Top all-time · #6204
Radford Neal
Personal blog · radfordneal.wordpress.comprogrammingdatascience
Radford Neal's personal blog at radfordneal.wordpress.com covers programming, data and science. Since 2010, 13 different Hacker News readers have linked it 16 times, most often “Exact Computation of Sums and Means”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-09-07, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (10) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Radford Neal's blog for posts on exact floating-point summation, R language implementations such as pqR, and statistical analyses, including a look at BMI and COVID-19 critical care data.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 10 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Exact Computation of Sums and Means3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2015-05-22
What Hacker News says?
According to Radford Neal, it is possible to sum a sequence of n-bit floating point numbers exactly, i.e. rounding to the n-bit floating point value closest to the exact result. The algorithm uses 2n bits for the sum. https://radfordneal.wordpress.com/2015/05/21/exact-computati...
Comment linking /2015/05/21/exact-computation-of-sums-and-means/
on “How to average floating point numbers (2015)”Submitted Announcing pqR: A faster version of R as a story · 113 points
HN discussionThere are other R implementations, see https://radfordneal.wordpress.com/2013/07/24/deferred-evalua... for some pointers.
Comment linking /2013/07/24/deferred-evaluation-in-renjin-riposte-and-pqr/
on “Switching from Common Lisp to Julia”Submitted Exact Computation of Sums and Means as a story · 32 points
HN discussionAre you aware of Radford Neal’s pqR? https://radfordneal.wordpress.com/
Comment linking /
on “An opinionated view of the Tidyverse “dialect” of the R language”Submitted Critique of ‘Debunking the climate hiatus’ as a story · 4 points
HN discussionActually, having an alpha of value x does NOT mean that 100 * x % are false. It only gives you an indication of the coverage of your experiment, which is useful when compared to other, independent studies. I think most scientists don't understand the meaning of the p-value. There was an interesting discussion last year in the statistical blog community on that question, with leading statisticians involved in it: htt…
Comment linking /2009/03/07/does-coverage-matter/
on “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False”Submitted Two Surpising Things about R as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThe programming language analysis is pretty interesting, but you have to ask, what's the point of a brand-new Java implementation? R isn't just a programming language, but it's a software framework/ecosystem. They mentioned this in the slides, but it's problematic because R crucially relies on C and Fortran interaction (which I thought the JVM can't do efficiently, since it doesn't like giving C/Fortran raw memory a…
Comment linking /2013/07/24/deferred-evaluation-in-renjin-riposte-and-pqr/
on “FastR: An implementation of the R language in Java [pdf]”Submitted Fixing R’s design flaws in a new version of pqR as a story · 1 points
HN discussionFrom the study: It was found that there was a linear relationship (Pnon-linearity = 0.242) between BMI and the risk of critical COVID-19 They seem to mean that the log odds ratio is a linear function of BMI. This just can't be true. Sufficiently low BMI has to be bad, not good. Figures 7 and 8 in the paper actually show a near-constant risk from BMI of 18 to BMI of about 27. The good results for BMI of 18, which is…
Comment linking /2020/04/06/body-mass-and-risk-from-covid-19-and-influenza
on “BMI 30 increases risk of severe Covid and death”Submitted The new pqR parser, and R’s “else” problem as a story · 1 points
HN discussionI looked at this question using the UK critical care data in a blog post at https://radfordneal.wordpress.com/2020/04/06/body-mass-and-r... From that data, it does indeed seem that having BMI>40 is a large risk factor for COVID-19 being serious. BMI between 30 and 40 is also a risk factor, but much less than for BMI>40. In drawing these conclusions, I was assuming that being put in critical care was a good proxy for…
Comment linking /2020/04/06/body-mass-and-risk-from-covid-19-and-influenza/
on “NYU: Obesity the biggest 'chronic' factor in New York’s Covid hospitalizations”i've used R for several large projects. it sucks in several ways for the projects i worked on: 1. it is extremely slow for numerics. slower than MATLAB. slower than python (with numpy). after talking to several stats people, it seems pretty much everyone ends up writing most of their code in C when using R. (in contrast, i didn't find this necessary in python or MATLAB for similar projects.) 2. its syntax is quite c…
Comment linking /2008/09/21/design-flaws-in-r-3-%E2%80%94-zero-subscripts/
on “Why R Doesn't Suck”A recent critical review of that book: http://radfordneal.wordpress.com/2011/06/18/two-textbooks-on...
Comment linking /2011/06/18/two-textbooks-on-probability-using-r/
on “Suggest good sites/books on probability”Related blog post : https://radfordneal.wordpress.com/2015/05/21/exact-computati... As someone who has worked with building, testing, and numerical software, this seems like a great thing. Generally floating point computations are effectively non-deterministic: you (or the compiler) change something that doesn't seem like it matters and all of a sudden your result changes. Having more methods available that give you…
Comment linking /2015/05/21/exact-computation-of-sums-and-means/
on “Fast exact summation using small and large superaccumulators”
