Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Dec 03, 2023

• Scorpil ☛ You (probably) don't need DateTime

  While most programming languages and databases support timezone-aware DateTime data types out of the box, it is quite common to see date/time information stored in a Unix epoch timestamp format. Even experienced software engineers sometimes struggle to choose the best format for the use case. This article aims to help make that decision easier and to clarify common misconceptions about managing time in geographically distributed systems.

  When talking about calendars, dates, and times it’s easy to get disoriented without clear terminology. After all, most people usually don’t think about things like time zones in their daily life. Even if you travel often, or work in a distributed team, your intuition is still likely local-first.

• Arjen Wiersma ☛ Advent of Code 2023 Day 1

  Day 1 was a tricky start for most people. Part 1 was not too bad, but part 2 tripped most people up. I guess the idea was that you would have to solve the challenge with an array iteration, but most students tripped up. They tried to match each word and replace the occurrence in the text, running head-on into the edge-case where 2 numbers overlap, such as “eightwo”.

• Arjen Wiersma ☛ Advent of Code 2023 Day 2

  I am sure I will not be able to complete all challenges this year, but so far so good.

• Mozilla

  • Hackaday ☛ Mozilla Lets Folks Turn AI LLMs Into Single-File Executables

    LLMs (Large Language Models) for local use are usually distributed as a set of weights in a multi-gigabyte file. These cannot be directly used on their own, which generally makes them harder to distribute and run compared to other software. A given model can also have undergone changes and tweaks, leading to different results if different versions are used.

• R

  • Dirk Eddelbuettel ☛ tidyCpp 0.0.7 on CRAN: Maintenance

    A maintenance release of the tidyCpp package arrived on CRAN this morning. The packages offers a clean C++ layer (as well as one small C++ helper class) on top of the C API for R which aims to make use of this robust (if awkward) C API a little easier and more consistent. See the vignette for motivating examples.

  • Rlang ☛ Data Engineering in R: How to Build Your First Data Pipeline with R, Mage, and Surveillance Giant Google Cloud Platform (in under 45 Minutes)

    Hey guys, welcome back to my R-tips newsletter. In today’s R-Tip, Arben Kqiku is sharing his exact 8-step framework for taking R into production for Digital Analytics projects.

  • Rlang ☛ Finding the most unique land cover spatial pattern

    Spatial signatures represent spatial patterns of land cover in a given area. Thus, they can be used to search for areas with similar spatial patterns to a query region or to quantify changes in spatial patterns.

  • Rlang ☛ gssr Update

    The General Social Survey, or GSS, is one of the cornerstones of US public opinion research and one of the most-analyzed datasets in Sociology. My colleague Steve Vaisey aptly describes it as the Hubble Space Telescope of American social science.

  • Dirk Eddelbuettel ☛ Dirk Eddelbuettel: dang 0.0.16: New Features, Some Maintenance

    A new release of my mixed collection of things package dang package arrived at CRAN a little while ago. The dang package regroups a few functions of mine that had no other home as for example lsos() from a StackOverflow question from 2009 (!!), the overbought/oversold price band plotter from an older blog post, the market monitor blogged about as well as the checkCRANStatus() function tweeted about by Tim Taylor. And more so take a look.

• AWK

  • Ubuntu Pit ☛ 40 Practical and Useful awk Command in GNU/Linux and BSD

    AWK is a powerful data-driven programming language that dates its origin back to the early days of Unix. It was initially developed for writing ‘one-liner’ programs but has since evolved into a full-fledged programming language. AWK gets its name from the initials of its authors – Aho, Weinberger, and Kernighan.