Parallel httpx requests
Useful overview of how to perform parallel requests with httpx.
HN Search API
An alternative API for HackerNews; one that looks way easier to work with and way more efficient.
HackerNews/API: Documentation and Samples for the Official HN API
The official documentation for the v0 version of the HackerNews API.
Using the Hacker News API
Blog post going over the main details of the Hacker News API (possibly one of the worst APIs I've ever seen).
Terminal Emulators Battle Royale – Unicode Edition!
It turns out that Unicode support in Terminals is a lot more difficult than it first appears. A quick overview of special support for Unicode characters in Terminals:
- "Wide" or "Fullwidth" characters, particularly for East Asian languages and emojis, are codepoints that occupy two cells in a terminal instead of one.
- "Zero" width combining characters used in languages such as Arabic, Hebrew, or Hindi do not occupy any cells themselves; instead, they modify the previous character.
- "Zero Width Joiner" (ZWJ U+200D) reduces and combines many codepoints into a single emoji. This is similar to combining, but encoded in a completely different way.
- "Variation Selector-16" (VS-16 U+FE0F) is a special character that, for specific "Narrow" emojis consuming one cell, causes them to become "Wide", consuming two cells.
Context Free Art
Context Free is a program that generates images from written instructions called a grammar. The program follows the instructions in a few seconds to create images that can contain millions of shapes.
Genetic Algorithms for Evolution of QWOP Gaits
QWOP is a browser-based, 2-dimensional flash game in which the player controls an Olympic sprinter competing in a simulated 100-meter race. The goal of the game is to advance the runner to the end of the 100-meter race as quickly as possible using the Q, W, O, and P keys, which control the muscles in the sprinters legs. Despite the game simple controls and straightforward goal, it is renowned for its difficulty and unintuitive gameplay. In this paper, we attempt to automatically discover effective QWOP gaits. We describe a programmatic interface developed to play the game, and we introduce several variants of a genetic algorithm tailored to solve this problem. We present experimental results on the effectiveness of various representations, initialization strategies, evolution paradigms, and parameter control mechanisms.
A Journey Into Shaders
An introduction to shaders.
Migrating from LSP-Mode to Eglot · Andrey Listopadov
Useful article talking about migrating from LSP mode to eglot in Emacs.
My User Experience Porting Off setup.py
There seems to be a lot of confusion around setup.py and friends; and while I’ve seen pushback against this post (mostly sniffy gatekeeper stuff rather than helpful feedback), it’s a worthwhile read if only because the confusion is real.
Common Lisp: An interactive approach
Electronic book introducing Common Lisp.
The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Must Know About Unicode in 2023 (Still No Excuses!)
Useful article talking about unicode stuff.
Page is annoying to read though with daft gimmicks.
Common Lisp Nova Spec
A very clean presentation of the Common Lisp HyperSpec
Writing Small CLI Programs in Common Lisp / Steve Losh
Text Editor Data Structures
Post about text editor data structures.
Bresenham's Circle Drawing Algorithm
Description of a method of drawing a circle
Basic introduction to Pydantic
Nice little introduction to what Pydantic offers.
Textual 0.11.0 adds a beautiful Markdown widget
Reddit thread where the Textual Markdown widget was announced.
Also includes the rather hilarious comment "I wish there were more full blown app examples out there", back when Textual was pretty damn new and barely out of the initial "CSS branch" release.
Style guides for Google-originated open-source projects
Google's style guide for Python code. Obviously not the law, not even always a good suggestion, but worthy of consideration.
Swearing makes code better
Fuck yeah quality fucking code!
Why (Python) type hinting sucks
I don’t agree with the post - type hinting is awesome in my experience - but it’s a cleverly-crafted argument and there’s some interesting debate in the comments.
Trimmed down python setup for Emacs. This is a basic `init.el` file for Python, you can pick the bits you like.
Handy cut-down config for Emacs and Python, showing examples of comapny and eglot (or optionally lsp-mode) along the way.
Ask HN: Why are toggle switches replacing checkboxes? Isn't on/off less obvious? | Hacker News
A rare good discussion on Hacker News; folk pondering the issues of toggle switches vs checkboxes.
These Years in Common Lisp: 2022 in review - Lisp journey
A revew of Common Lisp's 2022.
XTerm Control Sequences
A pretty definitive document covering XTerm control sequences.
GitHub Contributions Chart Generator
Generate a full history of your GitHub contributions.
What Are Python Wheels and Why Should You Care? – Real Python
Pretty comprehensive article covering the concept of Python "wheels".
PyPi - API reference - Warehouse documentation
PyPi API reference.
A collective list of free APIs
Pretty epic list of all sorts of free public APIs. Handy when you're looking for inspiration for a project to mess with.
Virtual Environments with Eglot, Tramp, and Pyright · robbmann
Blog post talking about getting eglot and pyright working together nicely.