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Comment by srean | Hacker News Reader

> I'm always hearing about these and other problems that > programmers have with the R language. In practice, none > of them seem to be a big deal to statisticians. > 64 bit integers? Never had a need for this

This kind of thinking is pervasive in a wide corner of statistics and this is pretty much why machine learning stole its crown, that's why I get to hear quips like "Statistics ? Is that even relevant ?"

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Crown of what? They are complementary fields. Try doing ML without any statistics and lets see how far you get.

They are closer than complementary and that is exactly what I am trying to point out.

How much funding, support, mind share, conferences, venture capital yadda yadda does stats get compared to ML -- thats what I mean by losing its crown. All that ML has now could easily have been stat's were it not for the attitude I draw attention to.

Isnt that sad, given that ML in many cases is just stats without the baggage "R can solve all of my problems and whatever R cant solve isnt a stats problem"

Yes I agree wholeheartedly, sorry I originally missed your point. I do think it's more of a DL vs. the world problem than stats vs. ML but everything you said rings true. I was kind of odd in that I started with DL and then became fascinated with statistics and lost focus with DL. Statistics is just so much more useful outside of the niche domains where DL is extremely effective.

> Statistics is just so much more useful outside of the niche domains where DL is extremely effective.

This. Sorry had to.

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