Monthly Archives: March 2019

An Application of Bayes’ Theorem to Differential Privacy

Posted on 2019-03-21 by jcs

In a nice followup to yesterday’s post about differential privacy, John Cook, the proprietor of the Data Privacy Twitter feed, has a nice post that uses Bayes’ Theorem to implement a simple differential privacy scheme. The problem is to gather … Continue reading →

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Differential Privacy

Posted on 2019-03-20 by jcs

One of the tough problems in ethical data gathering is how to collect statistics while respecting the privacy of those the data is being gathered from. It’s widely known that most forms of data anonymization are not robust and that … Continue reading →

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Numbering Org Table Rows

Posted on 2019-03-19 by jcs

Álvaro Ramírez tweeted a handy tip that I used to know about but had forgotten: #emacs multiple cursors + org tables = magic `mc/insert-numbers’ is bound to # when multiple cursors are active: https://t.co/Okx9sZ2TQW pic.twitter.com/WhMmKwjLMV — Alvaro Ramirez (@xenodium) March … Continue reading →

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Running Your Life With Emacs

Posted on 2019-03-18 by jcs

I’ve written a lot about how I hate leaving Emacs and find that its consistent UX and key bindings make a huge difference in the efficiency of my workflow. Not everyone agrees. Many people think I’m being overly sensitive when … Continue reading →

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Goto

Posted on 2019-03-17 by jcs

Everyone in our field knows about Dijkstra’s famous paper Go To Statement Considered Harmful but how many have actually read the paper or know what his arguments were? Mostly we use it as a template to generate memes of the … Continue reading →

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Dealing with GitHub Pull Requests in Emacs

Posted on 2019-03-16 by jcs

Laurent Charignon has an very nice package for dealing with GitHub pull requests from within Emacs. His package, github-review, allows you to retrieve the pull request from GitHub and deal with it entirely within Emacs. You can even work off-line … Continue reading →

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How and Why To Normalize Unicode

Posted on 2019-03-15 by jcs

From the excellent TeX Tip twitter feed, I found a pointer to an excellent article by Alessandro Segala concerning something I didn’t know much about and that many Irreal readers might not know about either: how and why to normalize … Continue reading →

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EmacsCast #8: Writing

Posted on 2019-03-14 by jcs

Rakhim Davletkaliyev is back with another episode of his Emacs podcast, EmacsCast. This time he presents part one of a two-part series on writing in Emacs and Org mode. My first thought as I started to listen to the podcast … Continue reading →

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An Afterword on Being Almost There

Posted on 2019-03-13 by jcs

In a comment to my recent post on achieving a digital life, Zarniwoop asks about the risks of putting all my eggs in one basket if everything I need for everyday carry is on my iPhone. That’s a question I … Continue reading →

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A History of the Development of C

Posted on 2019-03-12 by jcs

Someone posted a pointer to an old (1994) paper of Dennis Ritchie on the development of the C language. I haven’t read it in years and it was interesting to revisit it. The paper, along with several others describing aspects … Continue reading →

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