Hacker News: _Wintermute

New comment by _Wintermute in "Tube trains could navigate the Underground using the rules of Quantum Physics"

_Wintermute — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 11:09:54 +0000

A number of the tube lines have large sections above ground.

New comment by _Wintermute in "Frequently Asked Unicycling Questions"

_Wintermute — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 11:08:39 +0000

A fixed wheel counts as a brake, though I've only seen the law in relation to bicycles which require 2 working brakes not sure how this applied to unicycles.

New comment by _Wintermute in "Python is not a great language for data science"

_Wintermute — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 11:11:45 +0000

In my experience R is king of happily chugging along spitting out nonsense results when it should have errored 100 lines ago.

New comment by _Wintermute in "Python is not a great language for data science"

_Wintermute — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 11:06:09 +0000

The increasing prevalence of non-standard evaluation in R packages was one of the major reasons I switched from R to python for my work. The amount of ceremony and constant API changes just to have something as an argument in a function drove me mad.

New comment by _Wintermute in "UK full fibre availability rises to cover 81% of UK premises"

_Wintermute — Sun, 09 Nov 2025 23:25:21 +0000

It's because you're in London. I have family in rural Cumbria with full fibre, yet none of the flats I've rented in London have availability.

New comment by _Wintermute in "It's the Housing, Stupid"

_Wintermute — Mon, 18 Aug 2025 12:54:33 +0000

I don't see how I could ever afford to retire whilst still having to pay rent in the UK.

New comment by _Wintermute in "Facial recognition vans to be rolled out across police forces in England"

_Wintermute — Thu, 14 Aug 2025 09:23:36 +0000

If you've ever had to deal with the UK police as a victim of a crime, you'll quickly find out they're pretty useless at obtaining CCTV footage. I was asked to get it myself, to which the business who owned the CCTV told me they would only hand it to the police, so nothing happened.

New comment by _Wintermute in "Honesty Boxes in Scotland (2024)"

_Wintermute — Thu, 07 Aug 2025 15:02:54 +0000

The coachloads of Chinese tourists that I see every summer make me doubt this.

New comment by _Wintermute in "Tour de France confronts a new threat: Are cyclists using tiny motors?"

_Wintermute — Tue, 29 Jul 2025 13:17:28 +0000

I think it was largely pushed by Phil Gaimon who was trying to get into the news to sell his new (at the time) book.

New comment by _Wintermute in "Rotring 600 Ballpoint Pen"

_Wintermute — Tue, 29 Jul 2025 10:19:33 +0000

You can get some very permanent water-proof inks. Platinum Carbon black is my favourite.

New comment by _Wintermute in "Diet, not lack of exercise, drives obesity, a new study finds"

_Wintermute — Thu, 24 Jul 2025 14:57:15 +0000

Yep, at one point in my life I was consistently cycling for 30 hours a week and eating enough became a chore. So it's definitely possible, but it requires enough exercise that's essentially a full time job.

New comment by _Wintermute in "I'm switching to Python and actually liking it"

_Wintermute — Wed, 16 Jul 2025 15:53:52 +0000

Dataclasses have the one massive benefit of not being an additional dependency.

New comment by _Wintermute in "Nextflow: System for creating scalable, portable, reproducible workflows"

_Wintermute — Wed, 16 Jul 2025 10:32:55 +0000

The choice of groovy was unfortunate, but yet it still seems more popular than snakemake which I can only attribute to the nf-core set of curated workflows.

I have a dislike of nextflow because it submits 10s of thousands of separate jobs to our HPC scheduler which causes a number of issues, though they've now added support for array jobs which should hopefully solve that.

New comment by _Wintermute in "Show HN: Rv, a Package Manager for R"

_Wintermute — Fri, 16 May 2025 17:09:39 +0000

My biggest issue with R package management is version pinning. If I specify an older version of a package, R will fetch the latest versions of all its dependencies, regardless if they're compatible or not, which leads to manually chasing down and re-installing specific versions of dependencies and sub-dependencies one-by-one.

Microsoft's CRAN time machine helped solved this, but I think they've recently shut it down and I don't really trust Posit to not have a version behind a paywall.

New comment by _Wintermute in "I don't like NumPy"

_Wintermute — Thu, 15 May 2025 20:42:17 +0000

R kinda sucks at anything that isn't a dataframe though.

New comment by _Wintermute in "Redis is open source again"

_Wintermute — Thu, 01 May 2025 17:59:37 +0000

This comment has inspired me to switch to Valkey, thanks.

New comment by _Wintermute in "EU's von der Leyen invites scientists, researchers to make Europe their home"

_Wintermute — Wed, 30 Apr 2025 11:03:15 +0000

They can invite whoever they want, but I think they will struggle to attract talent unless they actually start making some changes to make it a more attractive option rather than just assuming elsewhere is going to get worse.

I did a post-doc in France after my PhD in the UK. It was possibly worthwhile just for the experience, but the actual funding and research environment is not one I would recommend to my colleagues.

New comment by _Wintermute in "Making a smart bike dumb so it works again"

_Wintermute — Wed, 23 Apr 2025 15:23:44 +0000

A 63 watt average must have been taking into account all the time you weren't pedalling, that's extremely low - you would struggle to ride into a slight breeze.

New comment by _Wintermute in "Big Book of R"

_Wintermute — Fri, 11 Apr 2025 13:49:56 +0000

We tried plumber at work and ran into enough issues (memory leaks, difficulty wrangling JSON in R, poor performance) that I don't think I could recommend it.

New comment by _Wintermute in "Why do we need modules at all? (2011)"

_Wintermute — Fri, 04 Apr 2025 10:23:14 +0000

Happens with R as well where everything gets dumped into a global namespace. It's a huge mess.

If you're lucky all functions will have a common prefix str_* or fct_*. If you're unlucky then you have to figure out which package has clobbered a standard library function, or the exact ordering of your package import statements you need for your code to run.