RSS Parrot

How to open a folder as a Positron project with macOS Quick Actions

https://www.andrewheiss.com/blog/2025/07/22/positron-open-with-finder/

Published: July 22, 2025 04:00

tl;dr Download and unzip this:  “Open in Positron” Quick Action Put Open in Positron.workflow in ~/Library/Services. Now you can right click on folders in Finder, go to Quick Actions, and select “Open in Positron” to open folders as projects in…

How to use Positron’s Connections Pane with DuckDB

https://www.andrewheiss.com/blog/2025/07/10/positron-database-connections/

Published: July 10, 2025 04:00

One more Positron-related post! It’s a quick one, just to highlight one feature I think is really neat and helpful: the Connections Pane. In a newer research project I’m working on, I have geocoded data for every foreign aid project run by most donor…

Use Positron to run R inside Docker a image through SSH

https://www.andrewheiss.com/blog/2025/07/05/positron-ssh-docker/

Published: July 5, 2025 04:00

I’ve long been a proponent of making quantitative research reproducible. It’s the main reason I do all my scientific writing in Quarto—I can mix code and text in the same document so I don’t need to copy/paste numbers, tables, and figures from some…

Open files in external programs with Positron or Visual Studio Code

https://www.andrewheiss.com/blog/2025/07/03/open-files-external-programs-positron/

Published: July 3, 2025 04:00

Positron’s Quarto support is really quite robust and it’s full of nice little features like previewing a citation using whatever bibliography style your document is using (Chicago, APA, etc.) when you hover over a citation key: Preview of a citation …

How to use a histogram as a legend in {ggplot2}

https://www.andrewheiss.com/blog/2025/02/19/ggplot-histogram-legend/

Published: February 19, 2025 05:00

On Bluesky the other day, I came across this neat post that suggested using a histogram as a plot legend to provide additional context for the data being shown: Joey Cherdarchuk’s original post Here’s a closer comparison of those two maps (click to…

How to move Crimea from Russia to Ukraine in maps with R

https://www.andrewheiss.com/blog/2025/02/13/natural-earth-crimea/

Published: February 13, 2025 05:00

The Natural Earth Project The Natural Earth Project provides high quality public domain geographic data with all sorts of incredible detail, at three resolutions: high (1:10m), medium (1:50m), and low (1:110m). I use their data all the time in my own work…

Using USAID data to make fancy world maps with Observable Plot

https://www.andrewheiss.com/blog/2025/02/10/usaid-ojs-maps/

Published: February 10, 2025 05:00

As part of Elon Musk’s weird Department of Government Efficiency’s unconstitutional rampage through the federal government, USAID’s ForeignAssistance.gov was taken offline on January 31, 2025. It reappeared on February 3, but it’s not clear how long it…

Guide to comparing sample and population proportions with CPS data, both classically and Bayesianly

https://www.andrewheiss.com/blog/2025/01/27/ipums-cps-proportions-bayes/

Published: January 27, 2025 05:00

Last week I was making some final revisions to a paper where we used a neat conjoint experiment to test the effect of a bunch of different treatments on nonprofit donor preference. One of the peer reviewers asked us to compare the characteristics of our…

Apple Music Wrapped with R

https://www.andrewheiss.com/blog/2024/12/04/apple-music-wrapped-r/

Published: December 4, 2024 05:00

’Tis the season for Spotify Wrapped stats and I love it, both for seeing what everyone listens to and because it’s such a cool way of presenting data. A few years ago on Twitter, Caitlin Hudon noted that Spotify Wrapped is a great example of how you can…

Guide to generating and rendering computational markdown content programmatically with Quarto

https://www.andrewheiss.com/blog/2024/11/04/render-generated-r-chunks-quarto/

Published: November 4, 2024 05:00

This year, I’ve helped build the Idaho Secretary of State’s office’s election results website for both the primary and general elections. Working with election data is a complex process, with each precinct reporting results to their parent counties, which…