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pjacotg

I listen to these frequently: - Software Engineering Radio - Signals and Threads - Developer Voices - Happy Path Programming
Re:Ask HN: What's your favorite children's books? on Tuesday October 13, 2026 @05:50PM (#50079372)
To get started board books and we also had a book with pictures of a 1000 everyday objects which both my kids loved.

Then for older than the first few months, my kids loved Maisy books, Spot books, various Julia Donaldsons, Percy the Park Keeper and Hairy Maclarey to name a few.

Good luck with all of it!

Re:Thinking in Python by Bruce Eckel on Saturday August 22, 2026 @11:39PM (#49405885)
I posted this link and found out about it on episide 121 of a podcast called Happy Path Programming, which Bruce Eckel hosts. I was aware that he had started and subsequently abandoned writing the book, so was excited to hear he had used Claude to clean up all of his old material for the book.
Re:Ask HN: Best Podcasts of 2026 [So Far] on Wednesday July 08, 2026 @02:15PM (#48835337)
Signals and Threads, The Pragmatic Engineer, Maintainable, Book Overflow, Happy Path Programming
I'm busy reading a book [0] by Keith Devlin about the correspondence between Pascal and Fermat. It's called the unfinished game and has been really good so far. It goes through the letters and provides some context around them. [0] https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/4443547-the-unfinishe...
Re:Toys with the highest play-time and lowest clean-up-time on Saturday December 27, 2025 @01:12PM (#46403821)
I second this. I joined a second hand Lego Whatsapp group a while ago and that's made it far more affordable.
My key takeaway from the book is the importance of conceptual integrity and how hard this is to achieve the bigger the team. I think this is just as true today as it ever has been before.
Re:Better Than JSON on Tuesday December 02, 2025 @06:28AM (#46120163)
On the human readability concern, we use protobuf converted to text format. It looks JSON like so very readable and comes with all the other benefits of protobuf.
Re:Ask HN: What does "legacy code" mean to you? on Wednesday November 19, 2025 @01:16AM (#45976414)
I was going to mention Peter Naurs paper as well. It's fundamentally changed the way I think about software. The projects I've seen that are in the most trouble are those where the current devs haven't had the opportunity to work closely with developers that understood the codebase well.
Have a look at a site called neetcode. They offer collections of leetcode problems that are representative of what you'd see in an interview. They have tutorial videos for each problem, which should help you get back up to speed with these sort of problems.
Completely agree. Beyond being of interest in its own right, "There exists" is a prerequisite for further work in finding a practical approach to find the path.
Re:Ask HN: What to do with a pure mathematics degree? on Thursday August 21, 2025 @03:00PM (#44976699)
In regards to a career as a quant, the top firms may focus on "young geniuses" but there will be plenty of places where your profile would be just fine. It's a broad industry!
That sounds interesting. Do you have a link?
Re:An Introduction to Stochastic Calculus on Thursday April 17, 2025 @10:35PM (#43724402)
There's a book on financial calculus by Rennie and Baxter [0] that gave me very good intuition on the ideas behind option pricing. It starts with the binomial model and moves on to using stochastic calculus. If you get into the topic you'll want to read more in depth books, but this may be a good place to start.

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/307698.Financial_Calculu...

Re:Big Book of R on Friday April 11, 2025 @01:06AM (#43650664)
Not the op, but I started using parquet instead of CSV because the types of the columns are preserved. At one point I was caching data to CSV but when you load the CSV again the types of certain columns like datetimes had to be set again.

I guess you'll need to decide whether this is a big enough issue to warrant the new dependencies.

Re:Ask HN: Books or games to teach kids math on Sunday February 16, 2025 @04:12PM (#43071758)
This book [0] has some really nice ideas in it. I have a 6 year old and 2 year old and I'm also on the look out for ways to develop a love of mathematics.

I've found mathematical inspired art projects to be quite effective. For example we'll cut tangram shapes out of card, make tangram animals, stick them on the wall and draw eyes on them and so on. You'll find lots of ideas if you search for math art projects for kids.

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12689040-math-from-three...

Re:Ask HN: Best Resources for a New Dad? on Monday November 25, 2024 @12:55AM (#42233628)
I actually got some useful ideas on previous hackernews threads on fatherhood and parenting. There were usually one or two ideas that resonated with me. I suspect the points that resonate will be different for each of us. Here's one of the older threads with a lot of responses: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31976803
In my last few projects I've made it possible to record inputs and outputs of applications and persist the data to disk. I've written tests that use the recorded inputs and compare the results to the recorded outputs. This meant we could record tests rather than writing them. We also record the results of testing sessions with end users and convert the results into tests.
Re:Ask HN: Postgres Primer for Programmers Recommendations? on Wednesday September 25, 2024 @05:01PM (#41651828)
There's a series of database moocs from Stanford that look good [0]. I'd start off by learning about the relational model as a foundation and after that exploring non relational DB's like TimescaleDB.

[0] https://online.stanford.edu/courses/soe-ydatabases0005-datab...

Re:Galilean Moons and Determination of Longitude on Wednesday September 25, 2024 @12:19AM (#41643637)
There's a book called Longitude by Dava Sobel which is about how the problem of determining longitude was solved. The Galiilean moons approach is discussed in the book.

I'm busy reading the book so this article caught my eye. It's been really good so far.

Nice! I've worked with a few similar real world payoff languages. This paper discusses one of them: https://www.infoq.com/presentations/haskell-barclays/
Re:Ask HN: How to Learn Data Engineering? on Wednesday July 24, 2024 @02:09PM (#41059929)
You could try the Stanford database moocs [0], they're on EdX as well. This will focus more on the relational model, SQL and database fundamentals. These are the fundamentals you need to understand so you can structure your tables and design a schema.

[0] https://online.stanford.edu/courses/soe-ydatabases0005-datab...

Re:Citi Missed a Fat Finger on Thursday May 23, 2024 @04:21AM (#40451998)
There's a 99% visible episode [1] on this very issue. Worth a listen!

[1] https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/sound-and-health-hosp...

Re:Ask HN: Best stack for real time data intensive apps on Wednesday April 17, 2024 @04:41PM (#40069848)
If you want to display analytics on a dashboard I would generate materialized views from your underlying data first and then display that. Try and precalculate as much as possible to avoid having to do it on your front end.
Re:Ask HN: What Are You Learning? on Monday April 01, 2024 @02:13AM (#39891324)
There's a popular math book called Infinite Powers by Steven Strogatz which is about the story of calculus. It's really good and may help bring the subject to life as opposed to rote learning problems.
I used it for exactly this in my previous role. I automated a lot of tasks and built tools for my previous team. Most of them weren't Python programmers so I used gooey to create simple GUI's on top of my scripts. It worked really well.
Re:Why do people still use VBA? on Wednesday November 15, 2023 @10:25AM (#38277639)
I work in banking and I've noticed an uptick in Python where a decade ago it would have been VBA. Still plenty of VBA around but Python is in the mix as well.

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