Why so much hate? Better access to data is generally a good thing. You could use it to build a proper argument on a political level, instead of resorting to this kind of snarkiness.
Sometimes on HN we get a blog post announcing a new library, or cool hack, or something like that. When that happens, I usually crawl the author's about page and online presence.
I'm looking for embarrassing details that are unrelated to the post being discussed. Then, I usually leave a comment on HN to the effect of "man, this guy's fat and probably has never been touched by a woman."
No hate, only humor. It might sting but it's probably true also. Who cares if it's an irrelevant non-contribution?
Do you have any recommendations for accessible R tutorials? I would love to get into this a little bit more. R seems quite effective for these kinds of things.
Not a tutorial, but I found the R Graph gallery helpful. When I first got started I typically just poked around for something interesting, downloaded the source and started tweaking parameters and/or loading in new data sets. It can be daunting to create graphs from scratch in R without experience - I found these provided some good training wheels.
