HackerNews Readings: Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are

All Time Past 6 Months

Designing Distributed Systems: Patterns and Paradigms for Scalable, Reliable Services

Brendan Burns

4.3 on Amazon

9 HN comments

High Performance Python: Practical Performant Programming for Humans

Micha Gorelick and Ian Ozsvald

4.8 on Amazon

9 HN comments

JavaScript: The Definitive Guide: Master the World's Most-Used Programming Language

David Flanagan

4.7 on Amazon

9 HN comments

Kubernetes in Action

Marko Luksa

4.7 on Amazon

8 HN comments

Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are

Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, Timothy Andrés Pabon, et al.

4.4 on Amazon

8 HN comments

Mathematics for Machine Learning

Marc Peter Deisenroth

4.7 on Amazon

7 HN comments

The Hundred-Page Machine Learning Book

Andriy Burkov

4.6 on Amazon

7 HN comments

Grokking Deep Learning

Andrew Trask

4.5 on Amazon

7 HN comments

Eating Animals

Jonathan Safran Foer

4.7 on Amazon

7 HN comments

Fundamentals of Database Systems

Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant Navathe

4.3 on Amazon

7 HN comments

Software Design for Flexibility: How to Avoid Programming Yourself into a Corner

Chris Hanson and Gerald Jay Sussman

4.3 on Amazon

7 HN comments

Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python

Al Sweigart

4.7 on Amazon

7 HN comments

Implementing Domain-Driven Design

Vaughn Vernon

4.5 on Amazon

7 HN comments

Math for Programmers: 3D graphics, machine learning, and simulations with Python

Paul Orland

4.9 on Amazon

7 HN comments

Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money

Nathaniel Popper

4.6 on Amazon

7 HN comments

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sah2edonMay 24, 2018

Humans can be spontaneous yes, but not exactly random. In aggregate, human behavior from online activities is predictable [0] according to Seth Stephens-Davidowitz in Everybody Lies.

0: https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/review/B01AFXZ2F4/R2TPT5454UEKL...

schnevetsonMay 4, 2021

I'm curious about what data suggests this, since getting honest answers about sexual activity from the public is a famously difficult challenge.

As an entertaining example, Seth Stephens-Davidowitz's big data book Everybody Lies mentioned a study that asked people in the United States how frequently they had sex, and how frequently they practiced safe sex with a condom. If the resulting data was accurate and projected across the entire country, the United States consume 2.7 billion condoms a year... even though only 600 million condoms are sold in a year.

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/06/our-searc...

sienonJune 8, 2017

The book Everybody Lies gets into actually looking at the data on this and comes to a different conclusion:

https://www.wired.com/2017/05/maybe-internet-isnt-tearing-us...

What data tell us:

"In the United States, according to Gentzkow and Shapiro, the chances that two people visiting the same news site have different political views is about 45 percent. In other words, the internet is far closer to perfect desegregation than perfect segregation."

and more:

"PROBABILITY THAT SOMEONE YOU MEET HAS OPPOSING POLITICAL VIEWS
On a News Website 45.2%

Coworker 41.6%

Offline Neighbor 40.3%

Family Member 37%

Friend 34.7%"

bkohlmannonSep 21, 2017

For sure! Our "textbook" was "Influence" by Robert Cialdini. Here's a number of others:

-"Thinking Fast and Slow" by Daniel Khaneman
-"The Undoing Project" by Michael Lewis
-"Fooled by Randomness" and "The Black Swan" by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
-"Pre-suasion" by Cialdini
-"The Moral Animal" by Robert Wright
-"The Most Important Thing" by Howard Marks
-"Everybody Lies" by Seth Stevens-Davidowitz
-"How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big" by Scott Adams
-The "Freakonomics" Trilogy

chiefalchemistonDec 21, 2017

Fwiw there's some discussion of this in the book Everybody Lies. Look into that. Perhaps follow up with the author. His name escapes me atm.

atlasunshruggedonJuly 10, 2021

Don't have kids so no direct experience but I read the book Everybody Lies which looked at google search trends and was just fascinating and I do think mentioned that many people actually do regret having kids (and also a lot of women wonder if they're male partners are gay). So, if you regret having kids, you're probably less alone than you think!

jseligeronMar 6, 2018

its publication has caused quite a few folks I know around here to renew their effort to buy local

"Buying local" is the kind of thing everyone is in favor of and no one actually does. Well, okay, not "no one," but far fewer than favor it in theory. Like "giving up Facebook," "switching to Linux" and "always using a condom," the number of people who make the claim in order to signal something about themselves is much smaller than the number actually engaging a behavior.

See further Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are ( https://www.amazon.com/Everybody-Lies-Internet-About-Really/... ).

chiefalchemistonNov 17, 2017

I just finished (the book) Everybody Lies. It seems to me using the doppelganger approach (as mentioned in the book) would at least be helpful.

A couple months ago I spent a good number of hours over a couple week at local hospital waiting for a close friend's mum to recover from a stroke. I could be mistaken but the only "data analysis" I noticed was taking place in the heads of the doctors and nurses.

The same goes for the physical therapy facility. That is, no one - not even the insurance company - was using similar cases as a guide. Yes, at a high general level they were. But using real data didn't seem to be on their radar.

This void made family decision making stressful and difficult.