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Programming Leftovers
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Rlang ☛ What We Learned from Our First Data Science for Open WASH Data Course
When we launched the first Data Science for Open WASH Data (ds4owd) course in October 2023, 235 WASH professionals from 46 countries around the world signed up—validating our belief that this community is eager to acquire data science skills.
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Positech Games ☛ Coding a load-balanced multithreaded particle system
Background: I am coding a 2D space-based autobattler with ridiculous levels of effects called ‘Ridiculous Space Battles‘. I code my own engine, for fun, in directx9 using C++ and Visual Studio. Because I love coding, yesterday I found myself wondering how well the multithreading in my game was holding up.
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Josh Sucher ☛ Lettervoxd
So I went home and spent a few hours making this, a list of words found in the dialogue of Network, ranked by their estimated frequency in the English language. I used a Python library called wordfreq (which, sadly, was deprecated last fall, a decision its creator partially attributed to the prevalence of AI slop making it impossible to analyze human word usage after 2022).
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Jamie Brandon ☛ Store tags after payloads
The short version of this shower thought: storing the tags for sum types after the payload rather than before can save a surprising amount of space.
The long version needs some context.
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Cassidy Williams ☛ Tools using tools
As we build, we need to think about how we’ll shape our own developer experience, and the developer experience of other humans. Chances are, a human using your tool/API/utility/library/etc. will have some kind of AI assistant. The humans will lead and they will delegate, and optimizing their experience for both is going to matter.
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David Gerrells ☛ How fast is swift? Heavy Metal Edition (feat Nardi)
And then, to see just how slow javascript really is, I simulated even MOAR particles in rust. Way more. But not on mobile because rust doesn't like mobile. Really Apple and Google don't like mobile but that is beside the point.
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Kevin Boone ☛ Kevin Boone: Why using crude PWM for sampled audio output on the Raspberry Pi Pico doesn’t sound that great
Pulse-width modulation (PWM) is a well-established method of digital-to-analog conversion. It’s inexpensive, easy to understand, and easy to implement. The desktop Raspberry Pi uses it for its default audio output, and many developers (including myself) use it on the Pico as well, which doesn’t have any built-in audio support.
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MJ Fransen ☛ Elisping like it is 1998
In search of an alternative method to generate and publish posts, I opted to make this a fun learning experience by going back to the oldest GNU Emacs version running in my home network, GNU Emacs 20.3.1, from 1998.
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Daniel Stenberg ☛ How I do it
As a successful Open Source project I acknowledge and am aware that we (I mean curl) might get more attention than some others, and that we are used as or considered a “model” sometimes, making it even more important to do things right. From my language use in public to source code decisions. I try to live up to these expectations.
A part of my job is to make companies become paying customers so that I can afford working on curl – and once they have become customers I need to every now and then attend to support tickets from them. I can work full-time on curl thanks to my commercial customers.
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Perl / Raku
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Arne Sommer ☛ Counter Nice with Raku - Arne Sommer
You are given a string containing only lower case English letters and digits.
Write a script to replace every non-digit character with a space and then return all the distinct integers left.
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Perl ☛ perldelta - what is new for perl v5.42.0
This document describes differences between the 5.42.0 release and the 5.40.0 release.
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Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh
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The New Stack ☛ The Grep Command in Linux
Although you might not think this, one of the reasons why Linux is so user-friendly (outside of the amazing desktop environments it has to offer) is the vast array of command-line tools it includes.
Did I really just say that?
I did.
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[Old] IDG Communications Inc ☛ The A-Z of Programming Languages: Bourne shell
On this occasion we speak to Steve Bourne, creator of the Bourne shell, or sh. In the early 1970s Bourne was at the Computer Laboratory in Cambridge, England working on a compiler for ALGOL68 as part of his PhD work in dynamical astronomy. This work paved the way for him to travel to IBM‘s T.J. Watson Research Center in New York in 1973, in part to undertake research into compilers. Through this work, and a series of connections and circumstance, Bourne got to know people at Bell Labs who then offered him a job in the Unix group in 1975. It was during this time Bourne developed sh.
What prompted the creation of the Bourne shell?
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Go
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Mediocregopher ☛ Why I Don't Like Go Channels
I'm a big fan of the go programming langauge, this is well known. But when asked what about the language I don't like, my answer surprises people: channels.
Despite being a cornerstone of the language's design and a builtin feature from day one, I try to avoid channels. To understand why, let's first take a look at the different states a channel can be in: [...]
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