peatmoss

78 ms·

661.
by peatmoss 8y ago
The bulk of people trying to get stuff done in a data / statistical / ML context are heavily biased toward not having to write their own tools. I fancy myself a reasonably good programmer, and reasonably competent at applied stati
662.
by peatmoss 8y ago
Most lisps are multiparadigm, and few would claim lisps are anti FP. I think Python is considered anti FP for two reasons: when suggestions to add more FP features have been raised, Guido has fairly unambiguously rejected those features. Th
663.
by peatmoss 8y ago
I’d guess to differentiate the civil / uncivil dichotomy from the civil(ian) / military dichotomy. That said, I feel that civil engineering is fairly widely understood to be a subdicipline of engineering.
664.
by peatmoss 8y ago
Slackware was a good gateway drug to the BSDs. That was certainly the path I took. The simplicity of the BSDs is really a nice feature. Slackware was for all intents and purposes a BSD with a weird kernel and userland. The simplicity of Sla
665.
by peatmoss 8y ago
At various points in my life, I’ve done all three of these things. But I see no essential nexus between any of them. I mean, if we torture any metaphor enough we can link anything to anything. Most human activities of sufficient complexity
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by peatmoss 8y ago
Sure, sorry about that. To be clear these are mass-market books that I recommend to people wanting to get a deeper, but still high level understanding of transportation systems. Tom Vanderbilt - Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do Anthony D
667.
by peatmoss 8y ago
In addition to busses being able to operate on less-flexible but faster infrastructure (EDIT: as well as on ordinary streets), express and non-express vehicles can integrate seemlessly at stations, which is a pretty cool benefit.
668.
by peatmoss 8y ago
For me, hearing Jarrett’s perspective of technological agnosticism resonated strongly with me. Each transit technology comes with various tradeoffs that can sometimes be unbundled and sometimes cannot. It’s hard for people to understand how
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by peatmoss 8y ago
Try installing OpenBSD (or even Xubuntu) with XFCE on that i7 Dell. It’ll fly. Resource sipping, featureful software exists.
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by peatmoss 8y ago
I hear that, but there’s something instructive here as well for members of the HN community who write software. Namely, it’s that sometimes performance and optimization matter. Given the size of the Indian / developing world market, I
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On Abandoning XLisp-Stat (for R) (2005, PDF)(jstatsoft.org)
3 points by peatmoss 8y ago|0 comments
672.
by peatmoss 8y ago
For people wondering about the XLispStat reference in the article, I'd point you to this PDF written by someone from UCLA, who was a major user of XLispStat: https://www.jstatsoft.org/article/view/v013i07&#x2F
673.
by peatmoss 8y ago
Racket (see my other comment) is my dream for the right place to start over for data and stats, but Julia is a pretty reasonable consolation prize. I feel like there was enormous excitement about Julia early on, but that I rarely hear much
674.
by peatmoss 8y ago
That's a good point. My usage of R is quite a lot more recent than S, or even the original advent of R. I know that R originally built on an open source Scheme runtime, but in so doing, I don't know how much influence that had on
675.
by peatmoss 8y ago
I could go on about the tidyverse and how relatively well thought out / researched the grammars are. For a "not a real programming language" the R community is doing some of the most useful and interesting DSL creation out th
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by peatmoss 8y ago
This is an uncharacteristically deep discussion of R. I also agree strongly with the "making R a 'real programming language' almost killed it" supposition. I feel like a lot of the genuine warts on R come from trying to
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by peatmoss 8y ago
> I was not prepared for how long and sometimes convoluted it was to change my email address on every site/service. I’ve made this recommendation before, but buy your own domain. It’s cheap, and will allow you to change your email h
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by peatmoss 8y ago
I was an undergraduate journalism major. If learning about people and the world is your want, then you’d be hard pressed to beat journalism. That said, I fell back on my computing hobby even before I graduated. When I started college, print
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by peatmoss 8y ago
Yes, I do think it’s pretty different. If you weren’t the fine upstanding person you are, you’d have all the web traffic of users at your disposal: banking, secure interactions with healthcare providers, credentials to Hacker News, the whol
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by peatmoss 8y ago
Back in the day, once I’d understood the value of decentralized revision control, I was convinced Mercurial would prevail, and that Git would become a footnote in history. This is one moment in my past that was formative in helping me make
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by peatmoss 8y ago
SVN also maintains one killer advantage over git to this day: Storing large binary files. - Data scientists and researchers who want to check in the original products of data collection, cleanup, etc. - Software with large artistic assests
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by peatmoss 8y ago
Ugh, for the life of me I never understood why Apple didn’t make Time Machine heavily integrated with ZFS right from the get go. In those days it wasn’t Oracle, it was Sun. And I cannot imagine Apple not being able to negotiate licensing te
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by peatmoss 8y ago
The one thing that I never saw make the leap from BeOS to other operating systems in a meaningful way was the "an application is a thin wrapper around a directory of metadata-enriched files" model that BeOS did. I think the mail a
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by peatmoss 8y ago
Not that I'd want a return to the vendor wars per se, but I feel like the 90s were an interesting time for Free *nixen in part because there were so many competing alternatives to draw inspiration from. A great deal of mindshare has be
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by peatmoss 8y ago
You surely must have done the "transfer my settings and apps" on the PPC->Intel transition. I can't imagine the HDD clone method working through the architecture change. Still, I'm impressed that settings haven't
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by peatmoss 8y ago
While the long-term plan for Apple appears to be to move everything to their own silicon, I wonder if we'll see a hardware refresh based on a 7nm AMD Ryzen chip between now and then. The integrated graphics on AMD seem to be relatively
687.
by peatmoss 8y ago
Funny enough, biologists complain about the very same thing. Common wisdom is that biologists who study "charismatic mega-fauna" get traction with public opinion / may find easier funding streams than researchers who study sm
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by peatmoss 8y ago
The first version of OS X I ran was the beta that didn’t look much like the UI we know today. In those days I was a NetBSD user. The first public release of OS X was mana from heaven for me. I think the addition of Expose (Panther?) was the
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by peatmoss 8y ago
Plotly for R has the neat feature whereby you can take a ggplot plot and render it with plotly. Same definition; perhaps more web-appropriate output. I think if I were to try and extend a grammar of graphics plotting system for another lang
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by peatmoss 8y ago
This comment is currently fading into downvotitude. Can someone explain why? Is it factually incorrect? Are people upset at the implication that other systems do lie about data being on stable storage when it isn’t? I haven’t spent much tim

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