Key takeaways
- Data science requires an interdisciplinary approach, combining analysis, programming, mathematics, and statistics.
- A hacker mindset can lead to more innovative and efficient solutions in data science compared to traditional methods.
- Asking the right questions is crucial; distinguishing between analytics and data science questions is essential for effective inquiry.
- The data revolution has created an overwhelming amount of information, necessitating intelligent systems for productivity.
With the data revolution in full swing, there is more information on the internet than a human can remember and process in his/her lifetime. Data Science is a demanding platform, where every forward looking enterprise and startup wants to increase their productivity with the help of intelligent systems. It is an interdisciplinary platform that involves numerous techniques and skills such as, analysis, programming, math and statistics. Now, it is commonly believed that a person with a hacker mindset can come up with an easier solution compared to an orthodox approach.
Let us look at some of the little-known hacks in data science field which aren’t extensively talked about.
“The job of the data scientist is to ask the right questions. If I ask a question like ‘how many clicks did this link get?’ which is something we look at all the time, that’s not a data science question. It’s an analytics question. If I ask a question like, ‘based on the previous history of links on this publisher’s site, can I predict how many people from France will read this in the next three hours?’ that’s more of a data science question.”
―Hilary Mason, Founder, Fast Forward Labs
Hacker Mindset
When dealing with data, a hacker’s mindset always wins hands down. Data science is not all about building models, plotting graphs to analyse the attributes, training and testing by tuning the parameters but a person who finds an easy way to deal with data rather than making use of complex tools to process a data is definitely a hacker. Let us consider an example which just reduces the code to just one line, From this,list1 = range(0, 10)
for i in list1:
print(i)
To this,
[print(i) for i in range(0 ,10)]




