August 12, 2025

Data Scientist (with R) - August 12th, 2025

🤝 R Community, News & Events

A Personal Message from an Open Source Contributor (pacha​.dev). Mauricio 'Pachá' Vargas S. asks for community support while detailing R packages cpp11armadillo, capybara, gravity, tabulapdf, pointblank, his PhD, guitar pedals, and a YouTube channel

Shiny in Production 2025: Sponsors (jumpingrivers​.com). Shiny in Production 2025 features sponsors like Posit, ThinkR, Datacove, Newcastle University Solve, CRC Press, and R Consortium, highlighting R package validation and analytics

Weekly tabs (causalinf​.substack​.com). Weekly tabs curates Brant Callaway ptetools, synthetic DiD, Callaway–Sant’Anna, panel data notes, MGK–Dylan link, OpenAI hiring senior labor economist, Cubs game menu and life musings

useR! 2025 - Durham, North Carolina (ropensci​.org). useR! 2025 in Durham showcases keynotes by Bellini Saibene, Landau, Ross, Siregar, Vargas, Verde Arregoita; targets, rPlaywright, hex stickers, community-driven packaging from rOpenSci for attendees

R Weekly 2025-W33 Wrote this talk with an LLM, What’s R vector, quarto R package v1.5.0 (rweekly​.org). Wickham's LLM-assisted talk on What’s R vector; quarto R package v1.5.0 streamlines R workflows, covering ML, EDA in Positron, igraph C core, libcurl in WebAssembly

🛠️ Development Tools & Workflows

Weeknote for 2025-W32 (eamoncaddigan​.net). Explores transitioning from notebooks to a hybrid workflow using targets, R packages, and R Markdown/Quarto, critiquing Jupyter; cites Joel Grus, DataBS, JupyterCon, and Will Landau

Release Notes - Tools Updated (infoepi​.org). Release notes reorganize privacy tiers and add Briar, Session, Tox; clarify Telegram; cover WhatsApp and MeWe; expand Books/Reading analytics (Metabase, Redash, Looker Studio, Plotly Dash)

How to build a Streamlit app in Positron (posit​.co). Explore building Streamlit apps in Positron, integrating Python and R tools, management with RStudio, Jupyter, and VS Code, publishing dashboards using CRAN, PyPI, and Bioconductor

🚀 Shiny Development & Applications

{shinytesters}: Updating Inputs in testServer (ashbaldry​.github​.io). Shinytesters enables updating inputs in testServer by mocking shiny update functions, leveraging localmockedbindings, testing updateDateInput and updateSelectInput, and preserving observer order in modules for reliability

Adding Shiny app’s parameters to the URL (pacha​.dev). Demonstrates adding Shiny app parameters to the URL with golem, bookmarking, and updateQueryString, filtering penguins data and plotting body mass via reactive inputs in R

Good vibes only (livefreeordichotomize​.com). Severance ding dataset with episode numbers, timestamps, pitch, and actions; plus a Shiny app prototype Q&A at useR2025, using Claude, Positron, RStudio, Google Sheets, GitHub

Immaculate vibes, questionable code (lucymcgowan​.com). Lucy D'Agostino McGowan and Davis Vaughan describe building a Slido-like replacement in pure vibe coding—no specs, no tests—exploring chaotic joy, accidental brilliance, and questionable code

📊 Statistics, Modeling & Mathematical Concepts

Reducing Optimization Risk through Portfolio Methods (win-vector​.com). Explores fragility of optimization, Dantzig and Stigler diet problems, uncertainty modeling, and portfolio theory to build robust solutions with risk-adjusted objectives and diverse plans therein

Modeling Uncertainty For Better Outcomes (win-vector​.com). Utilizing Stan MCMC sampler enhances business decisions by modeling uncertainty, leading to anti-fragile solutions rather than relying solely on surface KPIs

Let's get accuracy vs precision straight (riinu​.me). Clarifies accuracy and precision with practical examples and R visuals, using tidyverse and ggforce, illustrating four scenarios: accurate-precise, accurate-not-precise, not-accurate-precise, not-accurate-not-precise for readers seeking intuition

To understand mathematical concepts, look to history (kucharski​.substack​.com). History explains confidence intervals, sampling, and survey research via Neyman's 1934 theory, Fisher's criticisms, Bowley's doubts, and Lazarsfeld, Gallup, Marienthal studies shaping modern social statistics

📚 Academic Research

Two-sample comparison through additive tree models for density ratios (arxiv:stat). Additive tree models for density ratios using a balancing loss; applications in high-dimensional distributions, uncertainty quantification, and microbiome data assessment

SkipTrack: A Bayesian Hierarchical Model for Self-tracked Menstrual Cycle Length and Regularity in Large Mobile Health Cohorts (arxiv:stat). Bayesian hierarchical SkipTrack models baseline and time-varying menstrual cycle length and regularity in mobile-health cohorts, accounting for tracking skips and comparing to priori skip methods

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