Top all-time · #9045
Xi'an's Og
Personal blog · xianblog.wordpress.commathscienceprogramming
Xi'an's Og is a personal blog at xianblog.wordpress.com about math, science and programming. Since 2010, 9 different Hacker News readers have linked it 9 times. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-11-01, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (5) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Xi'an's Og for posts on R performance and licensing, a Bayesian statistics book review, and a coincidence analysis of Israeli lottery results. The comments only link to these posts and do not judge the writing.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 5 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
an attempt at bloggin, nothing more...
Most-linked posts?
- /2010/09/13/simply-start-over-and-build-something-better/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-07-12
What Hacker News says?
> R is somewhat slower Actually it's MUCH slower, up to a point of being entirely not usable for very large datasets (even ~100GB). True, much of MATLAB speed comes from using highly optimized BLAS (Math Kernel Library by Intel). But not just it. R lacks JIT optimization and numerous attempts to add it were unsuccessful. In fact it's so bad that Ross Ihaka, one of R's creator, proposed to "simply start over and buil…
Comment linking /2010/09/13/simply-start-over-and-build-something-better/
on “Try R — A new online course, for free”Submitted The R Inferno: A Review as a story · 3 points
HN discussionReview by Christian Robert, a statistician: https://xianblog.wordpress.com/2022/07/05/bayes-rules-book-r...
Comment linking /2022/07/05/bayes-rules-book-review/
on “Bayes Rules – An Introduction to Applied Bayesian Modeling (2021)”Submitted Common derivation for Metropolis–Hastings and other MCMC algorithms as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThey would avoid proprietary forks (not commercial, that's not the same thing) if they actually defended the damn GPL. Instead, they kept weakening it, kept trying to change the API from GPL to LGPL (and I think they actually did it) and encouraged non-free plugins on CRAN. The license will need to a better job of protecting work donated to the commons than GPL2 seems to have done. https://xianblog.wordpress.com/201…
Comment linking /2010/09/13/simply-start-over-and-build-something-better/
on “Introducing the free Microsoft R Client”Submitted Monte Carlo method has patent as a story · 2 points
HN discussionProbably referring to this: https://xianblog.wordpress.com/2010/09/13/simply-start-over-...
Comment linking /2010/09/13/simply-start-over-and-build-something-better/
on “Introducing the free Microsoft R Client”Submitted Some shortcomings in R (by Julien Cornebise) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionOriginal link: http://xianblog.wordpress.com/2010/10/20/coincidence-in-lott...
Comment linking /2010/10/20/coincidence-in-lotteries/
on “Lottery: chances for getting the same series twice in Israel”