Top all-time · #4925
Konrad Hinsen
Personal blog · blog.khinsen.net/postsscienceprogramming
Konrad Hinsen's personal blog at blog.khinsen.net covers science and programming. Since 2017, 16 different Hacker News readers have linked it 33 times, most often “A plea for stability in the SciPy ecosystem”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-09-25, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (11) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Hinsen's posts on research software stability, the SciPy ecosystem and Python migration, and on science resting on observations and models. Most comments cite the posts as support for their own points.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 11 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- A plea for stability in the SciPy ecosystem3 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2017-11-17
- A plea for stability in the SciPy ecosystem2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2019-11-14
- The structure and interpretation of scientific models2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-08-10
- To software engineers criticizing Neil Ferguson’s epidemics simulation code2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-05-18
- The computational notebook of the future (part 2)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2019-05-13
What Hacker News says?
Here's the open letter criticising our entire profession for producing something as terrible as C++ and allowing scientists to get into trouble with it - http://blog.khinsen.net/posts/2020/05/18/an-open-letter-to-s... There are links back to other parts of the story in the text there. Effectively, they built a model that predicted some real worst-case stuff, and used that as the basis for advice they sent out to try…
Comment linking /posts/2020/05/18/an-open-letter-to-software-engineers-criticizing-neil-ferguson-s-epidemics-simulation-code/
on “Science needs more research software engineers”Submitted To software engineers criticizing Neil Ferguson’s epidemics simulation code as a story · 90 points
HN discussionI'm reminded of https://blog.khinsen.net/posts/2020/12/10/the-structure-and-... the opening paragraph is worth quoting in (almost) full: > It is often said that science rests on two pillars, experiment and theory. Which has lead some to propose one or two additional pillars for the computing age: simulation and data analysis. However, the real two pillars of science are observations and models. Observations are the…
Comment linking /posts/2020/12/10/the-structure-and-interpretation-of-scientific-models/
on “New carnivorous plant discovered in Pacific Northwest”Submitted A plea for stability in the SciPy ecosystem as a story · 53 points
HN discussion"better in every way" ... except for 1) startup time (according to the linked-to article), 2) support for existing Python 2 code, and 3) support for Python 2 C extensions. For example, https://blog.khinsen.net/posts/2017/11/16/a-plea-for-stabili... describes the "Molecular Modelling Toolkit (MMTK), which might well be the oldest domain-specific library of the SciPy ecosystem, will probably go away after 2020. Portin…
Comment linking /posts/2017/11/16/a-plea-for-stability-in-the-scipy-ecosystem/
on “Mercurial’s journey to and reflections on Python 3”Submitted The computational notebook of the future (part 2) as a story · 6 points
HN discussionInevitable of not, this has real costs, in that that government will eventually turn off the gravy train and the "good" and "bad" research alike will be negatively impacted. In other words, academia is sowing the seeds of its own demise, and with it, the official institutional pinnacle of our culture [please don't wince too hard when reading that!]. ---- The solution i think is less research but more library work. S…
Comment linking /posts/2020/07/08/the-landscapes-of-digital-scientific-knowledge/
on “Peer-reviewed papers are getting increasingly boring”Submitted Explaining Software and Computational Methods as a story · 3 points
HN discussionVery related to this, see also Hinsens blog post: http://blog.khinsen.net/posts/2017/11/16/a-plea-for-stabilit... I think that GNU Guix is extremely well-suited to improve this situation. Also, one could think this is an academic problem, in the sense of am otherwise unimportant niche problem. It really isn't, it is just like in many other topics that academics get confronted first with this issue. I am sure that in…
Comment linking /posts/2017/11/16/a-plea-for-stability-in-the-scipy-ecosystem/
on “Challenge to scientists: does your ten-year-old code still run?”Submitted Why Computational Reproducibility Matters as a story · 2 points
HN discussionFirst https://xenaproject.wordpress.com/ , now this? I am very excited to see this sort of "codification" work become a legitimate academic enterprise. People I tend to trust are in that Frege > Russel camp, but that certainly doesn't make me less enthusiastic to see this sort of work undertaken. I am a big fan or the sort of thinking in https://hapgood.us/2015/10/17/the-garden-and-the-stream-a-te... and https://blo…
Comment linking /posts/2020/07/08/the-landscapes-of-digital-scientific-knowledge/
on “Whitehead and Russell’s Principia rewritten in Coq”Submitted The structure and interpretation of scientific models as a story · 2 points
HN discussion> On the other hand, they could progressively enhance upon a backwards compatible single 2 version. JS manages to do that just fine, as does Java... Common Lisp has a backwards compatibility which goes into decades, and implementations like SBCL had no difficulties at all to absorb Unicode. Racket even supports different language standards and completely different languages (such as Scheme and Algol) running on the…
Comment linking /posts/2017/11/16/a-plea-for-stability-in-the-scipy-ecosystem/
on “Why Is the Migration to Python 3 Taking So Long?”Submitted A Plea for Stability in the SciPy Ecosystem (2017) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionIt's best to read the 1st linked article and https://blog.khinsen.net/posts/2020/07/08/the-landscapes-of-... But if you want something shorter, ponder this: What percentage of journal article material makes it to textbooks, and how has that changed over time?
Comment linking /posts/2020/07/08/the-landscapes-of-digital-scientific-knowledge/
on “Charles Darwin’s hunch about early life was probably right”Submitted The rise of community-owned monopolies as a story · 2 points
HN discussion> Most of the rest of us will move on since the conversions were not that hard and the improvements worth it and we were given 10+ years to do it. You are describing it as if it is for everyone easy to convert. That might be true for fast-paced start-ups and web companies which rewrite their code every few years. I work in science, in projects which have complex infrastructure and are developed in the course of many…
Comment linking /posts/2017/11/16/a-plea-for-stability-in-the-scipy-ecosystem/
on “Why Python 4.0 might never arrive, according to its creator”Submitted Composition is the root of all evil (2016) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThe author addressed "a container or VM image" in the followup, at http://blog.khinsen.net/posts/2017/11/22/stability-in-the-sc... : > There are three main reasons why this is not a sufficient solution: > 1. Freezing code is fine for archival reproducibility, as I mentioned in my original post. It is not sufficient for living code bases that people work on over decades. ... (His example was his MMTK project which st…
Comment linking /posts/2017/11/22/stability-in-the-scipy-ecosystem-a-summary-of-the-discussion/
on “A plea for stability in the SciPy ecosystem”Submitted Pharo Year One as a story · 2 points
HN discussionNote that cancelling Python is my thesis, and khinsen just provides the evidence to support it. He doesn't come out and say, "Don't use Python," but I am. From my notes, here are (some? of) the posts I had in mind: - < https://blog.khinsen.net/posts/2015/11/06/a-rant-about-softw... > - < https://blog.khinsen.net/posts/2017/11/16/a-plea-for-stabili... > - < https://blog.khinsen.net/posts/2017/01/13/sustainable-softwa…
Comment linking /posts/2019/05/09/the-computational-notebook-of-the-future-part-2/
on “Ask HN: Are people still using Pascal in 2023?”Submitted A plea for stability in the SciPy ecosystem as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Reproducible research in the Python ecosystem: a reality check as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Conviviality in Computational Science as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Cultures of Making and Relating as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Deconstructing the Mastodon Client as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Some Comments on AlphaFold as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted A plea for stability in the SciPy ecosystem as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
