What's new in R 4.6.0? Here we summarise some of the more interesting changes in the April 2026 release of R 4.6.0.

New blog post about R4.6 #rstats

www.jumpingrivers.com/blog/whats-n...

Sustainability Engineer, PyPI - Career Page Apply to Sustainability Engineer, PyPI in Remote.

come work with meeee (again):

we're hiring (again) at the Python Software Foundation! We're looking for a Sustainability Engineer to join my team for a once-in-a-lifetime contract role (global, remote)

details:
pythonsoftwarefoundation.applytojob.com/apply/xz5k3X...

Principal Storage Architect & Team Lead (Research & HPC Data Platforms) in Business Affairs: University IT (UIT), Stanford, California, United States We are seeking a world-class technical leader to oversee our primary research storage platforms. These services span the gamut from the 15PB...

#Stanford Research Computing is hiring a Principal Storage Architect, to lead our HPC Data Platforms team.
100PB+ of research data, full-flash file systems, Lustre at scale.
Come architect storage for Nobel-caliber research!
careersearch.stanford.edu/jobs/princip...
#HPC #Lustre #storage #hiring

If you install TinyTeX via tinytex::install_tinytex(), please make sure you are using the latest CRAN version of tinytex (>= v0.59): github.com/rstudio/tiny... Older versions will point to an outdated download link and fail the installation. 1/2

Diagram showing the Python workflow: quarto render sets QUARTO_EXECUTE_INFO, which is parsed by get_brand_info(). That feeds configure_brand_fonts() using pyfonts and matplotlib, theme_brand() using plotnine, and gt_brand() using great_tables, producing light/dark figures and tables.

Who needs mermaid.js + browser in Quarto when you have Quarto + Typst?

Typst-render to make all your diagrams and more using Typst for all Quarto supported formats.

github.com/mcanouil/qua...

#Quarto #Diagrams #Typst #MermaidJS

Introducing Great Docs: Beautiful Documentation for Python Packages Great Docs is a new documentation site generator for Python packages. It auto-discovers your API, builds a modern site with Quarto, and ships with LLM-friendly features and one-command deployment.

We just released a blog post about something I'm very excited about: Great Docs. Post is in the *new* Posit Open Source site:

opensource.posit.co/blog/2026-04...

Great Docs is a #python pkg for creating beautiful Python package websites. We make it easy to use but also give you lots of options.

Oh man deep in the "more" is native parallelization of {renv} installations. Huzzah! Thanks @kevinushey.bsky.social

An interactive OJS playground demonstrating a linear congruential generator (LCG) using the formula X_n = (aX_{n-1} + c) mod m. Controls on the left set modulus (m=8), multiplier (a=5), increment (c=3), seed (X_0=1), and numbers to generate (12). A table on the right shows the resulting sequence of X values, intermediate calculations, mod m results, and normalized values X_n/m, with the final "random" numbers highlighted in yellow.

Excerpt from the blog post with R code that tests all seeds from 1 to 10,000 to find which ones produce 10 heads in a row when simulating coin flips. The possible_seeds data frame is filtered to show 10 seeds (614, 1667, 3212, 4166, 4580, 5527, 5824, 7365, 7468, 8975) that meet this criterion. The post notes that seed 614 actually produces 13 heads in a row, confirmed with a withr::with_seed(614, ...) call below.

R console output demonstrating that set.seed(1234) produces reproducible results. The first block calls runif(5) and returns five values: 0.1137, 0.6223, 0.6093, 0.6234, 0.8609. The second block uses the same seed but splits the draw into runif(2) then runif(3), returning the same five values in the same order, showing that the sequence is preserved regardless of how many numbers are drawn at a time.

Table of contents for the post: Introduction Seeds and reproducible randomness My (somewhat incorrect) mental model of how seeds work Making “random” numbers with an equation Live interactive playground Cycles and fancier algorithms Why does it matter if “random” numbers aren’t actually random? You’re limiting yourself to narrow, known universes You can seed hack and get any values you want Real world bad things can happen because of pseudorandom numbers Can computers even create true randomness? Moving a mouse around Lava lamps Atmospheric noise How I use true randomness in my own work “…as an ook cometh of a litel spyr…”

I've been using random seeds for years but I have no idea how they work. Seeds somehow(?) make the same random numbers?

So I figured it out! New post includes an interactive PRNG generator, lava lamps, lottery fraud, @random.org, Chaucer, and Minecraft #rstats

www.andrewheiss.com/blog/2026/04...

Announcing quarto-timeline quarto-timeline is a new Quarto extension that helps you make timeline visualizations.

I'm back with another quarto extension, now presenting quarto-timelines!

Customizable timelines in html and revealjs slides, different layout and fragment support included

emilhvitfeldt.com/post/quarto-...
#quarto

Screenshot of the announcement by Simon Urbanek regarding Tomáš Kalibera’s untimely passing. It is with great sadness that we announce the passing of Tomáš Kalibera on 1 April, a valuable member of the R core team for close to 10 years and a good friend, after a short but aggressive illness. Tomáš brought in fresh perspective and knowledge, enabling him to improve many aspects of R, including performance and reliability. He created many tools aimed at aiding package authors to make their packages more reliable, and was instrumental in modernizing the Windows build of R. He was an active member of CRAN and the R community, providing help to package authors, and he was the most prolific writer on the R core blog. He will be remembered for his profound contributions to R by millions of users. He is survived by his wife and 1 year old son. A full obituary will be posted in due time. Respectfully, Simon Urbanek

RIP Tomáš Kalibera. #rstats lost a huge contributor today. Condolences to his young family.

stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-...

As part of my efforts to combat the COVID Amnesia Project, let's accurately remember what 3 influential laptop class doctors from Stanford said 6 years ago as COVID overflowed hospitals and morgues.

They won't remind you.

I will.

My latest.

we have matured, too. We use R to infer causation from correlation now.

lmao

You can't spell market without "mark"

A news headline: "Oil prices plunge and stocks soar after U.S. and Iran agree on a ceasefire"

point of discussion: have we considered perhaps that the markets are stupid

Unionized ProPublica staff are on strike over AI, layoffs, and wages A key issue is protections against layoffs from AI

New: 150 unionized ProPublica workers are on strike TODAY over AI, layoff protections, wages, and more.

They're asking readers to not visit ProPublica or engage with content on other platforms. It's the first work stoppage of its kind at the newsroom.

www.theverge.com/news/908401/...

Earthset captured through the Orion spacecraft window at 6:41 p.m. EDT, April 6, 2026, during the Artemis II crew’s flyby of the Moon. A muted blue Earth with bright white clouds sets behind the cratered lunar surface. The dark portion of Earth is experiencing nighttime. On Earth’s day side, swirling clouds are visible over the Australia and Oceania region. In the foreground, Ohm crater has terraced edges and a flat floor interrupted by central peaks. Central peaks form in complex craters when the lunar surface, liquefied on impact, splashes upwards during the crater’s formation. [alt text from NASA]

#Artemis II lunar flyby images are showing up! 😍

A crescent Earth setting behind the Moon.

cover of the book "Bayesian Workflow" by Gelman, Vehtari, et al. Coming out later this year, in the summer probably.

I would have preferred to have the "draw the rest of the owl" meme on the cover, but this will do. Seems like it is on schedule, and we'll leave some typos so you know we didn't write it with AI.

me getting a graduate level lecture from tengen while a guy who I don't know who he is punches another guy who I don't know who he is: hell yeah cool animation on that punch

Comic. [Sign above four people. A person sits at a desk working on a laptop. A person with ponytail is talking to person with white hat. A person with short hair walks away.] SIGN: It has been [-0.00000000000000044] days since our last floating point error

Day Counter

xkcd.com/3228/

COLLABORATIVE WRITING

What’s next: Quarto 2 – Quarto We’ve started working on quarto-dev/q2, a full rewrite of Quarto in Rust.

And another Quarto announcement; I've alluded to it before, but we're making it "official".

We've started work on Quarto 2. The blog post has an overview: quarto.org/docs/blog/po...

We'll share more in future blog posts, but here's what you can expect from the Quarto 2 dev effort:

(1/)

Literati rules!

NASA Elements of Engineering Excellence NASA's Elements of Engineering Excellence

Quick post on "NASA Elements of Engineering Excellence"

vickiboykis.com/2026/04/05/n...

Like. Come on. Science is cool, and scientists are cool

The first known mention of the word was in the second century AD in a book called Liber Medicinalis (sometimes known as De Medicina Praecepta Saluberrima) by Serenus Sammonicus,[11] physician to the Roman emperor Caracalla, who in chapter 52 prescribed that malaria sufferers wear an amulet containing Abracadabra written in the form of a triangle.[12][13]

Just picked up @adamjkucharski.bsky.social’s “The Rules of Contagion” and am already glad I did, because now I know that abracadabra was prescribed against malaria 🦟

Screenshot of Positron in macOS opened inside a Linux-based Docker container, with a rendered Quarto HTML file that says it was built on Linux

I got native dev containers working in Positron! Blog post forthcoming, but for now, here's a minimal repo showing how it works: it uses Quarto and Typst and Docker to make a little PDF report github.com/andrewheiss/...

(Positron documentation: positron.posit.co/dev-containe...) #rstats

targets was the first thing I thought about!

It takes a tough nurse to make you understand the Monty Hall problem