RyxCommar writes critical essays on data science, machine learning, statistics, and the tech job market.
Commenters cite its 'Goodbye, Data Science' essay and its Zillow and Prophet analysis, with one agreeing with its Prophet criticism.
The problem with matplotlib has never been its capability. I consider its rendering backend and resulting image quality to be top-notch, and there are a billion options for you to customize.
That second part is the biggest problem with matplotlib: the imperative API cloned from Matlab is just terrible. The vast majority of matplotlib examples are rife with global states and overriding behavior (ever have to set font size twice to force it?) At first I thought that it's a bit clunky due to my inexperience, but no, the API is just that bad. See https://ryxcommar.com/2020/04/11/why-you-hate-matplotlib/
Now, I mean no hate to matplotlib, which is still a solid library. I appreciate their commitment to backward compatibility by keeping all those baggage, and I don't want them to yank them out, given that seaborn already mitigates most of the API problems, and Altair already brings enlightenment to Python plotting.
Now if only seaborn works with polars natively ...
Reminds me of "Goodbye, Data Science" from a few months ago:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33787270
The main reason I soured on data science is that the work felt like it didn’t matter, in multiple senses of the words “didn’t matter”:
https://ryxcommar.com/2022/11/27/goodbye-data-science/
For part of my career over 10 years ago, I worked in data science for big tech, and I can definitely see the hazards ...
It is extremely easy to get hoodwinked into joining a useless data science team, one that is mere signaling for executives, ineffective, ignored, or otherwise
No, the rumor was just that they put their thumb on the scale.
https://ryxcommar.com/2021/11/06/zillow-prophet-time-series-and-prices/
"Speaking of middle managers, word on the street is that Zillow Offers put their thumb on the scale of the algorithm to make it engage in more aggressive trades. Manually adjusting an algorithm isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but you need to do it for the right reasons. And clearly that didn’t end up working out..."
That not everyone in the organization knew that, is just me speculating.
"Finding a job now is harder than any time since the pandemic" - https://www.marketwatch.com/story/finding-a-job-now-is-harder-than-any-time-since-the-pandemic-bad-omen-for-the-economy-242aa46d
"IT job market is still shrinking" - https://www.theregister.com/2025/01/15/it_job_market/
"Why does getting a job in tech suck right now?" - https://ryxcommar.com/2024/08/17/why-does-getting-a-job-in-tech-suck-right-now-is-it-ai/
I used Prophet and personally I do not have any problems, but I agree with the criticism that the tool it’s extremely focused in ergonomics that abstracts important aspects of the tool that can be used to built better models [1].
[1] - https://ryxcommar.com/2021/11/06/zillow-prophet-time-series-and-prices/
An interesting essay that echoes these same sentiments:
https://ryxcommar.com/2022/11/27/goodbye-data-science/