Viewing profile — wdkrnls

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.

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 experim…

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 Babylo…

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 tha…

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.

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 …

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 st…

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 ca…

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 h…

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 n…

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 fo…

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.

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 dat…

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

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 help…

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

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 simulatio…

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

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

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…

This looks quite promising to me. I've loved using TXR in the past for such functionality. However, I would really rather have the TXR pattern language as a library embedded inside…

I've used this at work. It's very polished. I wish Linux had something this clean and simple to use. Honestly, I would prefer less UI, though. I just want something that works with…

As someone who is a data analyst, I am constantly reminded of the huge amount of necessary context needed to trust results from any analysis. I know that I lack some of that contex…

How does this compare with ugrep? I know that does many of these things while sticking with C++.

Has anyone looked at writing a script to transform those rules for yacas? Making yacas 94% as good as Mathematica at integration sounds like a worthy goal considering how easy it i…