In their “Object-Oriented Programming is Bad” video, Brian Will mentions a desired reserved word: use (timestamp) that could look something like this: The variables you specify come from the enclosing scope and would be available as copies within a separate … Continue reading →

In R I’m usually using a combination of base functions, functions from loaded packages, and functions I’ve defined in a script in my workflow or sourced from a helperfunctions.r type file. If you type the name of any R function … Continue reading →

I guess it might have been obvious, but I was surprised that rowSums appeared much slower slower than directly doing the matrix operation. At first I assumed it was because it has some overhead in the form of input handling/casting … Continue reading →

RStudio takes up a lot of screen real estate with its panes. I prefer to have two floating windows for script and console, plus help when needed. Unfortunately entering ?pch, for example, opens up a pane and squeezes everything out … Continue reading →

R is changing the way it deals with converting strings to factors in functions like data.frame(). There is a detailed post about the plan, but that post was created before version 4.0.0 so I’m not sure if anything has changed. … Continue reading →

There’s some interesting discussion in response to the cross validated question: Am I creating bias by using the same random seed over and over? whuber caught my attention in the accepted answer: …there is extraordinary merit in having a well-known … Continue reading →