Hacker News Reader

Tell that to tens of thousands of researchers.

Heck, even integration has been re-discovered and published:

https://fliptomato.wordpress.com/2007/03/19/medical-research...

If the tool doesn't work correctly by default. Then it's likely the wrong tool for the job.

The default conversions are fine for 99% of use-cases. But no one should mistake Excel for a robust data analysis tool.

Preferences have become a pretty natural part of using a computer, I'm not sure why we can't rely on users trying that when they run into problems.

I would be worried about endless forking of defaults as a feature of newly built tools, leading to a bunch of new tools that will be harder to maintain.

If they can't manage implicit data casting preferences (if those exist, they may not), surely handing them something more complicated like R, MATLAB, or SQL is even worse.

Interesting little article. I just read about Jeff Bezos initiative to push for all departments at Amazon to be accessible as service interfaces. Could there be real interdisciplinary growth by having academic fields concepts and data accessible in the same way? Maybe starting with papers. But then if every model developed was some kind of living running service in the cloud or hosted on .edu you could query or interact with

Reply on news.ycombinator.com