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He should learn a little bit of complexity and calculability by the way, best case, worst case, Big O notation, etc.
So after Ruby and Ruby on Rails, Zed has learnt some R and statistics. Because after reading almost all the article, he basically talks about: average, median, standard deviation. He should learn a little bit of complexity and calculability by the way, best case, worst case, Big O notation, etc.
From the article it sounds like he learned stats first.
> studied statistics in grad school,
It's just a fact of our profession, there is a significant percentage of people who just slap together APIs and have zero understanding of the maths behind it.
I don't see why it takes Zed 1000 words to say it or why he has to get sanctimonious about it.
The article does seem familiar, and I think I've even seen it on HN before. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48006 Yep. (There seems to be a slight change in the base URL for the submitted article, but this has been discussed here before.) Still this is well worth discussing again. It's amazing how much most college-educated people think they know about statistics that they really don't. Two of my favorite quick o…
I think he has a fair point. Here on HN I see a lot of armchair sociologists critique the various articles in the social sciences that get posted, but it's rather unclear to me whether these are well grounded in an actual understanding of the issues involved, or simply habitual incantations of rules of thumb such as "correlation doesn't imply causation."
I can see some people here claiming this is old (it is) and that it's a repost (it is), but I'll still vote this up, because especially now with people yelling "scaling! scaling!" all over the place, I can't imagine a more fitting time for developers to read this.
When I was hanging out in Homer Alaska, squatting in the tent city on the beach, I heard that on the halibut fishing tours, the women would catch more and bigger fish. (And halibut are big fish. A 25 pound halibut is puny. You can catch 300 pound halibut, and it's not a super-rare event.) This is because the husbands would bring their fishing egos with them from the lower 48 states and not listen to the deckhands. But the wives, with no preconceived ideas, would listen carefully and do things the right way to catch halibut. (As opposed to trout.)