[HN Gopher] Show HN: I wrote a book about using data science to ...
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Show HN: I wrote a book about using data science to solve
"everyday" problems
Author : andrewnc
Score : 257 points
Date : 2021-02-24 18:04 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (andrewnc.github.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (andrewnc.github.io)
| andrewnc wrote:
| I've always wanted to write a book. I have helped write 3
| different deeply technical books (and one solutions manual), but
| I wanted something fun, interesting, and valuable.
|
| So I wrote "Everyday Data Science" which is a collection of
| stories, tutorials, jokes, math, and code all written to inspire
| people to analyze their personal data.
|
| In general, I was also inspired by the challenge to "make $100
| online" which I have done in the past month since launching. It
| was daunting, and I felt quite vulnerable, but overall I'm
| pleased with what I've made.
|
| I wrote up this quick post to give you an idea of the process I
| followed to write the book, and some of the content.
|
| I'd love to know your thoughts and am open to (nice) feedback :)
| ghostbrainalpha wrote:
| Did you make the $100 entirely through book sales?
| andrewnc wrote:
| Yes. I officially launched the book at the end of January. I
| delayed doing a HN launch until I was sure people enjoyed the
| book and I knew there would be some interest.
|
| The unfortunate truth is that book writing is a low margin
| game and you shouldn't do it for the money. Development or
| actual data science is far more profitable.
|
| But there are many other intangibles :)
| mholt wrote:
| Hey Andrew, it's Matt from our graduate research lab. This is
| exciting, congrats!
|
| You always did make me thirst for more understanding of ML...
| guess I'll have to buy this book. Do you make more margins on
| digital or print copies?
|
| By the way -- HNers -- if your company needs talent in data
| science, Andrew is easily one of your best candidates. His
| intuitive understanding and teaching of data and ML inspired me
| to be a better scientist. Andrew thinks critically and is also
| a great person to work with.
| andrewnc wrote:
| I have higher margin on digital copies :) Amazon loves to
| take their share.
|
| Those are kind words coming from maybe the single greatest
| programmer I know.
|
| Thanks for your support and for the recommendation :D
| matsemann wrote:
| I've read "Algorithms to live by" and liked it. This looks like
| a data science variant of that same idea, very cool.
|
| I think books like these can be a great eye opener. We all
| remember thinking "what am I gonna use this for??" in high
| school maths, physics etc, and I think this is a fun,
| approachable and interesting way to see real life impact of
| maybe otherwise dry and abstract stuff.
| dan_can_code wrote:
| Hi Andrew, thank you for sharing this. I am inspired by the
| book and the reasons why you wrote it. This will definitely
| help with not only trying to use your book as some form of
| self-help, but to remind myself that when you put your mind to
| something, you can achieve it. This is something I have been
| struggling with for the last year and for some reason your book
| and this comment has been a motivating factor. Thank you.
| andrewnc wrote:
| Thank you for your kind words :)
|
| Motivation is such a fickle beast. For whatever reason, I
| felt good during the entire writing process. Going back and
| forth with the editor was definitely more challenging.
|
| One thing that helped, actually, was I tweeted an artificial
| deadline when I started writing. That was immensely
| motivating for me. I ended up missing the deadline (again
| because of editing woes) but that was key in helping me push
| this over the finish line.
|
| Again, I'm glad this was motivating for you and I wish you
| the best. Feel free to message me on twitter if you ever
| wanted to chat more about projects you're working on.
| rememberlenny wrote:
| Congrats!
|
| This book resonates with me.
|
| This reminds me of the "data science" book was from Data Smart,
| from the Mailchimp CDO, talking how to keep orange juice
| tasting the same all year round (using a seasonal fruit) or
| calculating the likelihood of a consumer being pregnant - all
| within Excel.
| NearAP wrote:
| It looks interesting. Since you say the book is for folks 'as
| untechnical as my Mom', I'll get a copy for my young niece that
| is trying to get into programming.
|
| You have a minor typo on the page - 'enthrawled' should be
| 'enthralled'
| e12e wrote:
| > You have a minor typo on the page - 'enthrawled' should be
| 'enthralled'
|
| Sure that it's not "entrawled in data", like someone entangled
| in a swift web of information? ;)
| andrewnc wrote:
| Nice catch, thank you!
|
| I hope your niece likes it, I would honestly love to know how
| she handles it. I bet she'll get a lot of the ideas, and might
| have to skip over some of the nitty-gritty details.
| simonbarker87 wrote:
| This looks great but.... I'm not going to buy the paperback and I
| hate reading extended stuff on tablet/phone/laptop - I read books
| on kindle, kind to my eyes, distraction free, lightweight and
| comfortable.
|
| Anything plans that address this?
| andrewnc wrote:
| I tried a number of hours to get a kindle version. But since I
| wrote the whole book in Latex and every converter from PDF ->
| Mobi/Epub mangled the book, I wasn't able to get a kindle
| version.
|
| I settled with the PDF as a soft copy instead (and I put PDFs
| on my kindle, even though that's obviously not desirable).
|
| If there is a nice way to get PDFs to read natively on kindle,
| I would jump on that, but I wasn't able to get it to work.
| simonbarker87 wrote:
| Ok, that's a shame, I wrote my thesis in Latex so am familiar
| with its ... issues.
|
| The only alternative I can think of is copy the paragraphs to
| html p tags and then any equations written in latex could be
| converted to images with LatexIt! (if that's still a thing)
|
| That all assume it's enough if a deal for you, understand if
| it's not and thanks for the reply
| another-dave wrote:
| Ah that's a shame to hear -- the book sounds really cool (as
| a layman with an interest) but I too was hoping for a Kindle
| edition. May pick up the paperback if I can make some room!
| -- now operating a strict one in, one out policy for physical
| books :)
| dewy wrote:
| Can you convert Latex to Word (or ODT, etc.), perhaps with
| Pandoc, and then from that to epub (e.g. Google Docs allows
| you to download a Doc as an epub)?
|
| Book looks interesting, btw!
| andrewnc wrote:
| Thank you!
|
| Yes, in theory.. but in practice it didn't work when I
| tried that route. Because I use the Tufte-Book template,
| there is a constant margin to the side of the main content
| that holds figures, equations, and such.
|
| This margin gets brutalized by every program (even the
| propriety ones Amazon built).
|
| Lessons learned. I need to be more mindful of the various
| conversion processes in the future.
| ghaff wrote:
| My conclusion with a self-published book a number of
| years ago was that, once you get beyond flowing text,
| creating a Kindle version gets a lot harder. It can
| clearly be done--e.g. there are Kindle format guidebooks
| that work well. But when I did another self-published
| book a few years later, I was giving it away anyway so I
| just did a PDF version for tablets. (My last one is
| through a publisher but it's also mostly text.)
| e12e wrote:
| > I use the Tufte-Book template
|
| This?
|
| https://github.com/Tufte-LaTeX/tufte-latex
|
| I've often been disappointed at the type of html it's
| possible to force out of (La)TeX. And epubs are pretty
| much html, css and images.
|
| I generally think that some kind of markdown with the
| help of pandoc is the happy path for pleasant
| writing/editing and good output for html/epub and
| print/pdf.
|
| I did find this, that have some hints on how to get xml,
| and then xhtml with support for equations - but it looks
| cumbersome:
|
| https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/1551/use-latex-
| to-pr...
|
| See also: https://github.com/duzyn/tufte-markdown And in
| particular (beautiful!):
| https://edwardtufte.github.io/tufte-css/
| e12e wrote:
| You know, the book looks interesting - but not in pdf,
| and not as a physical book (I try to live without
| physical books - won't I be a sad case when the
| singularity pushes us into post-apocalypse?)
|
| Did you cconsider selling access to the source (eg:
| private github repo, suitable license)?
| michaericalribo wrote:
| Nice! Real-world problems like these are what spurred my interest
| in statistics/data science, and I agree with your sentiment that
| intro stats books are a _terrible_ way to cultivate enthusiasm
| and curiosity about ways to solve problems using data.
|
| In my experience, the most difficult parts of the process are (1)
| translating from qualitative problems "in the field" to a
| formalized technical problem, and (2) all the wrangling necessary
| to implement the formal problem using field-collected data.
|
| I find that I spend most of my time as a data scientist working
| on these parts of the process, and often don't have the bandwidth
| or even requirement for more advanced methods. Not that fancy
| techniques are the goal, per se, but I do notice I rarely have
| the opportunity to use them.
| rootzmac wrote:
| I added the book to Goodreads and forgot to add the cover! Ugh,
| and you can't edit a book unless you have "librarian status",
| whatever that is. But here's the link if anyone's interested:
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/57197718-everyday-data-s....
| andrewnc wrote:
| whoa cool! Thank you for doing this. It looks like the cover
| has been added by some kind Librarian.
|
| I've submitting a petition to "claim" the book as an author.
| rootzmac wrote:
| Awesome! I just added it to my TBR!
| bradford wrote:
| I'd love to see a few sample pages from the book (in addition to
| the snippets that were on the page you linked to).
| andrewnc wrote:
| Sure! Here are two pages in context.
|
| https://andrewnc.github.io/preview/page_20.png
| https://andrewnc.github.io/preview/page_94.png
|
| That should give you an idea of the style of writing etc :)
| MitchProbst wrote:
| Hahaha I loved the humor displayed on page 20. Looks like
| you're sticking well to your idea of trying to make the book
| enjoyable and easy to read!
| ornornor wrote:
| That's my personal opinion but I prefer when line spacing
| isn't so massive to stretch the page count. I'd rather have
| smaller line spacing with less pages overall than thinking
| I'm getting a 120 pages book only to find out each page only
| has ten lines.
| ajkjk wrote:
| Yeah agreed. That spacing looks like a college essay, ie,
| basically unreadable.
| xenihn wrote:
| I'm probably going to buy the PDF. I think the paperback is too
| expensive for a book that is only 114 pages.
| ornornor wrote:
| Do you sell an epub version? I'd rather read this on my kobo but
| PDFs don't do well on it, and I'd rather not feed Amazon for the
| hard copy.
| andrewnc wrote:
| Unfortunately not :/
|
| I tried for a while to get the epub / mobi version but the PDF
| was always mangled by every conversion technique I tried.
|
| I did just get a nice tip from a HN user about a piece of
| software that might work. I'm going to give it a try and maybe
| I'll have an epub one down the road.
|
| But as of now, there isn't an epub version.
| pronoiac wrote:
| Have you looked at pandoc?
|
| I've been working on converting an old AI book into cleaner
| markdown for a while, and the biggest issue there has been
| the lack of a clean source. I'd be surprised if there isn't a
| way to manage this conversion.
| anotherevan wrote:
| That's a shame. No epub version was the very first thing I
| noticed, and searched this HN page on before even reading the
| comments.
| datadawg wrote:
| I've been looking for a book that balances technical rigor with
| real-world application, and more importantly, is fun to read.
| This looks promising - adding it to my reading list!
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(page generated 2021-02-24 23:00 UTC)