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by siddboots
4087 days ago
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I feel as though your comment comes very close to "gratuitous negativity" of the type mentioned recently on the YC blog. http://blog.ycombinator.com/new-hacker-news-guideline Clearly, a blog post primer it is not an alternative to an encyclopedia article or a textbook chapter. Rather it provides something not fulfilled by either: a brief introduction to a technical subject that relies on very little prior knowledge. I am sure that Jeremy is well aware of the challenges involved in writing in a style that is straight-forward without being "patronizing". Perhaps you don't like the balance that he has found, but is that a good enough reason to outright dismiss his efforts? Lastly, much of the post is in fact a plain-language explanation of the Metropolis-Hastings algorithm, and he adds: "... if demand is popular enough, I could implement the Metropolis-Hastings algorithm in code" |
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If anything, I read this and thought something along the lines of, "I wish some of the subjects I learned in college were explained this way, at least to start."
Now, I fully appreciate understanding fundamentals, and not black boxing things (see the ongoing framework debate posts), however I didn't read that article looking to be spoon fed a black box for ML or anything...I was just bored and curious. So it made for good reading.
Perhaps I'm generalizing too far, but it reminded me of when I was presented with the classic Lamport paper on "Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System" in undergrad. This would have been around 2004. I had been working (i.e. coding for money) for some time by then, but back then, you could still build a lot with a relatively stock LAMP stack (or similar.) MongoDB, Riak, Redis, Cassandra, DynamoDB, etc. were not all commonplace (much less things you could have a cluster ready to play with by means of a simple 'vagrant up'.) So when I was given the paper, without much context, I had a hard time really "getting it", or how it applied to me. I'm pretty sure I eventually got some commentary on it from the professor in class, while hurriedly going through powerpoint slides, probably anxious to get back to his research. Then a test question or two about it later.
Years later, after working more, and "distributed systems" becoming more of a tangible thing, I re-visited it, and it made more sense. Anyway, my point is that had I gotten some sort of a, "and here's what the paper is talking about, and how it applies to something tangible, in plainspeak", it would have been useful - so we shouldn't groan about an article like this. Someone out there is going to understand the subject much better thanks to that post.
[Note to the reader that's very familiar with the vector clocks paper - I realize it's not written with that much jargon, and DOES do a decent job in the introduction section of using plain language, but the purpose was just lost on me. I mean, it makes reference to ARPA Net, and then goes on to determining event ordering. It just didn't equate to any thing in my world view, and I had done a decent bit of multi-threaded/process programming by then too.]