Data

Introduction I consume far more feeds than I can reasonably examine with sustained attention, which means that the substantive difficulty lies not in volume alone but in the profoundly uneven distribution of relevance within that volume. On an active day, a hundred articles may arrive in rapid succession; perhaps four contain a development warranting action, while the remaining ninety-six obscure those few consequential pieces beneath a familiar and relentless accumulation of headlines, summaries, reposts, and derivative commentary. ...

Introduction Members of the United States Congress must disclose many securities transactions, and the resulting records are public. As a dataset, however, they are close to unusable: the House publishes a ZIP archive whose underlying filings are frequently scanned images; the Senate uses a separate system with its own irregularities; tickers are inconsistent or absent; and neither chamber provides an interface resembling a durable public API. Several commercial services solve this and sell the result. I wanted to see how much of it I could do myself, in-cluster, from the primary sources. ...