Hacker News: wdkrnls

New comment by wdkrnls in "Economists Are Obsessed with "Job Creation." How about Less Work? (2017)"

wdkrnls — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 23:26:46 +0000

Last I checked China was doing pretty well. Soon they will have double the nuclear power plants of everyone else and already have a monopoly on rare earth mineral processing.

New comment by wdkrnls in "Generalized Sequential Probability Ratio Test for Families of Hypotheses [pdf]"

wdkrnls — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 00:40:24 +0000

Implement a statistical software suite that ubiquitously uses this framework instead of the usual hierarchical mixed modeling tools whose assumptions often don't match what experiments were actually done.

New comment by wdkrnls in "Babylon 5 is now free to watch on YouTube"

wdkrnls — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 10:03:04 +0000

From what I've read, DS9 was heavily based on the Babylon 5 Bible which was pitched by JMS to Paramount years before. You might charitably say DS9 was the Guix to the Nix of Babylon 5: Same core ideas mapped onto different story universes. The earlier B5 Bible apparently even had a changeling security officer which evolved into the "changeling net" plot shown in the pilot episode.

New comment by wdkrnls in "Babylon 5 is now free to watch on YouTube"

wdkrnls — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 09:47:09 +0000

I heard the original story with O'Hare was for Babylon 5 to blow up after an alien attack and for the Babylon 4 to be sent forward from the past to replace it. We saw hints for that in two different premonitions in season 1. That's a pretty big departure from the story we actually got.

New comment by wdkrnls in "Why I Program in Lisp"

wdkrnls — Sun, 13 Apr 2025 20:08:50 +0000

When I was in high school I learned AutoCAD and I remember that back then it was scripted in LISP. I'm not sure if that is still true.

New comment by wdkrnls in "Big Book of R"

wdkrnls — Sat, 12 Apr 2025 13:09:35 +0000

Computer scientists had this idea that some things should be public and some things private. Java takes this to the nth degree with it's public and private typing keywords. R just forces you to know the lib:::priv_fun versus lib::pub_fun trick. At best it's a signal for package end users to tell which functions they can rely on to have stable interfaces and which they can't. Unfortunately, with R's heavy use of generics it gets confusing for unwary users how developers work with the feature as some methods (e.g. different ways to summarize various kinds of standard data sets as you get with the summary generic or even the print generic) get exported and some don't with seemingly no rhyme or reason.

New comment by wdkrnls in "Big Book of R"

wdkrnls — Fri, 11 Apr 2025 19:01:54 +0000

Is there a way to trace an attribute to a function? I couldn't find one, but curious if it exists. I seemed blocked by the fact that trace seemed to expect a name as a character string. Some functions in base R have functions in their attributes which modify their behavior (e.g. selfStart). I ended up just copying the whole code locally and then naming it, but for a better interactive experience I really wish there was a way to pass a function object as I can with debug.

New comment by wdkrnls in "Why I Program in Lisp"

wdkrnls — Fri, 11 Apr 2025 15:11:06 +0000

R works exactly as you describe. You can type `+`(1, 2) and get 3 because in R everything that happens is a function call even if a few binary functions get special sugar so you can type 1 + 2 for them as well. The user can of course make their own of these if they wrap them in precents. For example: `%plus%` = function(a, b) { `+`(a, b)}. A few computer algebra systems languages provide even more expressivity like yacas and fricas. The later even has a type system.

New comment by wdkrnls in "FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies"

wdkrnls — Sat, 22 Mar 2025 15:36:56 +0000

You have a very different definition of free than I do. Free to me means that people enter into agreements voluntarily. It's hard to claim a market is free when it's participants have no other choice...

New comment by wdkrnls in "Why R is the best coding language for data journalism"

wdkrnls — Fri, 20 Dec 2024 13:16:16 +0000

Nope. R's advantage is that the language is extremely expressive and makes many things about it's implementation extremely transparent to it's users. The huge package count for a niche language is a direct result of that.

New comment by wdkrnls in "Why R is the best coding language for data journalism"

wdkrnls — Fri, 20 Dec 2024 13:10:59 +0000

Speak for yourself. Programming in R is amazingly expressive for prototyping. Its semantics are extremely lispy, yet it provides excellent support for fast numerics. It keeps me focusing on the problems I want to solve and provides me the tools to abstract them quickly to handle related problems. Meanwhile, python keeps forcing me to care about pesky implementation details which I don't care about on a first or even second or third pass. I really can't understand people who like python over R. Did you guys not read SICP?

New comment by wdkrnls in "Lush: My favorite small programming language"

wdkrnls — Sun, 24 Nov 2024 17:14:25 +0000

You must hate lisp/scheme then too, which has similar semantics as R. In that case books such as SICP would be lost on you.

New comment by wdkrnls in "Lush: My favorite small programming language"

wdkrnls — Sun, 24 Nov 2024 17:12:46 +0000

This is so far from my experience. For me, R codes do tend to skimp on polish so it takes longer to get to the initial figure, but that is made up for by enabling me to see the data from a much richer perspective (to some extent because I had to think harder about what the output meant) such that I can find all the bugs in the data and in the underlying experimental plan: the stuff which makes it clear all the commercial reports are mostly useless anyway because Garbage in -> Garbage out

New comment by wdkrnls in "Lush: My favorite small programming language"

wdkrnls — Sun, 24 Nov 2024 17:02:57 +0000

On the contrary, I find base R less arcane than the current de jour python libraries which copied it

New comment by wdkrnls in "Debugging Compiled Code for R with Positron"

wdkrnls — Sat, 02 Nov 2024 02:21:08 +0000

Tyler is actually using R for exactly what R and it's predecessor S were designed to do since the beginning. You can read more about it's history by googling John Chambers who helped develop S at Bell Labs.

New comment by wdkrnls in "Pollen: A publishing system written in Racket"

wdkrnls — Mon, 28 Oct 2024 23:35:02 +0000

Typesetting and typography are very different tasks as far as I can tell. Scheme typesetting of documents is best done with TeXmacs.

New comment by wdkrnls in "Forscape – A Language and Editor for Scientific Computation"

wdkrnls — Tue, 15 Oct 2024 22:20:29 +0000

TeXmacs can execute code too. Honestly, if it had 1/10 the community of Emacs, I would be using it for everything from running my window manager to driving my statistical simulations. It's already what Stallman keeps asking Emacs to become.

New comment by wdkrnls in "How I animate 3Blue1Brown [video]"

wdkrnls — Sat, 12 Oct 2024 15:04:35 +0000

Sometimes knowing how to do something isn't nearly as important as badly wanting to do something

New comment by wdkrnls in "Statisticians use a technique that leverages randomness to deal with the unknown"

wdkrnls — Sun, 06 Oct 2024 20:53:20 +0000

In other words, EM makes more sense. All this imputation stuff seems to me more like an effort to keep using obsolete modeling techniques.

New comment by wdkrnls in "Dance training superior to physical exercise in inducing brain plasticity (2018)"

wdkrnls — Thu, 03 Oct 2024 17:14:42 +0000

Or it could be a problem of seeking statistical detection of any difference whatsoever versus detecting a practically meaningful difference... a type III error (answering the wrong question).