skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The upshot is that unless you carefully read the apply() documentation..., you’re hosed.

One thing that jumps out at me, having returned to R after several years in the Python world, is how obtuse its documentation can be.

The standard format for R documentation does a few things that I find impede understanding. First, the help pages are organized into sections giving the high-level description, the arguments, the details, and the results ("values"). The "details" generally are organized by argument keyword, and the arguments section draws on the language laid down-- usually in a vague, high-level way-- by the description section. Finally the practical effects of the details are deferred till the results section. That means unless you already know what's going on, you end up having to jump around among sections, trying to synthesize everything.

This is particularly a problem for those help pages-- and there are a lot of them-- that describe a raft of related functions all at the same time. Describing a bunch of related functions in the same place sounds like a good idea (it should help you figure out `apply` vs `sapply`, right?). Yet this is exactly when the documentation organization results in the most scattershot reading, because in addition to having to synthesize between sections, you have to mentally prune away text that, for one reason or another, doesn't apply to your particular case (for example, because different functions don't all share the same arguments, or because you want to read about the values for just one variation on the function).

Another idiom I dislike in the standard R documentation is how the examples don't actually show any sample output. There are generally some attempts at comments to explain what the sample code should or shouldn't do, but they are very much written in the style of programmer's comments, not in the style of documentation or learning points. So you end up having to run the code, and sometimes puzzle over the results for a while.

Here's an example, from the help page that I happen to have open right now, `help(sample)`:

# sample()'s surprise -- example
x <- 1:10
sample(x[x > 8]) # length 2
sample(x[x > 9]) # oops -- length 10!
sample(x[x > 10]) # length 0

The comments alert me that there's a "surprise" in store, and they even allude to the (apparently surprising) fact that the second line produces a 10-vector. Notably lacking is any explanation of what's meant to be surprising here, how that relates to the internal logic of `sample`, or how to avoid falling into the trap.

Overall, I feel like R's documentation is a bit like a conversation among experts, with a rather sink-or-swim attitude towards newcomers.

Documentation is far from the first thing that stands out about R vs Python, but it's the most salient, I think, in the context of the original article.
Thanks for explaining your feelings on the matter. I think I understand your point of view now.

I think you might just happen to be a more 'picky' eater than the friends and associates I cook for and with, excepting the vegans, perhaps.
I can relate to the sentiment - what's going to happen to countries in the short term when entire industries like transport and farming are automated at nearly the same time?
To contrast this - I'm the lead data scientist at the same company, and head over heels in love with R....

It is the only language I can quickly and efficiently jump from algebraic topology for novel pre-processing, straight into model building and validation - with just about every potential variation of every major algorithm freely available and packaged on a well curated package manager (CRAN), and then ensemble them.

I _agree_ that it's a bit difficult to use in production, and that dependency management needs work (Packrat is trying to do that), and that blindly trusting packages on CRAN can cause errors - but 98% of the time - it just works. Graphics, models, crazy niche things that are currently only used by one post-doc locked away in a top secret research lab... it all just works.

Of course, take this with a grain of salt: this is coming from a guy who's built web-servers (HTTP responses and all) in R.
Archiving isn't a one and done. Anyone that sells a single solution and doesn't have it including costs for migration over time have never dealt with data for very long or don't have any foresight at all.
Last paragraph in the article:

“They had a vision to promote renewables at a time when oil prices were high"

Guessing that's why Europe backed out.
Grabbing a bit of Syria would hardly have been worth the propaganda disaster though. The world wouldn't have reacted very favorably... particularly the Muslim world.

And yes, Israel has some extremely good technology. But they also have some pretty fierce enemies. See their incursion into Southern Lebanon a few years back for instance. They also don't have that large of a population. It probably is in their best interest they aren't seen as expansionist.... for the moment at least.
My attorney said that we have 3 cases: my criminal case (misdemeanor charges - trial is next week), my civil case against the hospital (false imprisonment), and my girlfriend's malpractice case. The industry is partially protected by "standard of care", which is basically "drugs for symptoms".

My thinking is that it is better to treat causes than symptoms. I have been observing and experimenting, and we've found some things that work rather well. The next step is to get my girlfriend off the sedative that the mental health court forces her to take.

A lot of my submission was trimmed away to fit in 2000 characters. I guess this was the core of it:

"Compulsory mental health care exists for a reason: sometimes people get suicidal, are incapable of taking care of themselves, or don’t realize how others see them. Lucky patients are watched for 48-hours to make sure they stabilize, then are released. After their acute crisis passes, these patients can go about their usual lives.

"Unlucky patients are treated in perpetuity with drugs that never allow them to recover: 'Sedate the patient until normalized'."
That's irrelevant, and massive hindsight bias. If the British still held the South, they might have kept slavery too. And if they did try to abolish it, the civil war/revolution probably would have happened anyway and they might have won.
Or, the advantage of polyamorous relationships.
The market cap of all the solar stocks in the industry ($14 billion or so) is about the same as the market cap of Twitter. Pretty baffling to me.

If you're a billionaire and want to be a trillionaire, all you'd have to do is buy every solar company and wait a few decades I bet.
The 1% is a minority? Well then I guess so is the 49%!

Your wealth isn't a trait. You're not born wealthy, you're born into wealth. You're not stuck being wealthy, you make a choice every day to remain wealthy.
I agree with you. I think most people think that more ingredients the dish has, the better it must be - while it is usually the opposite. Maybe it gets down to how sensitive one's taste is?
> That doesn't match my experience. Source?

No source. There's always a price to pay. Rust is zero-cost, but only on a subset of algorithms that are valid in idiomatic Rust. If you translate Rust to C you won't gain on speed, but if you translate C to Rust you might have to reorganize it and that will cost you. If your subset involved mostly increments and decrements of data and address registers then language called brainfuck would be zero-cost. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm led to believe at least some problems that would be most naturally expressed with graph structures will require reference counting when rewritten in safe Rust. Then again there are trade-offs in Rust that I might not be aware of, Singularity exceeded raw C in some instances by replacing overhead and functionality of MMU with static checking in compiler.

> In effect, you're saying we shouldn't care about security vulnerabilities

Cue a rant from spengler/deraadt. I was being sarcastic. We should rewrite most of our software in Rust 20 years ago. ;)
scrapinghub is pricy, isn't it?
>"average" US meal: some sort of noodles with a beef-based sauce, green beans, and biscuits

Is this what vegetarians believe the rest of us eat?
The only issue I have with R is when exposing it as a web service R is not great. For example if using R you will need one container for "dployr" and another for your web service. It's not the end of the world but more moving parts means more problems.
I saw me some boobs at a dining table at a restaurant. They were nice, but I doubt my boss appreciates them.
It doesn't seem like it's big enough to matter on a global scale. A million people is a rounding error.

We're never going to succeed if we can't get the cost close to fossil fuels.
The Fascination with Unicorns Is Dangerous and Unhealthy
The Robin Hood of Science: The Missing Chapter
It is like fishing. When you are fishing for smaller fish, people wonder if they have a shoe on the end of the line. Nobody ever questions the whale.
How the Tesla battery could change the way we buy power
Bash3boilerplate v1.2.0 supports long option cli argument parsing
"The simple fact is that non-violent means do not work against Evil. Gandhi's non-violent resistance against the British occupiers had some effect because Britain was wrong, but not Evil. The same is true of the success of non-violent civil rights resistance against de jure racism. Most people, including those in power, knew that what was being done was wrong. But Evil is an entirely different beast. Gandhi would have gone to the ovens had he attempted non-violent resistance against the Nazis. When one encounters Evil, the only solution is violence, actual or threatened. That's all Evil understands."

-- Robert Bruce Thompson
Fujitsu :( I worked at Fujitsu wholesale distributor around 1999, EVERY SINGLE drive sold between 1999-2001 died within 3 years (PB15/PB16). Those were great drives, cheap, silent, fast, and smelled great fresh from the factory due to pine sap rosin.

Allegedly Cirrus Logic controller had a manufacturing defect and died due to heat. Myself I always suspected that very peculiar and strong smelling rosin flux. PCB was drenched in it, this type of flux is usually highly activated and requires cleaning, otherwise acid will eat solder joints and copper away, especially in humid and hot environments.
On the basis of buying a single personal hard drive this data is interesting but wouldn't have much impact on your purchasing. As usual the advice is to have multiple backups of everything
There are very good reasons besides demographics to start with iOS. Stability, consistency, lack of piracy etc.
Former CEO of Nitrous.io on Early Sales to Enterprise Success
That's a common (and reasonable) argument, but the counter is that then such organizations will be staffed with "true believers" who question neither specific orders nor (especially) overall policies. Draftees are more likely to blow the whistle.
>If you are in Silicon Valley and your customers are mostly well-paid consumers with no free time, or other venture-backed startups, well, I’d be worried.

This is the most shallow statement I have read this year. The needs of the rich today would be needs of less rich tomorrow. The author clearly missed out on the whole American dream concept. I'm sure some people felt the same way about refrigerator and cars.

You'd almost never create a market segment starting with the bottom end. Almost every product you touch, including the very screen you're staring at, was once made for the 1%.

And almost always the version for the 1% is expensive, won't see a version 2, and is a one time sale. It doesn't matter if your initial rich/busy customers are going out of business. If you found a need you're fulfilling, you will with a fairly high probability will continue to find customers through the generation.

Dot com bust did not kill Network Solutions/Verisign. Very, very important.
> Maybe take a closer look at where Uber's capital is sourced from

Eeh, I don't think it's deliberate, they just didn't really think it through. It's not a bank and it's not, majorly, for Chinese audience. In Chinese culture, these round coins with square hole inside are a symbol of money (and luck, but mainly money), even on religious statues and the like. It's not a good fit for a taxi app.
For me, I think it actually works well as a user interface.

If I'm in a mood to be charitable and particularly open-minded, I can choose to squint closely or highlight with mouse, and read a greyed-out comment.

However, once that reading is done, the fact that it's greyed out means I don't feel the need to respond to it, correct it, etc. I know that it's being hidden, that people will give it less credence and attention. Plus, I just don't have to look at it once it's no longer highlighted.

In effect, greying out text is a gentle reminder to "don't feed the trolls"
I'm 26 and I've never even figured out how to start dating. Why are y'all in such a hurry to stop?
Your "cover letter" can also be a direct email to the hiring manager which mostly guarantees that they'll at least skim it.
http://www.dailyfinance.com/2012/08/30/debtors-prison-is-bac...

In this case a debt leads to a recurring pay or appear judgment that requires a monthly court appearance if payment cannot be made, and the arrest is made for failing the court appearance and not failing the payment. Close, but not exactly what I wanted.

https://www.themarshallproject.org/2015/02/24/debtors-prison...

In the opening, it is medical bill instead of loan and once again failure to appear, but given that the individual wasn't notified they had to appear it is once again pretty close. But later on it gives this line:

>or if the judge deems that the debtor is “willfully” not paying the debt, the judge may write a warrant for the debtor’s arrest on a charge of “contempt of court.”

So if the judge thinks the person can pay and they don't, they go to jail. It also brings up the 1983 case of Bearden v. Georgia which does allow imprisonment if the person is judged unwilling, but not unable, to pay. Do we assume the court is 100% perfect in these judgments?

>http://www.startribune.com/in-jail-for-being-in-debt/9569261...

Took a little searching because of all the websites focusing on debt resulting from anything criminal (I was purposefully not bringing up those results).

>In Illinois and southwest Indiana, some judges jail debtors for missing court-ordered debt payments. In extreme cases, people stay in jail until they raise a minimum payment. In January, a judge sentenced a Kenney, Ill., man "to indefinite incarceration" until he came up with $300 toward a lumber yard debt.

>In Minnesota, judges have issued arrest warrants for people who owe as little as $85

>Three debt buyers -- Unifund CCR Partners, Portfolio Recovery Associates Inc. and Debt Equities LLC -- accounted for 15 percent of all debt-related arrest warrants issued in Minnesota since 2005, court data show. The debt buyers also file tens of thousands of other collection actions in the state, seeking court orders to make people pay. The debts -- often five or six years old -- are purchased from companies like cellphone providers and credit card issuers, and cost a few cents on the dollar. Using automated dialing equipment and teams of lawyers, the debt-buyer firms try to collect the debt, plus interest and fees. A firm aims to collect at least twice what it paid for the debt to cover costs. Anything beyond that is profit.

All in all, it does seem the majority of cases I found were for failure to appear to a hearing (even though this could be caused by not being notified of a hearing or being required to repeatedly attend hearings and eventually missing one), but as the article points out that in a few places they don't even need that formality.
Ask HN: Should I pivot?
Hi HNers,

I built a Slack bot which turns Slack channels into SSH terminals. I got a few signups but the main feedback I'm getting is that people will not use it because it (understandably) poses a security risk.

I was initially thinking of marketing it as a tool for DevOps/sysadmin teams but I am now wondering if I should just give up and pivot into something else that will appeal to a different type of user.

Some ideas I came up with:

1) Education/training. I could see it being useful to teach users remotely. For example, a teacher could invite students in a channel, start a session and show terminal commands and students could participate as well.

2) Interviews. It could be useful as a quick first pass interview to see if your candidate knows how to use the command line.

3) Support. Companies/freelancers that do sysadmin type of work could invite their customers on their Slack, let them setup the SSH connection and let them watch in real time how they fix or setup their system.

Any feedback or advice would be greatly appreciated.
Clickable: https://opskit.com
>Rice is rice.

Coming from a long line of rice farmers...I can assure you that this is really not the case. Rice has HUGE variations between various rice cultivars, and HUGE variations in the end result depending on how the grains are polished. Environmental factors and cultivation/growing methods also influence the taste and nutritional profile of the grain.

A lot of people, particularly in the West, just simply aren't aware of these differences because they've historically never had access to much other than regular milled white rice.

You're also overlooking the fact that Japan's farmers grow nearly every sort of vegetable and fruit produce imaginable.
Why not just read for the pleasure of it? Do you every read anything from The New Yorker, or Esquire, or The Atlantic, etc.? There can be great stories that are enjoyable to read, while still being nonfiction.
Some young people do want to become farmers, just not enough to replace the ones aging out.

Some of the things they have brought about is the acceptance of "ugly" fruit and vegetables. It's not a big market but it's one that exists because young farmers ate pushing the market in this direction despite a fetish for perfect looking fruit and vegetables.

There is even a small movement to get young women into farming: http://modernfarmer.com/2014/03/yamagata-girls-farm/
But that's just it: it wasn't logical or rational. It was irrational and biased, because he wasn't even present at the event in question. He dismissed the only actual evidence available (the first-hand witness account) and fabricated his own story out of thin air based upon his own life experiences. Then he accused him of misinterpreting and overreacting. Mind-reading is bad enough second-hand, but third-hand?

And this passes for objectivity, logic, and reason? And this makes you smile?

Of course, the joke's really on all of us, because this kind of human interaction/communication/judgment/reasoning failure has been going on since the begnning of time. It's not as if I'm not guilty of it, too. And by the time we overcome it (if anyone ever does), we die, and people who haven't overcome it take our place.

Perhaps the ultimate lesson is to lower our expectations. Haha.
...a manufacturer of waterproof clothing.
A decent background: http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2015/01/24/heres-why-i...

Basically, highly transactional workloads that have severe performance and reliability requirements. If you're serving a web app, maybe you can spin up a bunch of instances on AWS because while performance and security are important, they're not that important. And by "not that important", I mean not important enough to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on. To a large consumer bank, it is that important. You also may be able to get away with having an eventual consistency model because it's okay if two different users see two different views of your app. But that's not okay for a bank processing credit card transactions, so they are forced to deal with highly transactional workloads which are now consistent.

I had the same questions as you did, but after talking to some of the z systems folks, I think it may be the case that mainframes, or things that look like mainframes, will always be around. Consider that basically the entire consumer banking and insurance industries still use mainframes. It's possible to consider that an artifact of legacy, but it's also possible evidence that their use-case doesn't fit well with the alternatives (clusters of smaller systems).

Disclaimer: I work for IBM Research, but not in this area.
Update: It looks like the patch is finally out.
Factors are weird because no other language has anything like it, but they are actually a quite clever way to group data. It just takes a while to get used to them.
A language filter option would be nice.

Edit: In addition, "emoji-only" tweets seem not that interesting to me - but maybe i am too picky.
Yea I feel like sapply, lapply, and mapply will cover most of what people need to do. Hell I've personally only really ever needed sapply as I don't work much with lists.
Well sort of.

http://www.pegnsean.net/~sue/pics/151-200/tn/162%20...and%20...

But yeah everyone everywhere can read Latin alphabet, at least in the demographic interesting for Uber.
Did I miss any discussion of what the "processing" is?

Using the Stanford Part-Of-Speech tagger, my goofy project, Ashurbanipal, can tag all the words in one book in about 8 seconds on one core, or ~25,000 books from the Project Gutenberg 2010 DVD image on my 4-core (hyperthreaded) laptop with a 10GB JVM heap in about 8 hours.
As an omnivore, I find those “throw all the veggies on” pizzas to be much more satisfying than ones with 1–2 toppings. (I also don’t much like pizzas with just cheese or pepperoni.) Maybe other people similarly prefer them? I often find the veggie pizzas running out first at big gatherings, with extra cheese and meat slices left over. YMMV, etc.
IBM is revamping its performance review
Email Fridays Episode 1 – Welcome Emails
(I would edit my other post but it is now too old).

>Which hey, those are some pretty shitty situations, but why aren't they appearing in court when ordered?

Based on another post I made, it appears that it can happen because they aren't notified because the official process to notify them only goes so far and if they have an old address or some incorrect information, you may never receive the summons.
But it's strange to call June "weeks away", June is months away.
Defeating GeoIP VPN Spoofing: Delay-Based Location Verification for the Internet [pdf]
That, or it was stolen by an intelligence agency.
4x5 is a whole nother beast though. We're talking about SLRs and fixed-lens cameras. Usually you don't get any movements and very little options on that front unless you're using a TS-E.

Don't see any reason why the one I picked wouldn't be shot at F1.4.

Anyway, here's another random one that does have EXIF that shows what I mean. Just because you're shooting at F1.4 doesn't mean that everything is blown away.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/jasoncowellphoto/5534870906

I guess you can call if "fetishizing" a lens if you want but it's a very popular lens for a reason.
Location Library for Android
The main flaw with this is that relationships aren't an ordered set. I don't even know how I'd rate my relationships in order. Either a relationship works or it doesn't. I married the first person I found where our relationship just never stopped working, even after a few years of living together.

edit: It also ignores the fact that you yourself are going to change as you date people. Some of the relationships that didn't work out for me, didn't work out because I was terrible at being in a relationship, and that doesn't factor into the equation at all. It sort of presumes you're some perfect relationship oracle.

(which isn't to say that the math isn't interesting, because it is, I just think anyone that takes the math as an actual model to use in their life is being silly).