Programming Leftovers
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Nicholas Tietz-Sokolsky ☛ Some things that make Rust lifetimes hard to learn
After I wrote YARR (Yet Another Rust Resource, with requisite pirate mentions), one of my friends tried it out. He gave me some really useful insights as he went through it, letting me see what was hard about learning Rust from a newcomer's perspective. Unsurprisingly, lifetimes are a challenge—and seeing him go through it helped me understand why they're hard to learn.
Here are a few of the challenges he ran into. I don't think that these are necessarily problems, but they're perhaps opportunities to improve educational materials.
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University of Toronto ☛ Updating local commits with more changes in Git (the harder way)
One of the things I do with Git is maintain personal changes locally on top of the upstream version, with my changes updated via rebasing every time I pull upstream to update it. In the simple case, I have only a single local change and commit, but in more complex cases I split my changes into multiple local commits; my local version of Firefox currently carries 12 separate personal commits. Every so often, upstream changes something that causes one of those personal changes to need an update, without actually breaking the rebase of that change. When this happens I need to update my local commit with more changes, and often it's not the 'top' local commit (which can be updated simply).
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Rlang ☛ Best Before Dates by Bass
This is a graph of the percentage of Stack Overflow questions tagged with data science terms such as R, Pandas, and so on. It seems to show exploding interest in R and Pandas, and maybe even Tensorflow. Pandas was likely chosen as a proxy for interest in Python for data science (versus a general interest in Python). I’d prefer view counts over question percentages as a proxy of interest, but it is what it is.
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Rlang ☛ A Bayesian proportional hazards model with a penalized spline
In my previous post, I outlined a Bayesian approach to proportional hazards modeling. This post serves as an addendum, providing code to incorporate a spline to model a time-varying hazard ratio non linearly. In a second addendum to come I will present a separate model with a site-specific random effect, essential for a cluster-randomized trial. These components lay the groundwork for analyzing a stepped-wedge cluster-randomized trial, where both splines and site-specific random effects will be integrated into a single model. I plan on describing this comprehensive model in a final post.
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Initial Commit ☛ I struggled with Git, so I'm making a game to spare others the pain
I wondered whether there was a variation or enhanced version of Git-Sim that could be more broadly applicable to coders of all skill levels - even total newbies - AND be even more immersive and intuitive than Git-Sim.
Then a thought popped into my head: [...]
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Rust
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Rust Blog ☛ The Rust Programming Language Blog: February Project Goals Update
This is the first Project Goals update for the new 2025h1 period. For the first 6 months of 2025, the Rust project will work towards a slate of 39 project goals, with 3 of them designed as Flagship Goals. This post provides selected updates on our progress towards these goals (or, in some cases, lack thereof). The full details for any particular goal are available in its associated tracking issue on the rust-project-goals repository.
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Rust Blog ☛ The Rust Programming Language Blog: Announcing Rustup 1.28.0
The rustup team is happy to announce the release of rustup version 1.28.0.
What's new in rustup 1.28.0
This new release of rustup has been a long time in the making and comes with substantial changes.
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