Peter Norvig - The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data
Why Hacker News recommends it
Recommended as a favorite tech talk showing how huge data availability changes how problems are approached.
What it is
Peter Norvig's UBC distinguished lecture on how massive amounts of simple data, such as for language modeling, can yield understanding that hand-built models could not.
Recommended by 3 HN commenters across 3 different months, 2012 to 2026.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec ChicagoBoy11 · 2016-10 · on “Ask HN: What's your favorite tech talk?”
Peter Norvig on the "Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data" [this video] I think it is so easy for us to discuss the impact of big data and quickly get into the weeds, but I think in this talk Norvig does an especially great job in making you truly appreciate the seismic impact that the availability of massive quantities of data can have on your way to think about problems. This is one of the first things I ever saw of him, and I've been in love ever since.
Recommends stiff · 2012-05 · on “Beware The Hype Over Big Data Analytics”
I am not sure if I disagree with the central thesis of the article, but the argumentation seems rather weak in many places, for example he says: Let's take the example of the number of people who walk into a store and buy a certain product. By studying 10 customers you can get an estimate of the probability of the purchase and predict sales; by studying 100 customers you get a better estimate. By analyzing 1000 customers you have a very good estimate. You could study a million customers, but the results are unlikely to be vastly different from the results of analyzing 1000 customers and probably not worth the expense. This makes sense only for very low-dimensional data sets, but most real-li
Recommends gpcz · 2013-01 · on “Data trumps everything”
If you're looking for more examples and information about using simple algorithms with lots of data, I recommend Peter Norvig's "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data": [this video]
Cites wslh · 2015-11 · on “Google Open-Sourcing TensorFlow Shows AI's Future Is Data, Not Code”
This is old news: Peter Norvig, The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data (2011): [this video] and a previous article from 2009: [LINK]
Cites DonHopkins · 2026-02 · on “Half million 'Words with Spaces' missing from dictionaries”
That happens often with domain names, but then you get expertsexchange.com, penisland.net, whorepresents.com, therapistfinder.com, a Dutch pre-match analysis site voorspel.nl, or a site about the game overspel.nl. Peter Norvig - The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data [this video]