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Comment by kiyoto | Hacker News Reader

I find the title to be linkbaity and misleading (quite disappointing for decorated computer scientists like Hopcroft and Kannan).

Based on the table of contents, a more accurate title would be "Modern Foundations of Theoretical Computer Science with an Eye Towards Machine Learning", and even that is given a disproportionately large weight on machine learning.

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> I find the title to be linkbaity and misleading (quite disappointing for decorated computer scientists like Hopcroft and Kannan). > > Based on the table of contents, a more accurate title would be "Modern Foundations of Theoretical Computer Science with an Eye Towards Machine Learning", and even that is given a disproportionately large weight on machine learning.

What? That's the title of the book. And it's not linkbaity at all. Linkbaity would be something like, "Two decorated computer scientists just wrote a book about data science, and you'll never guess what's in it!". Or, "419 things you didn't know about data science."

Changing the title of the post doesn't change the title of the book.

I believe that GP meant that the title of the book is linkbaity not that of the post.

The book is actually quite far from theoretical computer science, it is much more closer to a introductory book on numerical analysis and statistics for applications, which I find is quite in line with a book called "Foundations of Data Science". A bachelor's degree in applied mathematics usually covers around 70% of the book, with the rest being a bit of statistics (mostly around statistical learning and stochastic processes) and some sprinkles of discrete mathematics.

Ullman is one of the authors of 'Foundations of Computer Science' [1], a well-respected (but out-of-print) introduction to CS theory. I suspect he's borrowing both the intent and the name.

[1] http://infolab.stanford.edu/~ullman/focs.html

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