elf_m_sternberg

I recently wrote an article called "So You Want To Get Into Theoretical Computer Science," which is mostly about how to read a bunch of papers to figure out some obscure, heretofore unimplemented (outside of academia) algorithm.

The biggest challenge was reading the mathematical notation, to whit: the four biggest papers in the field I was studying used four different notations, and that you'll end up writing your own translation guide:

https://elfsternberg.com/2018/10/27/so-you-want-to-get-into-...

I found "Writing an Interpreter in Go" to be a much better read. It was actually completely portable to C++ and Rust, and that made it useful to pretty much anyone.

Olympus WS-600 dictation device. It's a slim thing about the size of a cigarette lighter, but it has actual physical buttons, and a built-in USB connector to dump it to my laptop. I review it every morning, and depending on the nature of the note, it goes into (a) Google Calendar, (b) a hand-written notebook, (c) an Emacs Org Wiki which I sync between my devices with Syncthing, or (d) the Notes folder for any of my specific projects.

It's the same thing Newt is speaking into in the movie Pacific Rim. I was tickled when I saw that. They're hard to get nowadays; the later 700 and 800 models are bigger, clunkier, and cheaper-feeling.

There are a few projects on my github (elfsternberg) that I've used Hy for.

One thing that I've also done is write the first draft in Hy, and then used Hy2Py to generate the version that I'm going to publish. This does result in a lot of compiling-by-hand, but the end product is often surprisingly robust.

On the other hand, it's also very (!) un-pythonic. Hy discourages classes in favor of closures, like Scheme, so I end up with a lot of nested sub-functions. My project git-linter looks like that. Hy encourages highly functional thinking, and git-linter is just that: the inputs are things like the configuration file, available linters, the command line, and (depending on the command) either the output of a "git-status --porcelain" or just "find . -type f"; the output is a report on the various outputs of the linters. It's a very straightforward map/reduce/filter, so no object-orientated code at all was required.

To an engrained Pythonista who must make a class for every last step, this land-of-verbs approach tends to look strange.

It's sorta clever how Elon Musk convinced Ayn Rand-besotted train-crazy tech bros to invest in his testbed for a Clarke Mass Driver.

I had two beers Wednesday. A glass of wine Monday night. The week prior was a bit like the same. Some weeks it's "none", some weeks it's "more than seven times in seven days." I don't think that constitutes a problem. I've missed more dates because I was writing code and forgot the clock (twice in my lifetime) than I have due to intoxication (zero so far).

Ditto. Used them all of my professional life. I've also had a Dell, a Toshiba, an HP, and two Macbooks. The Thinkpads were the only things that worked well.

I've been using an IdeaPad (The Thinkpad's consumer-oriented co-brand), namely a Yoga. Although I miss the red mouse pointer thing, it's otherwise an ideal development platform, with enough disk space for Docker and VirtualBox. Oh, and it runs Mint perfectly so my Docker images are compatible with almost any Debian-based deployment environment.

Interesting, but woefully incomplete since it doesn't include a single turnstile-based statement. I'm still looking for the cheat sheet that includes an explanation for how to read and comprehend anything written by Simon Peyton-Jones.

Yes. Liferea. I've been using it pretty much since the Death of Usenet.

I don't see any suggestions for a replacement technology.

Great work! There are a couple of other projects like this. Are you familiar with Wisp or Outlet? This is good work; I've been trying to hack my own Lisp -> JS transpiler, and not having much work.

Your 'Nodes' file shows a strong familiarity with what's going on inside Coffeescript, too. :)

Ditto everyone else's comments. This is a really good book. Readers should be aware that Irvine's goal of "persistent tranquility" isn't really what the Stoics had in mind; their objective was much more radical, in the same way that TED-talk "mindfulness" is a parboiled version of a much more radical Buddhism.

But still, a good intro.

There are other good Stoicism books, and anyone who's been through cognitive behavioral therapy will find Irvine's book a bit of a refresher course. Anyone have any comments about "Philosophy for Life" or "Stocism and the Art of Happiness"?