These are a few ways of many to go about it:
1) With library dplyr, you can simply group things and count into the format needed:
library(dplyr)
other %>% group_by(name) %>% summarise(N = sum(result == 'N'), Y = sum(result == 'Y'))
Source: local data frame [4 x 3]
name N Y
<fctr> <int> <int>
1 a 0 2
2 b 1 0
3 c 0 1
4 d 1 0
2) You can use a combination of table and tidyr spread as follows:
library(tidyr)
spread(as.data.frame(table(other)), result, Freq)
name N Y
1 a 0 2
2 b 1 0
3 c 0 1
4 d 1 0
3) You can use a combination of dplyr and tidyr to do as follows:
library(dplyr)
library(tidyr)
spread(count(other, name, result), result, n, fill = 0)
Source: local data frame [4 x 3]
Groups: name [4]
name N Y
<fctr> <dbl> <dbl>
1 a 0 2
2 b 1 0
3 c 0 1
4 d 1 0