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Comment by rogerhoward | Hacker News Reader

I've worked with this API a fair bit since early 2016, and it's been around longer. I've got no real complaints about the API, just want to note that the data itself is.. arcane.. it'll take a bit of study and research to get up to speed on even a small subset of what's available.

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Yes, as someone who has played with Census data a lot this year, I've found myself becoming intimately familiar with FIPS numbers. Also, it's interesting to see what the Census Bureau designates a "place" and what it designates a "county subdivision". New England and New Jersey in particular look weird from a Census perspective (because of this, I've found my self using subdivisions exclusively for New England, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and the Dakotas).

And if you think that's arcane, you should try shapefiles. It took me a while to figure out how to do it, but I have some Python code for pulling the vector data out of shapefiles, sticking them in Python data structures, and then rendering arbitrary combinations of shapefile shapes into a single PNG. It's pretty nice that I can traverse my data, grab the shapes for every place in, say, the Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington MSA, and render them all to a PNG. And I have a REST API for doing that dynamically.

Yeah, I really need to get my Census application up and running again and post it here...

Please do, that sounds awesome!

Just to add to that: I spent a fair amount of time with this data on a side project and you really need to dedicate yourself to understanding what this data is and isn't, and how it gets updated.

Is the data out of date? or is it fairly recent (ie at least 2016)

The main census is only every ten years, but there are other datasets updates more often, as well as extrapolated data. The issue for me wasn’t data being out of date, it’s just that the structure and content is fairly arcane if you’re not well versed in census - I assume much of the structure has been carried forward over the decades as there’s an obvious need to make sure data is comparable across different census.

While awkward, "censuses" is indeed the correct plural of census.

The main datasets that are tied to a "geography" are the American Community Survey (ACS) and the Census.

The ACS comes in 1, 3, and 5 year editions. The 1-year is the least precise, and has the smallest sample, while the 5-year uses trailing 5-year data. The tradeoff is that ACS-5 estimates are only available, IIRC, for geographies of 50,000 or more people.

The ACS-1 estimates for 2016 are already released. ACS-5 will come out in December.

> The ACS comes in 1, 3, and 5 year editions. The 1-year is the least precise, and has the smallest sample, while the 5-year uses trailing 5-year data. The tradeoff is that ACS-5 estimates are only available, IIRC, for geographies of 50,000 or more people.

Other way around. ACS-1 is only available for geographies above 20k people, but ACS-5 is available for everything up to and including the block group level.

https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/acs/guidance/estimat...

Also, ACS-3 has been discontinued.

My apologies, I was wrong about the direction of the tradeoff. I.e., ACS-1 is only available for larger geographies.

There is a distinction though between the "ACS-1" and "ACS-1 supplemental estimates". The former is only available for 65,000+ person geographies.

Also, it's worth noting that for ACS-1 datasets, if you're looking at the census tract or census block level, you're going to have a significant number of omitted estimates. E.g. if you want to see the year to year median income even in a well-surveyed area like New York City, there will be many NA values

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