Tan
LightNews LightNews
banner
tanho.ca
Tan
@tanho.ca
2.8K followers 630 following 700 posts
#rstats carver, @nflverse.com wizard, pumpkin engineer, easily nerdsniped, he/him. soccer @ teamworks intelligence, mentor @dslc.io.

tanho.ca
Posts Replies Media Videos
Pinned
tanho.ca
Tan @tanho.ca · Dec 2
I was looking over my hopeless hoard of bookmarks the other day and decided to make it a little more useful by curating my favourites into a more evergreen list of recommended reading/watching. Enjoy!

tanho.ca/recs
Things I Think You Should Read and Watch · TanHo.ca
A curated, non-exhaustive list of content I’ve really enjoyed and shared with friends and colleagues. Includes thoughts on life as a programmer, technical leadership, career advice, technical topics, ...
tanho.ca
Reposted by Tan
hockeyviz.com
Here's a thread of some scattered thoughts about Jordan Spence, first star of last night's Ottawa win over Utah. He is a very good and very unusual player, which is to say: my favourite kind of player.
November 10, 2025 at 6:27 PM
Reposted by Tan
emilyhughes.bsky.social
pre-writing a devastating obituary for your enemy is god-tier hating of a kind you don’t often see anymore. renaissance haterism. beautiful stuff.
brittanytrang.com Brittany Trang @brittanytrang.com · 3d
A Sharon Begley byline, almost 5 years after her death.

Upon hearing the news James Watson had died, a STAT reporter said in our Slack, "I wish I could read what Sharon would have written."

Incredible news: Sharon in fact did pre-write a Watson obit. And it is masterful and excoriating.
🧪🧬🧫
James Watson, dead at 97, was a scientific legend and a pariah among his peers
James Watson, the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA who died Thursday at 97, was a scientific legend and a pariah among his peers.
www.statnews.com
November 9, 2025 at 12:55 AM
Reposted by Tan
estebanng.bsky.social
We have a loaded lineup this year that includes @lvanden.bsky.social, @jperline.bsky.social, Gerard Cuenca (UEFA), Peter Tea (Sportlogiq), Dee Kundra (Bayern), Martha Reyna (Statsbomb), and many more!

isac.baquora.app/conference/s...
ITAM Sports Analytics Conference
The ITAM Sports Analytics Conference (ISAC) is an annual event founded by students and alumni from Mexico’s ITAM. Rooted in the belief that sports data can reshape the industry across Latin America, I...
isac.baquora.app
November 4, 2025 at 2:24 AM
Reposted by Tan
estebanng.bsky.social
Incredibly excited to be hosting @sethpartnow.bsky.social , Katie Krall, and Josh Orenstein this Thursday (11/6) for a panel on how technology and data are changing the essence of sports at the 3rd edition of the ITAM Sports Analytics Conference ⚾️🏀🧑🏼‍💻

Registration is still open: luma.com/junz793a
ITAM Sports Analytics Conference 2025 · Luma
Forma parte del evento de tecnología deportiva más importante de América Latina. Este 6 de noviembre de 2025, en el ITAM Campus Rio Hondo, se celebra la 3a…
luma.com
November 4, 2025 at 2:21 AM
Reposted by Tan
andrew.heiss.phd
Wrote up a little intervention post/explanation for my class about why using LLMs for trying to learn programming (as first time learners!) is bad and detrimental datavizf25.classes.andrewheiss.com/news/2025-11...
In the first week of class, I had you read an article about how ChatGPT is philosophical “bullshit”, as well as this other post about AI and LLMs in this class. I’ve seen a surprising increase in the amount of ChatGPT-based weekly check-ins and graph interpretations in the exercises. (In the past, I’ve even had students tell me they PDFs of the slides into ChatGPT to generate interesting and confusing things.) Don’t do this! LLMs cannot find three things that you personally found interesting from the readings. LLMs are not you. It’s a huge waste of time for all of us to for me to spend time evaluating and grading output from ChatGPT. I want to read what you think and do, not what a computer invents. NoteMy personal stance on AI and LLMs Many of you have asked about how I think about and use LLMs in my own work (and in the class materials). Please check this short little page where I explain what I do with text, images, code, research, and learning. In short, I do not use LLMs to create any of the materials for this class, and I do not use them to grade or evaluate any of your work. I’ve even had several students submit completely made up stuff for mini projects and final projects. In your final project, your job is to take a dataset, make three different plots with it, and combine the plots into one graphic that tells some sort of story. I’ve (really truly) received projects like this: (a ChatGPT-generated plot of completely made up data from gapminder) At a very quick glance, that looks like a plausible image. But holy crap it falls apart fast, both comically and tragically. Comically because, like, look at the y-axis in the scatterplot; or the x-axis ticks in the population grown chart that are sometimes spaced every 20 years, sometimes every 10 years, and has 1980 there twice; or the weird blobs in the map. Tragically—and most importantly—literally nothing in this image is real and none of the annotations make sense and none of the colors make sense and everything here is completely meaningless and devoid of any information. It’s pure philosophical bullshit—an image “produced without concern for its truth.” That’s what I mean when I say that it’s a forgetful and unreliable resource. Lots of that code is helpful as an illustration of what’s going on. Lots of the explanation is good and fine. But it subtly changed its mind halfway through and didn’t realize it (because it can’t realize it! it’s just a chain of statistically likely text!) Hopefully you can see where this is dangerous for learning. It can often “teach” you wrong, and you can only recognize that if you know stuff already. It’s extra dangerous if you then take that example output, paste it into your exercise, and submit it. I’m not even concerned about the plagiarism aspect of that—code is code and there are only a few ways to write {dplyr} code that will do this, and it’s easy to adapt from real human-based examples online, so I’m less worried about stealing other people’s work here. I’m concerned that it’s not real data. It made up values of 1, 2, 3, and 4 for some countries to illustrate grouping and summarizing. That’s good and normal. None of that is real. Don’t treat it as real.
November 2, 2025 at 10:17 PM
Reposted by Tan
kimischilling.bsky.social
I don’t think I like sports anymore, does anyone have idea for new interests
November 2, 2025 at 4:18 AM
Reposted by Tan
jonbois.bsky.social
time for a world series walkoff hbp
November 2, 2025 at 3:34 AM
Reposted by Tan
jessicacalarco.com
And we have now progressed from data analysis to policy recommendations.

I told her that we'd calculate the cash value of her candy haul, that I'd ask her to raid her piggy bank and donate 1/3 the candy cash value to a local food bank, and that I'd add on a 5X match.
The final candy bar graph, with my 11-year-old recoding the tallies in her journal and calculating their value
November 1, 2025 at 3:48 PM
tanho.ca
pumpkin carving 2025.02: big ducky energy 😎
A pumpkin carving of a rubber ducky sitting on a laptop. The ducky is grinning and wearing sunglasses.
October 31, 2025 at 11:43 AM
tanho.ca
Prepping for a pumpkin carving party later tonight 😎🐥
A pumpkin with a drawing of a rubber ducky sitting on top of a laptop
October 30, 2025 at 8:50 PM
Reposted by Tan
tylerjamesburch.com
Strong rec for data people: if you use a library often, go to its GitHub issues, and find something, anything, to fix and submit a PR

- nothing teaches you the internals better than doing development
- you get software development reps and real code review experience
- giving back is good.
October 28, 2025 at 11:47 AM
Reposted by Tan
astrokatie.com
When a chatbot gets something wrong, it’s not because it made an error. It’s because on that roll of the dice, it happened to string together a group of words that, when read by a human, represents something false. But it was working entirely as designed. It was supposed to make a sentence & it did.
June 19, 2025 at 11:28 AM
Reposted by Tan
astrokatie.com
Chatbots — LLMs — do not know facts and are not designed to be able to accurately answer factual questions. They are designed to find and mimic patterns of words, probabilistically. When they’re “right” it’s because correct things are often written down, so those patterns are frequent. That’s all.
June 19, 2025 at 11:21 AM
tanho.ca
Pumpkin szn! This carving is of my current obsession: playing a lot of rec volleyball 🏐
A pumpkin carving of a volleyball scene in which a player is jumping to attempt a spike over a defender reaching upwards with both arms outstretched to try and block them
October 26, 2025 at 4:48 PM
tanho.ca
in my happy place
Pumpkin carving in progress: a volleyball scene is drawn onto a pumpkin with dry erase marker, depicting a player about to spike the ball over the net against a blocker. In the background, you can see that I’m watching the arsenal vs crystal palace soccer match
October 26, 2025 at 3:58 PM
Reposted by Tan
emilyriederer.bsky.social
jacobtomlinson.dev/posts/2025/t...

Highly relatable for anyone that has ever written a line of code used by other people

Lovely little post from @jacobtomlinson.dev
The Majority Of Your Users
The majority of your users don’t read your changelog. The majority of your users only upgrade to new versions when forced to.
jacobtomlinson.dev
October 26, 2025 at 2:21 PM
Reposted by Tan
hockeyviz.com
October 25, 2025 at 3:29 AM
Reposted by Tan
mmac42.bsky.social
The Blue Jays are relentless
October 25, 2025 at 2:26 AM
Reposted by Tan
jonthegeek.com
I only need *5* more dataset curations (and to review those 5 plus the open PR) to be done curating #TidyTuesday for 2025! I can definitely do at least one myself, so I just need 4 of you to curate a dataset! Check out github.com/rfordatascie... for #RStats instructions.
github.com
October 24, 2025 at 11:28 AM
Reposted by Tan
johnbedwards.io
i'll be going live at 1 PM PT tomorrow on twitch with a chill stream working on the NFL's big data bowl competition! please feel free to drop in and hang out tomorrow afternoon! www.twitch.tv/john_b_edwards
john_b_edwards - Twitch
Sports/datascience/overwatch/hearthstone
www.twitch.tv
October 24, 2025 at 12:03 AM
tanho.ca
Live now!
libbyheeren.bsky.social Libby Heeren @libbyheeren.bsky.social · 20d
TOMORROW! Join me on the #DSHangout with @tanho.ca to chat all about... whatever you want! Great topics: R in Production, sports analytics, open source dev work, and pumpkin carving 🎃 ❤️

I plan on asking about my fave: working out loud!

You can go to pos.it/dsh to register! #databs #rstats #python
October 23, 2025 at 4:04 PM
Reposted by Tan
impect-official.bsky.social
🚀 𝐁𝐢𝐠 𝐧𝐞𝐰𝐬 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐟𝐨𝐨𝐭𝐛𝐚𝐥𝐥 𝐚𝐧𝐚𝐥𝐲𝐭𝐢𝐜𝐬 𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐦𝐮𝐧𝐢𝐭𝐲!

We are thrilled to announce the release of our 𝐨𝐩𝐞𝐧 𝐝𝐚𝐭𝐚 – the 𝐦𝐨𝐬𝐭 𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐱𝐭𝐮𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐳𝐞𝐝 𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐝𝐚𝐭𝐚𝐬𝐞𝐭 𝐢𝐧 𝐟𝐨𝐨𝐭𝐛𝐚𝐥𝐥, covering the 2023/24 𝐁𝐮𝐧𝐝𝐞𝐬𝐥𝐢𝐠𝐚 𝐬𝐞𝐚𝐬𝐨𝐧, including Bayer 04 Leverkusen’s historic invincible campaign.
October 23, 2025 at 11:55 AM
Reposted by Tan
libbyheeren.bsky.social
TOMORROW! Join me on the #DSHangout with @tanho.ca to chat all about... whatever you want! Great topics: R in Production, sports analytics, open source dev work, and pumpkin carving 🎃 ❤️

I plan on asking about my fave: working out loud!

You can go to pos.it/dsh to register! #databs #rstats #python
October 22, 2025 at 6:26 PM
Reposted by Tan
jhelvy.bsky.social
You should read this wonderful little history of the #tidyverse, by @hadley.nz.

It reminded me about my early #rstats days as a PhD student (2011 - 2016), where I was constantly trying out the new things Hadley and crew were cooking up.

hadley.github.io/25-tidyverse...
A personal history of the tidyverse
hadley.github.io
October 22, 2025 at 11:30 AM
Reposted by Tan
was.tl
Hello, friends! After 10(!) years of #AdventOfCode, I've made some changes to preserve my sanity: there will be 12 days of puzzles each December (still starting Dec 1) and there is no longer a global leaderboard. Read more:
adventofcode.com/2025/about#f...
adventofcode.com/2025/about#f...
October 22, 2025 at 2:32 AM