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Big data and machine learning

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Frankly, I can't tell anymore if the linked article is tongue in cheek. Enough HN for today.

It's 8am central and I've already expended my daily buzzword budget.

Could anyone explain to me whether this article is serious or sarcasm ?

And if it is sarcastic what exactly is he mocking ?

I guess that most HN readers would be unfamiliar the tools of the trade for big data and machine learning.

Not serious, or maybe ha-ha-only-serious. See:

http://philip.greenspun.com/humor/ai.text

  The AI field has been a prolific source of hokey new
  terminology
  ...
  AI is about the same age as the rest of computing.
  ...
  If DOD spending on AI drops far enough, universities   
  like Stanford, MIT and CMU may even find the integrity
  to rid themselves of scientifically embarassing, but 
  formerly profitable, AI programs. The quality of CS 
  faculties and budgets at universities across the  
  country will continue to be diluted by the presence of
  large numbers of AI meatballs. 
  -- Gary Martins (former RAND manager)

"Google is replacing PageRank with RankBrain and when this is complete they won’t know why certain pages are offered as the best result"

I'm not sure if this will always be true. I think that if we move toward a sort of neural network programming (1) we won't be able to "know why" in the sense that we can explain the functions, but will instead explain programs based on output from the layers and from the relationships between variables. For instance, deep dream is a way to understand how google's image classifier is "working" (2). It's super interesting that the classifier thinks that a human arm is part of a dumbbell, for instance.

1) Maybe something like this: http://web.mit.edu/~axch/www/art.pdf.

2) http://googleresearch.blogspot.ch/2015/06/inceptionism-going...

Don't take away my "for" loop from me.. It is the magical thing that brought me to computer science :)

Google is replacing PageRank with RankBrain and when this is complete they won’t know why certain pages are offered as the best results.

Google is well aware of the problems of machine learning:

http://research.google.com/pubs/pub43146.html

Kind of weird seeing a Greenspun post where he's not getting all het up about alimony.

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