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Comment by wrp | Hacker News Reader

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."

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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.

Previous poster didn't mention software engineers.

programmers != software engineers?

Yea I thought that was common knowledge.

same shit

If you're privy to the top-secret distinction between the two that nobody else knows, please share it.

While data science is not principally about programming, I think that having Norvig as one of the authors will lead to false expectations of the book unless the title is made more informative.

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

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

Social concerns are as a concern for engineers, as they are for their managers. However, I agree on changing the title somewhat, in order to indicate, that this is not a book about computer programming.

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.

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