One Year as a Data Scientist at Stack Overflow • Hacker News Board

Re: One Year as a Data Scientist at Stack Overflow

#41

Post by Programmatic » Tue, Jun 21, 2016, 5:41 PM UTC

Declanomous wrote: post #30

coherentpony wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the concern is less that it's a good tool, and more that it's one invariably receives emails with attached documents that open well only in Excel.

I re-read that part and I think the sentiment was more like "If you are a great computer scientist you have most of the skills you need to be able to use R." Regardless, even if the recipient has Excel, I think it is poor form to insert an Excel object into your reports and emails. The copy/paste menu allows you to paste charts and graphs as images, and it's a superior option to inserting an actual graph (or table) t…

The same can be said for screen clipping an Excel graph, which can be done at any point, and there's an additional bonus in that the layperson can see and manipulate the data as well. It's a(n admittedly poor) self-contained document that anyone can poke at, versus an image that only the anointed can recreate with different data. For better or for worse.

Re: One Year as a Data Scientist at Stack Overflow

#42

Post by JasonPunyon » Tue, Jun 21, 2016, 5:55 PM UTC

lovestats3 wrote: post #34

lovestats3 wrote: post #31

I just read your R course lessons and I find it very well explained, I enjoyed the lessons about data.table and ggplot2. The beta distribution: In the free book "think stats Probability and Statistics for Programmers" there is a chapter about how the beta distribution can be used as a prior to model an unknown probability and how Bayes' Theorem allow us to update that prior with a posterior distribution that is also…

If I were to work in your place to try to match people to jobs I should study some psychology and NLP trying to predict from what an user write and answers what is his mental state and how that mental state fits in the jobs. Unfortunately hiring seems to be a very difficult problem and I can imagine that many key features are hidden and can't be obtained since the candidate can't be put into a controlled experiment t…

What about the millions of people who've never written anything on Stack Overflow?

Re: One Year as a Data Scientist at Stack Overflow

#43

Post by marmaduke » Tue, Jun 21, 2016, 6:10 PM UTC

amelius wrote: post #10

marmaduke wrote: post #6

Ah man, I wanted that job. I guess I didn't waste enough time on the Internet answering questions during my PhD.

The article is a very nice write-up, but in the end he is still optimizing advertisement click-through rates (a zero-sum game). While interesting from a technical point of view, why not make yourself 1000x more useful to society by working, for example, on "cognitive health" problems? These are problems that lean heavily on statistics, and are interesting and imho more rewarding at the same time.

yep agree, found myself working on clinical neurology applications instead (probably less well paid tho)

Re: One Year as a Data Scientist at Stack Overflow

#44

Post by Declanomous » Tue, Jun 21, 2016, 6:23 PM UTC

Programmatic wrote: post #41

Declanomous wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I re-read that part and I think the sentiment was more like "If you are a great computer scientist you have most of the skills you need to be able to use R." Regardless, even if the recipient has Excel, I think it is poor form to insert an Excel object into your reports and emails. The copy/paste menu allows you to paste charts and graphs as images, and it's a superior option to inserting an actual graph (or table) t…

The same can be said for screen clipping an Excel graph, which can be done at any point, and there's an additional bonus in that the layperson can see and manipulate the data as well. It's a(n admittedly poor) self-contained document that anyone can poke at, versus an image that only the anointed can recreate with different data. For better or for worse.

That point was in favor of Excel actually, sorry I wasn't very clear. I was actually referring to the built-in functionality in Office that allows you to choose to paste Excel graphs as images instead of as full excel objects.

Putting people down for using Excel for simple tasks is snobbery, plain and simple. I'm not a Microsoft apologist in the least (I use Linux as my desktop OS), and I can confidently say Excel is a great program. While there are more powerful tools, Excel is often perfectly suited for smaller tasks. When I need to clean and match a small set of data, I'll reach for Excel. When I need to clean and link a small set of data, I'd rather use filter and VLOOKUP in Excel than dealing with SQL/R/Python.

The faster I can turn data into information the happier my coworkers are, and the happier I am in turn.

Re: One Year as a Data Scientist at Stack Overflow

#45

Post by imh » Wed, Jun 22, 2016, 12:59 AM UTC

amelius wrote: post #10

marmaduke wrote: post #6

Ah man, I wanted that job. I guess I didn't waste enough time on the Internet answering questions during my PhD.

The article is a very nice write-up, but in the end he is still optimizing advertisement click-through rates (a zero-sum game). While interesting from a technical point of view, why not make yourself 1000x more useful to society by working, for example, on "cognitive health" problems? These are problems that lean heavily on statistics, and are interesting and imho more rewarding at the same time.

Optimizing CTRs is not at all zero sum. Advertising a board game to me instead of beyonce tickets doesn't take my clicks away from Beyonce. I'm just not interested in seeing her show. Another client might be the reverse.

Re: One Year as a Data Scientist at Stack Overflow

#46

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Jun 22, 2016, 8:14 AM UTC

lovestats3 wrote: post #35

amelius wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article is a very nice write-up, but in the end he is still optimizing advertisement click-through rates (a zero-sum game). While interesting from a technical point of view, why not make yourself 1000x more useful to society by working, for example, on "cognitive health" problems? These are problems that lean heavily on statistics, and are interesting and imho more rewarding at the same time.

How is matching people to jobs a zero-sum game? If you are able to devise a method to find the ideal job for people I think that society will benefit from it, better products and services will be constructed, so this is in no way a zero-sum game. Is a win-win situation is jobs seekers and jobs providers are able to find the match the right candidate with the right job what require to pay the right price.

[deleted]