Top all-time · #25195
Evan Patterson
Personal blog · epatters.org/postprogrammingdata
Evan Patterson's personal blog at epatters.org covers programming and data. Since 2023, 3 different Hacker News readers have linked it 3 times, most often “The R programming language: The good, the bad, and the ugly”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-14, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (2) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Linked as a wiki page on categorical semantics for stochastic systems, cited to support a point about formal syntax and randomness. No comment judges the writing itself.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 2 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- The R programming language: The good, the bad, and the ugly2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-04-14
What Hacker News says?
Even with a source of randomness the software for a computer has a formal syntax and this formal syntax must correspond to a logical formalism. Even if you include syntax for randomness it still corresponds to a proof because there are categorical semantics for stochastic systems, e.g. https://www.epatters.org/wiki/stats-ml/categorical-probabili... .
Comment linking /wiki/stats-ml/categorical-probability-theory
on “Detecting hallucinations in large language models using semantic entropy”Submitted The R programming language: The good, the bad, and the ugly as a story · 2 points
HN discussionHere are 14 years of HN discussions/criticisms of R: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... "Does what it intends to do reasonably well" is going to be widely subjective, depending on whether the user's use-case is statistical/life-sciences vs more general purpose coding and relying on many packages; prototyping/experimentation vs production code; whether the user uses base-R, or tidyverse/d…
Comment linking /post/r-lang/
on “Maker of RStudio launches new R and Python IDE”