Monthly Archives: August 2022

From Unix Command to Startup

Matt Rickard has a whimsical post that really appealed to me. The idea, according to his title, is that every Unix command becomes a startup. His first example is grep. Grep’s a utility to search for a particular string in … Continue reading

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D. J.Bernstein on the NSA Corrupting Crypto Standards

J. Bernsein is my type of guy. He’s opinionated, crabby, curmudgeonly, and brilliant. He’s particularly brilliant when it comes to matters of cryptography. One of the things about being curmudgeonly is that you have little tolerance for lies and nonsense … Continue reading

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Paul Graham on SciHub

Paul Graham remarks on SciHub and how broken our current system is that everyone’s advice for getting research results is to use a pirate site. I was talking to a high school student interested in a certain technology and I … Continue reading

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A Graduate Student Research Workflow

Koustuv Sinha is a PhD student in machine learning and natural language processing. Because much of his time is devoted to reading research papers in his field, he’s devoted significant effort into optimizing his workflow. The TL;DR is that he’s … Continue reading

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Remote Work At The Doctor’s Office

If you’ve been reading Irreal for more than the last 5 posts you know that I’m a big supporter of remote work. There are many many jobs that can be done remotely and there’s no reason for many employees to … Continue reading

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Org-mode Versus Jupyter Notebook

John D. Cook, a consulting mathematician, who runs the TeX and Typography Twitter feed as well as several similar—mostly mathematically focused—feeds has two posts that consider using Org-mode instead of Jupyter Notebook. It’s interesting because it comes from someone who … Continue reading

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Red Meat Friday: PHP Is The Right Choice

One thing you have to say for Daniel Abernathy is that he’s not afraid of the heavy lift. He’s got a post that presses the claim that PHP Is the Right Choice in 2022 and Beyond. It’s hard to find … Continue reading

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Mickey on Evaluating Elisp

Mickey from Mastering Emacs has an excellent post on the various ways of evaluating Elisp in Emacs. As Mickey says, there are several ways of doing it depending on the context and it pays to be familiar with them all. … Continue reading

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Thoughts On Thoughts On RSS

Matt Rickard has a—at least to me—provocative post on RSS. As I’ve said many times, I’m a big believer in and user of RSS. Google did its best to kill it off but it turned out to be too useful … Continue reading

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Dired-rsync

Yi Tang has an interesting post on the dired-rsync package. It’s been around for a while, apparently, but I hadn’t heard of it before Tang’s post. The TL;DR is it allows you to use rsync in dired in the same … Continue reading

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