Hacker News with Generative AI: Statistics

San Francancisco crime is down, way down (growsf.org)
Citywide crime in San Francisco is now at its lowest point in 23 years. And in the past year, San Francisco saw one of the biggest drops in crime among major U.S. cities, including a 45% drop in property crime in the first quarter of 2025, alone.
Crime, San Francisco, Statistics, Urban Planning
9 points by JumpCrisscross 4 days ago | 0 comments
A puzzle of two unreliable sensors (wordpress.com)
Suppose you are trying to measure a value P and you have two unreliable sensors. Sensor A returns 0.5P + 0.5U, where U is uniform random noise over the same domain as P. Sensor B will return either P or U with 50% likelihood. In other words, sensor A is a noisy measurement of your variable, and B is sometimes the correct value and sometimes pure noise.
Data Analysis, Sensors, Probability, Statistics, Randomness
18 points by tibbar 10 days ago | 10 comments
Markov Chain Monte Carlo Without All the Bullshit (2015) (jeremykun.com)
I have a little secret: I don’t like the terminology, notation, and style of writing in statistics. I find it unnecessarily complicated.
Statistics, Machine Learning, Mathematics
228 points by ibobev 10 days ago | 48 comments
Prevalence and Early Identification of ASD Among Children Aged 4 and 8 Years (cdc.gov)
Prevalence of ASD among children aged 8 years was higher in 2022 than previous years.
Children's Health, Public Health, Statistics
3 points by bookofjoe 10 days ago | 1 comments
Monte Carlo Crash Course: Sampling (thenumb.at)
In the previous chapter, we assumed that we can uniformly randomly sample our domain. However, it’s not obvious how to actually do so—in fact, how can a deterministic computer even generate random numbers?
Probability, Computer Science, Statistics
108 points by ibobev 12 days ago | 20 comments
Fashionable Nonsense. Behaviorial Science Is Bullshit (thebaffler.com)
You’ve heard the rumors. People named Dennis are more likely to become dentists. If you do a little ritual before you go on stage, you’ll perform better. If you give your employees chocolate chip cookies, they will become, as if by magic, more motivated. What you think, and the judgments you make, are conditioned by “bias” that you need to overcome with data. With statistics. With science.
Behavioral Science, Psychology, Social Science, Statistics, Science
16 points by Traces 12 days ago | 1 comments
1 in Every 22 NYers Is a Millionaire (secretnyc.co)
Henley & Partners' just released its 2025 World's Wealthiest Cities Report, announcing NYC as the wealthiest city in the world, yet again!
Wealth, New York, Statistics, Cities
6 points by geox 12 days ago | 2 comments
Cross-Entropy and KL Divergence (thegreenplace.net)
Cross-entropy is widely used in modern ML to compute the loss for classification tasks. This post is a brief overview of the math behind it and a related concept called Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence.
Machine Learning, Math, Statistics
72 points by mfrw 13 days ago | 11 comments
Crime is down, way down (growsf.org)
Citywide crime in San Francisco is now at its lowest point in 23 years. And in the past year, San Francisco saw one of the biggest drops in crime among major U.S. cities, including a 45% drop in property crime in the first quarter of 2025, alone.
Crime, San Francisco, Statistics, Urban Planning
7 points by davikr 15 days ago | 8 comments
CPI for all items falls 0.1% in March, up 2.4% YoY (bls.gov)
The Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U) decreased 0.1 percent on a seasonally adjusted basis in March, after rising 0.2 percent in February, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today.
Economics, Inflation, Statistics
10 points by impish9208 16 days ago | 5 comments
Announcing Think Stats 3e (allendowney.com)
The third edition of Think Stats is on its way to the printer! You can preorder now from Bookshop.org and Amazon (those are affiliate links), or if you can’t wait to get a paper copy, you can read the free, online version here.
Data Analysis, Books, Statistics
3 points by mjlee 19 days ago | 0 comments
In U.S., Inability to Pay for Care, Medicine Hits New High (gallup.com)
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- The percentage of U.S. adults who have recently been unable to afford or access quality healthcare has reached 11% -- equivalent to nearly 29 million people -- its highest level since 2021, according to new findings from the West Health-Gallup Healthcare Indices Study, which classifies these individuals as “Cost Desperate.”
Healthcare, United States, Health Economics, Statistics
12 points by car 23 days ago | 1 comments
Sample Size [in Baseball] (fangraphs.com)
A baseball season is the amalgamation of a lot of little events. Each pitch fits into a plate appearance which fits into an inning which fits into a game which fits into a series which fits into a season. That’s a lot of little data points flowing into an overall end result. We care a lot about which players will have good seasons and careers.
Baseball, Statistics, Data Analysis
6 points by adregan 25 days ago | 0 comments
Accuracy and Precision (wikipedia.org)
Accuracy and precision are two measures of observational error.
Statistics, Measurement, Error Analysis
11 points by tosh 27 days ago | 0 comments
Collectively, the Tesla fleet has driven more than 3.6B miles on FSD (twitter.com)
Something went wrong, but don’t fret — let’s give it another shot.
Tesla, Self-Driving Cars, Autonomous Vehicles, Technology, Statistics
4 points by lopkeny12ko 28 days ago | 4 comments
The R Inferno (2011) [pdf] (burns-stat.com)
Statistics, Programming, Software, Data Analysis, Books
10 points by Tomte 29 days ago | 0 comments
The Minard System (visionscarto.net)
“The Minard System,” a book to be published in November 2018, features “the complete statistical graphics of Charles-Joseph Minard — from the collection of the École nationale des Ponts et Chaussées”.
Data Visualization, History, Statistics, Books
3 points by danso 29 days ago | 1 comments
% of calories from carbs is a robust predictor of overweight prevalence (twitter.com)
Something went wrong, but don’t fret — let’s give it another shot.
Health, Nutrition, Statistics
6 points by MrBuddyCasino 37 days ago | 4 comments
The Best-Kept Secret of Dutch Biking: The Dutch Hardly Bike at All (2018) (peopleforbikes.org)
The Best-Kept Secret of Dutch Biking: The Dutch Hardly Bike at All
Netherlands, Cycling, Transportation, Culture, Statistics
37 points by Tomte 38 days ago | 10 comments
Body wasn't built to last: a lesson from human mortality rates (2009) (wordpress.com)
What do you think are the odds that you will die during the next year?  Try to put a number to it — 1 in 100?  1 in 10,000?  Whatever it is, it will be twice as large 8 years from now.
Human Mortality, Statistics, Life Expectancy, Aging
15 points by Tomte 39 days ago | 0 comments
Experts warn about the 'crumbling infrastructure' of federal government data (npr.org)
Unstable funding for federal statistical agencies such as the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Economic Analysis, both based in Suitland, Md., is putting at risk the government statistics the U.S. uses to track changes in the country's economy and population, officials and data users warn.
Government, Data, Economy, Census, Statistics
99 points by xnx 42 days ago | 33 comments
Statistical Formulas for Programmers (2013) (evanmiller.org)
Being able to apply statistics is like having a secret superpower.
Programming, Statistics, Math
240 points by Tomte 44 days ago | 39 comments
60% of adults will be overweight or obese by 2050, study says (japantimes.co.jp)
Nearly 60% of all adults and a third of all children in the world will be overweight or obese by 2050 unless governments take action, a large new study said Tuesday.
Health, Obesity, Public Health, Statistics
4 points by PaulHoule 45 days ago | 1 comments
The inspection paradox is everywhere (2015) (blogspot.com)
The inspection paradox is a common source of confusion, an occasional source of error, and an opportunity for clever experimental design.  Most people are unaware of it, but like the cue marks that appear in movies to signal reel changes, once you notice it, you can’t stop seeing it.
Statistics, Mathematics, Cognitive Biases
130 points by ColinWright 52 days ago | 42 comments
Global sales of combustion engine cars have peaked (ourworldindata.org)
Global sales of combustion engine cars have peaked
Automotive Industry, Statistics, Environmental Impact
239 points by myroon5 53 days ago | 341 comments
NYC sees double-digit drops in overall crime, subway crime (ny1.com)
New York City saw a drop in crime last month, with overall crime falling nearly 17% compared to January 2024, according to NYPD statistics released Tuesday.
Crime, Statistics, Public Safety
9 points by geox 53 days ago | 2 comments
Is nearly a quarter of Gen Z queer – or is something else going on? (thehill.com)
According to a new Gallup report, nearly one in four Gen Z Americans identifies as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or queer. That’s more than just a statistic — it’s a statement, and a troubling one, for reasons that will become clearer.
Gen Z, LGBTQ+, Social Trends, Statistics, Identity
9 points by koolba 57 days ago | 3 comments
Antidepressant use among teen girls and young women has skyrocketed (2024) (apa.org)
Mental Health, Teenagers, Women, Statistics, Health
25 points by GeoAtreides 57 days ago | 29 comments
Trump Administration Keeps Citing an Untrue Stat as It Targets Federal Workers (propublica.org)
As the administration of President Donald Trump throws one government agency after another into the “wood chipper,” a startling statistic about federal workers keeps coming up: Only 6% of federal employees are working full time in their offices.
Politics, Government, Employment, Statistics
15 points by adultSwim 59 days ago | 4 comments
DisplayR: AI-powered Analysis and Reporting in R (displayr.com)
All blog posts about a chart or visualization type specifically, or which contains details on how to work with specific types of visualizations.
Data Visualization, AI, R, Statistics, Reporting
4 points by tetris11 63 days ago | 1 comments