Beautiful data

What Hacker News says

1. uxpMay 2011
   This is what I got from the article. data.gov has LOADS of datasets for the USA, as well as hundreds of other APIs from different departments that can be used to retrieve that data in real time.

   The problem comes just after you click "download" and realize you have a 600MB XML file listing the Ph levels of groundwater sites around the country for the past 25 years. How in the hell are you going to make that data an interesting draw that users want to read or learn about?

   I have no skill for frontend design, but I've recently begun to learn how to display data in an intelligent manner. If anyone is interested, these books have helped me:

   Information Dashboard Design: http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596100162

   Visualizing Data: http://www.amazon.com/Visualizing-Data-Explaining-Processing...

   Beautiful Data: http://www.amazon.com/Beautiful-Data-Stories-Elegant-Solutio...

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2. RickasaurusNov 2010
   I'm really enjoying O'Reilly's Beautiful * series. Instead being one of of your run of the mill how-to books they contain stories about some really cool projects.

   One of my favorites in Beautiful Data was about the architecture of the Mars lander. Enthralling stuff.

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3. mark_l_watsonJul 2010
   That is a fun book, and Peter Norvig's article was very interesting.

   There is only so much work that any of us as individuals can do, so I find myself vicariously enjoying other people's work, in books like Beautiful Data, success stories on HN and Reddit, etc.

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4. pgbovineDec 2009
   peter norvig has a great chapter in the O'Reilly book "Beautiful Data" about using naive bayes + a ton of data mined from the web to do fairly good natural language processing. one of his recent themes has been "naive algorithms + lots of training data can often beat sophisticated algorithms + little data"

   i dunno if his article is online somewhere, though.

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5. abecedariusMar 2023
   Norvig wrote a similar expansion in his chapter for the book Beautiful Data (along with several other small programs to do fun things with natural language corpus data).

   You can find it with a web search.

   (His version didn't use a trie, because Python's built-in dicts are much more efficient than a trie in Python, even with the extra redundancy that a trie eliminates.)

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6. dansoSep 2013
   FYI, I found the OP while re-reading Norvig's classic on spell-checker design, in which he mentions the chapter in passing: http://norvig.com/spell-correct.html

   The chapter is part of a book, Beautiful Data, and Norvig has a separate page for the source code:

   http://norvig.com/ngrams/

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