[it_does_follow]

Am I alone in really disliking Towards Data Science?

While their articles always look nice, their content is all written quickly by data scientists wanting to polish their resume with the ultimate aim of rapidly generating content for TDS that will match every conceivable data science related search. This post clearly exists solely so that TDS can get the top spot for "Word2vec explained" (which they have). As evidence of this tactic you can see that there already is a TDS post "Word2vec made easy" [0], offering nothing substantially different than this one.

The problem is that content is almost never useful, it just looks nice at first skim through. The authors, at no real fault of their own, are just eager novices that rarely have new perspective to add to a topic. It's not uncommon to find huge conceptual errors (or at least gaps) in the content there.

I personally encourage everyone at every level to write about what they can, but the issue is that TDS has manipulated this population of eager data scientists in order to dominant search results on nearly every single topic they can cover related to DS, which has made searching for anything tedious.

Compare this post to the fantastic work of Jay Alammar [1]. Jay's post is truly excellent, covering a lot of interesting details about word2vec and providing excellent visuals as well.

I'm assuming TDS will fold as soon as DS stops being a "hot" topic (which I think we'll be in the relatively near future), and will personally be glad to see the web rid of their low signal blog spam.

0. https://towardsdatascience.com/word2vec-made-easy-139a31a4b8... 1. https://jalammar.github.io/illustrated-word2vec/

[minimaxir]

TDS is a banned domain on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=towardsdatascience.co...

It's unusual that this article got vouched.

[ColinWright]

I thought this particular article gave a balanced, high-level overview, along with enough detail and references to provide a good starting point.

Yes, perhaps it's a bit light-weight, but as an introduction I thought it did a good job.

[yesenadam]

What makes you say it's banned? From that link it doesn't seem to be.

[heyhihello]

Agree on poor TDS quality.

You should check out Amazon’s MLU’s interactives - they’re like mini nyt articles on different algorithms:

https://mlu-explain.github.io/

[bllguo]

As another recommendation, Distill is higher level, and has less topic coverage, but their article quality is fantastic:

https://distill.pub/