl Jung |
| Anthropology & Psychology | Society of Mind | Marvin Minsky |
| Anthropology & Psychology | Archetypes: A Natural History of the Self | Anthony Stevens |
| Philosophy | Timeaus | Plato |
| Philosophy | Republic | Plato |
| Philosophy | A History of Western Philosophy | Bertrand Russell |
| Philosophy | Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits | Bertrand Russell |
| Philosophy | Sceptical Essays | Bertrand Russell |
| Philosophy | The Passion of the Western Mind | Richard Tarnas |
| Philosophy | Ascent of Man | Jacob Bronowski |
| Philosophy | Wisdom, Information & Wonder | Mary Midgley |
| Philosophy | Science as Salvation: A Modern Myth and Its Meaning | Mary Midgley |
| Philosophy | The Human Condition | Hannah Arendt |
| Philosophy | Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics | Count Korzybski |
| Philosophy | Science if not Enough | Vannevar Bush |
| Philosophy | What I believe | Mark Booth (Ed) |
| Philosophy | Te-Tao Ching | Lao-Tzu |
| Philosophy | Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind | Shunryu Suzuki |
| Art & Perception | Civilisation: A Personal View | Kenneth Clark |
| Art & Perception | What is a Masterpiece | Kenneth Clark |
| Art & Perception | Art and Illusion | Ernst Gombrich |
| Art & Perception | Eye and Brain | Richard Gregory |
| Art & Perception | Visual Thinking | Rudolf Arnheim |
| Design | Notes on the Synthesis of Form | Christopher Alexander |
| Design | Gossamer Odyssey: The Triumph of Human-Powered Flight | Morton Grosser |
| Design | Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology | Valentino Braitenberg |
| Design | The Living Brain | W. Gray Walter |
| Design | The Visual Display of Quantitative Information | Edward Tufte |
| Design | Envisioning Information | Edward Tufte |
| Science & Mathematics | The Machinery of Life | David Goodsell |
| Science & Mathematics | The Ring of Truth | Philip Morrison |
| Science & Mathematics | The Animal in Its World | Niko Tinbergen |
| Science & Mathematics | Relativity Visualized | L.C. Epstein |
| Science & Mathematics | Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology | Eric Drexler |
| Science & Mathematics | The Blind Watchmaker | Richard Dawkins |
| Science & Mathematics | The Selfish Gene | Richard Dawkins |
| Science & Mathematics | Dragons of Eden | Carl Sagan |
| Science & Mathematics | Broca's Brain: Reflections on the Romance of Science | Carl Sagan |
| Science & Mathematics | Neuroethology | J.-P. Ewert |
| Science & Mathematics | The Character of Physical Law | Richard Feynman |
| Science & Mathematics | QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter | Richard Feynman |
| Science & Mathematics | The God Particle | Leon Lederman |
| Science & Mathematics | From Quarks to Cosmos | Leon Lederman |
| Science & Mathematics | The Double Helix | James Watson |
| Science & Mathematics | The Fractal Geometry of Nature | Benoit Mandelbrot |
| Politics & Economy | An American Primer | Daniel Boorstin |
| Politics & Economy | The Americans : The democratic experience | Daniel Boorstin |
| Politics & Economy | The Federalist Papers | Madison, Et Al |
| Politics & Economy | The Anti-Federalist Papers and the Constitutional Convention Debates | Ralph Ketcham (Ed) |
| Politics & Economy | Common Sense | Tom Paine |
| Politics & Economy | The Rights of Man | Tom Paine |
| Politics & Economy | The Age of Reason | Tom Paine |
| Politics & Economy | An Aristocracy of Everyone: The Politics of Education and the Future of America | Benjamin Barber |
| Politics & Economy | The Zero-Sum Society: Distribution and the Possibilities for Economic Change | Lester Thurow |
| Politics & Economy | Economics Explained: Everything You Need to Know About How the Economy Works and Where It's Going | Lester Thurow |
| Politics & Economy | Head to Head: The Coming Economic Battle Among Japan, Europe, and America | Lester Thurow |
| Politics & Economy | Made in America: Regaining the Productive Edge | Mike Dertuozos (Ed) |
| Computers | Building Large Knowledge-Based Systems: Representation and Inference in the Cyc Project | Doug Lenat |
| Computers | LISP 1.5 Programmer's Manual | John Mccarthy |
| Computers | Computation: Finite and Infinite Machines (Automatic Computation) | Marvin Minsky |
| Computers | The Architecture Machine: Toward a More Human Environment | Nicholas Negroponte |
| Computers | Soft Architecture Machines | Nicholas Negroponte |
Nowadays, we do programming by poking
http://www.posteriorscience.net/?p=206 https://vimeo.com/151465912#t=59m36s
Today, this is no longer the case. Sussman pointed out that engineers now routinely write code for complicated hardware that they don’t fully understand (and often can’t understand because of trade secrecy.) The same is true at the software level, since programming environments consist of gigantic libraries with enormous functionality. According to Sussman, his students spend most of their time reading manuals for these libraries to figure out how to stitch them together to get a job done. He said that programming today is “More like science. You grab this piece of library and you poke at it. You write programs that poke it and see what it does. And you say, ‘Can I tweak it to do the thing I want?'”. The “analysis-by-synthesis” view of SICP — where you build a larger system out of smaller, simple parts — became irrelevant. Nowadays, we do programming by poking.
Isabella the Catholic brings change to Chess
"Learning Racket" series
"Learning Racket" series An expert programmer learns Racket and takes notes in the process. Many interesting remarks, for example (after discovering a library that let the user bend the language):
It must be any language designer's ultimate dream.
(And this is probably Lisp's greatest weakness as well – with this level of possible diversity, everyone has to use the “common lowest denominator” simply because nobody can agree on what alternative syntax / library / etc. is better and should be used.)
eshell and why can't I convert to you
eshell and why can't I convert to you Some interesting Emacs shell tricks in this Reddit thread.
The Lisp Curse
Interesting read, that resounds with something we were talking about at last Haskell meetup.
Lisp is so powerful that problems which are technical issues in other programming languages are social issues in Lisp.
Consider the case of Scheme, again. Since making Scheme object-oriented is so easy, many Scheme hackers have done so. More to the point, many individual Scheme hackers have done so. In the 1990s, this led to a veritable warehouse inventory list of object-oriented packages for the language. The Paradox of Choice, alone, guaranteed that none of them would become standard. Now that some Scheme implementations have their own object orientation facilities, it's not so bad. Nevertheless, the fact that many of these packages were the work of lone individuals led to problems which Olin Shivers wrote about in documenting the Scheme Shell, scsh.
What are some of the must-read, harder Sci Fi books you all recommend?
What are some of the must-read, harder Sci Fi books you all recommend?
Farewell, Marvin Minsky (1927–2016)
Farewell, Marvin Minsky (1927–2016)
Especially interesting is what Minsky observes about teaching programming languages:
I remember a few years ago bringing up the topic of teaching programming, and how I was hoping the Wolfram Language would be relevant to it. Marvin immediately launched into talking about how programming languages are the only ones that people are expected to learn to write before they can read. He said he’d been trying to convince Seymour Papert that the best way to teach programming was to start by showing people good code. He gave the example of teaching music by giving people Eine kleine Nachtmusik, and asking them to transpose it to a different rhythm and see what bugs occur. (Marvin was a long-time enthusiast of classical music.) In just this vein, one way the Wolfram Programming Lab that we launched just last week lets people learn programming is by starting with good code, and then having them modify it.
The best things and stuff of 2015
The best things and stuff of 2015 The annual post by Fogus. Great stuff.
How modern languages will save the text editor
How modern languages will save the text editor
Interesting post about programming language writing tools.
[…] the languages were developed in complete ignorance of these tools, which made them somewhat hostile to those goals (anybody who tried to implement a correct C++ parser knows what I mean, life before clang was just painful). As a result, very complex tools making heavy use of specialized partial parsers, static analysis, and crazy heuristics emerged. And they emerged as part of even more complex development suites to combine them all in a coherent form: the IDE was born.
[…]
But more recently, things took a different turn (for the best I think): a new language emerged that was promoting a different paradigm: Go. Instead of making the tooling an afterthought, it’s been pretty much there at some level since inception. It even shows in the language grammar itself, which is designed to enable fast compilation, partial parsing, and a whole bunch of analysis tools.
It resonates with an old paper I'm reading: Programming in an interactive environment the “LISP” experience by Eric Sandewall.
Untangling the Tale of Ada Lovelace
Untangling the Tale of Ada Lovelace
Nice post on Stephen Wolfram's blog ("In other words, she basically proposed to take on the role of CEO, with Babbage becoming CTO").
A Basis for Concurrency and Distribution
John Wiegley on git
From emacs-devel mailing list:
One thing to keep in mind is that Git has several distinct layers:
- The data model
- The plumbing
- The porcelain
The data model is incredibly simple. This, I think, is Git's main attraction. I've written about the data model in my article "Git from the Bottom Up", and also via a Haskell library for interacting with this model, called gitlib (http://hackage.haskell.org/package/gitlib).
The plumbing is… unintuitive to say the least. The porcelain is… fairly bad, but slowly getting better.
Collection of CSS styles for org
Collection of CSS styles for org A thread on Reddit with pointers to CSS styles for org-mode HTML export.
Clojure: If Lisp is so great, why do we keep needing new variants?
Clojure: If Lisp is so great, why do we keep needing new variants?
The one thing that Lisp programmers can agree on is how much better Lisp is than C and similar languages. I was talking last week to some programmers who use the Clojure version of Lisp and it made me wonder “If Lisp is so great, why did this guy have to build a slightly different version instead of building a popular application program in an existing version of Lisp, such as Common Lisp?”
Interesting discussion in the comments
The present in deep history
Charlie Stross on his blog:
Assume you are a historian in the 30th century, compiling a pop history text about the period 1700-2300AD. What are the five most influential factors in that period of history?
The comments are interesting.
which-key
@manuel_uberti wrote about which-key, a package that displays
available keybindings in popup. Manuel shows an example to activate
it:
(which-key-mode) (setq which-key-idle-delay 0.5 which-key-key-replacement-alist '(("<\\([[:alnum:]-]+\\)>" . "\\1") ("up" . "↑") ("right" . "→") ("down" . "↓") ("left" . "←") ("DEL" . "⌫") ("deletechar" . "⌦") ("RET" . "⏎")))
State of the Common Lisp Ecosystem, 2015
Ron Gilbert on Thimbleweed Park
Ron Gilbert on Thimbleweed Park
Saving games still scare me.This is something I should have figured out months ago. The issue isn't a matter of how to store the data, it's way more complex than that. There is a lot of data to iterate through and save off in a way that can be reconstructed. Doing save games is harder today than it was back in the SCUMM years. Back then we didn't have to worry about patching. These days, the save game has to survive the game being patched and that can mean resources being added or removed.
Ryan Carmack's game
Ryan is John Carmack's son.
I’m still taking a little heat from my wife for using an obscure language instead of something mainstream that is broadly used in industry, but I have nothing but good things to say about using Racket and DrRacket for a beginning programmer, and highly recommend it.
How to Help Self-Driving Cars Make Ethical Decisions
How to Help Self-Driving Cars Make Ethical Decisions
They implemented different ethical settings in the software that controls automated vehicles and then tested the code in simulations and even in real vehicles. Such settings might, for example, tell a car to prioritize avoiding humans over avoiding parked vehicles, or not to swerve for squirrels.
As the technology advances, however, and cars become capable of interpreting more complex scenes, automated driving systems may need to make split-second decisions that raise real ethical questions.
At a recent industry event, Gerdes gave an example of one such scenario: a child suddenly dashing into the road, forcing the self-driving car to choose between hitting the child or swerving into an oncoming van.
“As we see this with human eyes, one of these obstacles has a lot more value than the other,” Gerdes said. “What is the car’s responsibility?”
The Internet with a human face
An interesting talk by Maciej Cegłowski.
Anyone who works with computers learns to fear their capacity to forget. Like so many things with computers, memory is strictly binary. There is either perfect recall or total oblivion, with nothing in between. It doesn't matter how important or trivial the information is. The computer can forget anything in an instant. If it remembers, it remembers for keeps.
[…]
Our lives have become split between two worlds with two very different norms around memory.
[…]
The online world is very different. Online, everything is recorded by default, and you may not know where or by whom. If you've ever wondered why Facebook is such a joyless place, even though we've theoretically surrounded ourselves with friends and loved ones, it's because of this need to constantly be wearing our public face. Facebook is about as much fun as a zoning board hearing.
Links #56
- Processing documents with transducers Using transducers to extract information from XML, JSON and other documents (in Clojure)
- What To Eat Bikepacking And Ultra Cycling