_Wintermute

A number of the tube lines have large sections above ground.

A fixed wheel counts as a brake, though I've only seen the law in relation to bicycles which require 2 working brakes not sure how this applied to unicycles.

In my experience R is king of happily chugging along spitting out nonsense results when it should have errored 100 lines ago.

The increasing prevalence of non-standard evaluation in R packages was one of the major reasons I switched from R to python for my work. The amount of ceremony and constant API changes just to have something as an argument in a function drove me mad.

It's because you're in London. I have family in rural Cumbria with full fibre, yet none of the flats I've rented in London have availability.

I don't see how I could ever afford to retire whilst still having to pay rent in the UK.

If you've ever had to deal with the UK police as a victim of a crime, you'll quickly find out they're pretty useless at obtaining CCTV footage. I was asked to get it myself, to which the business who owned the CCTV told me they would only hand it to the police, so nothing happened.

The coachloads of Chinese tourists that I see every summer make me doubt this.

I think it was largely pushed by Phil Gaimon who was trying to get into the news to sell his new (at the time) book.

You can get some very permanent water-proof inks. Platinum Carbon black is my favourite.

Yep, at one point in my life I was consistently cycling for 30 hours a week and eating enough became a chore. So it's definitely possible, but it requires enough exercise that's essentially a full time job.

Dataclasses have the one massive benefit of not being an additional dependency.

The choice of groovy was unfortunate, but yet it still seems more popular than snakemake which I can only attribute to the nf-core set of curated workflows.

I have a dislike of nextflow because it submits 10s of thousands of separate jobs to our HPC scheduler which causes a number of issues, though they've now added support for array jobs which should hopefully solve that.

My biggest issue with R package management is version pinning. If I specify an older version of a package, R will fetch the latest versions of all its dependencies, regardless if they're compatible or not, which leads to manually chasing down and re-installing specific versions of dependencies and sub-dependencies one-by-one.

Microsoft's CRAN time machine helped solved this, but I think they've recently shut it down and I don't really trust Posit to not have a version behind a paywall.

R kinda sucks at anything that isn't a dataframe though.

This comment has inspired me to switch to Valkey, thanks.

They can invite whoever they want, but I think they will struggle to attract talent unless they actually start making some changes to make it a more attractive option rather than just assuming elsewhere is going to get worse.

I did a post-doc in France after my PhD in the UK. It was possibly worthwhile just for the experience, but the actual funding and research environment is not one I would recommend to my colleagues.

A 63 watt average must have been taking into account all the time you weren't pedalling, that's extremely low - you would struggle to ride into a slight breeze.

We tried plumber at work and ran into enough issues (memory leaks, difficulty wrangling JSON in R, poor performance) that I don't think I could recommend it.

Happens with R as well where everything gets dumped into a global namespace. It's a huge mess.

If you're lucky all functions will have a common prefix str_* or fct_*. If you're unlucky then you have to figure out which package has clobbered a standard library function, or the exact ordering of your package import statements you need for your code to run.

I would argue a European PhD prepares you for research better than a US one. You're expected to hit the ground running with required prior research experience and you have no classes or teaching obligations which explains why they're typically 3-4 years long.

Looks like it's staying: https://www.lfgss.com/conversations/401988/#comment17640529

I'm not sure which European country you're thinking about, but we had lockers, individual backpacks and heavy textbooks. I never used my locker because we didn't have enough time between lessons, so I just carried all my heavy textbooks for the day as did most people.

It's mentioned in the abstract and 45 times in the article. Most scientists don't use the brand name of a drug.

Counter-steering is how bicycles steer, whether you're doing it consciously or not.

And the ones who do care about reproducibility are using R anyway

I worked in a pharma company with lots of R code and this comment is bringing up some PTSD. One time we spent weeks trying to recreate an "environment" to reproduce a set of results. Try installing a specific version of a package, and all the dependencies it pulls in are the latest version, whether or not they are compatible. Nobody actually records the package versions they used.

The R community are only now realising that reproducible environments are a good thing, and not everybody simply wants the latest version of a package. Packrat was a disaster, renv is slightly better.

Reminds me of the hysteria we had about drones shutting down an airport in the UK, with loads of reported sightings yet no evidence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gatwick_Airport_drone_incident

The logic to detect and attempt to fix ID switches is unfortunately a huge part of multi-object tracking.

True, but trying to wrap any of that into a function rather than simple scripts makes you delve into the ever-deprecated API for non-standard evaluation.

In my opinion R should thought of as an unbeatable graphical calculator, but an awful programming language.