News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Not Your Grandmother's Textbook Exercise. Parent comment

Re:Not Your Grandmother's Textbook Exercise by pjc50 on Friday September 02, 2022 @08:04AM (#32689595)
Quite difficult now to reach this scale with personnel records, but: imagine that you're asked to provide the median of one trillion data points. This could provide lots of interesting possible approaches, since it's about the boundary between "big data" vs "do it on your laptop". And you can't just load it into Excel.

(and also to ask about the range of the data!)

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Not Your Grandmother's Textbook Exercise by nmstoker on Friday September 02, 2022 @08:51AM (#32690036)
For a trillion records, if you were in the UK government, you might just drop those above the Excel limit and proceed until journalists flagged the concern nationally.

Background context here:

- https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/oct/05/how-excel-m...

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Not Your Grandmother's Textbook Exercise by raverbashing on Friday September 02, 2022 @08:22AM (#32689737)
For 1 trillion records I'd say: estimate the probability distribution and values and give the corresponding value as the answer
[ Parent | on HN ]