Undergraduate Upends a 40-Year-Old Data Science Conjecture

Re:Undergraduate Upends a 40-Year-Old Data Science Conjecture by Dansvidania on Monday February 10, 2025 @05:14PM (#43005991)

there might be a decent amount of "survivorship bias" too. meaning you only hear of the few events where someone starts from first principles and actually finds, be it luck or smarts, a novel solution which improves on the status quo, but i'd argue there are N other similar situations where you don't end up with a better solution.

That being said, I so disagree with just taking the "state of the art" as written in stone, and "we can't possibly do better than library x" etc.

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Re:Undergraduate Upends a 40-Year-Old Data Science Conjecture by smaudet on Monday February 10, 2025 @05:22PM (#43006061)

Plenty of "state of the art", at least a decade ago, that was not very state of anything.

I think bias is inherent in our literature and solutions. But also, I agree that the probability of a better solution degrades over time (assuming that the implementations themselves do not degrade - building a faster hash table does not matter if you have made all operations exponentially more expensive for stupid, non-computational, reasons)

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