rnadna

I think the answer re tables is the meta-answer for linux generally: copy somebody else who has solved the problem. The Apple IOS-OSX dichotomy comes to mind as something to ape.

I fall into a similar misdirected-focus trap, but mine is simpler: I waste an embarrassing amount of time in editing the wrong damned file. After a sequence of small tweaks that yield no change in the results, I make a huge change and see nothing, and then realize that I've done it yet again. I need to write a vim macro that blanks the screen every few minutes, displaying the message "are you SURE this is the right file?"

The journal owns the copyright, not the author.

Re "deprivation ... from everybody"...

I was told once that the typical paper in my field gets only two serious readers, beyond the reviewers. (The joke is that it gets only two, including three reviewers.)

Of course, it is impossible to know who has read a paper, and that may explain why I've never seen the number written down. Still, it's easy to count citations. In my field, strong papers get perhaps a dozen citations. My guess is that no more than a quarter of citations indicates a thorough reading, so we indeed get a readership that could be counted on one hand.

For an author, a big factor is page charges. A popular [society, noncommercial] journal that I use has a special deal for providing content to readers for free. It "only" costs 3K. At that rate, the one or two potential readers who lack a university subscription could just phone me and I could buy them a ticket to visit, where I could explain the work in person.

I downloaded the new version, and tried it on a docx file that a colleague had sent me. In MSword, the file has 24 pages. In LibreOffice, it seems to have a bit over 5 pages. No error message, no dialog box ... it just gets to a certain string ($O_2$, expressed in latex format) and stops. If not for the fact that I have MSword, I'd email back to my colleague and ask her what the heck kind of a draft manuscript she was sending.

Although I use the Excel copy quite a lot (for grading), I have yet to see the Word copy function properly in a professional document of any realistic complexity.

I know, I should report the bug, but the material I'm looking at is under submission to a scientific journal, and will therefore be private until it may be published.

Security of data is a moral concern in some circles (e.g. academics outside the USA are quite wary of the Patriot Act) and a legal one in others (e.g. privacy of medical and financial information). Some jurisdictions have specific laws about certain types of data not being hosted across a border. These things may be disagreeable to some, but they certainly are not delusions.

Mathematica provides symbolic computation, R does not.

In case it's of any interest, below is code in the R language that produces time-series graphs for two provinces in Canada.

    fluPlot <- function(country="ca", regions="Nova.Scotia")
    {
        url <- sprintf("http://www.google.org/flutrends/intl/en_us/%s/data.txt", country)
        d <- read.csv(url, skip=11, header=TRUE)
        n <- length(regions)
        t <- as.POSIXct(d[["Date"]])
        for (i in 1:n) {
            if (i == 1) {
                plot(t, d[[regions[i]]], xlab="", ylab=regions[i], type='l', col=i)
                grid()
            } else {
                lines(t, d[[regions[i]]], col=i)
            }
        }
        legend("top", col=1:n, lwd=par('lwd'), legend=regions, bg='white')
    }
    par(mar=c(2, 2, 2, 2), mgp=c(2, 0.7, 0))
    fluPlot("ca", c("Ontario", "Nova.Scotia"))

Me too. And I didn't realize that made me old, until scanning this thread. I guess time flies.

Not only is this a great thing (well, everything about github is pretty great) but now I know that the funny icon can be called "breadcrumb".

Fifteen years ago, people would have found this interesting.

It might be my eyes, but the video is too blurry to be of much use. A couple of paragraphs would have been preferable.

I've not used mathematica in a long time, and I forgot how crazy-ugly the graphs are. The cartoonish legend in the Out[18] graph is a case in point, almost a lesson in what not to do, in terms of distracting from the content.

The syntax ain't pretty either, but one does get used to that, of course.

PS. opminion is right: the unit weaving is pretty strange. But the content of the posting is interesting enough to make me think "oh well, it's just another yank" and keep reading.

They worked in Nova Scotia, Canada.

Countries rely on ethical breaches by the military, so these 'moral' robots are a non-starter.

A better title: "How paperbacks transformed the way people read". Americans were late in the game. The protagonist in the essay was a copycat. Apart from the title, though, the essay is excellent.

If the existence of both GNOME and KDE has held back developers who are reluctant to halve their user community or double their coding efforts, then the collapse of GNOME may be a good thing.

I wonder if others have scaled back on the "meaningfulness" of file names. I name a lot of my files (and directories) 01, 02, 03, etc (with suffixes according to meaning) and then I have a local README file that lists the contents of each of these.

I find it this scheme handy for scientific work in which the files are often multiple attempts to solve a problem. It saves me from writing file names like "solution" and "solution_method2" and "solution_method2_with_bug_fix" etc. The README format gives me tons of space to write comments (and cross-reference other work), while the filename, incrementing from version to version, is a sort of diary stamp.

This works for directories too. I tend to go only 2 directories deep on a given project. The top level is for the task, e.g. a calculation or a figure for a paper I'm writing, and the second is for a sequence of approaches to that task.

With this scheme, I focus on README files and not names in a directory tree. Colleagues who have tried this have found it weird at first, but then tend to prefer it to the "informative name" scheme they grew up with.

If databases were more convenient, I could imagine doing all my work with "flattened" filenames in a single directory. I think that's what apple are moving toward, but they are thinking of application-specific work, so the application deals with the databases. I prefer the README/filesystem structure because it lets me use tools like grep, etc.

The keynote talk (http://cdn-smooth.ms-studiosmedia.com/news/mp4_mq/06182012_S...) is informative. At about minute 14, the demonstrator tries to show how IExplorer works on the tablet. It fails. He keeps clicking here and there to try to restart it, then he clues in that folks can see him doing this and he points it to his chest, card-player style. Then he sprints to the podium to get another machine. I felt for the poor guy.

One more thing: there are multiple definitions of "gallon". A lot of Canadians live near the USA border, and many cross the border to buy low-tax gasoline. The volume of a "gallon" differs by nearly 20% between the two countries.

I forgot how many adverts there were.

FFTs are used in lots of ways. The R function convolve(), for example, uses FFTs for efficiency.

You are right. It's very annoying. It's even worse than having links that are behind a paywall, because at least a paywall usually indicates that funds are flowing to the person (reporter, etc.) who created the content. The google groups situation is quite different, and quite annoying. I never login to google groups to see something listed on HN. I wonder whether HN could provide an option to let readers avoid such items, by removing them from the listing or flagging them?

R

Science is normally taken to be the study of nature. By that definition, "Computing Science" is a misnomer. Sure, it's a misnomer with a long history, but isn't the point of all the hand-wringing (beta status, area 51, ...) to try to get things right?

Apple should fix the iphone-4S battery problem.

There is no way to know whether a leap second will be used in the future, beyond the half-year "notice period". This can make it tricky to plan for synchronized events past the notice period. The solution, of course, is to use non-leaped time for such planning. As several have pointed out, libraries handle both times. As someone who needs to deal with both types in data processing, I can report that it's definitely not a big deal.

When German cars age, they tend get replaced by new German cars. Germany has wealth because it sells expensive things in high quantity. Greece? Spain? Not so much.

It would be nice if it handled issues. Their iphone app does that, but nothing else ... so one wonders whether they could combine the two.

Me too.