Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

No, shut up. What statistical programming languages can learn from Dropbox.

erehweb.wordpress.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 58 posts

Re: No, shut up. What statistical programming languages can learn from Dropbox.

#31

Post by brianto2010 »

crocowhile wrote: post #24
ltjohnson wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am a statistician that does both research and applied work. I use R for three reasons: (1) It's Free Software; (2) It's a programming language; (3) Other statisticians use it so it's easier for me to collaborate. There are the usual supporting arguments for (1). (2), I've only used SAS a little bit, and it was extremely unpleasant to use it for non-built-in stuff, which makes research harder for no good reason. For…

can you reccomend a book to get started with r?

Here's a site I always go to for reference: http://statmethods.net/

Re: No, shut up. What statistical programming languages can learn from Dropbox.

#32

Post by apu »

jhamburger wrote: post #21

To be honest I find the whole repeated "no, shut up" thing to be a bit crass and it makes me unsympathetic if anything. I hope this doesn't become a catchphrase in blogs.

I thought it was perfect in the original dropbox quora post, but I agree that it doesn't quite fit here, and there is certainly a danger of it becoming a meme.

Re: No, shut up. What statistical programming languages can learn from Dropbox.

#33

Post by bennylope »

crocowhile wrote: post #24
ltjohnson wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am a statistician that does both research and applied work. I use R for three reasons: (1) It's Free Software; (2) It's a programming language; (3) Other statisticians use it so it's easier for me to collaborate. There are the usual supporting arguments for (1). (2), I've only used SAS a little bit, and it was extremely unpleasant to use it for non-built-in stuff, which makes research harder for no good reason. For…

can you reccomend a book to get started with r?

If you really want a book I would recommend "Data Analysis and Graphics Using R" by Maindonald and Braun, http://books.google.com/books?id=d7OeVD6SKBsC.

Re: No, shut up. What statistical programming languages can learn from Dropbox.

#34

Post by crocowhile »

ltjohnson wrote: post #28
crocowhile wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

can you reccomend a book to get started with r?

No, 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 gene…

Thanks. I do biology with limited amount of data and my needs are very basic. Here is a software I wrote to do sleep analysis in Drosophila: http://www.pysolo.net

So far I could satisfy most of my statistics needs with the function in numpy and scipy but occasionally I need to do something slightly more fancy and R I guess is the way to go.

Re: No, shut up. What statistical programming languages can learn from Dropbox.

#35

Post by stevenbedrick »

crocowhile wrote: post #24
ltjohnson wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am a statistician that does both research and applied work. I use R for three reasons: (1) It's Free Software; (2) It's a programming language; (3) Other statisticians use it so it's easier for me to collaborate. There are the usual supporting arguments for (1). (2), I've only used SAS a little bit, and it was extremely unpleasant to use it for non-built-in stuff, which makes research harder for no good reason. For…

can you reccomend a book to get started with r?

I always seem to come back to "Introductory Statistics With R".[1] It gives a lot of examples of how to do "the day-to-day stuff". Also, since, as the title suggests, the statistical contents are mostly (very) introductory in nature, it's really easy for me as a reader to decipher what's going on in each example- it's easy to tell which parts are specific to the example itself and which parts are generic to R, if that makes any sense.

[1] http://www.powells.com/biblio/65-9780387790534-0

Re: No, shut up. What statistical programming languages can learn from Dropbox.

#37

Post by zzleeper »

kenjackson wrote: post #8
scott_s wrote: post #2

The code that makes him say "what a mess," I think is beautiful: def summary(data, key=itemgetter(0), value=itemgetter(1)): for k, group in groupby(data, key): yield (k, sum(value(row) for row in group)) Perhaps that's because I'm a programmer, and Python is a general purpose programming language. But I think that's what his complaint boils down to: the Python statistical code looks too much like Python . Which, yeah…

Perhaps that's because I'm a programmer, and Python is a general purpose programming language. Exactly. You shouldn't have to be a programmer to do statistics. Just like you shouldn't have to be a network engineer to share files. What if DropBox had stuff in there about http, ports, levels of service, bandwidth, etc... You'd probably say, "Great! I always wnated to specify that DropBox use SSL4.7 draft B over CDMA Ev…

It reminds me of Stata, which is has a fairly better syntax than SAS.

(Eg: the weird SAS code gets replaced by something as simple as tabulate x y)

Re: No, shut up. What statistical programming languages can learn from Dropbox.

#38

Post by momotomo »

Kirix Strata looks like the dropbox equivalent for this space (http://www.kirix.com/). All it does is suck in data -> Create relationships -> pivot, graph and report. The people I know that use it swear by it because it fills one small gap instead of many.

Re: No, shut up. What statistical programming languages can learn from Dropbox.

#39

Post by jules »

kenjackson wrote: post #8
scott_s wrote: post #2

The code that makes him say "what a mess," I think is beautiful: def summary(data, key=itemgetter(0), value=itemgetter(1)): for k, group in groupby(data, key): yield (k, sum(value(row) for row in group)) Perhaps that's because I'm a programmer, and Python is a general purpose programming language. But I think that's what his complaint boils down to: the Python statistical code looks too much like Python . Which, yeah…

Perhaps that's because I'm a programmer, and Python is a general purpose programming language. Exactly. You shouldn't have to be a programmer to do statistics. Just like you shouldn't have to be a network engineer to share files. What if DropBox had stuff in there about http, ports, levels of service, bandwidth, etc... You'd probably say, "Great! I always wnated to specify that DropBox use SSL4.7 draft B over CDMA Ev…

I'm pretty sure that Python makes a lot more sense to mathematicians than the special purpose syntax of SAS. List comprehensions: mathematicians use set comprehensions all the time. First class functions: same.

If you just need graphs and pivot tables, use some GUI tool.

Post reply on HN