Comment by plinkplonk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by plinkplonk | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

'As practicing data scientists have pointed out'

The OP and resulting discussion is about whether people calling themselves (or having titles saying) 'data scientists' actually are 'scientists' or know anything about 'data'.

so one guy having a 'data scientist' title and spending his time plugging data into black boxes says very little about what 'the least part of the job' in general is.

If anything your "some social skills and some database skills" is an even poorer description. By that measure, the business analyst next door who can write some SQL scripts is a 'data scientist'. But then otoh, maybe he is, who knows? ;)

Edit: I just noticed you are the "Are there practical applications for proving theorems? It seems like it's the full employment act for pencil pushers." guy.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4634969

My apologies for replying to your comments. Won't happen again. (beware @jacquesm !)

> (beware @jacquesm !)

I should log out of here anyway, thanks for the reminder

chmod 444 news.ycombinator.com

edit: I thought you were agreeing with that slandering fool plinkplonk so I got a little out hand. Sorry jacquesm, i've edited it all out.

There isn't a thing in what I wrote here that warrants this comment.

I don't think there's such a huge body of knowledge in "data science" as people claim. It's not astronomy or biology etc. As a "data scientist" the predictive ability of your model is all that counts. So the social skills and basic knowledge of stats + your progrmming skills/creativity is what's important (and the kaggle competitions have borne this out).

edit: Ok, ad hominem attack. And in that thread no one managed to making a convincing case for the utility of millions/billions of people learning maths as traditionally taught. You're probably a data scientist who wants to inflate your salary (there's my attack).

edit: LOL. you're a joke plinkponk, hahaha - being called out on your lies about your chosen profession being hard (so that you can feel special) really gets you doesn't it! http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Wiener%20Didd...

Keep it civil man. You can argue your points without calling names. As a party with no horse in this race, I find the conversation interesting enough without the need to get nasty.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com