Hadley Wickham
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Hadley Wickham
@hadley.nz
14K followers 220 following 710 posts
R, data, 🐕, 🍸, 🌈. He/him.
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Reposted by Hadley Wickham
cedricscherer.com
🎄 Hope you’ve got all your presents ready 💝

Google search interest shows a stable pattern:

🎅 “Christmas gift wife” peaks just before Christmas Eve
🎅 “Christmas gift husband” peaks much earlier

#MerryChristmas to all of you! 🎁

📈 Google Trends (Nov 18–Dec 24, 2020–2024)
#dataviz #ggplot2
Line chart of Google search interest for “Christmas gift wife” and “Christmas gift husband” from November 18 to December 24. Bold lines show the average pattern across 2020–2024, while lighter shaded lines represent individual years. Shaded areas highlight which term has higher search interest at each point in time. The chart shows that searches for gifts for wives peak later in December than searches for gifts for husbands.
December 24, 2025 at 10:16 AM
Reposted by Hadley Wickham
chezvoila.com
My tip is to give generously, without expectation. There cannot be a social network if everyone is coming to extract attention without putting as much in it.

So share cool stuff, repost, comment, like, all in the merriest way. 🎄
December 19, 2025 at 7:10 PM
Reposted by Hadley Wickham
clauswilke.com
Reminder that similar mistakes can easily arise in Python.
December 21, 2025 at 3:28 PM
Reposted by Hadley Wickham
smachlis.bsky.social
Some thoughts on what can help make a (reasonably) happy retirement, a year and a half into this new stage of my life.

nextchapter.machlis.com/posts/2025-1... #Retirement #NextChapter
What Makes a (Reasonably) Happy Retirement? – My Next Chapter: A Retirement Journey
A couple of thoughts almost a year and a half in
nextchapter.machlis.com
December 21, 2025 at 1:47 PM
Reposted by Hadley Wickham
simonpcouch.com
In this edition of the @posit.co AI Newsletter, some 🎄Year In Review🎄, notes on GPT 5.2, and an experimental AI product for RStudio users.

posit.co/blog/2025-12...
2025-12-19 AI Newsletter - Posit
In this edition of the Posit AI Newsletter, we dive into the most important AI news and research from the past two weeks. Curated for the data science community, we cover everything from model updates...
posit.co
December 19, 2025 at 5:51 PM
Reposted by Hadley Wickham
simonwillison.net
I see a lot of complaints about untested AI slop in pull requests. Submitting those is a dereliction of duty as a software engineer: Your job is to deliver code you have proven to work simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/18/...
Your job is to deliver code you have proven to work
In all of the debates about the value of AI-assistance in software development there’s one depressing anecdote that I keep on seeing: the junior engineer, empowered by some class of …
simonwillison.net
December 18, 2025 at 2:57 PM
Reposted by Hadley Wickham
rconsortium.bsky.social
Fantastic! $650k awarded via the Research Software Maintenance Fund for “Enabling the Next Generation of Contributors to R”—mentoring new contributors, modernizing R’s dev infrastructure, and strengthening the R Foundation.

r-consortium.org/posts/650K-f...

#rstats
R Consortium - Enabling the Next Generation of Contributors to R
The Software Sustainability Institute (UK) has awarded a grant of USD $650,000 under the Research Software Maintenance Fund, to the project Enabling the Next Generation of Contributors to R.
r-consortium.org
December 18, 2025 at 5:27 PM
Reposted by Hadley Wickham
kjhealy.co
kieranhealy.org/blog/archive...
December 14, 2025 at 12:46 PM
Reposted by Hadley Wickham
simonpcouch.com
GPT 5.2 is now included in our R code generation eval! The -Pro version is slightly SoTA at a substantially higher price point than similar performers.

Read more: skaltman-model-eval-app.share.connect.posit.cloud
A scatter plot comparing AI models by R coding accuracy (percent correct) versus total cost in USD, with points colored by provider (Anthropic in purple, Google in yellow, OpenAI in blue). Claude Opus 4.5 and GPT-5.2 Pro achieve the highest accuracy (~70%), but Claude Opus 4.5 does so at roughly one-sixth the cost of GPT-5.2 Pro.
December 12, 2025 at 6:20 PM
Reposted by Hadley Wickham
ellakaye.co.uk
🎉 Big news for the future of #RStats. The project

"Enabling the next generation of R contributors"

has received £500k over 2 years.

- mentoring expert contributors
- modernising infrastructure
- improving governance
- strengthen communication and outreach

www.software.ac.uk/rsmf-round-1...
RSMF Round 1 Projects | Software Sustainability Institute
Round 1 of the Research Software Maintenance Fund awarded just under £3 million to 13 projects selected for their potential to deliver high impact, value for money, feasibility, and quality. The funde...
www.software.ac.uk
December 12, 2025 at 12:15 PM
Reposted by Hadley Wickham
visnut.bsky.social
Are you interested in adding alt text to your publications? It helps share your data visualisations with vision impaired readers. Try out github.com/numbats/auto... to get a reasonable first draft or maybe complete text. @r-forwards.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy @rladies.org @rconsortium.bsky.social
GitHub - numbats/autoAlt
Contribute to numbats/autoAlt development by creating an account on GitHub.
github.com
December 11, 2025 at 9:41 PM
Reposted by Hadley Wickham
kellybodwin.com
Back in the top 10, baby!

Eat your heart out, "#rstats is dying" thinkpieces. 😜

www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/
TIOBE Index - TIOBE
www.tiobe.com
December 11, 2025 at 9:19 PM
Reposted by Hadley Wickham
kjhealy.co
I’m teaching a course on data wrangling with R & the tidyverse for @stathorizons.bsky.social in January. Filled to the brim with ways to do the stuff you have to do before you can run any of your spiffy models and that often breezily gets glossed over even though it’ll take up 90% of your time.
Data Wrangling with the Tidyverse | Online Seminar | Code Horizons
Learn how to clean, organize, and prepare your research data in R using the tidyverse with Kieran Healy, Ph.D., in this online seminar.
codehorizons.com
December 11, 2025 at 7:47 PM
Reposted by Hadley Wickham
jeremy-data.bsky.social
A worthy mantra from Andrew: "[I] cannot LLM [my] way into domain knowledge, data analysis expertise, or coding ability."
andrew.heiss.phd Andrew Heiss @andrew.heiss.phd · 16d
Some closing thoughts for my students this semester on LLMs and learning #rstats datavizf25.classes.andrewheiss.com/news/2025-12...
Will you incorporate LLMs and AI prompting into the course in the future? No. Why won’t you incorporate LLMs and AI prompting into the course? These tools are useful for coding (see this for my personal take on this). However, they’re only useful if you know what you’re doing first. If you skip the learning-the-process-of-writing-code step and just copy/paste output from ChatGPT, you will not learn. You cannot learn. You cannot improve. You will not understand the code. In that post, it warns that you cannot use it as a beginner: …to use Databot effectively and safely, you still need the skills of a data scientist: background and domain knowledge, data analysis expertise, and coding ability. There is no LLM-based shortcut to those skills. You cannot LLM your way into domain knowledge, data analysis expertise, or coding ability. The only way to gain domain knowledge, data analysis expertise, and coding ability is to struggle. To get errors. To google those errors. To look over the documentation. To copy/paste your own code and adapt it for different purposes. To explore messy datasets. To struggle to clean those datasets. To spend an hour looking for a missing comma. This isn’t a form of programming hazing, like “I had to walk to school uphill both ways in the snow and now you must too.” It’s the actual process of learning and growing and developing and improving. You’ve gotta struggle. This Tumblr post puts it well (it’s about art specifically, but it applies to coding and data analysis too): Contrary to popular belief the biggest beginner’s roadblock to art isn’t even technical skill it’s frustration tolerance, especially in the age of social media. It hurts and the frustration is endless but you must build the frustration tolerance equivalent to a roach’s capacity to survive a nuclear explosion. That’s how you build on the technical skill. Throw that “won’t even start because I’m afraid it won’t be perfect” shit out the window. Just do it. Just start. Good luck. (The original post has disappeared, but here’s a reblog.) It’s hard, but struggling is the only way to learn anything. You might not enjoy code as much as Williams does (or I do), but there’s still value in maintaining codings skills as you improve and learn more. You don’t want your skills to atrophy. As I discuss here, when I do use LLMs for coding-related tasks, I purposely throw as much friction into the process as possible: To avoid falling into over-reliance on LLM-assisted code help, I add as much friction into my workflow as possible. I only use GitHub Copilot and Claude in the browser, not through the chat sidebar in Positron or Visual Studio Code. I treat the code it generates like random answers from StackOverflow or blog posts and generally rewrite it completely. I disable the inline LLM-based auto complete in text editors. For routine tasks like generating {roxygen2} documentation scaffolding for functions, I use the {chores} package, which requires a bunch of pointing and clicking to use. Even though I use Positron, I purposely do not use either Positron Assistant or Databot. I have them disabled. So in the end, for pedagogical reasons, I don’t foresee me incorporating LLMs into this class. I’m pedagogically opposed to it. I’m facing all sorts of external pressure to do it, but I’m resisting. You’ve got to learn first.
December 9, 2025 at 11:54 PM
Reposted by Hadley Wickham
rainbowr.org
Today is the last day to submit proposals to speak at the rainbowR conference 🌈 Deadline is midnight, Anywhere on Earth time.

#RStats #QueerData
rainbowr.org rainbowR @rainbowr.org · 25d
Would you like to present at the inaugural rainbowR conference?

If you're LGBTQ+, we'd love you to tell us

🦄💻 How you use R
🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️ How you work with LGBTQ+ data

Call for submissions extended to December 8th.

conference.rainbowr.org/abstracts

#RStats #QueerData
Abstracts – rainbowR conference
conference.rainbowr.org
December 8, 2025 at 8:56 AM
Reposted by Hadley Wickham
adamjkucharski.bsky.social
How do large language models interpret words relating to probability like “unlikely,” “probably,” or “almost certain"?

The below shows what happens when we compare judgements from different models to a benchmark dataset of human judgments (data from: github.com/zonination/p...).
December 8, 2025 at 9:42 AM
Reposted by Hadley Wickham
simonpcouch.com
A new release of odbc, a package that allows for connecting to various databases, is on #rstats CRAN! Just a few bug fixes in this release.

github.com/r-dbi/odbc/r...
A diagram containing four boxes with arrows linking each pointing left to right. The boxes read, in order, "R interface," "driver manager," "ODBC driver," and "DBMS." The left-most box, R interface, contains three smaller components, labeled "dbplyr," "DBI," and "odbc."
December 8, 2025 at 2:47 PM
Reposted by Hadley Wickham
libbyheeren.bsky.social
We're getting a native R %notin%!! "after many years of private definitions mostly hidden in packages" 😂😂

#rstats #databs
December 6, 2025 at 7:49 PM
Reposted by Hadley Wickham
kellybodwin.com
Huge thanks to @posit.co and hosts @mchow.com and @wesmckinney.com for having me on The Test Set!!!

posit.co/thetestset/e...

My favorite part was learning that I've been pronouncing "pandas" correctly all along. I've never felt more vindicated.

And y'all are wrong about candy corn. 😜
Episode 11 : Kelly Bodwin — Quarto hacks, AI in the classroom, and why R should stay weird - Posit
posit.co
December 6, 2025 at 8:53 PM
Reposted by Hadley Wickham
posit.co
Hey data science junkies! 🚀 We just dropped The Test Set podcast on YouTube.

It’s been a blast having conversations with the folks behind your favorite #RStats and #Python tools. And, we have a stacked lineup of guests coming up next year!

Learn what we're cooking here! posit.co/blog/the-tes...
The Test Set: Now on YouTube + a look at what’s next - Posit
Posit's video podcast The Test Set is now on YouTube, featuring data science pioneers like Hadley Wickham and Wes McKinney discussing open-source tools, AI, and the future of data science.
posit.co
December 4, 2025 at 3:35 PM
Reposted by Hadley Wickham
andrewholz.bsky.social
I put together two roundups from posit::conf(2025):

• Shiny talks + full workshop materials
shiny.posit.co/blog/posts/c...

• Quarto talks playlist and summaries
quarto.org/docs/blog/po...
shiny.posit.co
December 4, 2025 at 4:48 PM
Reposted by Hadley Wickham
simonpcouch.com
It's Spotify Wrapped season🎁 Continuing the tradition of analyzing my music listening data with #rstats tidyverse, this time with Databot: www.simonpcouch.com/blog/2025-12...
A screenshot of the beginning of a conversation with databot, where I say 'Read blog/2025-12-03-wrapped-databot/Library.xml and turn it into a tibble' and the agent begins working.
December 3, 2025 at 9:57 PM
Reposted by Hadley Wickham
dgkeyes.com
Ever since we started making documents in Quarto and Typst, I've wanted to make EVERYTHING in Quarto and Typst. Curious to learn how make documents like these? Boy, do I have the blog post for you! #rstats

rfortherestofus.com/2025/11/quar...
December 1, 2025 at 1:36 PM
Reposted by Hadley Wickham
simonpcouch.com
A new release of vitals, a package for LLM evaluation in #rstats, is now on CRAN!🎄 This release includes all sorts of quality-of-life improvements; image support, precise latency measurement, better error messages, and more comprehensive logging.

github.com/tidyverse/vi...
December 2, 2025 at 2:17 PM
Reposted by Hadley Wickham
charliejhadley.bsky.social
Merry December folks!

Wanna know your most used and co-dependent geoms this past year?!

I've built "Spotify Wrapped" for {ggplot2} that produces you an interactive story and analytical tools for your geom usage! #rstats

Build your own report by following the docs:
gpcds.com/ggplot2wrapp...
December 1, 2025 at 10:51 AM