<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: condwanaland</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=condwanaland</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Fri, 19 Jun 2026 13:55:01 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=condwanaland" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by condwanaland in "Starfish by Peter Watts (1999)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Have not read this series (yet), but Watt's Blindsight is an absolute masterclass in literary sci-fi</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 11 Jun 2026 06:15:46 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48486826</link><dc:creator>condwanaland</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48486826</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48486826</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by condwanaland in "I design with Claude more than Figma now"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>In my experience, business people are chomping at the bit to build and manage the ops for their apps, but it's always an "IT Operating Model" that is thrown back at them</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 08 Jun 2026 05:44:42 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48441707</link><dc:creator>condwanaland</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48441707</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48441707</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by condwanaland in "Project Gutenberg – keeps getting better"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>SE is an amazing and wonderful resource</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 17 May 2026 05:13:55 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48166203</link><dc:creator>condwanaland</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48166203</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48166203</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by condwanaland in "What if database branching was easy?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>This is something that Palantir Foundry supports extremely well. Its data layer is built around the idea that anytime you're making a change, you make a branch, build on branch, only data you modified is copied to the branch, and then you can test it end to end on the branch.<p>Can't imagine doing it any other way</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 20 Apr 2026 21:38:32 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47841223</link><dc:creator>condwanaland</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47841223</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47841223</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by condwanaland in "Data Manipulation in Clojure Compared to R and Python"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Couldn't agree more. R and dplyrs ability to pass column names as unquoted objects actually reduces cognitive load for new people so much (pure anecdata, nothing to back this up except lots of teaching people).<p>And that's on top of the vastly simpler syntax compared to what's being shown here</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 24 Mar 2026 23:13:47 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47510915</link><dc:creator>condwanaland</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47510915</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47510915</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by condwanaland in "The Enterprise Context Layer"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Let's say that you want to know who your largest customer is, both by order value and volume. I could either:
1. Prompt my agent and deal with writing the prompt, waiting for the agent to sift through all the data (which would be massive), and pay the token costs, all of which has to be repeated everytime I want to answer this question, OR<p>2. I check my ontology for the answer, probably in a dashboard, and it takes 5 seconds. I have a link I can freely share around my enterprise and I haven't spent token costs.<p>Whats more, when I have sent my agent out to some tasks (go find out what revenue we're leaving on the table by not selling spot contracts to our biggest customers) my ontology gives me a few bits of data to validate the agents work against. For humans and AI to work together, they need the same context layer</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 15 Mar 2026 17:18:43 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47389516</link><dc:creator>condwanaland</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47389516</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47389516</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by condwanaland in "The Enterprise Context Layer"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I enjoyed reading this but felt like it missed a few of the points on why a lot of companies are indexing heavily on the context layer.<p>1. While AI is capable of driving massive value, chatbots are very rarely the solution<p>2. You need much more than this sort of text data to represent an enterprise. Timeseries, SAP (and other ERPs), and general relational data is part of building a knowledge graph, ontology, etc<p>3. Storing it the way this article presents makes it usable for agents, but not humans. Whereas the point of knowledge graph, ontology, etc is to create the same layer for both humans and AI to interact with</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 15 Mar 2026 07:51:53 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47385215</link><dc:creator>condwanaland</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47385215</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47385215</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by condwanaland in "Pandas 3.0"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Say I have a dataframe called 'penguins'<p>I can write code like:
penguin_sizes <- select(penguins, weight, height)<p>Here, weight and height are columns inside the dataframe. But I can refer to them as if they were objects in the environment (I., e without quotes) because the select function looks for them inside the penguins dataframe (it's first argument)<p>This is a very simple example but it's used extensively in some R paradigms</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 28 Jan 2026 19:27:41 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46800336</link><dc:creator>condwanaland</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46800336</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46800336</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by condwanaland in "Adventure 751 (1980)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Cannot recommend this book enough. Absolutely fascinating read</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 04 Jan 2026 00:28:26 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46483408</link><dc:creator>condwanaland</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46483408</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46483408</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by condwanaland in "Microservices Killed Our Startup. Monoliths Would've Saved Us"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The mistake here is having an architect who is not shipping product. Architects who's job it is to define 'rules' and 'patterns' without actually impending anything are almost always a bad idea. Just focus on shipping. Have at least one experienced engineer who can guide the development but don't give those decisions over to some 'architect' who is not even going to write 10 lines of code in your codebase</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 03 Jan 2026 03:11:51 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46472434</link><dc:creator>condwanaland</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46472434</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46472434</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by condwanaland in "R MCP Server"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I love R and am always excited about tools for R but I immediately get suspicious when I see things like:<p>> RMCP has been tested with real-world scenarios achieving 100% success rate:</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 19 Sep 2025 21:29:20 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45306870</link><dc:creator>condwanaland</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45306870</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45306870</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by condwanaland in "Every programming language has its 'killer' domain"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Possibly. I think R is actually easier to learn for people who have never studied or done programming before.<p>1. It's easier to get up and running as RStudio is much more 'batteries included' than other popular IDEs, it's harder to get into the case of multiple different python versions, and you install packages through the R interpreter rather than via pip at the command line<p>2. I would say R data analysis packages are easier to learn than the python equivalents. Because the dataframe is a native structure in R there has been a lot more packages that have tried alternative syntax approaches to try and find the 'optimal' one. Python has really only had pandas, polars, and pyspark (all of which have implemented their own data structures and therefore have focused more on performance than syntax)<p>3. This doesn't hold if you're studying a language to be a general purpose programmer. Then python is much better. Anything to avoid the hell of the R standard lib. But if you need to do a bit of coding to analyse data and you've never done any before, my vote would be for R.<p>However, these are thoughts from my own personal anecdotes rather than any pedagogical theory</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 18 May 2025 06:41:32 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44019460</link><dc:creator>condwanaland</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44019460</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44019460</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by condwanaland in "Every programming language has its 'killer' domain"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I strongly think that R has outgrown just having statistics as its killer feature. The killer feature of R is <i>data analysis</i><p>I have yet to see any software that rivals dplyr, data.table, and ggplot2 in the balance of power and ease of use. It also has all the auxiliary packages you need to fetch your data (DBI, httr, rvest), model it if necessary (parsnip, caret) and visualise it (ggplot2, plotly, shiny)<p>I know python is more popular here but I would choose R in a heartbeat 19 times out of 20</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 18 May 2025 06:13:55 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44019352</link><dc:creator>condwanaland</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44019352</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44019352</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by condwanaland in "Show HN: Rv, a Package Manager for R"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Very cool! Are you planning for there to be a corresponding R package that exposes the high level commands? The popularity of the usethis package really showed the power of keeping people within the R interpreter rather than going back and forth with the terminal. This is so important for a language like R that has so many users without much CS training</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 16 May 2025 22:19:30 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44010271</link><dc:creator>condwanaland</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44010271</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44010271</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by condwanaland in "Show HN: Nissan's Leaf app doesn't have a home screen widget so I made my own"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>A huge number of people. They're a very well selling car</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 14 Apr 2025 07:47:32 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43679006</link><dc:creator>condwanaland</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43679006</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43679006</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by condwanaland in "The End of Sierra as We Knew It, Part 1: The Acquisition"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Always thrilled to see another nethack player in the wild!<p>Been playing on and off for 20 years and have only managed a single ascension in that time!</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 05 Apr 2025 04:58:11 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43590881</link><dc:creator>condwanaland</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43590881</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43590881</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by condwanaland in "Younger cannabis users have reduced brain function, finds largest study yet"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Drugs or not, your comment was rude and condescending. And trying to brush it off as people being 'sensitive' doesn't change it being rude and condescending</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 31 Jan 2025 04:49:32 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42884788</link><dc:creator>condwanaland</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42884788</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42884788</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by condwanaland in "Show HN: Musoq – Query Anything with SQL Syntax (Git, C#, CSV, Can DBC)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Totally agree. PySpark, dplyr, or polars any day</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 21 Dec 2024 18:53:28 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42481434</link><dc:creator>condwanaland</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42481434</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42481434</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by condwanaland in "React 19"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>How are you measuring 'nice'?  How are you measuring 'performant'?<p>My assumption would be that if you haven't seen anything, even from the creator, then you just have different expectations to the people who do get value from React</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 06 Dec 2024 03:16:14 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42335898</link><dc:creator>condwanaland</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42335898</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42335898</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by condwanaland in "New Zealand scientists discover ghostly 'spookfish'"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I was a Masters student when Brit was finishing off her PhD. Awesome scientist and very cool person. So glad to see her continuing in this space!<p>NIWA is also just a very cool place in general. Have really liked everyone I've met from there.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 30 Sep 2024 06:00:03 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41693999</link><dc:creator>condwanaland</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41693999</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41693999</guid></item></channel></rss>