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Twice this week, I have come across embarassingly bad data
- hermitcrab 7mo agoIf you are putting out data without doing even the most basic validation, then you should be ashamed.
- ramon156 7mo agoWhat about most of Show HN's projects nowadays? Sometimes the docs straight up lie, and it takes 5 minutes to figure that out. Should they also be ashamed? What about people who don't know how their own code works? Despite it working flawlessly? I'm asking because I don't really know.
- add-sub-mul-div 7mo agoThis has become a spam site for AI shovelware projects that are nearly always posted by accounts with no activity here outside of self promotion.
- Calazon 7mo ago> Sometimes the docs straight up lie, and it takes 5 minutes to figure that out. Should they also be ashamed? Yes.
- hermitcrab 7mo ago>Sometimes the docs straight up lie, and it takes 5 minutes to figure that out. Should they also be ashamed? Yes. Lying is bad, even if some people are trying hard to normalise it. >What about people who don't know how their own code works? Despite it working flawlessly? I think that is fine, as long as you aren't making untrue claims.
- akudha 7mo agoHow is it fair to compare a Show HN project with official government datasets? People depend on government datasets, multi-billion dollar businesses are built on top of them. A show HN project is typically someone building it in a weekend. They’re not even remotely in the same league. Sure it is expensive to check every number, but at least some of it can be automated and flagged for human review, no? Switching lat/long numbers. For example
- subscribed 7mo agoIf they publish a lie they should be ashamed, even if their lie is orders of magnitude less impactful. And if someone publishes a flawless code but have no idea how it works, its not their code, quite clearly, AMD they should be ashamed if they lie it is. It's just, like, my opinion, but I like it :)
- torginus 7mo agoData and metrics is 90% what upper management sees of your project. You might not care about it, and treat it as an afterthought, but it's almost the most important thing about it organizationally. People who don't heed this advice get to discover it for themselves (I sure did) IF you can't make the data convincing, you'll lose all trust, and nobody will do business with you.
- agent_anuj 7mo agoIt is not just embarrassing, it can potentially kill your demo, project or even product as user will first look at data and then the tech behind it. If the data is wrong, it means the tech does not work. I never took data seriously during my demos in the first 10 years of my career and no wonder the audience rejected most of my work though it was backed by solid platforms.
- genthree 7mo agoI have learned that you must have data. I have also learned that rarely does anyone care if it’s any good, or means anything. This is generally true, but it’s especially true if you are going with the prevailing winds of whatever management fads are going on. Like, right now, you can definitely get away with inflating the efficacy of “AI” any way you can, in almost any company. Nobody with any authority will call you on it. Look at what management’s talking about and any pro-that numbers you come up with can be total gibberish, nobody minds. “Oh man, collecting good numbers for this and getting a baseline etc etc is practically impossible” ok so don’t and just use bad numbers that align with what management wants to do anyway. You’ll do great.
- torginus 7mo agoNot sure, but I have worked a lot on stuff where the metrics were often very easily convertible to business decisions, like expenses or income. Things like how much do we need to pay for infrastructure, how much money each customer/products brings in and how etc. If the company were an airplane essentially upper management were flying it by instrument. It would've been a scandal if the metrics had serious issues. Some of the metrics less directly tied to business stuff were a bit more 'creative' - as in I could justify why I did them that way, but still not 100% solid. Stuff like optimizing data pipelines, where data scientist experiments which tended to take 1hr, now only took 10 mins. I could say that data people were 6x as productive, but it's just as well possible they were just more careless with what they ran, but whatever, a white lie. However saying that stuff takes 1/6th the time, when in fact it doesn't, is an absolute no go. Neither is not knowing why is there a run that took 500 hours or 5 seconds, both of which should be impossible. Doing that stuff destroys the confidence in the rest of the data.
- mlaretallack 7mo agoI saw the RAC one this morning, though I was miss reading the graph, as why would the RAC publish such an obvious mistake. I have written my own Home Assistant custom component for the UK fuel finder data, and yes, the data really is that bad.
- GMoromisato 7mo agoClean data is expensive--as in, it takes real human labor to obtain clean data. One problem is that you can't just focus on outliers. Whatever pattern-matching you use to spot outliers will end up introducing a bias in the data. You need to check all the data, not just the data that "looks wrong". And that's expensive. In clinical drug trials, we have the concept of SDV--Source Data Verification. Someone checks every data point against the official source record, usually a medical chart. We track the % of data points that have been verified. For important data (e.g., Adverse Events), the goal is to get SDV to 100%. As you can imagine, this is expensive. Will LLMs help to make this cheaper? I don't know, but if we can give this tedious, detail-oriented work to a machine, I would love it.
- hermitcrab 7mo ago>Clean data is expensive--as in, it takes real human labor to obtain clean data. Yes, data can contain subtle errors that are expensive and difficult to find. But the 2nd error in the article was so obvious that a bright 10 year would probably have spotted it.
- GMoromisato 7mo agoAgreed--and maybe they should have fixed it. But sometimes the "provenance" of the data is important. I want to know whether I'm getting data straight from some source (even with errors) rather than having some intermediary make fixes that I don't know about. For example, in the case where maybe they flipped the latitude and longitude, I don't want them to just automatically "fix" the data (especially not without disclosing that). What they need to do is verify the outliers with the original gas station and fix the data from the source. But that's much more expensive.
- chaps 7mo agoExactly. This is a big problem with "open data". A lot goes into cleaning it up to make it publishable, which often includes removing data so that the public "doesn't get confused". Now I have to spend months and months fighting FOIA fights to get the original raw, messy data because someone , somewhere had opinions on what "clean data" is. I'll pass -- give me the raw, messy data.
- Phlogistique 7mo agoThat it's it's better to publish the garbage data than to not publish it though. I would worry about complaining too much lest they just decide to stop publishing it because it creates bad PR.
- nick__m 7mo agoAs long as the garbage data is authentic and the method used to produce it is adequately detailed, I agree with you that: "it's better to publish the garbage data than to not publish it" But fake data or garbage data without the method, is better left unpublished !
- hermitcrab 7mo agoHard disagree on that. They just need a basic smell test before they put it out.
- Tempest1981 7mo agoAgree. Maybe just add a Disclaimer.md file.
- chaps 7mo agoI have mixed feelings about this. On one hand, yeah stop publishing garbage data, but as a FOIA nerd... I'll take the data in any state it is. I'm not personally going to be able to clean the data before I receive it. Does that mean I shouldn't release the unsanitized (public) data knowing that it has garbage data within? Hell no. Instead, we should learn and cultivate techniques to work with shit data. Should I attempt to clean it? Sure. But it becomes a liability problem very, very quickly.
- hermitcrab 7mo agoSo you expect the 1000s of people trying to use the fuel price data to each individually clean and validate it, rather than the supplier doing it?
- torginus 7mo agoWhat does it mean to clean the data? Do you remove those weird implausible outliers? They're probably garbage, but are they? Where do you draw the line? If you've established the assumption that the data collection can go wrong, how do you know the points which look reasonable are actually accurate? Working with data like this has unknown error bars, and I've had weird shit happen where I fixed the tracing pipeline, and the metrics people complained that they corrected for the errors downstream, and now due to those corrections, the whole thing looked out of shape.
- chaps 7mo ago"What does it mean to clean the data?" This isn't possible to answer generally, but I'm sure you know that. Look -- I've been in nonstop litigation for data through FOIA for the past ten years. During litigation I can definitely push back on messy data and I have, but if I were to do that on every little "obviously wrong" point, then my litigation will get thrown out for me being a twat of a litigant. Again, I'd rather have the data and publish it with known gotchas. Here's an example: https://mchap.io/using-foia-data-and-unix-to-halve-major-source-of-parking-tickets.html https://mchap.io/using-foia-data-and-unix-to-halve-major-sou... Should I have told the Department of Finance to fuck off with their messy data? No -- even if I want to. Instead, we learn to work with its awfulness and advocate for cleaner data. Which is exactly what happened here -- once me and others started publishing stuff about tickets data and more journalists got involved, the data became cleaner over time.
- stared 7mo agoI dislike the premise. I mean, good data is wonderful. But if institutions are expected to release clear data or nothing, almost always it is the later. What is important, is to offer as much methodology and caveats as possible, even if in an informal way. Because there is a difference between "data covers 72% of companies registered in..." vs expecting that data is full and authoritative, whereas it is missing. (Source: 10 years ago I worked a lot with official data. All data requires cleaning.)
- sd9 7mo agoAgreed, pretty much all data is flawed. I still want my hands on it.
- readthenotes1 7mo agoI read the premises as "1. at least look at it 2. Have a way to fix it" Those seem reasonable asks. Edit to add: the tragedy of the school in Minab is an example of how bad things can go--and it just hints at how much worse bad data can bem
- stared 7mo agoFor me, it sounds much more like "vibe-bombing" or in general a lot of pressure to select targets, without necessary time for due diligence. Vide https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47544980 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47544980
- readthenotes1 7mo agoMy understanding is that the school was a part of the military base over a decade ago and was therefore put on a target list. The list was never updated when the building was turned into a school. It wasn't vibe bombing, and there certainly was enough time to do due diligence, but there was no process in place to do so.
- Mordisquitos 7mo agoBut surely we should expect some basic sanity checks on published data? This isn't some petrol stations being placed in the middle of a field due to minor typos or bad rounding, or some petrol stations' prices being listed as all 1.00 £/l out of laziness, or even a case of all unknown locations being listed as 0°0'0" N, 0°0'0" E by default. What the author reports appear to be mistakes which should be rather trivially detectable on input.
- albert_e 7mo agoConcluding passage: > Authors should have their work proof read Agreed. Opening passage: > A quick plot of the latitude and longitude shows some clear outliners "outliners" Ouch!
- hermitcrab 7mo agoOP here. Ouch indeed. I did actually get it proofread. But that was missed. I can't fire my proofreader, as we are married. ;0) Now fixed.
- rdiddly 7mo agoNot fixed at this hour
- hermitcrab 7mo agoYou might need to do a refresh.
- rdiddly 7mo agoUh yeah I've heard of that! It's the first thing I did after reading you had fixed it. So either you said it right before actually fixing it, or my browser is caching a bit too aggressively, or perhaps your CDN took some time to propagate the change over to this side of the world. I got downvoted over this. "Hilarious"
- hermitcrab 7mo agoIt wasn't me that downvoted you!
- rdiddly 7mo agoI figured. Thanks
- 7mo ago
- alias_neo 7mo agoI was looking at that RAC chart this morning. Given it's Sunday, and I was reading before my morning coffee, I'm not ashamed to say it took me a good few seconds of zooming in and out to realise they'd used a decimal point where a comma should have been. Easy type to make, but seriously, does no one even take a cursory look at the charts when publishing articles like this? The chart looks _obviously_ wrong, so imagine how many are only slightly wrong and are missed. The fuel prices one could surely be solved with a tiny bit of validation; are the coordinates even within a reasonable range? Fortunately, in the UK, it's really easy to tell which is latitude and which is longitude due to one of them being within a digit or two of zero on either side.
- Frank-Landry 7mo agoDid a bot write this title?
- bobro 7mo agoThis article assumes that there is a person with dedicated time to validate the data. Imagine you want this data and ask for it, but the government says, “sorry, we have this data, but we read an article that said we can only publish it if we spend a lot of time validating it. This data changes frequently and we don’t have a chunk of a full-time data analyst’s salary to spend on it, so we just aren’t going to publish anything. We’d rather put out nothing than embarrass ourselves, so you can’t even try to validate it yourself.”
- chaps 7mo agoIn fact, the government agencies will argue that they have zero legal obligation to clean the data, let alone figure anything about the data, and that they're just giving you the data as-is. This happened to me on a FOIA call where I was trying to get data from the county state's attorney. They insisted they could only run a specific report and that they had no obligation to run any query, meaning I can't even get access to the data I need. Clean vs not clean data is the wrong fight.
- hermitcrab 7mo ago>we don’t have a chunk of a full-time data analyst’s salary to spend on it I found the errors in a few minutes with a $198 tool.
- ath3nd 7mo ago[dead]
- hermitcrab 7mo agoWhy did the title of this post get moderated from: "Stop Publishing Garbage Data, It’s Embarrassing" To the rather lamer: "Twice this week, I have come across embarassingly bad data" ?
- bobosola 7mo agoA couple of days after the UK Fuel Finder service launch last month, I wrote a hobby site using its API to get the cheapest local fuel prices: https://fuelseeker.net https://fuelseeker.net. I too discovered prices which had obviously been entered in pounds rather than pennies, or even missing altogether some cases. You would think that they could have done a bit more basic data cleansing on the server to catch that type of thing. But, hey, we’re all wise after the event. To their credit though, they do seem to be actively reacting to feedback. I also contacted them about the bad data issue, and they are now adding user warnings about bad price values at the point of data entry (according to https://www.developer.fuel-finder.service.gov.uk/release-notes https://www.developer.fuel-finder.service.gov.uk/release-not...).
- hermitcrab 7mo agoThere an obvious incentive for petrol stations to 'accidentally' put too low price, so they can get top of the table on services like yours. So they probably need to do more than add warnings.