Berkeley offers its data science course online for free • Hacker News Board

Re: Berkeley offers its data science course online for free

#161

Post by fjsolwmv » Mon, Apr 09, 2018, 4:00 PM UTC

gaius wrote: post #109

nl wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did stats before data science was a thing, and then ran a data science team afterwards, and it's dramatically different. I've never seen any stats text book or course discuss techniques for dealing with large amounts of data to any significant level, but in data science that is a core part of what you do. I ran production systems before DevOps and after. Again, it's very different - prior to devops, there was no em…

I struggled for years to understand DevOps because I couldn’t see what was different from how I worked already... the answer was nothing :-)

DevOps gave a name to what your were doing, that other sysadmins and product devs did not. Is that bad?

Re: Berkeley offers its data science course online for free

#162

Post by banned1 » Mon, Apr 09, 2018, 10:51 PM UTC

fma wrote: post #49

banned1 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought biomedical engineering still has a lot of potential to offer?

The people I knew that majored in biomedical engineering went on to med school... Probably one of those areas that is always in the news and science magazine but still too early to revolutionize life. I remember when Dolly was cloned and we would have a whole new industry...

Evidently I am ignorant based on comments from people who are obviously better informed than me.

What is the field that is going to revolutionize curing diseases through genetics engineering etc?

Re: Berkeley offers its data science course online for free

#163

Post by frabbit » Wed, Apr 11, 2018, 2:49 AM UTC

pc86 wrote: post #155

frabbit wrote: post #152

There are at least two big turn-offs to this course at first blush: 1) they insist on using anaconda (effectively another package manager complicating the already layered interaction of system pip, virtualenv, virtualenvwrapper etc ). 2) they use Microsoft VisualStudioCode (so, inevitably a good deal of time in this course will be spent learning how to navigate a bloated IDE)

Neither of which are the least bit consequential for anyone more interested in learning about data science .

As it turns out I was wrong about one of those points: in fact the course prefers that you avoid MSVisualStudioCode and instead use the Jupyter notebooks.

But, this bring us back to a much more central topic in data science: the tools and environment DO matter. Hugely.

Reproducibility is central to not just data science but all science. This is facilitated by the use of Free, Open platforms which adhere to common standards.

Imagine trying to debug why someone has a different answer than you when there are x*variant-of-program environments in which they have obtained their answer?

At the most basic level this course should be distributing a Docker image or a VM image of some sort in order to ensure that everyone has the same version of the software.

Even if you do not care about any of the above, please, shed a tear for the student who would like a simple setup.

Thank you.

Re: Berkeley offers its data science course online for free

#164

Post by YPBS » Thu, Apr 12, 2018, 11:42 AM UTC

sigi45 wrote: post #115

jamestimmins wrote: post #5

I find it curious that there are so many courses for data-science related subjects, which superficially seem to cover the same material, and relatively few courses covering more traditional CS topics such as computer systems, networks, OS. I suppose it has to do with the market, but also feels like colleges are skating to where the puck is, rather than where it will be (or perhaps, where it could be).

This is a general issue i have seen as well. We live in 2018 and there is no open source course for everything. Instead there are probably 10-30k universities who have similar courses and professors who give the same lecture every year. They get paid often enough by countries to create and do those courses. In germany most of our unversities are paid by all of us germans anyway. And what do you find online? Always th…

Here is a list of CS courses including many graduate level courses:

https://github.com/Developer-Y/cs-video-courses