NULLs in R

data <- lapply("foo",function(x){return(NULL)}) > data [[1]] NULL > data[[1]] <- NULL > data list() This is the STUPIDEST LANGUAGE.…

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randomness, statistics, science

Zombie von Neumann lives!

Yesterday, while working on a tremendously fun project that involved random-number generation, I discovered random.org - which is probably the coolest site on the internet. Here's why. Randomness is a hard problem - in fact, it's an intractable problem and people who think too hard about how to measure…

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wikimedia, R, uaparser, user-agent parsing

user agent parsing in R

(The title is somewhat deceptive, but only somewhat) One of the projects I've been patching for a while is ua-parser, which does what it says on the tin - takes user agents and extracts useful information (device, operating system, browser, so on) from them. We use it at the Wikimedia…

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Tab-clearing

Stuff from my bookmarks: An excellent essay on what happens when you indulge toxic individuals. A couple of weeks ago I was introduced to Lewis' Law, which manages to simultaneously be accurate, amusing and deeply sad. "and the user agent string was a complete mess, and near useless, and everyone…

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Work

There's an only semi-humorous software license called the CRAPL. It's designed for academics, and is based on the principle that: In academic software (my own included), software engineering principles vaporize as deadlines loom, and code becomes overrun with debugging hooks, perl golf, hard-coded configuration variables, dirty hacks, commentless tracts, a…

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R, regular expressions, ore, Oniguruma

Regular expressions with ore

Jon Clayden has released version 1.0 of ore, a regular expression library for R based on the Oniguruma regular expression library. Regular expressions in R are based on the PCRE library, which is fairly standard; the implementation, though, suffers from...let's call them "limitations", because it's the polite phrasing…

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comics

Comics

Comics I've recently read that I'd recommend: Volumes 1 and 2 of Lazarus - A post-disaster society featuring a weird mix of feudalism and high technology. The entirety of Global Frequency, which is great because it's Warren Ellis of course it's bloody great. Global network of specialists in the weird…

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R, Hive, Hadoop, RDF, MapReduce, Object-Oriented Programming

Tab-clearing

    Kaushik Sathupadi has written Map Reduce: A really simple introduction, which does what it says on the tin. It's a really easily understandable explanation! Been reading a lot around equality, diversity and, well, not being a dick about either given that I'm inherently part of the oppressive system. Recommended: this…

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    R

    The origin of <-

    R is noted for using <- for assignment instead of = - decidedly nonstandard. = itself is accepted - it's just not the traditional/proper way of doing things. While browsing the internet I discovered a Revolution Analytics post that sets out the practical origins of <-: This is a…

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