Top all-time · #2882
Yihui Xie
Personal blog · yihui.nameprogrammingdata
Yihui Xie's personal blog at yihui.name covers programming and data. Since 2010, 27 different Hacker News readers have linked it 29 times, most often “The First Notebook War”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-29, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (16) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Yihui Xie's blog on R, knitr, RMarkdown, LaTeX and notebooks. HN readers link it for reproducible documents and for essays on notebook tools and career struggles.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 16 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Personal website of Yihui Xie; 谢益辉的个人网站
Most-linked posts?
- The First Notebook War4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2018-09-11
- /knitr/demo/engines/3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2012-12-08
- TinyTeX: A lightweight and easy-to-maintain LaTeX distribution3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2018-10-07
- My Early Career Crisis (2014 – 2015)2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2018-02-18
- Knitr: Elegant, Flexible and Fast Dynamic Report Generation with R2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-01-19
What Hacker News says?
> Part of the problem with blogs is that they're less rewarding than Facebook and Twitter: your post may perhaps get some thoughtful responses but it doesn't get immediate likes. To me, this is not a problem. People should not be rewarded with instant dopamine for low-effort actions. [0] The reward for publishing on a blog is in the responses you receive from readers and not from a counter incremented by a click or…
Comment linking /en/2017/12/so-bounties/
on “Questions”Submitted TinyTeX: A lightweight and easy-to-maintain LaTeX distribution as a story · 131 points
HN discussionYou might enjoy reading Yihui Xie (bookdown, Knitr)'s very honest blog post on his problems that sound similar to yours: https://yihui.name/en/2018/02/career-crisis/
Comment linking /en/2018/02/career-crisis/
on “Ask HN: Is it 'normal' to struggle so hard with work?”Submitted GitHub Pages Is Dead, Long Live Netlify as a story · 5 points
HN discussionPython will be better supported in knitr in future; for now it only has preliminary support: http://yihui.name/knitr/demo/engines/
Comment linking /knitr/demo/engines/
on “Try R — A new online course, for free”Submitted Timezones, and Worse, Daylight Saving Time as a story · 3 points
HN discussioncombine several languages in a single document without any issues You can do this with RMarkdown as well, despite the name, and run notebooks in RStudio. Much better experience than Jupyter in a browser. https://yihui.name/knitr/demo/engines/
Comment linking /knitr/demo/engines/
on “Jupyter, Mathematica, and the Future of the Research Paper”Submitted On Tiobe Index and the era of decision fatigue as a story · 2 points
HN discussion...and a well-written response to that by Yihui Xie: https://yihui.name/en/2018/09/notebook-war/ Since Xie's post discusses a "meta" layer above Joel Grus, I recommend people read it before JG. This actually helps one understand the underlying thinking in JG's slides.
Comment linking /en/2018/09/notebook-war/
on “Estimating Number of Jupyter Notebooks on Github”Submitted Why TinyTeX? What is the pain with other LaTeX distributions? as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI don't have a problem about "geeking out" with LaTeX `\' slashes, but frankly, what you mention about LyX is right. Thought you might appreciate this writeup by someone else who also agrees on your LyX viewpoint.... http://yihui.name/en/2012/10/lyx-vs-latex/ Enjoy the read.
Comment linking /en/2012/10/lyx-vs-latex/
on “LaTeX Templates”Submitted The First Notebook War as a story · 2 points
HN discussionIsn't this a simple instruction you give students in the very first class like "before you submit your homework, restart R session, and make sure your submission runs in the new session"? This only requires them to click a menu item (Restart R session), and a button (Knit or Source or something). Not really a burden for them, but will save your life as the instructor. As someone who had been a student in statistics…
Comment linking /rlp/
on “Announcing RStudio v1.0”Submitted The First Notebook Wars as a story · 2 points
HN discussionhttps://yihui.name/tinytex/ is a pretty cool minimal tex distro with nice utilities for finding dependencies, if of interest :-)
Comment linking /tinytex/
on “TeX Live 2019”Submitted My Early Career Crisis (2014 – 2015) as a story · 2 points
HN discussion> We also recommend to save the command used to generate a figure in the LaTeX file An approach I have adopted recently is Knitr[1], so this layer of indirection goes away. With knitr, my data goes directly into the paper repository, and then my Makefile has something like this: %.tex: graphs/%.Rnw Rscript -e "library(knitr); knit('$?')" The nice thing is exactly what the authors recommend: it's much easier to enfor…
Comment linking /knitr/
on “Tips and tricks to write LaTeX papers in with figures generated in Python”Submitted On the Gory Loops in R as a story · 2 points
HN discussionknitr does this reasonably well for letting you drop LaTeX directly into R reports with a delimiter... if you haven't seen that might be worth a look at the interface in some examples (e.g. http://yihui.name/knitr/demo/showcase/ )
Comment linking /knitr/demo/showcase/
on “Pollen: the book is a program”Submitted My Early Career Crisis (2014 – 2015) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionA really good article on notebooks is the blog post by Yihui Xie - https://yihui.name/en/2018/09/notebook-war/ .
Comment linking /en/2018/09/notebook-war/
on “Advantages of Using R Notebooks Instead of Jupyter Notebooks (2017)”Submitted Markdown or LaTeX? (2013) as a story · 1 points
HN discussiontikzDevice [1] defines a device in tikz terms, which I've used for vanilla R plots, and should work for ggplot, but I'm not positive. Actually, a quick search yielded [2], so it appears that ggplot2 is supported as well. And apparently supported in one of the knitr examples [3] (if you use knitr, which I highly recommend). [1] https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/tikzDevice/index.htm... [2] http://iltabiai.github…
Comment linking /knitr/demo/graphics/
on “High quality graphics for Latex documents: The Matlab route”Submitted Knitr: Elegant, Flexible and Fast Dynamic Report Generation with R as a story · 1 points
HN discussionThere is a recent development that provides a much smaller subset: TinyTex by Yihui Xie (who has made many contributions to Rmarkdown). See https://yihui.name/tinytex/ One can add just the packages you need and it can be installed in user directories for people who do not have admin privleges.
Comment linking /tinytex/
on “The LaTeX fetish (2016)”Submitted A Special Graphics Device in R: the Null Device as a story · 1 points
HN discussionFrom kintr website: http://yihui.name/knitr/demo/engines/ Language wise you can use the following in knitr: We can use any languages in knitr, including but not limited to R. Here are some simple demos with Python, Awk, Ruby, Haskell, Bash, Perl, Graphviz, TikZ, SAS, Scala, and CoffeeScript, etc: python.Rmd (output) c.Rmd (output) fortran.Rmd (output) sql.Rmd (output) awk.Rmd (output) ruby.Rmd (output) haskell.Rmd (…
Comment linking /knitr/demo/engines/
on “R Notebooks”As well as a number of other rather useful languages [1]. Now days I use RMarkdown even for experiments because it's nice to document my line of thinking as I write the code and get a nicely formatted output when I'm finished. [1] http://yihui.name/knitr/demo/engines/
Comment linking /knitr/demo/engines/
on “R Markdown – Dynamic documents, presentations and reports for R”A recent episode of Not So Standard Deviations (a great podcast for anyone in the sciences or applied statistics) covered reproducibility: https://soundcloud.com/nssd-podcast/episode-5-irl-roger-is-t... I'd suggest treating your code like a software project: convert repeated logic into methods, collect methods into modules/libraries depending on their use, write lots of documentation, and use version control (Github…
Comment linking /knitr/
on “Ask HN: Best way to stay organized as a data analyst?”
