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Simon Smart

@simonsmart

โœจ Shiny app developer at University of Leicester with @statsforbios ๐Ÿฅ” Former spudologist. ๐ŸŒฑ Grows plants ๐Ÿšฒ Rides bikes ๐Ÿบ Brews beer ๐ŸŒ https://github.com/simon-smart88

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07.10.2024
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Latest posts by Simon Smart @simonsmart

f <- function(very_fast, 
              incredibly_dangerous){
  data.frame("very_fast" = 
             very_fast, 
             "incredibly_dangerous" = 
             incredibly_dangerous)
}

df <- f(v = 1, i = 2)
df$very * df$inc
df$very_broken <- 3
df$very * df$inc

f <- function(very_fast, incredibly_dangerous){ data.frame("very_fast" = very_fast, "incredibly_dangerous" = incredibly_dangerous) } df <- f(v = 1, i = 2) df$very * df$inc df$very_broken <- 3 df$very * df$inc

Partial matching of names in #rstats is wild. I knew the function would run, but didn't know it "works" with dataframes as well!

05.03.2026 20:55 ๐Ÿ‘ 5 ๐Ÿ” 2 ๐Ÿ’ฌ 3 ๐Ÿ“Œ 0

I guess there are some good / historical reasons for this, but it's not an ideal situation and doesn't encourage developers to write tests.

03.03.2026 11:36 ๐Ÿ‘ 2 ๐Ÿ” 0 ๐Ÿ’ฌ 0 ๐Ÿ“Œ 0

When submitting #Rstats packages to CRAN you can either: spend weeks writing a comprehensive test suite and get threatened with removal when one don't pass under some unusual condition, OR don't write any tests, R CMD check still passes, most users are none the wiser and you won't be threatened.

03.03.2026 11:34 ๐Ÿ‘ 11 ๐Ÿ” 1 ๐Ÿ’ฌ 3 ๐Ÿ“Œ 0
Preview
Testing the R-universe build workflow from your own GitHub repository We refactored the R-universe CI workflows to make it possible to run the exact same workflow from your own GitHub repository.

I can't find the exact versions but this might be useful: ropensci.org/blog/2026/01... R-hub has three versions of mac but not exactly corresponding r-hub.github.io/rhub/ (I don't understand why it's so hard to test on machines that match what CRAN use)

26.02.2026 08:24 ๐Ÿ‘ 1 ๐Ÿ” 1 ๐Ÿ’ฌ 1 ๐Ÿ“Œ 0

thanks - I will give it a go.

23.02.2026 22:25 ๐Ÿ‘ 0 ๐Ÿ” 0 ๐Ÿ’ฌ 0 ๐Ÿ“Œ 0

It's surprising that neither R CMD INSTALL nor R CMD check flag having two identically named functions in an #rstats package. It's easy to accidentally duplicate when refactoring code and can lead to much confusion!

23.02.2026 18:22 ๐Ÿ‘ 7 ๐Ÿ” 1 ๐Ÿ’ฌ 3 ๐Ÿ“Œ 0
Internet Archive: Digital Library of Free & Borrowable Texts, Movies, Music & Wayback Machine

There's a version from last year on archive.org which looks similar. "You do not need to be registered with any statistical organisation to come." suggests it isn't RSS any more.

10.02.2026 20:34 ๐Ÿ‘ 1 ๐Ÿ” 0 ๐Ÿ’ฌ 0 ๐Ÿ“Œ 0

Not sure if that's the same thing?

10.02.2026 15:10 ๐Ÿ‘ 0 ๐Ÿ” 0 ๐Ÿ’ฌ 0 ๐Ÿ“Œ 0
Preview
YSM SAVE THE DATE! YSM is coming to Cambridge, UK 29th - 31st July 2026

sites.google.com/view/youngst...

10.02.2026 15:08 ๐Ÿ‘ 0 ๐Ÿ” 0 ๐Ÿ’ฌ 1 ๐Ÿ“Œ 0
'<svg><text x="0" y="200" 
style="font-size: 100px;">
Hello world</text></svg>' |>
charToRaw() |>
rsvg::rsvg_svg(NULL) |>
rawToChar()

'<svg><text x="0" y="200" style="font-size: 100px;"> Hello world</text></svg>' |> charToRaw() |> rsvg::rsvg_svg(NULL) |> rawToChar()

Is there a term for figuring something out that LLMs say isn't possible? Grind coding? Organic coding? In this case, rendering <text> elements in an SVG to <path> in #Rstats. (Claude cooked up a whole non-functioning package in an attempt to do it).

10.02.2026 12:17 ๐Ÿ‘ 1 ๐Ÿ” 0 ๐Ÿ’ฌ 0 ๐Ÿ“Œ 2

That doesn't sound like too much data for leaflet to handle. I noticed your time column is chr rather than a date/time which might be causing problems - maybe some are formatted differently? It's probably worth trying to convert with that column with as.Date() as a first try.

09.02.2026 11:59 ๐Ÿ‘ 0 ๐Ÿ” 0 ๐Ÿ’ฌ 1 ๐Ÿ“Œ 0
addTimeslider function - RDocumentation <p>The <a href="https://github.com/dwilhelm89/LeafletSlider">LeafletSlider plugin</a> enables you to dynamically add and remove Markers on a map by using a JQuery UI slider.</p>

Do you mean www.rdocumentation.org/packages/lea... ? I adapted the example to use 200 data points and that works fine. Can you share an example showing the problem?

08.02.2026 17:14 ๐Ÿ‘ 1 ๐Ÿ” 0 ๐Ÿ’ฌ 1 ๐Ÿ“Œ 0

(which is what lazydata loads)

19.01.2026 16:40 ๐Ÿ‘ 0 ๐Ÿ” 0 ๐Ÿ’ฌ 0 ๐Ÿ“Œ 0

Confusingly that package put the data in "cancer.rda" which seems to be what data() references, but that file evidently contains the data in a variable called rotterdam.

19.01.2026 16:39 ๐Ÿ‘ 0 ๐Ÿ” 0 ๐Ÿ’ฌ 1 ๐Ÿ“Œ 0
Preview
DeepWiki | AI documentation you can talk to, for every repo DeepWiki provides up-to-date documentation you can talk to, for every repo in the world. Think Deep Research for GitHub - powered by Devin.

Agree that would be cool. There's a CRAN mirror on github but someone needs to make that a single repo and feed it into deepwiki.com

11.12.2025 00:33 ๐Ÿ‘ 1 ๐Ÿ” 0 ๐Ÿ’ฌ 1 ๐Ÿ“Œ 0
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bookdown: Authoring Books and Technical Documents with R Markdown The platform bookdown.org is provided by RStudio for authors to publish books online for free. The bookdown package is an open-source R package that facilitates writing books and long-form articles/re...

Plenty here already: web.archive.org/web/20250730...

05.12.2025 18:24 ๐Ÿ‘ 1 ๐Ÿ” 0 ๐Ÿ’ฌ 0 ๐Ÿ“Œ 0
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Tidyplots โ€“ Publication-ready plots for scientific papers The goal of tidyplots is to streamline the creation of publication-ready plots for scientific papers. It allows to gradually add, remove and adjust plot components using a consistent and intuitive syn...

Sounds like tidyplots.org might be helpful.

05.12.2025 17:32 ๐Ÿ‘ 5 ๐Ÿ” 0 ๐Ÿ’ฌ 1 ๐Ÿ“Œ 0
Seeing the forest for the lines - Scaling complex base plots in Shiny

I've spent a lot of time wrestling with base #rstats plots in Shiny this year and thought I'd share the solution I've come up with to ensure they scale correctly and downloads match exactly what is shown in the app: simon-smart88.github.io/forest_plot_...

02.12.2025 17:17 ๐Ÿ‘ 5 ๐Ÿ” 0 ๐Ÿ’ฌ 0 ๐Ÿ“Œ 0
Preview
Grokipedia - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grokipe...

28.10.2025 16:52 ๐Ÿ‘ 1 ๐Ÿ” 0 ๐Ÿ’ฌ 0 ๐Ÿ“Œ 0
Wikipedia:Mirrors and forks - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikiped...

28.10.2025 15:14 ๐Ÿ‘ 2 ๐Ÿ” 0 ๐Ÿ’ฌ 0 ๐Ÿ“Œ 0

This is definitely not the case - people have been free to fork wikipedia from the get go as everything is CC licenced. All contributors are made aware of this every time they edit an article.

28.10.2025 15:10 ๐Ÿ‘ 4 ๐Ÿ” 0 ๐Ÿ’ฌ 2 ๐Ÿ“Œ 0

Also, are you aware of {wallace}? That's what I forked to make {shinyscholar} and seems to have some crossover with what you're doing - I think it can load paleo data as well as current data.

28.10.2025 11:08 ๐Ÿ‘ 1 ๐Ÿ” 0 ๐Ÿ’ฌ 1 ๐Ÿ“Œ 0
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GitHub - simon-smart88/shinyscholar: A template for creating modular shiny applications that meet academic standards and are reproducible A template for creating modular shiny applications that meet academic standards and are reproducible - simon-smart88/shinyscholar

Interesting to see you used {shinymeta} I'd looked at it but wasn't sure how scalable it would be for complex analyses. github.com/simon-smart8... is my attempt at making a generic solution for reproducible apps

28.10.2025 08:49 ๐Ÿ‘ 1 ๐Ÿ” 0 ๐Ÿ’ฌ 1 ๐Ÿ“Œ 0

* on top!

26.10.2025 14:53 ๐Ÿ‘ 0 ๐Ÿ” 0 ๐Ÿ’ฌ 0 ๐Ÿ“Œ 0

My vote would be on. I'd also lose the lines between years as they imply there could be data between the points when that's not the case.

26.10.2025 14:53 ๐Ÿ‘ 0 ๐Ÿ” 0 ๐Ÿ’ฌ 2 ๐Ÿ“Œ 0

.libPaths() gives:
"/home/simon/R/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-library/4.5"
"/usr/local/lib/R/site-library"
"/usr/lib/R/site-library"
"/usr/lib/R/library"

But I'm not sure how to check where devtools::test() is looking for binaries. I tried installing mirai from github, but test() still couldn't find it

20.10.2025 21:10 ๐Ÿ‘ 0 ๐Ÿ” 0 ๐Ÿ’ฌ 0 ๐Ÿ“Œ 0

Also, not sure if this is related, but it seems like it could be. Last week mirai wasn't being updated by apt and I may have done something stupid in the process of trying to remove it to force the update. Could remove.packages("mirai") have broken something?

20.10.2025 16:17 ๐Ÿ‘ 0 ๐Ÿ” 0 ๐Ÿ’ฌ 0 ๐Ÿ“Œ 0

I've run R CMD check and there are no mirai-related problems, but I get `Error: Reason: On CRAN` when it tries to run the tests.

Not that I know of.

I have mirai 2.2.0 in "/usr/lib/R/site-library" for some reason, but remove.packages() won't remove it.

20.10.2025 16:11 ๐Ÿ‘ 0 ๐Ÿ” 0 ๐Ÿ’ฌ 0 ๐Ÿ“Œ 0

It's definitely in the DESCRIPTION. Tried adding that print statement in various spots e.g. to testthat.R but it doesn't get executed before the error message.

20.10.2025 15:17 ๐Ÿ‘ 0 ๐Ÿ” 0 ๐Ÿ’ฌ 1 ๐Ÿ“Œ 0
==> devtools::test()

โ„น Testing metainsight
Error in load_imports(path) : The package "mirai" is required.
Calls: <Anonymous> ... load_imports -> deps_check_installed -> check_installed
Execution halted

Exited with status 1.

==> devtools::test() โ„น Testing metainsight Error in load_imports(path) : The package "mirai" is required. Calls: <Anonymous> ... load_imports -> deps_check_installed -> check_installed Execution halted Exited with status 1.

#rstats when I run devtools::test() from the Build pane I get an error that mirai isn't installed even though it is. I use r2u and have already uninstalled with apt remove and reinstalled. It runs okay from the terminal but whatever environment shinytest2 runs in can't find mirai either. Any ideas?

20.10.2025 14:21 ๐Ÿ‘ 1 ๐Ÿ” 0 ๐Ÿ’ฌ 2 ๐Ÿ“Œ 0