skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My thoughts (a little of a Rant) on R as the Lead Engineer at a data science focused company is that R is a great statistical language, but a poor programming language. I use the term programming language as a language which is very versatile for a variety of needs (web app, commandline app) such as python, ruby, etc. R has the capabilities to use as a programming language like a climbing rope can be used as a belt. It can, but shouldn't because of some points I have below.

It is great for exploratory analysis, as it is forgiving and easy to use in the console for testing things; but once it needs to be put into practice, it has issues. For a non-programmer, grasping R isn't too hard thanks to some great developers in the community.

There is a lot of good in the R community, but people are focused on making it isn't. Just look at deploying R into production, that can be a nightmare. I've spent days looking over code to figure out where an error in production lies. One of the errors was a package of a package which was updated for the first time in years. That package depended on another package which my package called another function that called the first one; basically it was a mess of dependencies. And there are some misconceptions, while doing the engineering work in R and learning I learned not to use for loops. Then one day I timed it and the for loop was 10x+ faster than any apply/plyr function including using a gpu.

The things that separate a programming language from a statistical language are a programming language have more than one of these:

* Good dependency management

* Easy deployment into production environment

* A clear way to setup environment (e.g. naming, folder conventions)

* Ability to do most of the things you want with the base packages

* Good documentation about the above.

Basically, I believe a good data scientist is someone who can use R (or something else) to explore data and then create the algorithm in a compiled language to be put in production. And for someone who just needs to create analysis for research or a paper, R is the perfect use case. R is an excellent language for its use cases, just don't think about using it for general programming. It has caused a lot of extra dev hours working on issues with it.

Little plug, we wrote a piece on hiring data scientists.[0]

[0]: https://gastrograph.com/blogs/gastronexus/interviewing-data-...
Thanks for the great answer. Is that how it panned out for you? Love to hear your experience about this.

Typically, I would find it difficult for get into the zone to get work done within 45min period.

Huge congrats to you for being pulling this off in such difficult circumstances.
I remember similar sentiment when AirBnB did their rebrand. An article comparing the rebrands of the two companies would be interesting.
With all those positives, would you use it?
Twitter is using Rust: A tool for benchmarking RPC services
Here's an example from Brian Moriarty's retrospective on the game "Loom" [1] in 2015, a mere 27 years after work on it began in 1988:

"The third disk here is the only known copy of the original design documents for Loom. It's an 800K Macintosh floppy employing a proprietary format readable only by a vintage Macintosh drive (thank you Apple). In preparing for this lecture, I obtained a dusty old Mac which had not been turned on since 1997. After reseating all the cables and boards I got it to boot and determined that the files on that disk are still intact and still fully readable. A few moments after making this happy discovery however, and before I could actually retrieve those files, the hard drive in the Mac crashed and died permanently. I'll recover the files eventually, but for now you'll have to rely on my failing memory for how Loom was conceived."

[1]: http://ludix.com/moriarty/loom.html (I transcribed the passage above from the video)
We serve three years, between high school and college
I keep hearing young people don't want to farm but I think there are plenty that do. The problem is, they don't have the experience, nor the millions of dollars in credit required to buy a farm.
MOst of the quotes made sense to me:
>> “changed the code” (the scare quotes bit)

Might not be scare quotes but a direct quotation

>> to invent a “vaccine”

This is pretty obvious - an antivirus

>> the secret formula... fell into the hands of Russia and Iran

They got a way to get the virus' signature, as well as copies to reverse-engineer

>> increasingly stronger versions of the virus

>> the most deadly version of the virus

Might refer to virulence or how quickly the effects were ramped up. The most effective viruses are not the most transmissible (burn themselves out and/or are quickly noticed)

> now that Russia and Iran have a copy of stuxnet we're all doomed

not doomed per se, but it would probably be better for the average american if this hadn't happened. The worst thing about this, IMO, is that it set a very public precedent on the use of 'cyber-weaponry', costing the US moral high-ground
I think my inspiration for writing the story on the maker movement and ham radio was my daughter, who decided to get her ham license when she was 8. Since then she's become deeply involved in the maker movement and wearable electronics. These days she's an engineer. But what really motivated her wasn't the fact that she can talk to people around the world, but rather that ham radio is the only way she can build the gear that she wants to build. You can't do that with your cell phone or a WiFi router unless you have the right license.
What makes R infuriating is most of the complexity and gotchas aren't inherent to the problem.

So you learn Clojure and you inevitably meet the collections. And it takes like 5 minutes to tell you how to map and how to reduce and then the lecture ends with "and it just works". And in fact it does just work.

Then you learn functional R and the first five minutes are the same as the Clojure experience. Then the slow motion train wreck starts and "And R likes mapping so much, we have nine microscopically different apply statements for list and tables and they input some things and output other things and if you pick the wrong one the failure looks like the Trinity nuclear test but more impressive". Every R language lecture is like that, five minutes of how real languages do it, then the rest of the 45 minutes is endless pitfalls and accidents. Its like a 45 minute long fever dream or nightmare "... and if you accidentally tapply, table apply, to a list, then it coerces the input to ..." and drift back to Cthulhu, or maybe away from, whatever.

Pragmatically if you teach R as a statistical analysis language what looks weird often enough turns out to be super convenient. But if you try to teach and learn R as a general purpose computational language, you wonder if its a joke and nobody would actually use Intercal or BF to run analysis, would they?

Its a very powerful system in spite of the language. Think of PC hardware architecture going back to the old XT days, its sinfully ugly, but its quite capable. R is no PDP-11 or VAX, thats for sure.
> Curious, what language did the poster uses that implies aggression? I see none.

This: "Yeah, I know what quotation marks mean..." It comes off as snappy.
Yeah, in 4x5 you've got a larger "sensor" which also contributes to DoF. [edit] If I remember my lens geometry correctly, film size is just the other side of focal length when it comes to bokeh calculations.

I grabbed this random image from the 35L group on Flickr, they didn't include EXIF so I can't be 100% certain they shot it at F1.4 but it looks very close to shots I have at F1.4 from that lens.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/49830238@N04/25021998886/in/po...
It mentions in the article that 123Mountain sent a credit-card chargeback to collections against one of their customers.
There are not any because the masters delete them. And "any" means any comment that is critical against Israel and is immediately flagged as "anti-semitic" by the watchdogs/lapdogs. What a discrace.
Cool, I'll make sure to drop my 35L off at the local recycling center then.
> It wasn't supposed to, because those results of classical EM were wrong.

You're badly mistaken. Although nobody succeeded in obtaining the emission line frequencies of gases out of the classical EM theory, the theory did correctly give other results consistent with observations. One of them is the formula for emission intensity that connects energy radiated with second derivative of electric moment; it goes back to Larmor's work. This was the result the new theory would preferably reproduce or at least be consistent with. Wave mechanics wasn't consistent with it - the hydrogen atom oscillates indefinitely in wave mechanics. Schroedinger himself viewed this as a deficiency and planned to get back to it - check the ending part of his seminal papers on wave mechanics. The classical formula is taught to this day both in macroscopic EM theory and quantum optics courses, although there are some deficiencies and problems about the formula that Larmor did not know.

> In the case of gravitational waves, we have a correct "old theory"--General Relativity--so any new theory that did not match that correct old theory would be a nonstarter.

I do not think any physics theory could even be "correct" in the sense of Platonic ideals, but I do not know what you mean by "correct". I do not claim a new theory could completely replace the old one before it could deliver the same or better results. I claim theory has value and is accepted based on its new benefits, not its superiority in every aspect the old theory was superior before. Calling incomplete theory non-starter makes no sense to me, as all theories, including General Relativity, are incomplete.
Thanks! A hands-off (on?) manual client is what I always wanted. I've just finally used Let's Encrypt for the first time, with manuale.
Currently ~50% of the cost of residential electricity is due to the grid, not generation - and it probably affects commercial electricity.
I guess I'm ok with Stuxnet. What I am most decidedly not OK with is the assassination of Iranian scientists. Iran has a right to be upset... it's only a wonder they aren't more upset.
Agreed. I thought that feature was fascinating, it worked extremely well. The Honeywell in my midwest home did a perfect job of learning how long the 17-year-old furnace took to heat up the house in the mornings.

The heat was set to go back to the daytime temperatures at 6 AM, and I began to wake up at about 5:47 every morning when, like clockwork, the furnace kicked on to reach 64 degrees before I rolled out of bed. Well played, Honeywell engineers.
It's not £8 per call, it's £8 per minute. I don't know the protocol for satellite calls, but I'd been taught that for both 911 calls and VHF-Marine distress calls, you're supposed to stay in contact with the dispatcher, to update them as the situation changes and to help guide the responders to your location. E.g: "The fire truck is at Smith Street, they can't find you." "No, I'm on Smith Lane, not Smith Street". Or "I can hear the helicopter, it sounds like they just flew by south of me, can you have them fly back 1000 yards further north?" For satellite distress calls, I would imagine this could take a while, though I imagine they'd set up a schedule where you'd only call back periodically.
"It's like there's a four tier system to what defines a US Ally."

The editor of Al-Ahram in Cairo, who was very close to the government, once wrote on that subject back in the Cold War days. He said that the USSR had a quite explicit three-tier system, and it was very hard for a country to change tiers. Tier I countries got the Bolshoi ballet on tour, and when mid-level ministers called Moscow, the call back was from a higher level minister. Tier II countries got the Leningrad ballet, and callbacks from an equal level minister. Tier III countries didn't get tours and got callbacks from some low-level staffer.

On Israel as an ally of the US: The US and Israel do not have a mutual defense treaty. The US has a treaty obligation to defend NATO countries, most of South America, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, and the Philippines.[2] But not Israel. The NATO connection is particularly strong; the NATO commander (a job which rotates amongst the NATO countries) can deploy troops from the member nations. Israel has a "security cooperation" treaty, but it doesn't obligate the US to support Israel militarily if they get into a war. A few years ago, Israel was pushing for war with Iran, but the US made it clear that Israel was on their own if they started a war with Iran.[3]

[1] http://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/the-monitors-view/2012/0...
[2] http://www.state.gov/s/l/treaty/collectivedefense/
[3] http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2015/07/20/the-real-cr...
This is based on the "Techcrunch" concept that being successful and continuing business for a startup depends heavily on external funds.

That couldn't be farther from the truth, for a real startup with a real business. Maybe growth will not be as fast without VC funds, but I don't think real businesses will notice shrinking investments.

Correct me if I'm wrong.
Low density information is easier to digest.

Plus, like a stick of gum, sometimes you just have nothing to do and it fills the time.
Which is quite justified, as with more modern programming languages, these sorts of bugs are much less likely to happen.
37% of what? equal what? did I miss the suggested number? I see that it's dependent on the number of people that you are considering, from 10 to 100, but that leaves a difference of between 4 and 40 people to date. How do we know how many people, total, we would date, when we are just starting?

I get the feeling that this article only has half the math.

As an aside, I've heard that the optimum number for this equation is in fact 12. So 12 is the 38%. But this article doesn't confirm that - as far as I can tell.
If it helps, they're not much better at writing copy about actual viruses.
What Gmail's New TLS Icon Really Means: Email Encryption Is Still Broken
ReactOS 0.4.0 Released
I'd venture to guess that the vast, vast majority of American startups that raise a series A are not cash flow positive.
In my experience a lot of the claims that R is slow are greatly exaggerated and made by people who don't actually use it. Kind of an echo chamber. Every time I see someone say chose Python instead because of speed, I roll my eyes.
Seems odd one wasn't included. At the least, I expected a grand total.
Road to Growth #7 – Ex-Wildfire and Current Pattern CEO Derek Draper
> I imagine that the news would be quite boring if every article were written as a bullet-point list of points. Sometimes people enjoy reading a story, not just a two minute summary.

This is exactly what I've wanted but never known how to express it ... is there such a thing? I would love to browse a list of news stories distilled to factual bullet points. Sigh. One can dream :)
And, unfortunately, Javascript is a hack too:

> var m = {};
> m["__alpha__"] = 10;
> m["__bravo__"] = 20;
> m["__proto__"] = 30;
> for(var key in m) { console.log(key); }
__alpha__
__bravo__
> Tell 'em you don't like X, block 'em, and boom, you're done.

Until X start automating the creation of new account and spamming your specifically because you blocked them of course.
Programmatic and Direct Manipulation, Together at Last [pdf]
Dams are dependent on a large volume of water flowing over a large drop to spin turbines. Looking at the aerial in the article, it's safe to assume that the water in the dam is a precious strategic resource and cannot be sent downstream in sufficient volume to provide infrastructure scale power.
Browsing through an environment that's integrated nicely, deeply configurable, and completely programmable. What else would you want as a programmer and an pc user?
Interactive Demo: http://ravichugh.github.io/sketch-n-sketch/releases/v0.4/

via LtU: http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/5303
I think this is another longform article that does not do justice to the title. Yes there are interesting nuggets of information in there, but really all of that does not really lead to the "how". Tldr; Catherine brought perfumes and perfume laced gloves to france. She is rumored to have killed some one with a poison laced glove. It is not even clear if she actually ever even made a poison laced glove.
React Look: advanced, dynamic component styling for React (+Native)
>A lot of the "good ones" often exit marriages and long-term relationships to better themselves.

Second marriage divorce rates are 67%. Doesn't this strategy imply a fair bit of medium to long run risk?

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-intelligent-divorce...

I agree on the bettering yourself bit.
I got a NSFW image. Be careful everyone.
That was what I was thinking but it was stupid idea.

My point is that if you could use this bug to use one rogue DNS to own other DNSes this could be leveraged to bring large parts of the Internet down.

I don't know how hard or easy this could be.
A quick glance into PDNS reveals four calls to getaddrinfo()[1]. So it might be possible...

[1] https://github.com/PowerDNS/pdns/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=get...
It just seems out of character. Google is huge with the not-invented-here.
If alloca could be used to get arbitrary-sized buffer the bug would not exist. Another Y story https://fosdem.org/2016/schedule/event/ada_memory/ points out that Ada does not have this limitation. There it is a job of the compiler to allocate bug chunks outside of the stack not to cause stack overflows. C really needs such API.
How exactly does that work? I thought the credit card company was the final arbiter of whether the charge was valid or not? If they decide it's not, can a collection agency really enter the fray?
FCC commissioner: U.S. tradition of free expression slipping away
You should use factor for data cleaning and verification.

So you have "sex" on the questionnaire, and factor will very quickly identify contamination such as "often", "not yet", various mis-spellings, etc.
Pretty skeptical about that. Rice is rice.
>Yeah, in 4x5 you've got a larger "sensor" which also contributes to DoF.

It’s only the focal length and aperture that contribute to DoF. With a larger sensor you are typically using longer focal lengths since you need a longer focal length to get the same FoV. That being said, you also have the option of using movements on 4x5, so subject separation can be achieved by changing the plane of focus even when using a narrow aperture. There are some very technically accomplished examples of this at http://www.p1600.com/en/portfolio/london_5x4/ (not my photos), but on balance I think that these are more of a technical tour de force than an artistic success.

There's no way to know what aperture the photo you linked to was shot at, but it doesn't look to me like it would have to be particularly wide. Honestly, I find it a bit depressing that there are flickr groups fetishizing particular lenses.
When I look at this sequence I see that for from 7 on, there seem nearly always exist more than one class of oriented differentiable structures on N-spheres, except for (up to 63) for 12 and 61. Does anybody know what makes the dimensions 12 and 61 so special here?
Oddly enough, the very first scene of this Person of Interest clip is also in Union Square.
With the difference that true leaders work on making others the future leaders.
Well, I'm by no means part of the rust community, so don't let anything I say reflect upon them.

That said, how else do you correct someone in the case their statements are provably false?

Edit: Whoops, "probably" was supposed to be "provably" :/
> A lot of the "good ones" often exit marriages and long-term relationships to better themselves.

I would not consider someone who exited a marriage for the sole purpose of bettering themselves to be one of the "good ones". The more apt term would perhaps be "selfish" (this assumes that both parties accepted the conventional terms of what a marriage implies). On the other hand, there's nothing wrong with ending a long-term relationship to better one's self — no permanent commitment has been established.
I understand what you're saying, but I think moron4hire has a very good point here.

There is no objective reading to be done here. You have available a single account from a single source. Despite having nothing but his account to go on, you think your interpretation is more correct. Despite him knowing this other person personally, in real life, and having been there in-person to witness body language and tone-of-voice, you think you are a better judge of that person's intent.

At the same time, of course, to you, moron4hire is just as random of a person as moron4hire's lunch companion, and equally likely to be the socially inept one of the two. So it's fine that you are skeptical of his interpretation; it's fine that you think he probably misinterpreted his friend's jesting.

But out of about three choices of how to respond, you chose the worst one.

a) You could have said nothing. Mildly amusing anecdote, skepticism registered, moving on.

b) You could have said something like, "I wonder if he was just kidding." Skepticism expressed without implying fault or incompetence, while leaving the door open for further, neutral discussion and elaboration by moron4hire.

But instead, you chose c) Explicitly accuse him of overreaction and misinterpretation, implying that you know better than him, despite his being there and your only reading his account, while also engaging in armchair psychoanalysis ("odd, and overly defensive, reaction...").

And that's just plain rude, as well as arrogant. It's basically the same as the "you put ketchup on your hot dog?!" reaction.

> I'm reading objectively and drawing my own conclusions rather than immediately buying into a single-sided narrative. That's what we should do when confronted with unfamiliar situations relayed by people we don't know, because it's the fundamental brick in the foundation of avoiding mobs, rash conclusions, beheading people over blogs, and so on.

Actually you're jumping to your own conclusions based upon a dearth of evidence. That's one of the causes of mob mentality. You think you're being objective, but you're actually just discounting his experience and drawing exclusively upon your own. And by accusing him of being wrong, you assert your own correctness and superiority, thus reinforcing your bias.

And this is the whole problem! People think they're being objective when they're merely replacing one subjective bias with another. No wonder there's so much arguing and misunderstanding in this world. :(
Create efficient Reactive systems