News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

_Wintermute

A number of the tube lines have large sections above ground.
Re:Frequently Asked Unicycling Questions on Tuesday December 02, 2025 @06:08AM (#46120029)
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.
In my experience R is king of happily chugging along spitting out nonsense results when it should have errored 100 lines ago.
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.
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.
Re:It's the Housing, Stupid on Monday August 18, 2025 @08:54AM (#44940057)
I don't see how I could ever afford to retire whilst still having to pay rent in the UK.
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.
Re:Honesty Boxes in Scotland (2024) on Thursday August 07, 2025 @11:02AM (#44825412)
The coachloads of Chinese tourists that I see every summer make me doubt this.
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.
Re:Rotring 600 Ballpoint Pen on Tuesday July 29, 2025 @06:19AM (#44721450)
You can get some very permanent water-proof inks. Platinum Carbon black is my favourite.
Re:You can't outrun a bad diet on Thursday July 24, 2025 @10:57AM (#44671490)
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.
Re:I'm Switching to Python and Actually Liking It on Wednesday July 16, 2025 @11:53AM (#44583667)
Dataclasses have the one massive benefit of not being an additional dependency.
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.

Re:Show HN: Rv, a Package Manager for R on Friday May 16, 2025 @01:09PM (#44007732)
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.

Re:I Don't Like NumPy on Thursday May 15, 2025 @04:42PM (#43999138)
R kinda sucks at anything that isn't a dataframe though.
Re:Redis is open source again on Thursday May 01, 2025 @01:59PM (#43861164)
This comment has inspired me to switch to Valkey, thanks.
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.

Re:Making a smart bike dumb so it works again on Wednesday April 23, 2025 @11:23AM (#43773223)
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.
Re:Big Book of R on Friday April 11, 2025 @09:49AM (#43653776)
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.
Re:Why do we need modules at all? on Friday April 04, 2025 @06:23AM (#43580276)
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.

Re:What went wrong with the Alan Turing Institute? on Thursday March 27, 2025 @11:14AM (#43494526)
I would argue a European PhD prepares you for research better than a US one. You're expected to hit the ground running with required prior research experience and you have no classes or teaching obligations which explains why they're typically 3-4 years long.
Re:Sweden is investing €104M to bring back printed textbooks on Thursday January 16, 2025 @03:52AM (#42723000)
I'm not sure which European country you're thinking about, but we had lockers, individual backpacks and heavy textbooks. I never used my locker because we didn't have enough time between lessons, so I just carried all my heavy textbooks for the day as did most people.
It's mentioned in the abstract and 45 times in the article. Most scientists don't use the brand name of a drug.
Re:Take the Pedals Off the Bike on Wednesday January 15, 2025 @09:29AM (#42711128)
Counter-steering is how bicycles steer, whether you're doing it consciously or not.
Re:Conda: A Package Management Disaster? on Saturday December 21, 2024 @07:38AM (#42479325)
> And the ones who do care about reproducibility are using R anyway

I worked in a pharma company with lots of R code and this comment is bringing up some PTSD. One time we spent weeks trying to recreate an "environment" to reproduce a set of results. Try installing a specific version of a package, and all the dependencies it pulls in are the latest version, whether or not they are compatible. Nobody actually records the package versions they used.

The R community are only now realising that reproducible environments are a good thing, and not everybody simply wants the latest version of a package. Packrat was a disaster, renv is slightly better.

Reminds me of the hysteria we had about drones shutting down an airport in the UK, with loads of reported sightings yet no evidence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gatwick_Airport_drone_incident
Re:Efficient Track Anything on Monday December 09, 2024 @06:34AM (#42365205)
The logic to detect and attempt to fix ID switches is unfortunately a huge part of multi-object tracking.
Re:Lush: My favorite small programming language on Thursday November 21, 2024 @03:56AM (#42202384)
True, but trying to wrap any of that into a function rather than simple scripts makes you delve into the ever-deprecated API for non-standard evaluation.
Re:Lush: My favorite small programming language on Wednesday November 20, 2024 @10:43AM (#42194909)
In my opinion R should thought of as an unbeatable graphical calculator, but an awful programming language.

Older »