wdkrnls (u/wdkrnls) - Readit News

wdkrnls commented on Generalized Sequential Probability Ratio Test for Families of Hypotheses [pdf] sites.stat.columbia.edu/j... · Posted by u/luu

measurablefunc · 22 days ago

Great. How do I use this in my life to make things better?

wdkrnls · 21 days ago

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.

wdkrnls commented on Babylon 5 is now free to watch on YouTube cordcuttersnews.com/babyl... · Posted by u/walterbell

conception · a month ago

Season one it was a traditional adventure of the week style show that was popular at the time and before. because having a multi season story arc was unheard of and still more or less is today so the first season was traditional TV and only when mildly successful did it have the ability to spread its wings. and it did so so well that it forced other shows like DS9 to also have seasonal story arcs.

wdkrnls · a month ago

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.

wdkrnls commented on Babylon 5 is now free to watch on YouTube cordcuttersnews.com/babyl... · Posted by u/walterbell

fao_ · a month ago

> Season one it was a traditional adventure of the week style show that was popular at the time and before. because having a multi season story arc was unheard of and still more or less is today so the first season was traditional TV and only when mildly successful did it have the ability to spread its wings. and it did so so well that it forced other shows like DS9 to also have seasonal story arcs.

Unfortunately incorrect! JMS had the entire plot and "bible" written out start to finish before the show was produced, and the show was approved based on that bible. It had all the room it planned for and needed at the start. There were even built-in "escape hatches" planned for if actors had to drop out (which happened to Michael O'Hare, unfortunately)

wdkrnls · a month ago

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.

wdkrnls commented on Why I Program in Lisp funcall.blogspot.com/2025... · Posted by u/ska80

Rendello · a year ago

The only software I use that I know runs a lisp is Hacker News.

wdkrnls · a year ago

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.

wdkrnls commented on Big Book of R bigbookofr.com/... · Posted by u/sebg

account-5 · a year ago

I've never used R before, why would functions be hidden on purpose? Sounds like a recipe for frustration.

wdkrnls · a year ago

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.

wdkrnls commented on Big Book of R bigbookofr.com/... · Posted by u/sebg

disgruntledphd2 · a year ago

trace subsumes browser, it's much more flexible and can be applied to library code without editing it.

wdkrnls · a year ago

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.

wdkrnls commented on Why I Program in Lisp funcall.blogspot.com/2025... · Posted by u/ska80

no_wizard · a year ago

Though these are minor complaints, there is a couple things I'd like to change about a Lisp language.

One is its the implicit function calls. For example, you'll usually see calls like this: `(+ 1 2)` which translates to 1 + 2, but I would find it more clear if it was `(+(1,2))` where you have a certain explicitness to it.

It doesn't stop me from using Lisp languages (Racket is fun, and I been investigating Clojure) but it took way too long for the implicit function stuff to grok in my brain.

My other complain is how the character `'` can have overloaded meaning, though I'm not entirely sure if this is implementation dependent or not

wdkrnls · a year ago

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.

wdkrnls commented on FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies thelibre.news/foss-infras... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

consteval · a year ago

> This isn't a consequence of capitalism.

Yes, it is. The fact we have welfare isn't a refutation of that, it's proof. The welfare is a bandaid over the fundamental flaws of capitalism. A purely capitalist system is so evil, it is unthinkable. Those people currently on welfare should, in a free labor market, die and rot in the street. We, collectively, decided that's not a good idea and went against that.

That's why the labor market, and truly all our markets, are not free. Free markets suck major ass. We all know it. Six year olds have no business being in coal mines, no matter how much the invisible hand demands it.

wdkrnls · a year ago

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...

wdkrnls commented on Why R is the best coding language for data journalism economist.com/graphic-det... · Posted by u/countrymile

kristofferg · a year ago

You are right - the language itself can be a bit messy. R’s advantage is the massive amount of packages available. Almost no matter what niche problem you are trying to solve - someone probably made a package for it. And if not all the functionality is there: you can just add.

wdkrnls · a year ago

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.

wdkrnls commented on Why R is the best coding language for data journalism economist.com/graphic-det... · Posted by u/countrymile

wodenokoto · a year ago

I don’t think R is conflating vectors and scalars. It straight up doesn’t let you access scalars.

Hot take: if you are programming in R you are probably using the wrong tool. If you are analyzing, munging, modeling, visualizing data or fitting/training models, you are probably using the right tool.

wdkrnls · a year ago

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?