KKPMW's comments

> But it's a particular research programme, embedded in a social context, that generates knowledge, not a single reproducible experiment.

Somewhat disagree. That particular research programme must still have reproducible experiment as a unit. A million irreproducible experiments will generate exactly zero knowledge.

Cool. Few times I thought about doing something like this (not for sapiens) my self. But always stopped to wonder how legal it would be.

Maybe someone here has an idea about possible copyright issues?

I feel like you would miss on a lot of good things with an attitude like that. And will get persuaded by projects that spend time on PR.

I completely understand the position of the person you replied to. One video outlining it is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3XuFr7rw84 . Many people disagree with it but I think thats because they don't imagine being productive without auto-completion.

> If I were a boss of a company and saw one of my employees do this, I would seriously reconsider their employment. Purposely limiting yourself has no place in development.

If I was a boss of a company I would try to judge people based on some objective measure, rather than subjective opinions about how one should be doing things.

Haven't read them all, but from the ones I have:

1. What you can't say.

2. Keep your identity small.

3. Life is short.

I created twitter about a month ago with the intention of using it like a multi-purpose RSS feed and reader. I decided to only tweet about updates and new content from my side. And then to find others that work in areas I care about and follow them. Trouble is - nobody else seems to use twitter like that. They post memes, retweet things, share their political opinions, ask questions, get into discussions, and I see all of that when I follow them. It's just too noisy, currently haven't deleted it but heavily considering the option.

Can I ask what symptoms you had that were caused by mold?

Don't have a chronic condition (as far as I know) but have a child with a minor autoimmune issue. Having someone you care about affected provides a somewhat interesting "sideline" perspective on the best course of action. Here is what I did:

1. Try to learn what the world knows. I've read 2 books and close to 100 scientific papers ranging from 1980 up to 2020 about the condition. This helps placing the incident as a point along the timeline. You will see how people in the past coped with it, what are the most promising treatments today, and what is coming up around the corner. Also a lot of insights into what might have caused it and what changes can be made to slow it down. Also you will most likely see that the future is bright. The medicine is full of hot upcoming things. Training t-cells to fight cancer, selectively suppressing certain pathways to turn-off auto-immune responses, healing gut bacteria to get rid of sub-clinical infections, etc.

2. Find the best doctor who takes a personal interest in your case. You should be able to go to your doctor and discuss any new development, any changes you noticed, and get a reasonable advice back. The doctor will compare your case with other persons he/she is treating and will be able to give you a lot of advice, even some anecdotal wisdom.

3. In addition to your local doctor, try identifying the leading figures that are investigating the disease across the globe. They typically attend conferences which you can find online, or write blogs on some website, or other things like that. They will also respond to emails, especially after seeing that you did your homework and know about their work.

4. If the disease is manageable - do what you can to stay healthy. Eat healthier, sleep healthier, avoid stress and excess pollution. Most diseases have some individual-specific corners to them. In this case experiment until you find what works for you.

5. For personal peace of mind, think about the big picture. Do not compare yourself with others. Rather think about what you are able to achieve for this world compared with the case of not being born at all. You will find that it is substantially better, for the world and humanity, for you to be born with the condition, than to loose you. Concentrate on that and do your part, do what you want, do what you can.

In the end I think that onset of some illness might be a hidden blessing. Someone might be healthy all life, seek pleasures too much, and waste a lot of it on hedonism. A durable yet uncomfortable disease can provide direction and a boost in motivation. And if the disease can be managed by a healthy lifestyle, chances are, you will turn out to be healthier than the average person on the street.

What do you mean by "style is questionable" ?

For me - multimarkdown[0], as an alternative to pandoc.

Multimarkdown syntax definition manages to be conservative with respect to original markdown and at the same time provide several needed updates, like image attributes, references within document, footnotes, complex tables, etc. All done in a style that fits original markdown quite naturally.

The program itself does everything well - reads from stdin or file, prints to stdout, very fast, reliable, doesn't have a hundred flags.

[0]: https://github.com/fletcher/MultiMarkdown-6

Thanks for the honest feedback, but I think everything you want summarized is in the summary at the top:

> Vim is a highly customizable text editor geared towards writing code. But open-ended configuration possibilities often lure users into wasting time while chasing after perceived minute gains in productivity. This article describes my Vim journey, starting from heavy personal customization and ending with a renewed love for defaults.

One can read it, take the message, and move on.

However if another reader wants details, it's hard to know upfront what kinds of details he/she will care about. Hence, based on the premises in the summary, the article expands on: 1) the ways in which Vim can be over-configured; 2) some examples demonstrating the possibilities of changing default behaviour; 3) the benefits of scaling configuration down; 4) Summary and additional notes.

You might only care about one or few of those. However this, I feel, is where you would have to selectively skip some sections, based on your own judgement.

I was using 10 year old HTC ONE up until a few months back. The reason is simple - for my use cases getting a new phone didn't add anything - no new functionality, no new design.

In the past new phones used to mean some kind of additional function: either colors, or mp3 support, or bluetooth. Now it's faster CPU and more pixels in your camera. After you sync stuff from your old phone you don't even notice any difference.

Nice article. But I am not sure I would use the word "productivity" here. Maybe "mental ability" would be a nice substitute. "3 basic rules to enhance your mental ability".

Real threats and serious political discussions have their place, but this is just political theatre before the upcoming election.

> This is hopefully one of the most educated and forward looking places online.

If a person would think this remark about executive order was made as a threat, or that it has a real possibility of passing, or even if the current president is serious about acting on it, I would subconsciously exclude that person from the "one of the most educated" group.

That's a good question. For me it is mainly to tidy things up. I feel more at ease when I know where everything is and when everything is simple. It's a similar feeling to working on a messy desk vs a clean one. Disorder places a tiny amount of additional mental burden.

I only read the first question in theory.md and think the answer is quite weak.

> What is regression? Which models can you use to solve a regression problem?

The current answer only list some names that have "regression" in it, and the description of what a regression is doesn't say anything that distinguishes it from classification.

It fails to mention that regression (in ML terminology) is prediction of a continuous variable. And that almost any method can be used to do regression: knn, neural network, random forest, svm.

If other answers are of similar nature you might fail the interview.

> What routine tasks and skills of yours have become so second nature, you sparsely think about them anymore?

Noticing hypotheticals. I think this is similar to being paranoid about possible bugs in your code. In the same vein when you do statistics and obtain some result (i.e. something between group A and group B is different by x%) you start automatically imagining scenarios that could have caused this result as a false-positive. Maybe the groups were somehow imbalanced, maybe the methodology used did something differently for both of those groups, maybe there was a sampling bias.

> As a careered data scientist, what separates industry practice from academia? What project, or task helped you realize this?

In industry your result is typically subservient to some other purpose (i.e. making decisions, increasing sales, reducing costs, predicting customer loyalty). In academia the result is typically at the forefront (i.e. an observation worth writing a paper about)

> Did you wear rose color glasses before practicing in your field? What cleared them?

No, I started working with statistics before the term "data scientist" became popular. I did have some hopes after the articles with "statistics will be the sexiest job of the 21st century" appeared. But it quickly waned. The hype brought a lot of noise to the field and the focus shifted from what (in my opinion) is most important - working with open eyes. Today a lot of "data scientists" don't have fundamentals in statistics, use methods they don't understand, focus on secondary things like programming languages and tools, and think of themselves as having an "imposter's syndrome".

(this part turned out to be quite ranty but I want to leave it like that).

> What is the monotony or grunge work of a data scientist?

Staring at a computer. Preparing the data, cleaning the data, combining the data, looking for more data, presenting your results.

> What is the kind of work that makes it all worth it?

Getting insights and intuitions that other people don't have. Being the first to discover something novel, interesting, or valuable. Reflecting back on what you do in a more general way, i.e. asking questions "what it means to know something", "can data really speak for itself", "does every kind of analysis require having some initial assumptions". And if you are good then you can get to work in a variety of different areas, from predicting the results of an election, to analysing 3d scans of brain patterns in schizophrenia.

> What other questions should be seeking answers that would help me understand what life as a data scientist is really like?

Talk is cheap. If I were you I would try to experience it myself. Volunteer somewhere or start participating in some open competition (like maybe Kaggle) and see how your day will look like.

> That's okay. Yes you're missing out on a world of productivity.

Feels like a sentence like this doesn't explain much. I assume you are not moving files around all day, so where is the productivity exactly in a tool like Midnight Commander? What it allows you to do?

I use the command line extensively but never found a need for a file manager in there. Just `cp`, `mv`, `rm`. Am I missing something big by not having one?

I do believe my statement is correct.

You find some articles via google search about things like "black lives matter" in Croatia and claim it is relevant there somehow. There was a BLM protest in Lithuania too (where I am from). There were maybe 10 black people in that protest. Half of them when interviewed said they were traveling through different countries (Estonia, Lithuania, Poland) to create and initiate those protest. Then if you look at the people who attended - mostly teenagers. When asked why they are attending this protest they came up with "to show solidarity for US". Which is to say - they are being fed US politics over the internet and found an opportunity to join an event here.

So that's how I see it. These US political things leak to other countries. Through media, through twitter and instagram, and now even through HN.