Programming Leftovers
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Rlang ☛ How to Subset a Data Frame in R: 4 Practical Methods with Examples
Data manipulation is a crucial skill in R programming, and subsetting data frames is one of the most common operations you’ll perform. This comprehensive guide will walk you through four powerful methods to subset data frames in R, complete with practical examples and best practices.
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Python Speed ☛ Using portable SIMD in stable Rust
In a previous post we saw that you can speed up code significantly on a single core using SIMD: Single Instruction Multiple Data. These specialized CPU instructions allow you to, for example, add 4 values at once with a single instruction, instead of the usual one value at a time. The performance improvement you get compounds with multi-core parallelism: you can benefit from both SIMD and threading at the same time.
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Sandor Dargo ☛ Implicit string conversions to booleans
From C++ Brain Teasers by Anders Schau Knatten, I learned about a compiler warning offered by Clang, called -Wstring-conversion. It emits a warning when a string literal is implicitly converted into a boolean.
You might even be surprised that it is even possible. And why would anyone do that?
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Lucidity ☛ Why I Will Always Be Angry About Software Engineering
Why do I bother getting angry about software?
When I started writing, it came from a place of ennui — absolute despair at the amount of waste I was seeing in the technology sector since leaving university. I was paid spectacularly well, but nothing I produced had any value. No one I knew in the corporate world was producing any value, save for those who were completely deluding themselves. Even the most talented people spent all of their time trying (and failing) to stop uncaring amateurs and empty suits from blowing millions on nonsense.
Two years later, after much writing and agonizing, I've quit my job to start my own consultancy. Whether it works or not surprisingly doesn't bother me at all — I know the risks I am taking. Money comes, money goes, at least I'm not storming the beaches of Normandy.
No, the question that actually keeps me up is this: [...]
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openQA and PowerPC
Due to recent changes in the worker configuration of the SUSE internal openQA instance, we needed to reconfigure some of the PowerPC jobs in openQA. This triggered a couple of questions regarding the availability of openQA worker, worker backends, their differences and their caveats. This blog post should act as a quickstart/overview guide for people getting into OpenQA testing on the PowerPC architecture.
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Neowin ☛ Intel sees GNU/Linux performance jump nearly 4000% or 40 times from one line of code
Intel spots a single line of code that sees GNU/Linux gain a massive nearly 40 times or 4000% performance gain.
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Perl / Raku
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Buttondown LLC ☛ Five Unusual Raku Features
Logic for Programmers is now in Beta!
v0.5 marks the official end of alpha! With the new version, all of the content I wanted to put in the book is now present, and all that's left is copyediting, proofreading, and formatting. Which will probably take as long as it took to actually write the book. You can see the release notes on the leanpub page.
And I've got a snazzy new cover:
(I don't actually like the cover that much but it looks official enough until I can pay an actual cover designer.)
"Five" Unusual Raku Features
Last year I started learning Raku, and the sheer bizarreness of the language left me describing it as a language for gremlins. Now that I've used it in anger for over a year, I have a better way of describing it:
Raku is a laboratory for language features.
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Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh
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Caleb Hearth ☛ Search and Sync Your Shell History With Atuin
Atuin is a tool that runs in the background to capture commands you’ve entered. It stores these locally in a SQLite database and provides a great CLI tool to search through that history, provide stats of what commands you frequently run, and optionally syncs this history across devices.
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Standards/Consortia
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Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ Why SMS will survive internet messaging onslaught
Application-to-person (A2P) SMS “will remain a valid and valuable channel for the termination of mission-critical, time-sensitive, high-value messages – over and above anything that data can provide – until such time that data services are as ubiquitous and as quickly read as SMSs are today”, Offer said.
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Daniel Stenberg ☛ The 2024 HTTP Workshop
This time we are in London.
Let me tell you a little about the topics of day one – without spilling the beans about exactly who said what or what the company they came from. (I will add links to the presentations later once I know where to link to.)
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