Until a couple of months ago, I was kind of looking for something like this to get my son started in programming. I ended up using a Raspberry Pi with a C64 emulator using retropie.

I used to think that learning BASIC was the best way to get into programming because that’s how I got into it. Only recently have I realized that learning BASIC worked in the 80s and 90s when technology was just more limited. You would turn on a computer and you would be met with a monochromatic prompt. I remember learning how to use BASIC to change the text color on the screen and it blew my mind and prompted me to keep exploring.

I bought the old book that I used when I was in the 5th grade to learn programming (called Basic Fun: Computer Games, Puzzles, and Problems Children Can Write). I remembered it being awesome but a lot of the exercises in there are pretty boring in 2018 :(

https://github.com/zainhoda/orbgo

Free and open source Tableau alternative that generates Python Pandas code. Still in early stages but I’d love to bounce some ideas around if you know anything about IPython.

Microsoft Sculpt Ergonomic Keyboard

totally happy with a Microsoft ergonomic keyboard.

No mention of app engine?

So far I’ve only found one solution that is actually robust. Which is to manually check that the value is not nil before actually using it.

This seems reasonable to me. If anything, I’d consider knowing how and when to use this kind of check a part of language competency knowledge as it is how Go was designed.

Wow. I was using Atom until I read this post. I had dismissed VSCode because Microsoft but WOW, this is zippy!

For too long, finance has been a net consumer of open source.

The nature of finance is such that it’s largely a zero-sum game so cooperation between companies is not the norm.

Another great example is Autozone. Remember when they had the text consoles where people could very quickly lookup parts. It’s all be replaced by a GUI app now. If you learn all the keyboard shortcuts, it can be close to the original, but most people I just watch click and click and click.

Another entry for this transition matrix: https://erikbern.com/2017/03/15/the-eigenvector-of-why-we-moved-from-language-x-to-language-y.html

I just turned on HTTPS in my App Engine web app – it’s integrated with Let’s Encrypt. It was surprisingly easy compared to the times I’ve used old school CAs.

Creating a simple Go appengine service with datastore as a db for future project. Starting from CRUD, than adding integrations to Slack/Github.

Interesting but not really alarming.

This article is saying that if someone breaks into my house, they can hack the Echo and use it to record my conversations. If someone is going to break into my house to monitor me, I’d be more concerned that they’d hack my router.

I don’t code in Python but it seems to be that many of these are solutions to the fact that Python is dynamically typed.

emoji? why?

the most generic implementation of the code tends to be very inefficient

I’ve found this to be true in the data analytics space regardless of the language being used. Some composition of generalized functions yields the numerically correct result but often very inefficiently.

One more for this matrix: https://erikbern.com/2017/03/15/the-eigenvector-of-why-we-moved-from-language-x-to-language-y.html

I’m starting to wonder how difficult it would be to approximate how curl is used around the world.

curl clearly has a lot of functionality baked in which would take a lot of development to duplicate, but if it turns out 95% of use cases simply dump an HTTP served file to disk, perhaps another tool can be written in the likes of Go or Rust which could meet most of the use cases fairly quickly.

Edit: Found this - curl-to-go

:) Very entertaining read. I’ve been picking up some smaller components in GO lately. I’ve also rewritten a component I originally built in Python in GO. Which gives a nice but anecdotal comparison:

Python: 11 days of development, performance, 160ms for ranking 3600 activities GO: 3 days of development, performance, 6ms for ranking 3600 activities

The project is quite simple. It reads a ranking formula and turns it into a function which runs scoring on a large list of activities. Here’s an example ranking config:

{
"functions":{
  "simple_gauss":{
    "base":"decay_gauss",
    "scale":"5d",
    "offset":"1d",
    "decay":"0.3"
  },
  "popularity_gauss":{
    "base":"decay_gauss",
    "scale":"100",
    "offset":"5",
    "decay":"0.5"
  }
},
"defaults": {
    "popularity": 1
},
"score":"simple_gauss(time)*popularity"

}

So you basically you need to parse the score expression, translate it to AST, configure the defaults in the context, setup partials for the specified functions, add a bunch of builtin functions and create a huge set of test cases to make sure you’ve covered every possible way in which people can break it :)

With Python most of the time was spent on benchmarking and performance optimization. The GO code started out at 15ms and with some super simple optimization came down to 6. (GO also had the unfair advantage of a better expression parsing library being available.)

I used to believe that GO gives you better performance at the cost of developer productivity. For certain projects it definitely seems to beat Python at both productivity and performance though.

It’s been over a decade since I’ve programmed in C. I read through the source code for this project and now I remember what I hated about C.

There’s a ton of laziness in this code about checking types. It’s not self-documenting at all. There’s a lot of if (!timeout), if (!ptr), if (!...) where that ... could be an int, a pointer, a char, or any number of other things. Then you see a lot of commits trying to fix bad assumptions that those values would be 0. For example, in the timeout case the code initially only checked whether it was 0 or nonzero. Then later there was a commit to take into account the fact that the timeout could be negative.

I have no idea what this function does but in any sane modern language that function would return a type that you could switch over if the expected behaviors are for timeout < 0, timeout == 0, and timeout > 0.

The commit that changed

else if('\\' == *ptr) {

to this

else if('\\' == *ptr && ptr[1]) {

is only because of C’s uniquely bad string type

There are literally hundreds of commits fixing memory leaks.

My bet is that if you were to re-write curl in a newer language, you might miss out on some functionality but you wouldn’t have nearly as many security holes.