
A “Rat” Every 14 Seconds: Analyzing NYC 311 Calls - jonbaer
https://www.omnisci.com/blog/a-rat-every-14-seconds-analyzing-nyc-311-calls
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francisj
I made a front end to search for individual buildings' rat inspection records.
Working on predicting risk too - needs some tuning, the "rat model" is less
accurate than the one for code violations, which you can try now.

[https://beta.getaugrented.com](https://beta.getaugrented.com)

~~~
sieabahlpark
Now for LA

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punnerud
I love it! Will try to make a request for the same type of data from Oslo
municipality (Norway). We have a law where they have to hand over the data.
Think we have a lot to learn from NYC.

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chrisseaton
> Will try to make a request for the same type of data from Oslo municipality
> (Norway). We have a law where they have to hand over the data.

Is asking them to spend time getting this data for you honestly a good use of
precious public money?

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yjftsjthsd-h
Transparency is _always_ a good use of resources.

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chrisseaton
Always? No exceptions? You can't conceive of any situation whatsoever that
spending time responding to a frivolous freedom of information request is a
better use of a civil servant's time over meeting an actual immediate need of
a member of the public?

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naikrovek
Freedom of information is not frivolous.

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chrisseaton
I can see you editing your comment out from underneath my response, removing
your abuse of public servants.

No individual freedom of information request can be frivolous? I can't
understand how someone can think it can never be a waste of finite time and
resources to respond to a request.

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mulmen
Transparency does not inherently require a request.

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msla
Is it acceptable to have unmarked advertisements on HN?

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dang
I like questions that show how useful it is to have only one thing you're
optimizing for. They're easy to answer and the answers are sometimes
surprising.

On HN, the only thing we're optimizing for intellectual curiosity, so to the
degree that a post gratifies intellectual interest, it's fine. Actually you
can take this even further. If the 30 most interesting things on HN happened
to be ads, then the best front page that day would be all ads. Of course that
won't likely happen before HN (or the universe) ends.

The problem with content marketing is that it tends to be lame. If someone
produces a genuinely interesting article in the genre of "we used our product
to do X", that's not only ok, it's interesting in another way too: "we managed
to make content marketing not be boring".

One thing that's _not_ ok, of course, is for people to get others to upvote
their content marketing in order to promote it. But that applies to every
submission. And the votes on this story look clean.

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tikhonj
As a good example, I remember a whole string of _great_ Priceonomics articles
showing up on HN—well-written, interesting investigations into cool topics.
They might have been part of a content marketing campaign, but they were also
consistently in the top 10% of articles I saw on the front page.

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fjsolwmv
And they were mostly all plagiarized from other sources.

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cbhl
dang and the other moderators are happy to update submissions to original
sources when folks leave a comment and the original source better satisfies
HN's goals.

But I do acknowledge that's a relatively recent change (last few years).

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milemi
I'm just glad NYC 311 turned out to be useful for someone.

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saghm
I actually had an experience where 311 was extremely useful! A couple of years
back, my grandmother visited New York, and when we got back to her hotel after
dinner, she realized she had forgotten get pocketbook in the cab. Since I had
paid for it with my credit card, I was able to get the cab number from my
bank's app, but I was stuck without a way to get the cab driver's contact
information. I was fairly new to New York at the time, so I didn't actually
know about 311, but the hotel concierge recommended I try it, and I was able
to get the phone number of the garage for the cab. I called them and let them
know what happened, and they called the driver and gave him my phone number,
and he drove back to return the pocketbook. I'm not sure if there were any
other ways of looking up the garage from the cab number (I spent a good amount
of time googling without any luck), but 311 was able to do exactly that, which
was pretty astonishing to us.

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milemi
That’s a good story, and I’m glad again, thanks.

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Eric_WVGG
cached:
[https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:tPeRrJ...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:tPeRrJpSRHsJ:https://www.omnisci.com/blog/a-rat-
every-14-seconds-analyzing-
nyc-311-calls+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=safari)

~~~
ChuckMcM
And for basically an advertisement for the Omnisci product written by a
"developer advocate" (which we used to call a solutions architect at Sun but
was really just a sales person).

TL;DR version - If you can import your data into our product [here let us show
you how] you can visualize many different things [here let us show you how]
and using your new insights take actionable steps [here let us show you how.]

I keep hoping for the equivalent of the Jepson call me maybe series but for
data visualization packages. That and perhaps a 'youtube of data' which are
data sets loaded into a common visualization framework so that you can browse
different data sets like you do videos on Youtube.

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vnchr
I, too, would like to see the OmniSci Community team make a Call Me Maybe lip
sync. I’ll post the suggestion in their Slack channel (disclosure: I’m an
engineer at OmniSci).

A challenge for us with a “YouTube of Data” is that our backend requires GPU
instances for the dataviz that we focus on. Scaling that to YouTube heights
would take a really well concerted effort, more than a fun side project. We’ve
talked about the idea a lot though. Our backend (OmniSciDB) is open sourced so
anyone else could do it with their own resources and a custom dataviz client.

I know I’m sounding like a commercial, but I thought you might actually like
an answer. That’s basically how we play with the app internally. I like using
our Pokémon data set for debugging whenever possible :-)

Our paying customers are big enterprises right now who are well supported by
the kind of sales team you’d expect. Our Community team is totally separate
from sales and they genuinely likes helping people use our open source
offering, hence the demo. We’re pretty happy for Sean that his post made HN.

But yeah, we’re still a business. But we’re kind of a family too. And data
junkies.

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dang
Other threads on NYC 311 calls:

2018:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18316622](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18316622)

2010:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1870111](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1870111)

~~~
remarkEon
Unrelated, but one of my favorite things about HN is going back and reading
old threads like this. It's a fascinating anthropology of how we view tech
over time.

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DaveVoyles
This is awesome. Love seeing people dive into publicly accessible data, make
sense of it, and highlight features which really stand out.

Good use of a data set and illustrates what's possible.

