Top all-time · #2171
Allen Downey
Personal blog · allendowney.comdatamathscience
Allen Downey's personal blog at allendowney.com covers data, math and science. Since 2011, 37 different Hacker News readers have linked it 64 times, most often “Millennials are not getting married”. The last post was in 2023, but the archive is still widely read.
Allen Downey: professor emeritus at Olin College, data scientist at PyMC Labs, author of Think Python, Think Bayes, Think Stats and Probably Overthinking It.
Most-linked posts?
- /blog/4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2019-02-08
- /wp/books/3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2017-05-01
- Millennials are not getting married2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2020-10-21
- What Does a Confidence Interval Mean?2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-04-19
- Regrets and Regression2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-07-02
- The fallacy of teaching programming by showing working programs2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2011-03-20
- In Search Of: Simpson's Paradox2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-05-26
- Bayesian Dice2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-08-13
- Is the Ideology Gap Growing?2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-01-28
What Hacker News says?
The author also blogs his latest Python projects (mostly Bayesian data analysis) on https://www.allendowney.com/blog/ , which I have really enjoyed.
Comment linking /blog/
on “Think Python, 3rd Edition”Submitted The Tyranny of the Extroverts as a story · 219 points
HN discussionI cannot recommended them because I have them on my back burner, but I would like to start working through the "Think" Stats series soon [1]. I love the premise: "if you know how to program, you can use that skill to learn other topics." Perhaps someone here can speak to their experience with some of these books? 1: http://www.allendowney.com/wp/books/
Comment linking /wp/books/
on “Seeing Theory: A Visual Introduction to Probability and Statistics”Submitted Cancer survival rates are misleading as a story · 106 points
HN discussionI saw Allen Downey speak about this concept a year ago in a small forum at the University of Richmond. Several professors in the audience challenged his thinking. I approached one after that and asked what he thought and the answer was basically that Dr. Downey's approach is spot on. This coming from a CS professor. I have just started reading his Think Stats book http://www.allendowney.com/wp/books/ which is starti…
Comment linking /wp/books/
on “Programming as a Way of Thinking”Submitted Preston’s Paradox as a story · 67 points
HN discussionBack in the days of slatestarcodex, the comment policy [1] was you can comment if your post is at least two of these three things: true, necessary, or kind. This post is all three: what they're describing is true (these dynamics in meetings do exist, very often), it is kind (in the sense they're giving you a skill to help both yourself and others), and I'll give it necessary in the sense it's used in the original de…
Comment linking /blog/2021/04/07/berkson-goes-to-college/
on “Be a thermostat, not a thermometer (2023)”Submitted In Search Of: Simpson's Paradox as a story · 21 points
HN discussionHere are some relatively lesser known blogs that I can recommend, apart from the usual suspects (worrydream, John Baez etc.) https://jeremykun.com http://colah.github.io https://mathwithbaddrawings.com https://www.allendowney.com/blog/ And yeah I finally decided to inject some character into my personal website and spent a couple of days wrangling with css and made this --- http://linkdot.link . Not much content rea…
Comment linking /blog/
on “Ask HN: What are some great personal blogs/portfolios?”Submitted Millennials are not getting married as a story · 10 points
HN discussionI counted close to ten free books by Allen B. Downey [ http://allendowney.com ].
Comment linking /
on “A lot of free ebooks”Submitted Young Americans Are Marrying Later or Never as a story · 7 points
HN discussionA great guy. More interesting readings on his website (research papers, etc.: http://allendowney.com/
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on “The Little Book of Semaphores”Submitted The fallacy of teaching programming by showing working programs as a story · 5 points
HN discussionLook at "Blog archive" in the sidebar; you can click on each year/month to expand; it looks something like this: https://imgur.com/a/Q91LC4k And you can find more recent posts at his newer blog: https://www.allendowney.com/blog/ where again there are similar links for each month.
Comment linking /blog/
on “The inspection paradox is everywhere (2015)”Submitted Announcing Think Linear Algebra as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThank you for asking. I find this stuff super interesting. I write about it on my blog https://ravinkumar.com/ and here's a video for the most common question I get about bayes vs frequentist https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=foSPfzYs4yY For recommendations here's my suggestions split by persona * I want a PHD in statistics or to write novel research - Go read BDA3 cover to cover. Gelman etal are amazing, and amazingl…
Comment linking /blog/
on “Bayesian Analysis with Python”Submitted Announcing Think Stats 3e as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThe book is designed to support an introductory class on systems - eg a 100 level or first year class. It's a little more technical than you might find in a typical gen-ed quantitative reasoning class, but the material is presented in a way that I think would be approachable from a STEM or non-STEM career emphasis. I trained as an engineer, so I could be overstating that... There is a pedagogical library, pyCX [0].…
Comment linking /wp/books/
on “Introduction to the Modeling and Analysis of Complex Systems”Submitted Density and Likelihood: What's the Difference? as a story · 3 points
HN discussionDowney published a (big-endian, SPARC) method in 2007: https://allendowney.com/research/rand/ And Lemire in 2017 asked the question https://lemire.me/blog/2017/02/28/how-many-floating-point-nu... The basic approach: collect top 60 bits of a 64-bit PRNG. (Assume the LSBs are corrupt or zero or nonrandom). Set exponent zero. If the top mantissa bit is zero, shift left, subtract one from exponent. Repeat. When you run…
Comment linking /research/rand/
on “Show HN: Fast Random Library for C++17”Submitted Combining Risks as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThere are six (maybe more, but I have six so far) factors in low nuptiality (marriage rates)[1] and consequently sub-replacement fertility, under the headings of religion, medicine, technology, geography, sociology, and ethics. 1. Secularism. Secular populations are less fertile than highly religious populations. 2. Infant survival (low infant mortality). 3. Mechanisation particularly of agriculture. 4. Urbanisation…
Comment linking /blog/2020/10/21/millennials-are-not-getting-married/
on “Tokyo dating app to promote marriage, keep out phonies”Submitted Should divorce be more difficult? as a story · 3 points
HN discussionA college credential is a gatekeeping device for access to "good" jobs, those considered high status. Young women looking for partners are complaining that there are no "good" men, those with (among other attributes) high-paying jobs that can support them while they take time off for motherhood, and that men in general lack motivation. This (they say) largely explains why young people are not getting married[1] and…
Comment linking /blog/2020/10/21/millennials-are-not-getting-married/
on “Why aren't we talking about the real reason male college enrollment is dropping?”Submitted Which Standard Deviation? as a story · 3 points
HN discussionbla bla far right bla bla far right. Everything is far right. My neighbors cat is far right apparently. How the heck is Twitter far right AND Telegram Moscow far right? Those two things arent even remotely the same. And since when is Telegram a problem when most voting people in the west don't even know wtf it is. Reminds me of this: https://www.allendowney.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/... But you know... may…
Comment linking /blog/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/image.png
on “German men 18-45 need military permit to leave country for longer than 3 months”Submitted The Center Moves Faster Than You as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI read those before but will read them again. That narrative influenced my thinking about this. There is confusion I think because peoples attitudes tend to be stubborn over time. But they tend to match the milieu they were raised under. An example of that is the plots in this essay. Attitudes don't change much plotted by age cohort over time. https://www.allendowney.com/blog/2026/05/28/sexual-morality/ Summarize th…
Comment linking /blog/2026/05/28/sexual-morality/
on “India's surprise baby bust is a warning to the world”Submitted Is the Ideology Gap Growing? as a story · 3 points
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