Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Data Science in Context – Peter Norvig's New Book

datascienceincontext.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–46 of 46 posts

Re: Data Science in Context – Peter Norvig's New Book

#41

Post by wrp »

saturnaga wrote: post #33
wrp wrote: post #19

They should change the title. It is not a book for programmers about implementation of data science techniques. It is a book for managers about concerns surrounding the application of data science in various domains. The title should be something like "Social Concerns in the Application of Data Science."

I think a more philosophical text by Norvig is quite welcome. This is better than yet another machine learning algorithm book.

I didn't say there was anything wrong with the book, just the title.

Re: Data Science in Context – Peter Norvig's New Book

#42

Post by mint2 »

laichzeit0 wrote: post #29

Quick skim and so far I've learned that the term "black box" model is now part of exclusionary language. It's "opaque box".

It appears they are just using an alternative phrasing without making comment, but if they were actually making a comment then wouldn’t the overall objection be “not to read too much into the wording”, but that is a catch 22. Objecting to someone taking wording too seriously to the point of changing the wording is in itself taking the wording too seriously.

Re: Data Science in Context – Peter Norvig's New Book

#44

Post by mbeex »

nojito wrote: post #39
mbeex wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because the opposite of black box is clear box Not a native speaker (never heard "clear box" as terminus technicus), but a mathematician: If it is "the (only) opposite", the relation ist symmetric. So the opposite of "clear box" is "black box" again. Skipping the injective part, "black box" would be still one possible opposite.

it's also known as open box or glass box and very rarely white box.

> very rarely white box.

I would not consider the attribute "rare" to be appropriate here.

For example: I regularly deal with adversarial networks, and both black- and white-box attacks are quite common there.

Re: Data Science in Context – Peter Norvig's New Book

#45

Post by antipaul »

urthor wrote: post #23
wrp wrote: post #19

They should change the title. It is not a book for programmers about implementation of data science techniques. It is a book for managers about concerns surrounding the application of data science in various domains. The title should be something like "Social Concerns in the Application of Data Science."

It's a book for data scientists. Data scientists are not software engineers. They analyze data, they don't produce applications. Not everything in the world is written for the benefit of software engineers.

I agree with you - mostly.

But in the book, computation is one of the three braids comprising data science. And they include software engineering in computation.

See book sections 1.2, 1.2.4, 2.1.3 etc

—

What I am trying to untie is, should data engineering be distinguished from data science, or not?

Re: Data Science in Context – Peter Norvig's New Book

#46

Post by da39a3ee »

nojito wrote: post #12
da39a3ee wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you sure? You sound like someone who’s interested in actually doing things; the book looks like endless rambling about high level ethical/conceptual/societal context for data science. It looks about as interesting as picking up a random volume of a random social sciences journal. I think Peter Norvig’s python code is beautiful and amazing though, and probably same for most things he’s done.

The code is the least important part of data science.

I didn't mean to suggest otherwise.
Post reply on HN