peatmoss

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571.
by peatmoss 8y ago
Totally. I’ve taught intro R to mostly social scientists, and intro Python to mostly physical scientists. Every workshop, the R group is coding circles around the Python group with the same number of hours of instruction. And the intro R cu
572.
by peatmoss 8y ago
It’s a great set of DSLs that show off some of the pretty decent meta programming facilities of R. I think those DSLs could be created elsewhere, but I also don’t think it's an accident that it happened in R.
573.
by peatmoss 8y ago
Eh, it’s not as bad as people like to whinge that it is. There are indeed warts, but they’re pretty overblown. If you are comfortable with functional idioms R mostly does what you want without a great deal of fuss. If you’re predisposed to
574.
by peatmoss 8y ago
Yes! This is a great list. It could almost serve as a partial roadmap for endeavors like NEXTSPACE.
575.
by peatmoss 8y ago
I think it’s more than guidelines. I think it’s the APIs and tooling that provide a happy path for developers to build apps that conform. I feel that the UI design guidelines plus the developer APIs and tools are self reinforcing. And yeah,
576.
by peatmoss 8y ago
I like to think that the F/OSS community could have done better with OpenSTEP/Cocoa language bridges than Apple’s performance with Java had the community not been burning all its energy on frameworkless window bling. In the other
577.
by peatmoss 8y ago
While I like the way NeXT looks too (“Lickable, like concrete!”), a lot of the comments are getting wrapped around the axle of skin deep appearances. What’s exciting to me about this is that someone is chasing the notion of desktop environm
578.
by peatmoss 8y ago
That’s fair. He at least appears to have created a configuration app that is a integrated with prefs, which makes the alienness of WindowMaker less exposed. On the other hand the dock in GWorkspace is pretty non-functional by comparison.
579.
by peatmoss 8y ago
I've not dug deeper than reading the page and looking at the screenshots, but it looks like he’s making some sane default choices such as to use WindowMaker for the dock rather than GWorkspace’s dock. And it appears he's working t
580.
by peatmoss 8y ago
I imagine a world in which the F/OSS community chose to implement and innovate on GNUStep or some other OpenSTEP/NeXT/Cocoa compatible implementation. This project is exciting by way of providing a more complete nucleus of wh
581.
by peatmoss 8y ago
I learned page layout in the 90s, and have by virtue of the time period, committed acts of typography tantamount to war crimes. As such, I have self-imposed a lifetime ban on “getting clever” with fonts. My one exception is Computer Modern,
582.
by peatmoss 8y ago
You can sometimes pair a decent in-ear pair of headphones with shooting / construction earmuffs, depending on the clearances. That’s the best of both worlds IMO. Also, don’t worry about looking derpy; I give you blanket permission to n
583.
by peatmoss 8y ago
I know people like to hate on Amazon for the gentrification of Seattle, but as someone who has studied and worked in urban planning, I absolutely believe Amazon did the right thing by betting on an urban campus in the heart of Seattle. The
584.
by peatmoss 8y ago
Wow, looks like others have had the same idea. Wonder what stalled things out? Maybe there’d be something worth picking back up.
585.
by peatmoss 8y ago
It feels like more of the Linux desktop world is increasingly tied to things that are either dispositionally incompatible or incompatible license-wise with the BSDs. For example dbus, Wayland, and systemd are all problematic for BSD for va
586.
by peatmoss 8y ago
Org-mode is strictly speaking the most powerful notebook programming environment out there. I’m also much more excited by R Notebooks as implemented by RStudio than I am Jupyter. R Notebooks take the same basic approach as org-mode, impleme
587.
by peatmoss 8y ago
And if you put aggressive insoles in them (I like superfeet greens) then you pretty much have something like a birkenstock!
588.
by peatmoss 8y ago
Yeah, it’s easy to get nostalgic about old stuff, particularly when the old stuff was legit good. But man, FTP and telnet needed to die in a fire.
589.
by peatmoss 8y ago
I miss the idea that a platform, applications, and marketplace were not a vertical stack owned by one entity. As a consumer, I’d love to buy a phone, not a content distribution straight jacket.
590.
by peatmoss 8y ago
If anyone wants a sound track to this tragic story, Pearl Jam’s “Elderly Woman Behind the Counter in a Small Town” is—I’m convinced—influenced by bassist Jeff Ament having grown up in Big Sandy, which is the town discussed in this article.
591.
by peatmoss 8y ago
I grew up in suburban MT, and was one generation removed from rural MT. I never heard “cowboy up,” but “is there a bone sticking out” definitely checks out. The stresses of being in a rural state can be good and bad. Even in suburban MT, it
592.
by peatmoss 8y ago
I marvel at what a terrible hand Obama was dealt when he entered office. I don’t support everything he did, but I’ve got to give the guy props for getting anything done. I miss “No Drama Obama.” Obama may not be quite the boy scout that Car
593.
by peatmoss 8y ago
Yes, though it was hypothetically possible to buy a domain and host your own email. Not a solution for most people in those days, certainly! That’s gotten harder and easier today. It’s never been harder to properly manage a mailserver yours
594.
by peatmoss 8y ago
This is delightful. Scuttlebutt appears to be very much the sort of approach that I was talking about in another thread about 90s app-centric approach. And here we see the downside of that approach: “it doesn’t support my platform.” The iro
595.
by peatmoss 8y ago
The posting from a few days ago that reimagined email as a social network really got me thinking how much our approach to social networks has been led by the webbification of everything. The spirit-of-the-nineties approach to recreating mas
596.
by peatmoss 8y ago
Yes, that’s most common in parts of the United States I’ve frequented. Pronunciation guidance by analogy is hard without taking in to account the region of the reader.
597.
by peatmoss 8y ago
Many new titles seem to support Linux. Old titles largely don’t. Even if a Wine-ish compatibly layer adds some performance overhead, the PC that sits behind my TV is losing Windows pretty quickly once this comes out. Managing Windows is a P
598.
by peatmoss 8y ago
Cool, but in between data that fits in RAM and data that requires exotic storage and computing surely you can at least imagine data of this mid-sized variety. For that, SQLite isn’t necessarily bad.
599.
by peatmoss 8y ago
Many analytics use cases are single user. I’ve often thought you could do worse than SQLite as a first pass at a dataframe implementation. And SQLite is a great fit for a range of analyses on a single-user computer where you’re looking to s
600.
by peatmoss 8y ago
Having lived in New Zealand where the IRD does this, yes. Yes I would. If they owe you money, you can file. If you owe them money because they screwed up, you don’t need to do anything. This assumes pay as you earn, standard employee status

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