The hottest Open Data Substack posts right now

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Britain's geospatial data is a huge mess

Odds and Ends of History • 1809 implied HN points • 18 Mar 26
đź•ą Technology Open Data
  1. Geospatial data in Britain is fragmented across many organisations, with inconsistent rules and paywalls that make it hard to find and use.
  2. That fragmentation and charging for core datasets slows innovation and creates worse-quality data, and it effectively acts like a tax on startups and small projects.
  3. A National Data Library could consolidate and open addresses, maps and property data, and making these datasets free and usable would unlock big economic and social benefits.

Unlocking a Taxpayer-Funded Dataset

Cremieux Recueil • 465 implied HN points • 19 Mar 26
🔬 Science Open Data
  1. The National Collaborative Perinatal Project was fully digitized and modernized into a public, searchable dataset with precomputed variables and kinship links, enabling sibling- and cousin-based analyses; the data and code are openly available for researchers to use.
  2. Analyses support a real general intelligence factor (g) that is strongly linked to genetic influences, with little evidence that aggregate gene–environment interactions matter, though shared environment contributes more to verbal and academic subtests.
  3. Within-family tests show breastfeeding has no clear effect on IQ and socioeconomic effects on IQ are much smaller than cross-sectional estimates; the Black–White IQ gap at age seven is estimated to be largely genetic (~65–69% of the common variance) and brain size correlates with IQ but is largely explained by IQ.

Google Correlate alternative: Similiarity search of Wikipedia Pageview Statistics in Python

Franz likes to code • 1 HN point • 16 Sep 24
đź•ą Technology Open Data
  1. Google Correlate was a tool for finding related search patterns, similar to Google Trends, but it was shut down in 2019.
  2. You can create a personal alternative using publicly available data, like Wikipedia page views, by scraping and analyzing it with Python.
  3. Using methods like similarity searches and cosine distance, you can identify articles that have similar view patterns to a given topic.

Data Science Weekly - Issue 151

Data Science Weekly Newsletter • 19 implied HN points • 13 Oct 16
đź•ą Technology Open Data
  1. Machines are getting better, but humans still have unique abilities that machines can't replicate, especially in creative and critical thinking tasks.
  2. There's a growing demand for open data, but different groups have different expectations and definitions of what 'open' means.
  3. Sharing your side projects online can really benefit your career; it makes your GitHub profile a great part of your résumé and lets others contribute to your work.
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