[HN Gopher] The End of Big Data ___________________________________________________________________ The End of Big Data Author : swyx Score : 23 points Date : 2022-05-26 08:13 UTC (14 hours ago) (HTM) web link (benn.substack.com) (TXT) w3m dump (benn.substack.com) | bigcat12345678 wrote: | Can someone summarize what the article want to say? | | I am not happy about spending 10 minutes on it but realized I | need another 10 minutes, and in the end would still be confused, | and would need post this comment anyway. | | So I just stopped there and wrote this comment. | | Rip writing clarity, and the effective communication... | PLenz wrote: | Big data didn't lose. It became so common that now what was once | big data is just data. | mr_toad wrote: | > But we never connected these dots during our evaluation because | the story Databricks told was buzzwords. Snowflake's was boring, | and all we wanted--at least at first--was boring. | | How do you describe a chocolate gateau to someone who has only | ever eaten rice? | | If you've never worked with tools like Pandas, or R, or SAS, | you're just not going to understand Spark and Databricks. | nonrandomstring wrote: | > the end of an over-hyped era | | Hype is part of what drives technology and I don't see it going | away any time soon - because a lot of people make a buck purely | by milking hype cycles. | | I've come to see there are two modes of intelligence. The ability | to understand something and say 'yes' to it is complemented by | bullshit detectors, a more mature ability to see through other | people muddying the waters trying to look smart, and reject their | nonsense. | | Every cycle has its real innovators and hype-pedlars. At the | height of blockhain madness a decade ago they had worked | themselves into a frenzied fetish of near-supernatural woowooism. | Once all the smoke and hullabaloo has cleared, and all the | grandiose promises have fallen to the wayside, what remains is a | core of genuinely useful and relatively simple core concepts that | enter the canon, along with standards and protocols. | | This line in TFA sums it up: | | > I needed a database. | | The same happened with "data". The hype problem there has always | been a lack of telos reminiscent of the underpants gnome's flawed | "profit?" scheme. Somewhere is a crucial missing step, where we | ask "Why?". And the answer is "don't worry, the data plus magical | "AI" fairy dust will reveal why". There is a quite religious | (faith-like) flavour to this. | | I blame the NSA. The idea that "collect it all" is anything but a | thugish brute force excuse to waste of billions dollars building | data-centres, has led to commercial obsession with "data" as a | panacea. | | It isn't "big data" _per se_ that 's a problem. Some | applications, like in medicine or environmental science, | absolutely thrive on large sets and sophisticated analytics. But | the fact is that in most applications it's mostly useless, | burdensome, energy-consuming, and space-wasting. But "data- | hoarding" and over-analysis is pushed by those with sledgehammers | to sell for cracking nuts. | Swizec wrote: | > Once all the smoke and hullabaloo has cleared, and all the | grandiose promises have fallen to the wayside, what remains is | a core of genuinely useful and relatively simple core concepts | that enter the canon, along with standards and protocols | | _has_ this happened with blockchain yet? I 'm not seeing it. | | Maybe I haven't been around the block enough because blockchain | is the first hype tech I've seen that keeps not doing anything | that existing tech can't do better. And yes I've looked, a lot. | | The underlying tech sounds super promising and I hope someone | figures _something_ out. Not much luck so far. | phil21 wrote: | > has this happened with blockchain yet? I'm not seeing it. | | No one wants to admit it for some reason, but Bitcoin is the | killer app for Blockchain. | | > The underlying tech sounds super promising and I hope | someone figures something out. Not much luck so far. | | Plenty of luck for me at least. Bitcoin solved exactly the | problem it told me it would when it was created - | permissionless digital "cash" transactions that cannot be | reversed. It's a very specific use case, but one I am quite | happy exists when I need it. | | Those who have never had their money stolen by the banking | system or denied the ability to use their money as they see | fit likely won't understand my take. Those that do, are using | the currency today. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-05-26 23:00 UTC)