Ben Schneider
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bschneidr.bsky.social
Ben Schneider
@bschneidr.bsky.social
Stats, surveys, R, and dogs.
www.practicalsignificance.com
Reposted by Ben Schneider
Watergate, but if someone was killed.
NYT confirming MS NOW reporting:

Prosecutors began investigating Renee Good's killing, then Washington told them to stop.

Federal prosecutors had a warrant to collect evidence from Good's vehicle, but Trump leaders said to drop it. About a dozen prosecutors have since departed.
Prosecutors Began Investigating Renee Good’s Killing. Washington Told Them to Stop.
www.nytimes.com
February 8, 2026 at 12:22 AM
Reposted by Ben Schneider
I just led a workshop on Quarto with @physaliacourses.bsky.social which I’ve now made public. I’m sharing the full source code to demonstrate advanced features: extensions, brand.yml styling across formats, and full CI/CD via GitHub Actions. github.com/mcanouil/mas...
#Quarto #Workshop #GitHub #CICD
GitHub - mcanouil/mastering-quarto-cli: [Workshop] Mastering Quarto CLI: From Authoring to Publishing
[Workshop] Mastering Quarto CLI: From Authoring to Publishing - mcanouil/mastering-quarto-cli
github.com
February 6, 2026 at 7:29 PM
Reposted by Ben Schneider
The python notebook dependence is one of my least favorite parts of the move to industry. Writing code that gets saved as json instead of plain text, absolutely disgusting.
February 6, 2026 at 4:41 PM
Reposted by Ben Schneider
Back when notebooks became popular, the markdown ecosystem for literate programming was very much centred around R, but now, with Quarto, notebooks really feel like a legacy technology and they survive because people are used to them
February 6, 2026 at 4:53 PM
Reposted by Ben Schneider
The real command is

claude --make-me-a-sandwich --dangerously-skip-permissions.

Without the flag you get:

Claude wants to open the bread bag [y/n]

Claude wants to access the fridge [y/n]

Claude wants to use a knife — this tool can modify your physical environment. Allow? [y/n]
February 6, 2026 at 7:33 PM
Reposted by Ben Schneider
Ian McKellen performs “The Strangers’ Case” speech from “Sir Thomas More” on Colbert.
February 5, 2026 at 1:07 PM
Reposted by Ben Schneider
inspired by CLAUDE.md, I’ve started putting markdown files named after coworkers into work code repos so I can remind them to stop doing shit to the codebase that annoys me

for some reason they’re all mad at me now, which means ill be adding commands to JEREMY.md for an attitude adjustment
February 4, 2026 at 5:32 PM
Reposted by Ben Schneider
"Ten simple rules for teaching data science": arxiv.org/abs/2602.02874

A new preprint by @minecr.bsky.social and myself. We'd love any feedback!
Ten simple rules for teaching data science
Teaching data science presents unique challenges and opportunities that cannot be fully addressed by simply borrowing pedagogical strategies from its parent disciplines of statistics and computer scie...
arxiv.org
February 4, 2026 at 4:39 PM
Reposted by Ben Schneider
6/ The Post has lost over 375,000 subscribers in just over a year. If 10% of those readers subscribed to The 51st instead, we could hire 10 reporters and five editors, dramatically scaling our coverage of the city at this critical time. 51st.news/signup
Join The 51st
The 51st is a worker-led nonprofit news source for D.C. Our reporting is rooted in our conviction that local journalism is meant to make people’s lives better — no paywalls, ever. But that's only…
51st.news
February 4, 2026 at 7:21 PM
Reposted by Ben Schneider
dplyr 1.2.0 is out now and we are SO excited!

- `filter_out()` for dropping rows

- `recode_values()`, `replace_values()`, and `replace_when()` that join `case_when()` as a complete family of recoding/replacing tools

These are huge quality of life wins for #rstats!

tidyverse.org/blog/2026/02...
dplyr 1.2.0
dplyr 1.2.0 fills in some important gaps in dplyr's API: we've added a new complement to `filter()` focused on dropping rows, and we've expanded the `case_when()` family with three new recoding and re...
tidyverse.org
February 4, 2026 at 11:39 AM
Reposted by Ben Schneider
basically yglesias, jain, jentleson, WelcomePAC donors etc all base their prescriptions for Dems on a statistical model that nobody can replicate, and refuse to acknowledge (a) that uncertainty dwarfs the detectable effect of moderation & (b) that the last year has proved their views wrong!!
February 3, 2026 at 6:12 PM
The book “Computer Age Statistical Inference” is a great read (and freely available!), and now there’s an R package that makes it easy to get the data for examples.
February 4, 2026 at 4:09 AM
Reposted by Ben Schneider
My complaint about the moderation debate isn't that moderate might, on average, help some candidates in very close districts. My complaint is that it is a drunkard's search, looking for keys under the lamppost because that's where there's light, not because that's where the keys will be found
February 3, 2026 at 5:57 PM
Reposted by Ben Schneider
“NOTUS verified dozens of instances of lapsed federal data to capture the range of information that is no longer being collected, has been paused or is now not available to the public.”
www.notus.org/trump-white-...
Federal Data Is Disappearing
The Trump administration has disrupted data collection on everything from homeland security, maternal mortality, hunger, drug use, education, disaster preparation and the economy.
www.notus.org
February 2, 2026 at 2:35 PM
Reposted by Ben Schneider
Join us on Tuesday at the Data Science Lab 🧪 We are joined by @sara-altman.bsky.social, who will show us how to explore and analyze data using AI assistants in #RStats or #Python!

Feb 3 @ 12 pm ET: pos.it/dslab
February 2, 2026 at 3:09 PM
Reposted by Ben Schneider
Took me way too long to realize that its super easy to just merge pdfs in R rather than fussing with Adobe #rstats

library(pdftools)
pdf_combine(
input = c("file1.pdf", "file2.pdf"),
output = "merged.pdf"
)
January 30, 2026 at 6:43 PM
Reposted by Ben Schneider
okay #rstats

I've been iterating on {sqlm} package on and off for two years but managed to complete this thanks to @posit.co positron

So what is this package? its the lm() that runs against databases using the same sugar syntax as the lm() function

usrbinr.codeberg.page/sqlm/
sqlm
usrbinr.codeberg.page
January 31, 2026 at 10:09 PM
Reposted by Ben Schneider
What if your dplyr pipelines ran on GPU?

That's what I built with cuplyr! A CUDA-powered backend for #rstats data manipulation. Looking for testers and feedback!

github.com/bbtheo/cuplyr
GitHub - bbtheo/cuplyr: GPU powered dataframes in R
GPU powered dataframes in R. Contribute to bbtheo/cuplyr development by creating an account on GitHub.
github.com
January 29, 2026 at 5:56 PM
Reposted by Ben Schneider
Oh, this is great news!!
"Trump Picks Veteran Staffer to Head Bureau of Labor Statistics: Brett Matsumoto, the next chief, has worked as an economist at the BLS since 2015."

Excellent choice! www.wsj.com/economy/trum...
Exclusive | Trump Picks Veteran Staffer to Head Bureau of Labor Statistics
Brett Matsumoto, the next chief, has worked as an economist at the BLS since 2015.
www.wsj.com
January 30, 2026 at 9:28 PM
Reposted by Ben Schneider
Data sciencey people — if you haven’t tried Positron, I highly, highly recommend giving it a whirl.
January 30, 2026 at 3:43 PM
Reposted by Ben Schneider
"Trump Picks Veteran Staffer to Head Bureau of Labor Statistics: Brett Matsumoto, the next chief, has worked as an economist at the BLS since 2015."

Excellent choice! www.wsj.com/economy/trum...
Exclusive | Trump Picks Veteran Staffer to Head Bureau of Labor Statistics
Brett Matsumoto, the next chief, has worked as an economist at the BLS since 2015.
www.wsj.com
January 30, 2026 at 9:26 PM
Reposted by Ben Schneider
Hey has anyone else noticed that augmented synthetic control packages (at least in R; geolift, augsynth, tidysynth…etc) have very little documentation compared to what I would expect given their usefulness????

(Ask my why I know🫩)
January 28, 2026 at 6:24 PM
Reposted by Ben Schneider
We're excited to announce the release of {arrow} 23.0.0 🏹📦

Here's a roundup of the new features and changes in a 🧵

Full details can be found at arrow.apache.org/docs/r/news/

#rstats #apachearrow
Changelog
arrow.apache.org
January 28, 2026 at 4:55 PM
Reposted by Ben Schneider
I love this idea: duckdb.org/community_ex.... It translates dplyr syntax _inside_ of duckdb so you can mix it with regular SQL
dplyr
DuckDB Community Extensions R dplyr pipeline syntax support for DuckDB - transpiles dplyr verbs to SQL
duckdb.org
January 27, 2026 at 7:08 PM
Reposted by Ben Schneider
January 27, 2026 at 8:27 PM