Top all-time · #19957
Andrew Wheeler
Personal blog · andrewpwheeler.com · on HN as apwheeledatascienceai
Andrew Wheeler's personal blog at andrewpwheeler.com covers data, science and ai. Since 2021, 3 different Hacker News readers have linked it 102 times, most often “Why academics should self publish textbooks”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-14, and you can follow it by feed.
Crime Analysis and Crime Mapping
Most-linked posts?
- Why academics should self publish textbooks2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2026-10-14
What Hacker News says?
They are relevant and courts have considered the whole of a persons movements standard in terms of whether querying ALPR data constitutes a search, https://andrewpwheeler.com/2026/08/12/license-plate-reader-s... Under current case law (Carpenter and recently affirmed in Chatrie) it will definitely be a search, IMO it is just when the sensors become dense enough according to the court (absent states do not make regul…
Comment linking /2026/08/12/license-plate-reader-searches-should-require-a-warrant/
on “Flock Wants a Closely Surveilled World with No Exit”Submitted Suits, money laundering, and linear programming as a story · 75 points
HN discussionEven before the coding assistants I was not happy with homework. It was not discriminatory, everyone looked the same, https://andrewpwheeler.com/2022/03/24/i-have-no-clue-how-to-... .
Comment linking /2022/03/24/i-have-no-clue-how-to-interview-for-data-scientists/
on “Live coding interviews measure stress, not coding skills”Submitted Using linear programming to assess spatial access as a story · 70 points
HN discussionI don't disagree with the fundamentals of the post (most stuff is vapid, not just on LinkedIn but other platforms as well). But I still personally have benefitted the most from LinkedIn for grass roots for my business most recently, https://andrewpwheeler.com/2025/02/20/linkedin-is-the-best-s... . It is higher quality referrals than I ever got from X for example.
Comment linking /2025/02/20/linkedin-is-the-best-social-media-site/
on “Sunny days are warm: why LinkedIn rewards mediocrity”Submitted License Plate Reader Searches Should Require a Warrant as a story · 32 points
HN discussionFor a demo of this (although not sure with duckdb wasm that it works with iceberg) https://andrewpwheeler.com/2025/06/29/using-duckdb-wasm-clou...
Comment linking /2025/06/29/using-duckdb-wasm-cloudflare-r2-to-host-and-query-big-data-for-almost-free/
on “Use DuckDB-WASM to query TB of data in browser”Submitted Reloading Classes in Python as a story · 31 points
HN discussionAgree with this, I am pretty agnostic to the pandas vs R whatever stuff (I prefer base R to tidyverse, and I like pandas, but realize I am old and probably not in majority based on comments online). But many teams who are "R adherent" folks I talk to are not deploying software in varying environments so much as reporting shops doing ad-hoc analytics. For those whom want to use both R/python, I have notes on using co…
Comment linking /2022/04/08/managing-r-environments-using-conda/
on “R: Introduction to Data Science (2019)”Submitted Using DuckDB WASM and Cloudflare R2 to host and query big data (for almost free) as a story · 23 points
HN discussionThis is very obnoxious when transferring documents from Gemini to google docs (and not just math, tables/code sections are often not transferred correctly as well). I have a javascript hack from the dev console where I can at least print the chat to PDF, https://andrewpwheeler.com/2025/08/28/deep-research-and-open... (that at least worked 2 months ago)
Comment linking /2025/08/28/deep-research-and-open-access/
on “KaTeX – The fastest math typesetting library for the web”Submitted Advice for crime analyst to break into data science as a story · 22 points
HN discussionFor statsmodels for the methods I am familiar with you can pass in frequency weights, https://www.statsmodels.org/stable/generated/statsmodels.gen... So that will be a bit different than r style formula's using cbind, but yes if you only have a few categories of data using weights makes sense. (Even many of sklearn's functions allow you to pass in weights.) I have not worked out closed form for logit regression, but…
Comment linking /2024/03/18/poisson-designs-and-minimum-detectable-effects/
on “Show HN: Tea-tasting, a Python package for the statistical analysis of A/B tests”Submitted Some notes on self-publishing a tech book as a story · 14 points
HN discussionI feel the same way, and a good follow up book about more general communication is Trees, maps and theorems by Doumont, https://andrewpwheeler.com/2016/12/05/review-of-trees-maps-a... That said, I think it is possible my refusal to do cheeky ppt slides with smart art and fill them with graphs of real data instead has stunted my career growth into management.
Comment linking /2016/12/05/review-of-trees-maps-and-theorems-effective-communication-for-rational-minds-by-jean-luc-doumont/
on “The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint (2006) [pdf]”Submitted My Journey Submitting to Cran as a story · 14 points
HN discussionIMO if doing this, you should avoid text in the charts entirely (as the title can sometimes I think lead the models astray, such as the clustering title I think will bias it to find clusters even if none exist). Presuming you are the one making the chart and not just prompting with another image. I believe the text in the image will be more prone to misinterpretation that direct text in the prompt anyway, https://an…
Comment linking /2024/07/16/using-genai-to-describe-charts-for-reports/
on “Unlocking the power of time-series data with multimodal models”Submitted Poisson designs and minimum detectable effects as a story · 13 points
HN discussionWhile I really love Tufte's books, for more direct advice I recommend Albert Cairo's The Functional Art . I don't remember discussion of fonts offhand, but everything else in your list is covered. Several of the other comments, such as Wilkinson's GoG or Cleveland's research, I don't think make sense as an intro to the topic. I have posted my notes on various data viz books (which are quite heterogenous) in this blo…
Comment linking /2020/11/04/overview-of-dataviz-books/
on “Ask HN: What is the best book on data visualization in 2021?”Submitted Counting Lines of Code as a story · 13 points
HN discussionNice job -- I have examples using statsmodels for similar (not time series) data [1,2]. I typically use this for EDA before regression modelling, so dependencies in that scenario are not a big deal. But I might weep if someone told me no scipy in production. [1] https://github.com/apwheele/Blog_Code/tree/master/Python/Smo... [2] https://andrewpwheeler.com/2020/09/20/making-smoothed-scatte...
Comment linking /2020/09/20/making-smoothed-scatterplots-in-python/
on “Python library for univariate regression, interpolation, and smoothing”Submitted Hillbilly Lament as a story · 6 points
HN discussionSEEKING WORK | Remote | Raleigh, NC, USA PhD (in criminal justice), and with my background mostly focus on mathematical modeling in the public sector. This includes program analysis (I did X and want to see if it made Y go down), forecasting/machine-learning (I have won several prediction competitions by NASA/NIJ), and optimal allocation (integer linear programming, GIS, and network algorithms). Doing this work you…
Comment linking /c-v/datascience-portfolio/
on “Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (April 2024)”Submitted Question Sets and All Paths as a story · 5 points
HN discussionThey had a similar article for some of the warehouses in the states and I showed the rates are what you would expect using OSHA injury data, https://andrewpwheeler.com/2022/11/05/injury-rates-at-amazon...
Comment linking /2022/11/05/injury-rates-at-amazon-warehouses/
on “Ambulances called to Amazon's UK warehouses 1,400 times in five years”Submitted Advice for Learning Statistics as a story · 5 points
HN discussionThe way that these programs work, it is no questions asked (intended to get even criminals to turn in firearms, to prevent them from using in future crimes/suicides). So a "show ID to turn in" policy is a non-starter. Shameless promotion, but even absent such gaming I am quite skeptical these are cost-effective, https://andrewpwheeler.com/2022/08/21/gun-buy-back-programs-... . Making it so they only take working han…
Comment linking /2022/08/21/gun-buy-back-programs-probably-dont-work/
on “New York changes gun buyback after seller gets $21,000 for 3D-printed parts”Submitted Some Notes on Project Management as a story · 4 points
HN discussionNot SPC, but in a similar spirit usecase, I have code examples here of calculating confidence intervals around proportions in SQL, https://andrewpwheeler.com/2020/11/30/confidence-intervals-a... I am one of the folks that for dashboarding prefer to push everything to SQL VIEWS and functions. So I use this to monitor proportions for different processes month to month, which may have error bars +/- five to ten percent…
Comment linking /2020/11/30/confidence-intervals-around-proportions/
on “Spc-kit: A toolkit for statistical process control using SQL”Submitted What to show in your tech resume? as a story · 3 points
HN discussion