HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

vhhn

43 karma · joined December 9, 2017

submissionscomments
vhhn··on Like digging 'your own grave': The translators grappling with losing work to AI
Me too. Training a neural net of this scale is basically a lossy compression and promting just an interpolation of the data. But explain this to lawyers and courts...
vhhn··on Like digging 'your own grave': The translators grappling with losing work to AI
Anyone else worries that by contributing to open source software these days one is also digging his/her own grave?
vhhn··on Visopsys: OS maintained by a single developer since 1997
Or Linux
vhhn··on Big Book of R
There are so many options to emded R in any kind of system. Thanks to the C API, there are connectors for any if the traditional language. There is also RServe and plumber for inter-process interaction. Managing dependencies is also super easy.

My employer is using R to crunch numbers enbeded in a large system based on microservices.

The only thing to keep in mind is that most people writing R are not programmers by trade so it is good to have one person on the project who can refactor their code from time to time.

vhhn··on LibreOffice still kicking at 40, now with browser tricks and real-time collab
Latvian? I've always thought OnlyOffice is developed in Russia.
vhhn··on Debugging Compiled Code for R with Positron
Unlike many other languages, R has a native/built-in tabular data structure. So when your data have tabular structure R is by far the best glue for building pipes between external libreries. If the data fits in RAM it literally doesn't have to leave the data.table object throughout the whole pipeline (including all the cleaning and transformations).

The only meaningful alternative I see is Python with maybe Polars or DuckDB.

vhhn··on Enhancing R: The Vision and Impact of Jan Vitek's MaintainR Initiative
We use embedded R in production in a way some other companies would use Python and I can say having a better compiler would definitely help.

Even if most people use R interactively, having contributers working on compiler has many positive spillovers for the language.

Also note that the R code running behind the scenes of your scripts (powering the functions of your favourite packages) is quite a different language, using less dynamic features. This is where a better compiler would always be appreciated.

vhhn··on Atari 800XL Remake
Fun story.

My first computer too. Got it from my uncle without any manuals, we spend a whole afternoon writing down a code of a game from a magazine letter by letter. We thought we will just press the "Start" functional key on the right side. To our surprise, sadly, absolutely nothing happened! After few more hours, my dad came home and it took him few guesses to finally type "RUN" in the console...

vhhn··on Older iPhones bricked for being too outdated, locking users from data [video]
Exactly my experience. I have never bought another Apple device since then.
vhhn··on Doctests in R
There are still several areas where R beats Python: tabular data crunching, data analysis (plotting, stats), finance (econometrics etc...) but it's less and less obvious.
vhhn··on Mapy.cz – Lesser Known but Awesome Maps
Mapy.cz even used to have a great Symbian client with navigation and all, very low battery drain. It was awasome.
vhhn··on Health care is turning into a consumer product
There are several factors that make healthcare a specific type of product that laissez-faire markets fail to efficiently produce by nature:

* tight connection to insurance

* typical consumer-producer relation relation broken into consumer(patient)-prescriber(doctor)-producer-payer(insurance or government)

* large externalities

These factors led to health care being provided by the public sector in most of the countries.

vhhn··on Darling – Run Mac apps on Linux
> that doesn’t randomly crash after 30 minutes

that rules out any Adobe product :)

vhhn··on The science of visual data communication: what works
This an amazing resource. Thanks!
vhhn··on Apple broke up with me
Actually, all of them (kdeconnect, firefox, nextcloud) have pretty good Android clients
vhhn··on Ask HN: What you up to? (Who doesn't want to be hired?)
consider starting a family :-)
vhhn··on R, OpenMP, MKL, Disaster
> OpenBLAS is incompatible with application threads

R is single-threaded.

vhhn··on Lambdas as values in Excel
I think parent comment was referring to the M-code [0]

[0](https://www.howtoexcel.org/power-query/m-code/)

vhhn··on Groundhog: Addressing the Threat That R Poses to Reproducible Research
There are two camps in the R world - tidyverse and base-R (tiniverse).

Its not a coincidence that the author gives an example from the tidyverse ecosystem. Authors and users of tidyverse value other things like consistency and new features over API stability and backward compatility. The base-R ecosystem is actually very stable and so the original package manager is very simple.

With R spreading out from the academic environment and with many new authors breaking their packages' APIs we observe new attempts to solve the issues with dependencies (such as renv or https://rsuite.io)

vhhn··on Logistic regression from scratch
I see. But I think after demeaning X, beta0 will just have a special meaning... log odds of the average case. Nothing more.
vhhn··on Logistic regression from scratch
You don't want to demean your dependent (response) binary variable. So you almost always want to keep beta0 to control for any imbalance in your dependent var.
vhhn··on Rsuite – R development and data science platform
Hi Wit, you guys do a great job to make R ready for deployment in production.

What do you think of the new renv package?

vhhn··on Linux apps that run anywhere
I was surprised when VSCode snap told me that I should start using different snap to install new versions if VSCode and that my settings would be kept. And it did. So there is some way to respect users settings across snaps at least
vhhn··on GNU Octave 5.1.0
m[x,] is for interactive use

If you write a function and need stable behavior use m[x,, drop = FALSE]. Problem solved.

No need of tideverse (which comes with its own surprises).

vhhn··on Why Jupyter is data scientists’ computational notebook of choice
RStudio has a server mode as well
vhhn··on Advantages of Using R Notebooks Instead of Jupyter Notebooks (2017)
Also vim editing is restricted to editor window in the current session. So you can't paste from registers in console or in other RStudio sessions.

But its still much better experience to use RStudio markdown than Jupyter for me.

vhhn··on Introduction to R Programming
the data.table way:

mydt[, newvar := oldvar1/oldvar2]

I could not resist.