Great to get some truly "Big Data" sets out there. I consider "Big Data" to be data that can't be conventionally processed on a commodity machine, else it's just analytics
Yahoo must be applauded for supplying various data sets and helping progress machine learning research
I saw a course advertised in my email yesterday. Big data with MySQL. The description talked about queries and aggregate functions. That isn't big data - that's just "using a database" before the term "big data" appeared in the mainstream.
Ugh.. I had a boss years back who insisted on using "big data" to refer to our analytics and reporting work (which was nowhere near big data in terms of data size - we had maybe a million rows in our database across all our tables), and I fruitlessly tried for months to explain to him that anyone who really knows what "big data" means would immediately see through his bullshit..
I really wish we could get rid of the hipster / buzzword / fashionista aspect of our industry. Way too much churn as a result.
I would far rather spend time honing SQL skills to perfection rather than having to learn another NoSQL database. Unfortunately job descriptions prefer the latter.
> She lives on a farm in Wisconsin and homeschools her sons
More power to her, her professional success has allowed her to pursue her passion. I think the lesson then is that to pursue your passion you first need to earn it.
> Grad school on your resume is a formal announcement of a mistake [if not working in the field]
Success is working forward, and not worrying about or admitting to mistakes
