This comes up every time that the term data science is mentioned on Hacker News, and it's frustrating that so many of the replies to you are the same ha-ha-only

This comes up every time that the term data science is mentioned on Hacker News, and it's frustrating that so many of the replies to you are the same ha-ha-only-serious responses that always pop up. The term is over 50 years old, and refers -- straightforwardly enough -- to the science of studying how to learn from data.[1] To all the jokes of "data science is just statistics done by engineers" and other such things, read Breiman's "Statistical Modeling: The Two Cultures." [2] It talks about how the field of statistics largely ignored "algorithmic modeling" techniques, and therefore historically those techniques have been developed outside of academic statistics, either in computer science departments or in industry. If you look at all the big name people who are pushing forward on deep learning and machine learning -- Yann LeCunn, Andrew Ng, Geoffry Hinton -- at Facebook, Google and other places, they don't have statistics degrees, they have computer science degrees. There's a whole wave of techniques and schools of thought that developed outside of statistics. To come back now and say "data science is statistics done by engineers" as some slight against engineers is malicious, parochial and wrong, and it annoys me greatly that it comes up so often on Hacker News. 1) http://courses.csail.mit.edu/18.337/2015/docs/50YearsDataScience.pdf http://courses.csail.mit.edu/18.337/2015/docs/50YearsDataSci... 2) https://projecteuclid.org/download/pdf_1/euclid.ss/1009213726 https://projecteuclid.org/download/pdf_1/euclid.ss/100921372...