Live data from Hacker News

City of Boulder Open Data

open-data.bouldercolorado.gov

61–67 of 67 posts

Re: City of Boulder Open Data

#62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a small town, but rather a suburb of Denver.

It's 25 miles away from Denver.

My old boss when I worked in Boulder (commuting from Arvada) claimed he hadn't been to Denver proper in at least a decade, not counting DIA or the interstate to it. I believe him. Boulder is definitely its own thing.

Re: City of Boulder Open Data

#63
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Boulder is the worst best small town in America. You know what I mean.

I lived there for 6 years and halfheartedly agree. It's a very nice town in terms of general quality of life - definitely the best I've ever experienced, and I've lived all over America. But there's a pretentiousness in the air that can be utterly nauseating at times. The "Boulder bubble" is real.

I enjoy some of the pretentiousness, namely the physical fitness and cycling fanaticism. There are some really, really tremendous athletes there.

But Boulder lost me at the rock worshipping yogis that appropriate "brown people cultures" into their daily routines while chastising white people who celebrate Cinco de Mayo. They're fucking everywhere.

Re: City of Boulder Open Data

#64
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the most productive things I've seen is to request for "data sufficient to show" rather than describing the data you're looking for. That way you have a bit more wiggle room in the space of interpretation. Another way is to just look up forms ("filetype:pdf site:yourmunicipality.gov" in google works wonders) that are online -- if filled out reports have text filled in by a computer, then that information was l…

Incredibly helpful, thanks for the reply. These tips will make their way into my requests immediately.

Anytime!

Re: City of Boulder Open Data

#65
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in Boulder. It's certainly expensive, although more reasonable than some of the other popular tech cities. I honestly don't think of it as crowded though. There's tourist spots to avoid, but plenty of open space for all.

I found it crowded. I guess it depends on where you're coming from. On weekends, It takes 3 hours to make (what should be) a 1 hour drive at 5AM going to the mountain to ski, very difficult to find parking at most trailheads, camping spots are pretty much swamped on the peak to peak...etc. etc. But I guess if you're coming from L.A. or somewhere that kind of traffic isn't too bad lol And that's not all Boulder traffi…

Oh yeah, definitely not disputing the I-70 traffic on weekends, it's bad!

Re: City of Boulder Open Data

#66
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

interesting! what sort of errors did you find and were there any sort of take aways your had other than lack of care by the data provider?

Each crime report would specify (among other things) what crime was reported and what city block it had occurred. Using my tool, it was easy to analyze specific crimes over time for specific areas. One of the problems was their database would have multiple spellings for the same location which made it much harder to do the analysis since you had to account for that.

This is a common problem, especially for "crime" datasets and very emblematic of the kind of data capturing processes for each reported "crime" (really, they're some of the worst datasets because of the extent of imperfect information and incentives to capture some "crimes" some vs others). Send it through a geocoder like geocodio to resolve most of that problem. It won't be perfect.

Re: City of Boulder Open Data

#67
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I lived there for 6 years and halfheartedly agree. It's a very nice town in terms of general quality of life - definitely the best I've ever experienced, and I've lived all over America. But there's a pretentiousness in the air that can be utterly nauseating at times. The "Boulder bubble" is real.

I enjoy some of the pretentiousness, namely the physical fitness and cycling fanaticism. There are some really, really tremendous athletes there. But Boulder lost me at the rock worshipping yogis that appropriate "brown people cultures" into their daily routines while chastising white people who celebrate Cinco de Mayo. They're fucking everywhere.

lol, well said. The trustafarians, as I liked to call them.

Also yeah, the athleticism there is off the charts. I'm a fairly lazy dude and I was in the best shape of my life, simply by biking around town.

Post reply on HN