Over the past 20 years, we've gone from writing software that runs on a single desktop with a very limited set of data to systems like Amazon and Google that accumulate large sets of data and needed to solve scalability problems. Now that we have all this data available, and the scalability problems are FAR more in hand than they were previously, the ? is what do we do with this data.
There are lots of ways we can use big data to solve real-world problems, but to solve real-world problems requires a degree of fluency in the language of the problem you're trying to solve. Most data-mining knowledge is being used to sell ads or to make it easier to share and find pictures of cats on social networking site, when with a little bit of domain knowledge you could literally change the world by solving a big, data-driven problem. Go do that. Learn on your own time and do something worth doing instead of finding new ways to earn a buck by sharing pictures of cats.
Over the past 20 years, we've gone from writing software that runs on a single desktop with a very limited set of data to systems like Amazon and Google that accumulate large sets of data and needed to solve scalability problems. Now that we have all this data available, and the scalability problems are FAR more in hand than they were previously, the ? is what do we do with this data.
There are lots of ways we can use big data to solve real-world problems, but to solve real-world problems requires a degree of fluency in the language of the problem you're trying to solve. Most data-mining knowledge is being used to sell ads or to make it easier to share and find pictures of cats on social networking site, when with a little bit of domain knowledge you could literally change the world by solving a big, data-driven problem. Go do that. Learn on your own time and do something worth doing instead of finding new ways to earn a buck by sharing pictures of cats.
I'm Steve Yegge and I quit.