Programming Leftovers

• A Major Contribution to Learning R

  Prominent statistician Frank Harrell has come out with a radically new R tutorial, rflow. The name is short for “R workflow,” but I call it “R in a box” –everything one needs for beginning serious usage of R, starting from little or no background. By serious usage I mean real applications in which the user has a substantial computational need. This could be a grad student researcher, a person who needs to write data reports for her job, or simply a person who is doing personal analysis such as stock picking. Like other tutorials/books, rflow covers data manipulation, generation of tables and graphics, etc. But UNLIKE many others, rflow empowers the user to handle general issues as they inevitably pop up, as opposed to just teaching a few basic, largely ungeneralizable operations. I’ve criticized the tidyverse in particular for that latter problem, but really no tutorial, including my own, has this key “R in a box” quality.

• The deep learning obesity crisis - Vincent Lequertier's blog

  Deep learning have made dramatic improvements over the last decades. Part of this is attributed to improved methods that allowed training wider and deeper neural networks. This can also be attributed to better hardware, as well as the development of techniques to use this hardware efficiently. All of this leads to neural networks that grow exponentially in size. But is continuing down this path the best avenue for success? Deep learning models have gotten bigger and bigger. The figure below shows the accuracy of convolutional neural networks (left) and the size and number of parameters used for the Imagenet competition (right). While the accuracy is increasing and reaching impressive levels, the models get both bigger and use more and more resources. In Schwartz et al., 2020, as a result of rewarding more accuracy than efficiency, it is stated that the amount of compute have increased 300k-fold in 6 years which implies environmental costs as well as increasing the barrier to entry in the field.

• Mint: A New Programming Language for Building Single Page Apps (SPAs)

  Mint is a refreshing programming language for the front-end web development. It is developed and maintained by a large community of experienced developers.

• Understanding Have I Been Pwned's Use of SHA-1 and k-Anonymity

  Four and a half years ago now, I rolled out version 2 of HIBP's Pwned Passwords that implemented a really cool k-anonymity model courtesy of the brains at Cloudflare. Later in 2018, I did the same thing with the email address search feature used by Mozilla, 1Password and a handful of other paying subscribers. It works beautifully; it's ridiculously fast, efficient and above all, anonymous.

today's howtos

• How to Select All in Vim / Vi

  Knowing how to select all content in Vim or the Vi editor enables you to complete routines like copying and pasting in Linux quickly. The process can be tricky if you don’t understand how to use the editors properly or bind keys. For instance, you can select all in Vim/Vi by combining the gg, V, and G keys. ggVG Before that, you must be in the normal mode and know what the groups of keys mean or do. This article takes you through Vim/Vi modes, commands, and key bindings. You will find it simpler to select and use file contents with this knowledge.

• How to Use Restic to Backup and Restore Data in Linux

  Restic is an open-source, secure, and cross-platform backup program. Using Restic we can store multiple versions of files and directories in an encrypted repository. Restic can be used to back up data to an external device or to cloud storage. Restic encrypts data with the AES-256 in counter mode and then authenticates it using the Poly1305-AES cryptographic message authentication code. This way Restic guarantees confidentiality and data integrity by utilizing cryptography. Restic does incremental backups which makes it easier and faster compared to some other backup programs. What this means is that it stores a base backup image and then for each subsequent backup, it stores the difference between that base image and the source machine. This leads to increased backup speed as only the modified data is backed up. It also consumes less backup space.

• How to install PulseEffects on a Chromebook

  Today we are looking at how to install PulseEffects on a Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.

• Rubenerd: Basic fix between pf tables and macros on FreeBSD

  I worked with a FreeBSD client this morning who’d messed up the pf rules on their VM firewall, and wanted to know how to fix them.

LINMOB.net - Weekly GNU-like Mobile Linux Update (26/2022): Plasma Mobile Gear 22.06, Ubuntu Touch OTA-23 and the MNT Pocket Reform

Extensions coming to GNOME Web, some new Sailfish OS Community News, NOKIA causes a naming dispute and more!

The Best Desktop Environments of 2022

As Linux users, we’re often spoiled for choice when it comes to software. There are some basic programs that we keep coming back to that are so integrated into the stack that we forget they’re even there. However, when it comes to things like desktop environments, it can be hard to determine the best option for exactly what you’re going to use it for. We have reviewed different Linux Desktop Environments, and there’s a lot of overlap between use cases. Here we show you the best Linux Desktop Environments for your particular use case.