Rasmus Bååth

sumsar.net · Personal blog · on HN since 2014

Rasmus Bååth writes about Bayesian statistics, R, and data analysis, and has built small tools such as a browser MCMC library.

What HN saysCommenters recommend his article on why pandas feels clunky coming from R, and his online Bayesian alternative to the t-test.
21HN people shared it
9linked it in comments
16stories submitted
263story points
11 months agolast shared
2014people per year2026

Most-shared posts

  1. 1
    Why Pandas feels clunky when coming from R (2024)
    6 people · 181 points · first shared 2024 · 45 comments on HN
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  4. 4
    Best online
    2 people · first shared 2017
  5. 5
    Basic MCMC and Bayesian Statistics in BASIC
    1 people · 16 points · first shared 2015 · 3 comments on HN
  6. 6
    The Source of the Cake Dataset
    1 people · 3 points · first shared 2024 · discussion on HN
  7. 7
    Bayes.js: A Small Library for Doing MCMC in the Browser
    1 people · 3 points · first shared 2015 · 1 comments on HN
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  10. 10
    Rasmus' Meeting Length Formula
    1 people · 1 points · first shared 2023 · discussion on HN
  11. 11
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    The probability my son will be stung by a bumblebee
    1 people · 1 points · first shared 2017 · discussion on HN
  13. 13
    How I made some Pokémon Business Cards
    1 people · 1 points · first shared 2016 · discussion on HN
  14. 14
    Introduction to bayesian data analysis part one
    1 people · first shared 2018
  15. 15
    Makefile recipe python data pipelines
    1 people · first shared 2025

What HN people wrote when they linked it

egecant · 2025-11-27
This article reminds me of another great article comparing R to Python: "Why pandas feels clunky when coming from R" (https://www.sumsar.net/blog/pandas-feels-clunky-when-coming-from-r/)
rasmusab · 2025-03-21
Pure python scripts, maybe using the #%%-convention (https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/python/jupyter-support-py#_jupyter-… so you get the best of both notebooks and scripts, in a right-sized instance/container/machine. And if you need to run jobs in parallel, then orchestrate using make, like so: https://www.sumsar.net/blog/makefile-recipe-python-data-pipelines/
happy3483t583 · 2023-10-23
Gateway drug: Everyone's favorite old-school t-test, brought into the modern world: https://www.sumsar.net/best_online/ Here's the story of the tool: https://jkkweb.sitehost.iu.edu/articles/Kruschke2013JEPG.pdf (Kruschke's books and papers are a terrific resource for learning real-world applied stats)
cameronraysmith · 2017-09-07
I've had some luck showing John Kruschke's Bayesian estimation supersedes the t-test (BEST) and this simple demonstration http://www.sumsar.net/best_online/ to people.
civilized · 2024-03-02
> We found R has a really hard time integrating into data pipelines and was best used as a standalone tool by individuals In my org we have several 100% R teams (including mine) that have been developing and maintaining business-critical, data-intensive applications for a decade now. We don't find R difficult to integrate into data pipelines. We write our data pipelines in R, and we find it very efficient to do so. They talk to databases, APIs, command line tools, etc without issue. Doing what we do in Python is unimaginable, especially if pandas is the tabular lingua franca in the team. I vehemently agree with this article on the clunkiness of pandas from a sister comment: https://www.sumsar.net/blog/pandas-feels-clunky-when-coming-from-r/. Compared to dplyr and the tidyverse, pandas very noticeably gets in your way rather than being a tool of thought. (For what it's worth, there are other teams in my org that use Python for entirely justified reasons, and they use polars these days, not pandas.) If I had to complain about anything in R these days, it would be the increasing complexity and illegibility of error messages. Tidyverse tracebacks are often dozens or hundreds of lines. This is made much worse if you have a web app in the Shiny framework, as Shiny seems to mangle and garble what little useful information you can get (my kingdom for an error with a file name and line number). Even outside of advanced packages like Shiny, the reporting of error messages suffers…
medstrom · 2024-03-02
Basically with tidyverse, R can let you write less code and keep it readable: https://www.sumsar.net/blog/pandas-feels-clunky-when-coming-from-r/ Can't speak to abandonment, but it seems a lot of recent devel is occurring inside the the tidyverse, which is deprecating a whole bunch of other stuff.
uoaei · 2023-05-14
A closely related idea is Approximate Bayesian Computation: https://www.sumsar.net/blog/2014/10/tiny-data-and-the-socks-of-karl-br…
tfehring · 2018-06-10
- Marginal Revolution (Tyler Cowen & Alex Tabarrok): economics https://marginalrevolution.com - John Cochrane: economics https://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com - Interfluidity (Steve Randy Waldman): all over the place, but mostly economics-focused https://www.interfluidity.com - FT Alphaville: finance and economics, free signup required https://ftalphaville.ft.com - Money Stuff (Matt Levine): finance and economics, very entertaining and accessible https://www.bloomberg.com/view/contributors/ARbTQlRLRjE/matthew-s-levi… - Andrew Gelman: statistics with an emphasis on applications in the social sciences http://andrewgelman.com - Flowing Data (Nathan Yau): data visualization and statistics https://flowingdata.com - Shravan Vasishth: statistics and statistical computing, often very technical https://vasishth-statistics.blogspot.com - Rasmus Bååth: statistics and statistical computing (inactive but worth mentioning) http://www.sumsar.net/blog/archives

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