_deh

Formidable argument.

This line of thought seems to rely on existence and verified existence being co-extensional (if not equivalent). Perhaps Kurt Gödel showed us otherwise.

It's an excellent list. A little amusing as Dennett's own debating style is a touch more robust than this might suggest. Though in all fairness, if it's him vs. another philosopher of similar standing, both with subtle and complex positions built up over 40+ year careers, working through steps 1 - 3 might lengthen the discussion somewhat.

To expand on the free point - it's not just that SAS and SPSS have a price tag. You're then supposed to pay for a load of bolt-on modules. The extreme case is if you want to do decision trees in SAS, they've made a commercial decision that you must be doing some kind of 'Enterprise-Grade Data Mining', and therefore need to pay their 5-figure price tag rather than their 4-figure price tag.

I think this has been a big barrier to any sort of package ecosystem to rival CRAN. Even if your entire target audience has SAS or SPSS, if your new package depended on one or more of those modules, it's going to cost some of your prospective users hard cash to run it. Whereas R just installs the dependencies for you.

Agree entirely. Academics led and industry followed.

SAS a bit, but as another comment notes, nothing like CRAN. SPSS not at all, at best you could publish some sort of script.

Yup, my first thought too. Though presumably different roots - player and pliers. There's also another stringr (crowdsourced video content platform) and caret (text editing for Chrome).

That could make for an interesting filter bubble

I've found Evernote's web clipper to be a good replacement for that same process.

This starts with something on measure theory: http://www.metacademy.org/graphs/concepts/bayesian_parameter...

'Big learning'

Gorgeous. I'll throw in mentions for two more, both in London - Peckham Library and the Reading Room at the British Museum.

I remember my German teacher struggling to get the class to remember Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte (admittedly two words). So she taught us Vierwaldstätterseedampfschiffgesellschaftskapitänsmützensternlein instead. After that Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte was easy.

Lovely piece of work.

So, doing things that don't scales?

'Au contraire, mon ami, it is you and your programs that suck' retorted some languages. Though in fairness I think there was as much comic hyperbole as grating condescension.

It looks like they released it yesterday

I suspect he is the presenter. But agree totally - the tone of the talk works 100% better.

Agree entirely, an excellent read. Fiercely imaginative blend of sci-fi, religion, time travel, horror, Keats & Chaucer.

Very nice indeed. My team do statistical work, usually delivered in Excel, and we're going to be focused on automation / productivity quite heavily in the next few months. I need to put this through its paces a bit more than putting 'Hello World' in A1 - but it raises the tantalising prospect of a bunch of R and VBA work turning into a bunch of R and Python work.

Great read

Nice. Reading about an exit intent algorithm - and then a bit later triggering one - made me smile.

Leaving the gratuitous sexism to one side briefly - a Black Tie Rave... 'champagne and caviar paired with glowsticks'... I ask you. And from the city that gave the world house music.

Marketing are claiming a 91.3x.

Phrased with admirable restraint:

"The Swift parallel scripting language web is experiencing heavy load due to Apple's announcement of a new language by the same name. We'll have a raft of new web servers online shortly to handle this trafic. Please check back in a few hours! -- The Swift team..."

Here's another paper that's relevant to this topic: http://www.qubitproducts.com/sites/default/files/pdf/most_wi.... And discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7287665

Excellent - I don't know what yet, but something around here is in for a "hodgepodge brute" designation this afternoon.

This is good as well: http://www.win-vector.com/blog/2012/07/minimal-version-contr...

A ton is £100, you're thinking of an Archer.