Programming Leftovers
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James G ☛ More adventures with compression
I have been working on the Hutter Prize compression challenge, in which participants are tasked to compress 1GB of Wikipedia into as small a file as possible. The file is marked up as XML data. The current record for compressing the 1GB file is ~113 MB.
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Nicholas Tietz-Sokolsky ☛ I found some of my first code! Annotating and reflecting on robotics code from 2009.
In high school, one of my teachers shattered my plans for my life, in the most beautiful way. Most of my life, I'd intended to become a math professional of some sort: a math teacher, when that was all I saw math for; an actuary, when I started to learn more; and then a mathematician. I knew that to get a math degree, I'd probably have to take computer science, so I signed up for a programming class in high school. If I wanted to be a mathematician, that was a mistake, because it got me hooked.
The first programming classes were good, but didn't change the course of my life: I still saw them as a useful tool. But our programming teacher started a FIRST Robotics Competition team with us. And that ended up sending my life on a different course1. The magic of writing code that controlled a moving actual thing? Yeah, that pushed me toward where I am today.
Recently, I found the code from our second season in 2009. Let's take a look at what the game was and what made our robot special. Then we'll go through the code, and I'll reflect on things at the end.
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Eric MacAdie ☛ Emacs Commands I Got By With For Years
As far as I know, the next meeting of EmacsATX, the Austin Emacs Meetup group, has a planned topic: Org mode. I was going to make a post about the common Org functions I use frequently, but I thought that I should start with common commands I used for generic Emacs when I started using it more than twenty years ago. This might also be useful for people starting out learning Emacs.
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Juha-Matti Santala ☛ Advent of Code 2023 retrospective
Last month was spent once again helping elves figure out this Christmas thing. I’m of course talking about Advent of Code, developers’ puzzle advent calendar by the wonderful Eric Wastl. As I’ve done the past few years, I solved the puzzles with Python using Jupyter Notebook and wrote explanations of my solutions with Python education sparkled in.
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[Repeat]Trail Of Bits ☛ Tag, you’re it: Signal tagging in Circom
We at Trail of Bits perform security reviews for a seemingly endless stream of applications that use zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs. While fast new arithmetization and folding libraries like Halo2, Plonky2, and Boojum are rapidly gaining adoption, Circom remains a mainstay of ZK circuit design. We’ve written about Circom safety before in the context of Circomspect, our linter and static analyzer; in this post, we will look at another way to guard against bugs in your Circom circuits using a lesser-known language feature called signal tags. We present four simple rules for incorporating signal tags into your development process, which will help protect you from common bugs and facilitate auditing of your codebase.
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R
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Rlang ☛ Using great circle distance to determine Twin Cities
In the US we think of Minneapolis and St. Paul as the Twin Cities, but Ben Olin, author of Math with Bad Drawings, https://mathwithbaddrawings.com/, posed this data science question: Which U.S. cities are the true twin cities?
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Rlang ☛ Mastering Lowess Smoothing in R: A Step-by-Step Guide
Hey fellow R enthusiasts! Today, let’s dive into the fascinating world of Lowess smoothing and learn how to harness its power for creating smooth visualizations of your data.
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Rlang ☛ Quantile Regression with Random Forests
In my December 22 blog, I first introduced the classic parametric quantile regression (QR) concept. I then showed how one could use the qeML package to perform quantile regression nonparametrically, using the package’s qeKNN function for a k-Nearest Neighbors approach. A reader then asked if this could be applied to random forests (RFs). The answer is yes, and this will be the topic of the current post.
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Rlang ☛ Most popular posts – 2023
This blog is just a personal hobby. When I’m extra busy as I was this year the blog is a front-line casualty. This is why 2023 saw a weaker posting stream. Nonetheless I am pleased with just over 30K visits this year, with an average of roughly one minute per visit (engagement time, whatever google-analytics means by that). This year I only provide the top two posts (rather than the usual 3). Both posts have to do with statistical shrinkage: [...]
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Python
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Archipylago ☛ Start your year with a new podcast
With 2024 now officially under way, it's a good time to pick up a new podcast or two. Whether you're interested in the internals, community projects, use cases or people in the community, from these podcasts you'll find one that fits your interests.
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Haki Benita ☛ Fastest Way to Read Excel in Python
In this article I compare several ways to read Excel from Python.
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Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh
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Stephen Kell ☛ How to “make” a shell script
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Jacob Adams Tookmund ☛ Fixing My Shell
Clearly I’ve done something horrible to my configuration, and now I’ve got to clean it up.
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