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Comment by warsheep | Hacker News Reader

I'm going to sound very aggressive, but I don't understand the point of this book. They say

> The material in this book is too valuable not to share.

and after reading the sample I feel their definition of valuable doesn't align with mine. It's a "handbook" but the chapters are interviews that don't go in depth into anything. Here's a sample "question"

> Compassion is also critical for designing beautiful and intuitive products, by solving the pain of the user. Is that how you chose to work in product, as the embodiment of data?

Really? This reads like an onion article about data science.

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As a data scientist, I draw inspiration from the infinite depths of understanding. Life is merely the unfolding of a series of recursive recommendation engines, each one AB testing the local gradients of human emotion. You think you are just buying a pair of socks online. Foolish mortal. That transaction was a multi-armed map-reduce set into motion long before the internet existed. Data science is the internet of things, it is big data at the speed of entropy, quantum mechanics at the scale of desire.

In data we trust. All others bring EVEN. MORE. DATA.

Your comment is meaningless. I don't mean that negatively. I mean that it really is meaningless. It's buzzwords connected together with a lack of thought or direction.

It is clearly satire.

You had me at "life is merely the unfolding of a series of recursive recommendation engines, each one AB testing the local gradients of human emotion". The more i think about it the more it makes sense.

Good points (the unstated ones). This field is more like data junk yard wars.

Agree, this seems like a collection of interviews with some famous folks who are in the field of 'data science' (can we just call it stats please). A handbook is a poor description indeed.

For folks interested in learning about this topic there are tons of online courses/videos on the real stuff. The stanford islr course is a great place to start

I think this passage actually addresses the context of that question:

>The difference between empathy and compassion is big. Empathy is understanding the pain. Compassion is about taking away the pain away from others, it’s about solving the problem. That small subtle shift is the difference between a data scientist that can tell you what the graph is doing versus telling you what action you need to do from the insight. That’s a force multiplier by definition.

I think the context you've quoted only further proves my point. This sentence means absolutely nothing to me, it's trivial and devoid of any actionable information. But because the interviewee is a "famous data scientist" it is suddenly important info that needs to be shared with the world?

To be fair, I know some of the co-authors and I'd say they're pretty sharp at data science. However, this book highlights something they're not so sharp at: self-promotion.

I believe this book is meant to be a gag in the way the original Facebook Brogrammer store was meant to be a gag. And, similarly, the authors are going to learn the consequences of having a lot of people take the gag seriously.

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