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Patrick Burns
Personal blog · burns-stat.comprogrammingdata
Patrick Burns writes Burns Statistics, a personal blog at burns-stat.com about programming and data. Since 2007, 33 different Hacker News readers have linked it 37 times, most often “The R Inferno (2011) [pdf]”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-06-25, and you can follow it by feed.
Quantitative Finance Statistical Computing in R Heuristic Optimization About Burns statistics Specialties include: Programming in the R language Statistics, including quantitative finance Solving difficult problems via heuristic optimization (genetic algorithms and simulated annealing). Consu
Most-linked posts?
- The R Inferno (2011) [pdf]10 people · 11 mentions · first linked 2018-12-12
- The R Inferno9 people · 11 mentions · first linked 2011-01-11
- The R Inferno (free ebook on R)5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2013-11-17
- Burns Statistics - Spreadsheet Addiction3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2007-09-07
- /documents/books/the-r-inferno/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2019-06-15
What Hacker News says?
Patrick Burns' R inferno[1] enumerates a lot of R's eccentricities and workarounds for them. I think R gets a lot better once you switch to using the libraries Hadley maintains like plyr and ggplot. I still think proficiency in R is akin to a type of Stockholm syndrome. [1] : http://www.burns-stat.com/pages/Tutor/R_inferno.pdf [PDF]
Comment linking /pages/Tutor/R_inferno.pdf
on “Why I'm Betting On Julia”Submitted Impatient R as a story · 68 points
HN discussionFor those who want to go deep : http://www.burns-stat.com/pages/Tutor/R_inferno.pdf
Comment linking /pages/Tutor/R_inferno.pdf
on “Try R — A new online course, for free”Submitted The R Inferno (2011) [pdf] as a story · 10 points
HN discussionthe elevator pitch is, it's an easy to use language, you can vectorize things if you want, but also if you hand-write loops it will be very fast. Whereas in R, hand-writing loops brings you to the 3rd circle of hell [1]. the more general version of the elevator pitch is that being in an environment where all the code is written in one high-level language that is still fast is qualitatively different. you can combine…
Comment linking /pages/Tutor/R_inferno.pdf
on “Julia Language Co-Creators Win James H. Wilkinson Prize for Numerical Software”Submitted The R Inferno (2011) [pdf] as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI also like this fun though dated handbook, full of gotchas common among new R programmers: https://www.burns-stat.com/pages/Tutor/R_inferno.pdf
Comment linking /pages/Tutor/R_inferno.pdf
on “Big Book of R”Submitted The R Inferno [pdf] as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThere is also the R Inferno "If you are using R and you think you’re in hell, this is a map for you": http://www.burns-stat.com/documents/books/the-r-inferno/
Comment linking /documents/books/the-r-inferno/
on “Announcing R Tools for Visual Studio”Submitted The R Inferno (2011) [pdf] as a story · 2 points
HN discussionR is a language with a lot of gotcha's. I usually get burned by characters being converted to factors in read.csv() and converting factors to numeric (it works, but not how you intend). The R Inferno ( http://www.burns-stat.com/documents/books/the-r-inferno/ ) has a lot of other gotcha's and is worth a read for people who use the language. That said, the power, flexibility and user community make it my go-to for any…
Comment linking /documents/books/the-r-inferno/
on “R, the master troll of statistical languages (2012)”Submitted The R Inferno as a story · 2 points
HN discussionQuick R, helped several of my friends try R: http://www.statmethods.net/ Once you're hooked, go to the R inferno: http://www.burns-stat.com/pages/Tutor/R_inferno.pdf
Comment linking /pages/Tutor/R_inferno.pdf
on “Think Stats, using python to learn stats ”Submitted R Inferno : A deeper guide to the functioning of R as a story · 2 points
HN discussion"how does R do the things it does so well?" R is a vector/array-based language which fits the problems of its domain in a natural way. On the other hand, you wouldn't really want to use such a language for anything else then data munching. The language has it's flaws but those are well described, e.g., in "The R Inferno" ( http://www.burns-stat.com/documents/books/the-r-inferno/ ).
Comment linking /documents/books/the-r-inferno/
on “Advanced R programming”Submitted Burns Statistics -- Spreadsheet Addiction (Beware) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionWhile this looks like a good basic article for programmers learning R I recommend moving onto The R Inferno: http://www.burns-stat.com/pages/Tutor/R_inferno.pdf The R Inferno touches on do's and don't within R programming. The burns-stat.com website is also a good reference for R tutorials as well.
Comment linking /pages/Tutor/R_inferno.pdf
on “R programming for those coming from other languages”Submitted Burns Statistics - Spreadsheet Addiction as a story · 2 points
HN discussionNo, but I can give some suggestions. It would help to know what you want to do. First of all, you need to decide if you want a language reference, or an application guide, as R books fall into those two categories. If you have a specific type of work in mind (bio-informatics, data mining, data visualization, ...) I'd say to find a book that focuses on that topic. I haven't looked in a while, but I haven't seen a gen…
Comment linking /pages/Tutor/R_inferno.pdf
on “No, shut up. What statistical programming languages can learn from Dropbox.”Submitted Burns Statistics -- Spreadsheet Addiction as a story · 2 points
HN discussionWhat are you talking about? Of course it was written in lower-level, compiled languages. Is it any different than Python? Javascript? Perl? As for the "easy iterop with other languages": [1] So, how is R different from Python? Also, it's not true that R wasn't designed for writing software. Even a critical "pamphlet" by Pat Burns [2] states otherwise. For writing statistical software, yes. -- [1] https://wiki.python…
Comment linking /pages/Present/infernoishR_annotated.pdf
on “Rsuite – R development and data science platform”Submitted The R Inferno (free ebook on R) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionR language has many quirks. Here was an effort to list them: https://www.burns-stat.com/pages/Tutor/R_inferno.pdf Also, the author of R language said the performance of R is sub-optimal. In his own words: https://www.stat.auckland.ac.nz/~ihaka/downloads/JSM-2010.pd... Currently I am using PyCharm with R plugin that JetBrains released very recently. R Studio is very slow and buggy.
Comment linking /pages/Tutor/R_inferno.pdf
on “Rsuite – R development and data science platform”Submitted Impatient R - Burns Statistics as a story · 1 points
HN discussionHere are some fun links: https://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2012/06/08/r-the-master-trol... https://www.burns-stat.com/pages/Tutor/R_inferno.pdf and many others. I have come to believe that the only people that think R is ok are those that are either: - beginners that just passed the newbie state, learned a few tricks and feel empowered - actual experts - that fully understand the minute details of the implementation a…
Comment linking /pages/Tutor/R_inferno.pdf
on “Rsuite – R development and data science platform”Submitted Inferno-ish R (talk by Patrick Burns) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionI'm a heavy user of R, and I like using it a lot. But the language has lots of traps for beginners: code idioms that look correct but are subtly wrong. For example, if you need to iterate over the indices of a vector X, the obvious thing to do is 1:length(X), looks fine and works fine until you happen to pass a 0-length vector, and then it explodes. Similarly, the obvious way to select a subset of rows i and a subse…
Comment linking /pages/Tutor/R_inferno.pdf
on “Rsuite – R development and data science platform”R is definitely a good language for quant work. In some ways it could have been the natural choice, and there are still places where it's a better choice than Python. It's just far to fragmented, only really good for numeric work (and thus harder to integrate with production systems), and full of the weirdest gotchas. https://www.burns-stat.com/pages/Tutor/R_inferno.pdf
Comment linking /pages/Tutor/R_inferno.pdf
on “Ask HN: How did Python become the lingua franca of ML/AI?”Same guy who wrote "The R Inferno," which is a good resource for more advanced R users: http://www.burns-stat.com/documents/books/the-r-inferno/ (this could use a 2013 in the title, however)
Comment linking /documents/books/the-r-inferno/
on “Impatient R”One thing I'd add to the section on "Coming from another language" [0] is a brief introduction to non-standard-evaluation. Hadley Wickham's Advanced R (free to read on the Web) has a nice section on it: http://adv-r.had.co.nz/Computing-on-the-language.html NSE is what allows these two statements to both work: library('ggplot2') and: library(ggplot2) It's a relatively minor thing but it helps to explain some of the "…
Comment linking /documents/tutorials/impatient-r/r-coming-programming-languages/
on “Impatient R”
