dmlorenzetti

The most useful one typesets the labels of equations, sections, figures, and so forth, so I can copy-paste right from the document as I'm editing. That makes it so much easier to insert cross-references while writing, without breaking the flow to search out the definition.

Rather than commenting out packages, I have two top-level input files, which `\input{}` the actual content. Those files differ only where they read the developer-oriented definitions:

    \input{latex_input/defn/dev_defns_for_devs.tex}

    \input{latex_input/defn/dev_defns_for_release.tex}

You know what you like -- which is enough, especially if you are reading for pleasure.

In my experience, discussing a work, or reading about its context or meaning, often deepens my enjoyment of it. So maybe one "trick" is to engage with others. But at some point you can't go throwing your precious spare time into something that doesn't fundamentally engage you.

I no longer let it bother me if I don't "get" something that many others enjoy. Conversely, I have a number of favorite books (and movies and music) that I rarely recommend to others, because I've learned that few people share my personal response to them.

This approach would also give students insight into testing strategies like mocking, plus it would work on more operating systems.

[Edit: Not to disparage this project. It seems like it would have lots of uses, and it was probably a lot of fun to develop.]

When I was a kid, maybe 5th or 6th grade, my family was driving out in the country and came upon a burning farmer's field.

We stopped to help, and my older brother and I were charged with keeping an eye on the smoking remains of a field that had already burned out. The adults, and my younger siblings, went to fight the actual fire.

By the time it was all over, my brother and I were both feeling slighted and sidelined. But as we got back to the car, my mother, may she rest in peace, told us how much responsibility we had been given, to be set such an important job, with no adult supervision, the farmer must have thought we were older than we really are.

Two points, I suppose. First, one doesn't always appreciate one's salient qualities. Second, 45+ years later, that episode still stands out in my memory for how rewarding it felt.

I had a colleague whose surname, Sextro, was part of his email address. He occasionally had messages blocked by blanket filters like that.

Having flashbacks to when a close friend was getting an MS in Political Science, and spent the first semester in a class devoted to whether or not political science is a science.

With the meter stuck on a pole at the parking space, if I pay for an hour but leave after 20 minutes, the meter still shows time. Somebody else can come and park there for 40 minutes, free.

But if I buy a paper receipt and stick on my dashboard, and leave after 20 minutes, the next person still has to rent the same 40 minutes of time.

Nobody I mention this to is upset about it (neither am I, at heart, though I do notice it). That suggests to me that conflicts over tray space on airplanes is driven more by a sense of claustrophobia and powerlessness, than by any particular notion of fairness or ownership.

[0] https://documentation.divio.com

But it's also possible to think of it as "Grab one element of the vector, use it to scale the corresponding col of the matrix, and repeat, summing results." Both are efficient means of finding the result, and both have block-level versions that play nicely with the machine cache.

Meanwhile, linear algebra also often involves finding vector norms, and scaling vectors, and so on, and the way we usually set up tables means that the vectors of interest are generally columns of the data tables.

I also curate content to watch with my daughter. It started long before she had access to a computer, because it made for a nice pocket of time to share fun moments in the evenings.

We call them "Watch With XXX" (where XXX is my daughter's nickname). When I find something I think she'll like, I email it to myself with the subject "wwXXX". An email filter shuffles them off to a separate mailbox. She regularly asks if I have any new WWXXX's, or if we can watch an old favorite again.

[0] http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_8368000/836...

[1] https://www.novartis.com/stories/from-our-labs/giraffes-have...

I was on a modeling project that used scripts to generate hundreds of input parameters, embed them in models, run the models, and produce reports. The inputs and outputs shifted a lot over the course of the project, as we came to understand the domain and implications of the work better. At every update, the changes had to be transferred to a Microsoft Word document that went to the project sponsors.

Pandoc made this easy -- we just added scripts to write out the model inputs as Markdown tables, then embed those tables in a larger writeup, also written in Markdown. Pandoc turned it all into a Word document. Thus, the same toolchain that did the actual work, also drove the final report. I really don't think we could have had confidence all the tabular data was right, had it not been automated through Pandoc.

"Modern C" takes a staged approach, going through

  + Level 0 Encounter
  + Level 1 Acquaintance
  + Level 2 Cognition
  + Level 3 Experience

First of all, organizing by levels of detail, rather than treating individual topics in depth all at once, means that a fair amount of related information gets spread around the book.

This might be OK if the book had a comprehensive index, or consistently used forward-references to point the reader to a detailed discussion, but the book is generally weak in these sorts of cross-references.

For example, suppose you want to look up formatting strings for use with `printf()`. The index (I am looking at the Manning version) lists exactly one entry for `printf()`, which is on page 8 -- and the actual text there just mentions basically that `printf()` is a function that exists.

You could also look up "format", which gives one reference, to page 5, where the term is introduced but hardly even defined. The index does have more entries for `snprintf()` and `sprintf()`, if you happen to think to look for those. But after you play this game for a while, it becomes clear that the index takes a quite mechanical view of these functions, content to list locations where the function gets called out in the text, but without any great concern for where they are discussed as a cohesive collection of related functionality.

To me, this levels-of-experience approach makes sense for some things, like deferring discussion of threads, and setjmp-longjmp, till later chapters. That's why I say that the book errs by sticking to the game plan too rigidly.

The second major shortcoming of this rigid levels-of-experience approach is that the book delays discussing pointers for a long time. They aren't really taken up until chapter 11. Literally the book doesn't show a basic "swap" function until page 170. This means that a lot of code examples that come before chapter 11 do quite a dance to avoid using pointers.

When, finally, pointers are discussed, I felt that the text was somewhat lackluster. There is nothing wrong with it, but if this chapter was a blog post by some random C programmer, and got posted to HN, I doubt it would garner a lot of upvotes by enthusiasts saying it was the best description of pointers they had ever read.

Thus it had an anti-climactic effect for me -- I expected that deferring the discussion of pointers for so long would have some kind of pedagogical payoff, but there wasn't anything to it that, to me, justified putting it off for so long.

I had a few other problems with the book, but nothing that, by themselves, would keep me from recommending it.

I might recommend the book to somebody who already knows C, and wanted a deep dive on certain topics. However I would steer a beginner away from it.

Somebody else on this thread mentioned another new entry to this field, "Effective C" from No Starch Press. I am in the middle of this one, and so far like it a bit more (though I am not yet a full-throated enthusiast for it). I would note that "Effective C" introduces a swap function on page 16. That would be wildly premature to the author of "Modern C", but in the end I think it will serve the beginning reader somewhat better.

In-code selection statements like `if( True ) {...}`, where you have no idea what is being selected or why.

Code that only runs in the particular workspace image that contains some function that was hacked out to make things work during a debugging session 5 years ago.

Distributed projects where one person wrote the preprocessor, another wrote the simulation software, and a third wrote the analysis scripts, and they all share undocumented assumptions worked out between the three researchers over the course of two years.

Depending on implementation-defined behavior (like zeroing out of data structures).

Function and variable names, like `doit()` and `hold`, which make it hard to understand the intention.

Files that contain thousands of lines of imperative instructions with documentation like "Per researcher X" every 100 lines or so.

Code that runs fine for 6 hours, then stops because some command-line input had the wrong value.

I've seen all of these over the years. Even as a domain expert who has spoken directly with authors and project leads, this kind of stuff makes it very hard to tease out what the code actually does, and how the code corresponds to the papers written about the results.

Here, he had a thought, and he expressed it in two paragraphs. I'm sure he could have riffed on the core idea for another 10 paragraphs, developed a few tangential lines of thought, inserted pull quotes -- in short, turned it into a full-blown essay.

Given that his blog serves, at least in part, as an advertisement for his services, he even has some incentive to demonstrate how comprehensive and "smart" he can be.

His unpadded style means I'm never afraid to check out a link to one of his posts on HN. Whereas I will often forego clicking on links to Medium, or the Atlantic, or wherever, until I have looked at a few comments to see whether it will be worth my time.

As a user, I shudder anytime I have to interact with the App Store. Even when it works flawlessly, there is nothing interesting or pleasing about it. And most of my interactions with it leave me with a mild feeling of having being bullied about.

I had much rather install software via Homebrew than the App Store.

I heard through the grapevine, many years after the fact, that during salary discussions at an outfit that was planning to make me an offer, there was a small debate about how many years of experience to credit me. By the calendar, I had $y$ years of work since graduation, but in terms of job experience it was $y - 2$ years, due to time I spent in Peace Corps. The difference affected the salary range their internal guidelines indicated I could be offered.

Finally one of the PIs cajoled the "y-2" crowd, saying, effectively, Come on, he spent two years teaching math in a village with no electricity and no running water...

One Christmas when my whole family got together, I made a "stink detector" which consisted of a USB cable stuck inside a ziplock bag. My nephews were invited to put anybody's sock in the bag, then enter some parameters (like sock color, how long since it was washed, and, crucially, the name of the sock's owner) in a GUI.

Under the hood of the GUI was a grep engine that checked for a whitelist of names and titles ("uncle" among them to be sure), and assigned those names the lowest possible stink number. Whereas my nephews of course were guaranteed to get a high value. That result was fed through a random number generator, to produce a fuzzed-up normal distribution for display on the screen.

They spent a long time varying the parameters, trying to figure out how they affected the "analysis" before figuring out it was all driven by the name.

For those interested in practical aspects of reading out loud to children, check out Jim Trelease's "Read-Aloud Handbook". It has advice, advocacy, and specific age-appropriate book suggestions.

http://trelease-on-reading.com/rah-contents.html

+ Failing to select an amount to send should raise a flag.

+ Entering a negative amount to send should raise a flag.

+ After viewing a result, if I hit `back` on my browser (say, to compare results for a different transfer amount), it resets the currencies to their defaults (for me, U.S. and Argentina). It would be nicer to remember my selections.

He says it's "an important subject that deserves a lot more attention".

If the time scale of climate change matched the time scale of coral evolution, then your comforting thought might hold water. Unfortunately, our climate is changing faster than many evolutionary processes can keep up with.

Rates of change can matter. Just because you can safely walk down 30 flights of steps, doesn't mean you can safely jump off the roof of a 30-story building.

Deborah Tannen, Gender and Discourse. Oxford University Press, 1994

https://www.thoughtco.com/cooperative-overlap-conversation-1...

One thing that helped me was to understand the motivations of those involved. It's easy to think somebody is rude, or showing off, but fortunately I started from a place of deep respect for the capabilities of everyone in my group, and eventually a great affection for them. I saw that we had a few individuals who, if they weren't interrupting, it meant they weren't interested. After I realized this, I started to prize the guy practically jumping out of his chair to take over what I was saying, because it meant he was engaged and excited by it.

Nevertheless, I did often think about the effect on people who might be less self-confident than me, or quieter (we had a lot of students passing through in those days). In the end, if I needed to be heard, I could raise my own voice just as effectively as anybody else in the group -- but not everybody can do that.

It came to a head one group meeting, when a foreign researcher came to present some results. His presentation effectively ended after a few slides, because it got derailed by the back-and-forth of the "audience". I was really steaming and embarrassed.

He agreed to come back the following week, so I sent round an e-mail saying we had all better be on good behavior. I told the group I would bring three notebooks -- one green, one yellow, and one red. The meeting would start with the green one on top of the stack, and if I got annoyed, I would move the yellow one to the top. If the red one came to the top, I would -- well, I don't remember what I threatened, but it couldn't have been very scary, since I had no power.

In the event, the green notebook stayed on top. Not only was the group on strictly respectful behavior for the presenter, but I think it got better generally for a long time afterwards. I think seeing how that behavior affected an outsider gave everybody a little pause, and made us see ourselves better. But again, I think the details of this anecdote show what a great group of people these were. As a junior team member, I felt able to express and act on my disappointment, and everybody listened and tried to accommodate me.

This shift in building style also brought about a shift in usage.

At the most visible level, round, amorphous shapes gave way to rectilinear layouts.

The organization of family compounds also changed. Traditionally, one would see 2-4 rondavels (round, single-room structures), all linked by a low wall (lolwapa) into an inward-oriented cluster. That got replaced by a single, larger house, presumably with multiple rooms inside.

In terms of usage, you could see the difference best in the middle of the day. This is a desert country, and the modern materials and constructions are a thermal disaster. Thick walls with a lot of thermal mass got replaced by low-mass walls. Uninsulated tin roofs collect solar gains (and radiate heat, becoming uncomfortably cold at night). Thatch roofs also tend to have wide overhangs, providing shade at the side of houses.

As a result, people living in new houses tended to be outside, squeezed under the shade of whatever scraggly trees there were. Those with traditional houses tended to be inside, or sitting in the shade on the kind of built-up seat that runs around many rondavels.

I never priced things out, but the only way to understand this shift had to be as a function of cost. Thatch had to be imported, and I think doesn't last beyond a decade at most. And the traditional walls required a lot more seasonal maintenance.

To see the difference, typeset this with LaTeX:

    \documentclass{standalone}
    \begin{document}
    -50 vs $-50$
    \end{document}