6 ms·

A “Rat” Every 14 Seconds: Analyzing NYC 311 Calls

60 points by jonbaer 7y ago

Eric_WVGG 7y ago
cached: 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 https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:tPeRrJ...
- vinay_ys 7y ago
  Are they down? I'm unable to open the link.
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  Wayback: https://web.archive.org/web/20190614191130/https://www.omnisci.com/blog/a-rat-every-14-seconds-analyzing-nyc-311-calls https://web.archive.org/web/20190614191130/https://www.omnis...
- msla 7y ago
  More stable mirror: https://web.archive.org/web/20190614191130/https://www.omnisci.com/blog/a-rat-every-14-seconds-analyzing-nyc-311-calls https://web.archive.org/web/20190614191130/https://www.omnis...
- ChuckMcM 7y ago
  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.
  - vnchr 7y ago
    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.
punnerud 7y ago
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.
- chrisseaton 7y ago
  > 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?
  - yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
    Transparency is always a good use of resources.
    - chrisseaton 7y ago
      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?
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
      - naikrovek 7y ago
        Freedom of information is not frivolous.
        chrisseaton 7y ago
        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.
msla 7y ago
Is it acceptable to have unmarked advertisements on HN?
- dang 7y ago
  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. 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 the universe ends, but still, it follows! 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.
  - tikhonj 7y ago
    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.
    - fjsolwmv 7y ago
      And they were mostly all plagiarized from other sources.
      - cbhl 7y ago
        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).
dang 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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.
francisj 7y ago
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 7y ago
  Now for LA
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
milemi 7y ago
I'm just glad NYC 311 turned out to be useful for someone.
- saghm 7y ago
  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.
  - milemi 7y ago
    That’s a good story, and I’m glad again, thanks.
DaveVoyles 7y ago
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.

60 points by jonbaer 7y ago

cached: 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 https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:tPeRrJ...

vinay_ys 7y ago
Are they down? I'm unable to open the link.
dredmorbius 7y ago
Wayback: https://web.archive.org/web/20190614191130/https://www.omnisci.com/blog/a-rat-every-14-seconds-analyzing-nyc-311-calls https://web.archive.org/web/20190614191130/https://www.omnis...
msla 7y ago
More stable mirror: https://web.archive.org/web/20190614191130/https://www.omnisci.com/blog/a-rat-every-14-seconds-analyzing-nyc-311-calls https://web.archive.org/web/20190614191130/https://www.omnis...
ChuckMcM 7y ago
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.
- vnchr 7y ago
  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.

punnerud 7y ago

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.

chrisseaton 7y ago
> 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?
- yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
  Transparency is always a good use of resources.
  - chrisseaton 7y ago
    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?
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - naikrovek 7y ago
      Freedom of information is not frivolous.
      - chrisseaton 7y ago
        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.

msla 7y ago

Is it acceptable to have unmarked advertisements on HN?

dang 7y ago
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. 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 the universe ends, but still, it follows! 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.
- tikhonj 7y ago
  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.
  - fjsolwmv 7y ago
    And they were mostly all plagiarized from other sources.
    - cbhl 7y ago
      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).

dang 7y ago

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 7y ago
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.

francisj 7y ago

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 7y ago
Now for LA

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

milemi 7y ago

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

saghm 7y ago
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.
- milemi 7y ago
  That’s a good story, and I’m glad again, thanks.

DaveVoyles 7y ago

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.