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Comment by analognoise | Hacker News Reader

Can we please stop putting "hack" on EVERYTHING?

It isn't a hack to present mathematics in an understandable way - it's a pedagogical improvement for introductory works, not a "hack".

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I don't think that the title or the content claimed that "presenting mathematics in an understandable way" is a hack. "Statistics for Hackers" sounds to me like hackers are the intended audience.

This method of presentation makes sense to me. Most statistics classes that I've experienced were taught from the point of view of abstract math. That's certainly one way to do it, but I knew a lot of people for whom that wasn't the optimal presentation strategy. Now that computing is cheap and there is a large audience of people with programming knowledge, I think that teaching statistics through examples of simulation, bootstrapping shuffling and cross validation is a great way to learn things.

Isn't working around things to make them work for you exactly what the essence of hacking is?

Plus, doesn't every hacker start as a script kiddie? Using something others came up with usually sparks the imagination. The next step is usually using the scripts right, followed by using the scripts extensively and finding issues, followed by making your own scripts (or improving the existing ones) to avoid these issues.

This looks pretty hackish to me.

Actually the example code is pretty close to the code you would use for more formal analysis. (naturally, real-world data needs more cleaning)

The hacking here refers to the approach of "just compute it" rather than using an analytical approach.

Then it's even worse than "not hacking" - it's not useful.

Any idiot can run a simulation, or compute "something". "Something" is only useful in context.

"If you can write a for loop, you can do statistics!" Ugh. Can nobody read anymore? It has to be a "slide deck"?

Jesus, pick up a book and ask some goddamn questions if you're interested.

Sometimes you can get a well-defined problem, but finding the "right" analytical solution will take you days of reading up on it, and the chance of getting it wrong is relatively high. Especially if you don't have someone with strong mathematical/statistical background to review your work.

In those cases, finding a programmatic hack around it is a very good approach for giving you reasonable results in a shorter timeframe.

Why are you so angry? He gave a talk and released the slides because he thought people may benefit from it - given Jake's (the speaker) background and skills, I would say he's doing everyone a favor by publicly releasing this.

Calm down.

This is a slide deck accompanying the author's presentation he gave here:

http://www.meetup.com/Multithreaded-Data/events/225205209/

I think you're taking things a bit too far here.

It's actually the opposite: the "hacking" is used to provide better data and analysis using programmatic techniques (bootstrapping, cross-validation) than just by taking a spot average in Excel as gospel.

I've seen many, many data scientists from startups write blog posts with skewed data without using such techniques and failing to identify the potential statistical problems.

In my opinion, the "for hackers" title is in reference to multiple books that have been released with the "X for hackers" that targets people with hacking skills but do not have a formal background in X.

Machine Learning for Hackers http://www.amazon.co.uk/Machine-Learning-Hackers-Drew-Conway...

Design for Hackers http://www.amazon.co.uk/Design-Hackers-Reverse-Engineering-B...

Bayesian Methods for Hackers http://www.amazon.co.uk/Bayesian-Methods-Hackers-Probabilist...

EDIT: I'm not the author, but you can find Bayesian Methods for Hackers (free, released by the author) at the link below. I think it's a great resource for anyone wanting to explore Bayesian methods using Python.

https://github.com/CamDavidsonPilon/Probabilistic-Programmin...

"Physics for Poets" is physics presented in a way tailored to poets [1], not physics as done by poets—i.e., for poets, not by poets. Similarly, "Statistics for Hackers" is for hackers, not by hackers. Thus the focus on brute-force computational solutions via for loops, with which hackers would presumably be familiar.

[1]: Where poets is a possibly inaccurate metonym for "less mathematically sophisticated students"

It will pass, just like when use of that ridiculous word "grok" passed.

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