Michael Hadley mthadley

Mathematics: What do grad students in math do all day?

A lot of math grad school is reading books and papers and trying to understand what's going on. The difficulty is that reading math is not like reading a mystery thriller, and it's not even like reading a history book or a New York Times article.

The main issue is that, by the time you get to the frontiers of math, the words to describe the concepts don't really exist yet. Communicating these ideas is a bit like trying to explain a vacuum cleaner to someone who has never seen one, except you're only allowed to use words that are four letters long or shorter.

What can you say?

There are certain files created by particular editors, IDEs, operating systems, etc., that do not belong in a repository. But adding system-specific files to the repo's .gitignore is considered a poor practice. This file should only exclude files and directories that are a part of the package that should not be versioned (such as the node_modules directory) as well as files that are generated (and regenerated) as artifacts of a build process.

All other files should be in your own global gitignore file:

Create a file called .gitignore in your home directory and add any filepath patterns you want to ignore.
Tell git where your global gitignore file is.

Note: The specific name and path you choose aren't important as long as you configure git to find it, as shown below. You could substitute .config/git/ignore for .gitignore in your home directory, if you prefer.

langify

transform a file full of sentences into the Language.properties format

Usage

langify ./path/to/sentences/file.txt

It will take a file with these contents (that blank line at the end needs to be there):

This is the first sentence.  It's pretty great.
Isn't the second sentence better? I think so.

Say you have three nested components. GrandParent -> Parent -> Child. You have state(foo and bar) that lives in Grandparent. That state is then changed by something that happens in Child. There are two different ways to think about how to get this state to change, Event Emitting and Callback passing. I think it would be wise of us to consider switching to a callback approach rather than an Event Emitting. Primarily because I think it reduces unneccessary boilerplate and having to write logic in the "middle man" component, which in this case is the parent.

Here is the code for the two different approaches. Let me know what you think

Event Emitting

{namespace GrandParent}

/**

How npm 5+ works with package-lock

Having had hard times understanding how exactly npm processes package-lock.json and at what stages it is being updated, I put a little guide together to sort of reverse engineer in what way the locked dependencies are updated. This is not going to be an exhausting research about every aspects of npm dealing with these locked dependecies, but rather a very quick step-by-step guide that lines up my findings.

Preparations

To get the ball rolling, I prepared a rather simple React boilerplate project to experiment with. It incorporates the very basics needed to generate a "Hello React!" application. This will perfectly make it for our little demonstration.

Let's swiftly take a glimpse through the fundamental project files.

app.js

A vision for data interchange in Elm

How do you send information between clients and servers? What format should that information be in? What happens when the server changes the format, but the client has not been updated yet? What happens when the server changes the format, but the database cannot be updated?

These are difficult questions. It is not just about picking a format, but rather picking a format that can evolve as your application evolves.

Literature Review

By now there are many approaches to communicating between client and server. These approaches tend to be known within specific companies and language communities, but the techniques do not cross borders. I will outline JSON, ProtoBuf, and GraphQL here so we can learn from them all.

	//
	// Regular Expression for URL validation
	//
	// Author: Diego Perini
	// Created: 2010/12/05
	// Updated: 2018/09/12
	// License: MIT
	//
	// Copyright (c) 2010-2018 Diego Perini (http://www.iport.it)
	//

	/**
	* Copyright (c) 2000-present Liferay, Inc. All rights reserved.
	*
	* This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under
	* the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License as published by the Free
	* Software Foundation; either version 2.1 of the License, or (at your option)
	* any later version.
	*
	* This library is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT
	* ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS


	const outside = {weather: FRIGHTFUL}
	const inside = {fire: DELIGHTFUL}
	const go = places => places.some(p=>p>outside.weather)))

	const snow = () => (outside.weather < inside.fire && !go(places)) {
	let it = snow()
	}

	let it = snow()

	# Initially based on https://github.com/sonnym/jekyll_elm
	#
	# USAGE:
	# Copy/paste this file into the `_plugins` directory of your Jekyll project.
	# For every .elm file in your project, it will generate a .js file in your site
	# using the same name and relative path.
	#
	# As-is, the converter expects the following directory structure:
	#
	# your-jekyll-project/