kkoncevicius

Here goes my cynical take - maybe you are trying to use HN as a discussion forum? I think it is intended to be used for link aggregation. And cynical comments sometimes can be very helpful. You read some promotion of an app and the comment says "tried it, didn't work, you can achieve the same with notepad, would not recommend". What a useful reply! Hide the link and move on.

Thanks! I am trying it now, quite nice, but it does a bit too much. Also the hidden posts are still left as empty lines, so it's not a real "hide" as implemented by HN.

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25024132

I am not saying he should, just an observation about high quality of the text.

But also to your question - it's not the quantity of readers that matters. Reaching the right people, for whom this text will not just be an afternoon entertainment read, is more important.

You can put titles, comments, and tags on the same line if you want.

I just don't understand these tools. If someone stores bookmarks - why not put them into a text file - one line per bookmark, and then search with grep.

Feeding on anger so that readers engage with you seems to be one the principle ways modern media operates. They cover Trump because their viewers get mad which translates into clicks which translates into ad revenue. I think making people hate Trump and at the same time keep talking about Trump is the business strategy here.

This is also Chomsky's position from back when he was talking about the Crimea crisis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iq5IlDB-Ago

Don't do anything on your own, go to a physiotherapist. You can start doing exercises for the wrong group of muscles and other muscles will then start to compensate leading to more serious problems. "neck pain" is not specific enough for any recommendations. The best non-specific advice is to change your sitting position frequently and take breaks.

I was very interested in the "But" link but it lead to page not found.

I store very few books on principle, and only have around 10. Only books that are worth re-reading get into the "library". Typically one book per topic. The book I enjoy re-reading the most is Oxford's collection of essays, and imagine this one will stay forever.

On one hand I totally agree - Google is becoming unusable for any refined specific searches, if you use any SEO-enhanced keyword you mostly get nonsense.

But on the other hand I am thinking - Google is not stupid, they know what they doing. Maybe this kind of search is a good fit for the majority of the less-tech-savvy people, and only audience here on HN think it's bad.

Can you give more context for the "wise men in boats" idea?

In my opinion we are bad at deciding what knowledge is important and what ought to be forgotten. I leave this to my subconscious. If I forget something that means I wasn't using it anyway, why try to artificially retain a piece knowledge?

So my strategy is to work first and learn second. When I encounter a roadblock I try o learn something new, but in most cases I then quickly forget about it soon. This might happen several times over. Once I had to learn about unix file permissions, I knew all the commands and numbers and what they meant and it all made sense. But now I only remember `chmod +x` and that there is a command named `chown`. This satisfies for my day-to-day needs and is enough so that I can re-learn the thing if necessary.

And for the general context that are important to know in detail I found that teaching is a good way to remember and reinforce. I teach a course every year and every year I am surprised how much I've forgotten. But it quickly comes back after I start preparing materials for the class.

When I was young I used to think that you can learn a thing once and then remember. Now I know that, speaking strictly for myself, this is not the case.

A fitting quote:

"The error in depicting critics of animal experiments as anti-science becomes clear when one begins to question the extent to which the purported scientific aims of these experiments are actually accomplished. For then it turns out that the experiments and not their critics are unscientific. Those experiments that cannot be justified on scientific grounds can be no more justified than the frivolous killing and torturing of animals. In fact they are even less capable of justification, since such experiments block more fruitful uses of scientific resources."

-- Deborah Mayo

Everyone is quick to talk bad about the "ultra rich". Ultra rich have means, they are intelligent, they have advisors, and they know how to adapt. If economy turned towards deflation those ultra-rich would liquidize their assets, store money, and benefit from that instead. When two opposing processes can benefit the rich I would say it's not in the process but in how you react to the undergoing changes and how you adapt.

I don't know, my hair stylist increased the price for a haircut 2 times during the past 2 years. She isn't rich by any means. People who work and can set their prices adjust fast. People who depends on salaries set by others lag behind, but eventually even the government wages catch up. What never catches up are the savings. If you had 10,000$ before inflation - that will be worth less after without any bouncing back.

I don't think we disagree.

That's relative. If food gets more expensive - that money goes to someone, someone who is producing or selling food. Prices cannot increase without someone at the same time making more money.

Say we trade and I give you an apple. In return you give me a note saying "this note is a proof wodenokoto owns me one apple and can be exchange for one apple at any time". What good does making this note depreciate over time serve, except as a pressure for me to demand you return the apple as soon as possible?

It acts as a mechanism which nudges me to lend less apples overall. If inflation is good, why not ramp it up to 200%? At that level it's clear that nobody would accept money and barter would take place instead. And my thinking goes that it is also bad at those lower percentages, except to a lesser degree. I don't see how it can suddenly turn to positive at, say 10%.

The things is that markets adapt but lag behind. For a while the old prices are still in place while the money is being printed. Then, slowly, the market "notices" that the amount of money increased so the prices readjust. While the prices readjust - everything becomes more expensive. Your haircut is more expensive - so the hair stylists salary catches up. Your bread becomes more expensive so the farmers that produce flour also have their salaries catch up. Everything eventually catches up, except for the amounts of money that were allocated to savings.

The best one-sentence description of inflation I've heard is: inflation is a hidden tax on savings. People who save money are hurt the most. It's as if the newly printed money is generated by taking a bit from anyone according to how much cash he/she has stored away.

I think this one is overblown. If Gates wanted to learn about viruses all the worlds bleeding edge experts are in his reach. I would be charitable and assume he took advantage of that. If so he can be a lot more educated about the subject than any doctor.

Wait here. The book is about how we can make this pandemic be the last. But how, what lessons have we learned? In my country now majority of people are vaccinated, a lot of others recovered, and currently covid cases are highest they have ever been. Just lucky this variant is milder but other than that seems like nothing we did worked. We knew it is coming and no country was able to stop it from breaching the borders and simply spreading.

This is a book, a long task, which means it was probably almost finished before this new covid wave. I wonder if the book will not look silly once it comes out.

There were many similar threads on HN in the past, and my recommendation is always the same: "The problems of philosophy" by Bertrand Russell

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/5827/5827-h/5827-h.htm

I read it recently and didn't like it that much. 1/3 of the book is author praising himself for what he had accomplished, another 1/3 are success stories from his patients and one-sided presentation of research that agrees with his points. The rest 1/3 of the book I found interesting.

As many modern books - it suffers from lack of focus; my opinion.

Tangentially related, but I re-iterated the style of my "simple text-based website" a few times. During this period I noticed that once I find a design that looks slick - it gets too familiar after a couple of weeks and then looses it's "charm" and all the other sites I read suddenly appear more readable. One such time I stumbled upon a very clean website [1] and thought to myself how good it looked. After inspecting the style it turned out that it only centered the text, reduced the size of the headers, and increased the line height; didn't even bother to declare font-family as serif or sans. And that's what I ended up using too. It gets boring, as all the other styles did, but having it at that level of minimalism has its own charms, so I am no longer adjusting anything.

Another, similar point, is that when the content is good - the style get's ignored. As an example, I read these [2] [3] from start to finish without distracting myself, and enjoyed the read. Didn't even notice that they are in a plain `txt` style, and when I did - it wasn't an issue.

Basically what I am saying is that people can pay too much attention on style, and it gets overrated. At least in my opinion.

[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20210614170925/https://www.gtf.i...

[2]: https://netfuture.org/2001/Nov1501_125.html

[3]: http://fmwww.bc.edu/repec/bocode/t/transint.html

This depends on what you are using R for. Tidyverse is focused on handling data.frame objects and everything that comes with them. Even ggplot2 uses a data.frame as a default input. And tidyverse has a competitor - data.table, which can be substituted instead (given that you are familiar with base R).

However, some data are better suited to be represented in the form of matrices. Putting matrix-like data in a data.frame is silly, since performance will suffer and you would have to convert it back and forth for many matrix-friendly operations like PCA, tSNE, etc. The creator of data.table shares this opinion [1]. And similar opinions are generally given by people who are familiar with problems that fall outside the data.frame model [2].

[1]: https://twitter.com/mattdowle/status/1037949621773844480?lan...

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Objw9Tvhb4&t=225s

In practice the difference is almost non-existent, unless you start doing assignments within function calls, which is a popular style among some R stars, like Martin Machler [1]. But on the other hand some of them resolve to just always use "=" everywhere, including one of R's creators - Ross Ihaka [2].

Anyhow, explaining the difference at that part of the tutorial is not easy, so I chose to omit it for now. But might introduce it later, along with "<<-" and "->>", probably after describing closures.

[1]: https://github.com/cran/diptest/blob/master/R/dipTest.R#L37

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=88TftllIjaY&t=2101s

I use R with Vim. Usually the R script file is open on top and there is a :terminal buffer with R running below. And I use a small vim-plugin [1] for sending commands from the editor to the REPL.

This has a few advantages, major being that you can run any language with a dynamic REPL this way, without changing your setup. Or, you can even have two files, written in two different languages, open side by side with a corresponding REPLs running beneath each of them. The downside of course is that you miss on auto-completion and other integrations like that. These are not impossible, but you would have to torture your Vim setup quite a bit in order to implement them.

[1]: https://github.com/karoliskoncevicius/vim-sendtowindow

Defence mechanism defines how a person deals with stress and anxiety [1].

For example one common defence mechanism among younger intellectual types is rationalisation [2]. A person might get asked why they don't have children and respond with something like "I don't have the money, today children are so expensive", or "I enjoy my free time too much to be bothered with children", or "there are already too many humans on the planet, I don't want to make the problem worse", etc. But in their subconscious the fact everyone around them starts having children while they don't might silently be causing anxiety. When a person gets older such rationalisations can break down, i.e. "I enjoy my free time too much" might not work when you are 35 and start to feel lonely, so the stress that was once suppressed by a defence mechanism rises up.

That's just my layman's understanding of it.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defence_mechanism

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationalization_(psychology)