Earlier this week, Github introduced Noops, a collection of simple black-box machines with API endpoints, with the goal of challenging developers of all skill levels to solve problems with them. Five "Noops" machines have been released so far along with challenges suitable for beginner programmers, with 15 further machines (and some ...

For almost five years, the entire CRAN repository of R packages has been archived on a daily basis at MRAN. If you use CRAN snapshots from MRAN, we'd love to hear how you use them in this survey. If you're not familiar with the concept, or just want to learn ...

Which US city has the worst weather? To answer that question, data analyst Taras Kaduk counted the number of pleasant days in each city and ranked them accordingly. For this analysis, a "pleasant" day is one where the average temperature was in the range 55°F-75°F, the maximum was in ...

Let's say you've developed a predictive model in R, and you want to embed predictions (scores) from that model into another application (like a mobile or Web app, or some automated service). If you expect a heavy load of requests, R running on a single server isn't going to cut ...

If you're looking a guide to making publication-ready data visualizations in R, check out the BBC Visual and Data Journalism cookbook for R graphics. Announced in a BBC blog post this week, it provides scripts for making line charts, bar charts, and other visualizations like those below used in the ...

by Allison Koenecke, Data Scientist, AI & Research Group at Microsoft, with acknowledgements to Amita Gajewar and John-Mark Agosta. In this tutorial, Allison Koenecke demonstrates how Microsoft could recommend to customers the next set of services they should acquire as they expand their use of the Azure Cloud, by using a ...

RStudio Server Pro is now available on the Azure Marketplace, the company announced on the RStudio Blog earlier this month. This means you can launch RStudio Server Pro on an virtual machine with the memory, disk, and CPU configuration of your choice, and pay by the minute for the VM ...

It's relatively easy to find the player who has scored the most goals in the last 12 years (hello, Lionel Messi). But which professional football (soccer) player is the best finisher, i.e. which player is most likely to put a shot they take into the goal? You can't simply use ...