What are fortunes?

Question

In R, one sometime sees people making references to fortunes. For example:

fortune(108) 

What does this mean? Where does this originate? Where can I get the code?

Edit. The sharp-eyed reader would have noticed that this question marks the 5,000th question with the [r] tag. Forgive the frivolity, but such a milestone should be marked with a bit of humour. For an extra bit of fun, you can provide an answer with your favourite fortune cookie.

Answer 1

It refers to the fortunes package, which is a package that contains a whole set of humorous quotes and comments from the help lists, conferences, fora and even StackOverflow.

It is actually a database or small dataframe you can browse through.

library(fortunes) fortune() 

To get a random one. Or look for a specific one, eg :

> fortune("stackoverflow")  datayoda: Bing is my friend...I found the cumsum() function. Dirk Eddelbuettel: If bing is your friend, then rseek.org is bound  to be your uncle.    -- datayoda and Dirk Eddelbuettel (after searching for a function that        computes cumulative sums)       stackoverflow.com (October 2010) 

If you want to get all of them in a dataframe, just do

MyFortunes <- read.fortunes() 

The numbers sometimes referred to, are the row numbers of this dataframe. To find everything on stackoverflow :

> grep("(?i)stackoverflow",MyFortunes$source) [1] 273 275 > fortune(275)  I used a heuristic... pulled from my posterior. That makes it Bayesian, right?    -- JD Long (in a not too serious chat about modeling strategies)       Stackoverflow (November 2010)