zschuessler

Hi HN,

In 2021 I'm working to open source a behemoth project I've poured over 1,500 hours into. It relates to US Congress bill discovery and analysis (similar, but different, to govtrack).

My next major step is to write a data dictionary to bring organization to the undefined/unstructured chaos. The goal is anyone can quickly start hacking on their own applications with the data, and conduct their own analyses, but without requiring a polysci degree to do that. I'd be thrilled if a highschool student could pick the data up and start hacking.

Here is an example schema: https://i.imgur.com/Qsoa1aj.png

Currently I use a relational database and although JSON querying does work fine, it isn't exactly easy to build statistical analyses with on the fly. Here are some questions I can answer, but not quickly:

1. What's the entire list of unique bill attributes that have ever existed in the dataset? What about only for 2019?

2. How many times was X attribute used in 2019? What was every possible value for it?

3. For all bills and all actions ever recorded, what is the total number of unique types of actions have been recorded? (eg tabling a bill, holding a vote, passed to committee, etc)

4. Which bill was most "popular" (most referenced by other bills) in 2020?

I have experience with Elasticsearch, MongoDB, et al and am intrigued by Typesense. But as I don't work with statistical analysis often, I humbly ask the community if there are tools I should be considering to answer the above questions (quickly!).

Cheers!

I received an email today indicating AirBnb will now automatically opt-in user's photo and first name in order to fight discrimination via their "Project Lighthouse"

There is no public content about this change, but if you are logged in you can view this page and opt out:

https://www.airbnb.com/account-settings/privacy-and-sharing/...

  Project Lighthouse

  If you leave this setting turned on, you’re helping us identify and prevent discrimination from happening on Airbnb—and you’re taking part in an initiative to better understand how and where discrimination happens on platforms like ours.

  If you turn this setting off, we won’t use your information, and we’ll remove it from future studies. You can change your mind at any time.

The bit about being opted in was hidden towards the bottom of the email. Feels wrong.

Hi everyone,

I'm surveying data in an effort to make an article I'm interested in writing. I'd like to know an answer to a simple question:

"What has made projects 'unfun' for you?"

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To jog your memory, here are so disparate subjects that have made projects unfun for me:

1. Interpersonal communication with coworkers/managers

2. ill-defined requirements (bad scope of work, nebulous requirements/needs)

3. Lack of recognition from leadership (no 'good job!' after doing a weekend of work)

4. 'bad' code with no budget to improve it, only budget for more features

-

Please respond with as many stories as you'd like! It's most helpful if you do the Google survey below, but feel free to respond in comments too:

https://forms.gle/w8pGuSVZwmRk9rt2A

Thanks so much! I'm very excited to write on this topic and share it with others.

Hi friends, I recently tried selling a side project of mine I don't have time for anymore, because of another project's success.

I tried selling on Flippa, but they won't take a website that doesn't have revenue (at least, selling over a certain amount)

The project has thousands of dev and design hours in it. It's worth at least $10k, even after heavily discounting it. It'd be a shame to just throw it away, does anyone know of a good place I could post it to get that number?

Unfortunately open sourcing it isn't an option.

Thanks in advance, cheers.