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Show HN: My ML applications book, which HN helped me write (sample chapter) [pdf]

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Re: Show HN: My ML applications book, which HN helped me write (sample chapter) [pdf]

#11

Congratulations to the release. I am a little bit skeptic about your running example, the "ML Editor". A model that helps you asking "good" questions, e.g. on StackOverflow. Isn't that like an extremely complicated problem, I would even say AI hard? How do you want to evaluate if a question is "good" (and sure thing, it's not the number of upvotes it gets)? Is there a working example of such an editor in action, beca…

Didn't read the book yet, but from your description absolutely agree on the trickiness of the problem - it almost requires solving the "proper artificial intelligence" problem first, like you say.

However, I imagine it could be applied to refine an existing question? There certainly exist "obviously poor" questions on SO, and it's a good first step to make otherwise poor question "look" like a good question - trivial things like formatting and misuse of the language. It won't get other, high-level attributes of a genuinely good question however, but some poor questions are poor in just that - formatting and language, the "requires editing" queue.

Regarding "intrinsically poor" questions, on the other hand, if everyone used the described model, readers would now have an increased cognitive load to distinguish between good and poor questions. Over time, the described model would drop in performance, as the "typical good question attributes" are used in poor questions which wouldn't have those otherwise.

(Forgive me for trivialising the concept of the quality of a question)

It's still a very interesting problem for a book. It's just as suitable for demonstrating the model development process, and it's likely very relevant to the vast majority of the readers (I imagine).

Re: Show HN: My ML applications book, which HN helped me write (sample chapter) [pdf]

#12
For what I’ve been reading recently, there will be some big consolidation in the sector this decade, with a handful of industries faring much better than others because of diminished return on investments, incoming regulations and marginal tech improvements?

Re: Show HN: My ML applications book, which HN helped me write (sample chapter) [pdf]

#13

I recently published my first book! Writing a book has been a personal goal for the longest time, and Hacker News is the main reason I got to do so. Reading interesting posts on HN daily eventually inspired me to write my own, and posting my own writing to HN showed me there was an audience for the topics I wanted to write about. I started blogging about Machine Learning in 2017, and posted some of my writing to HN.…

That’s great! I don’t believe it’s ever occurred to me that a publisher might reach out to a blogger. One good use for web analytics eh. I have a text file I’ve kept for 16 years that contains quotes from many sources and some of my own musings. I dream to one day use it to inspire myself to spout something.

I got approached from Packt publishing based on a github repo. Thought it was cool at the time, but later I felt maybe it was a bit like recruiterspam on linkedin, I just got hit by some keyword filter, as my repo wasn't particularly exciting.

Re: Show HN: My ML applications book, which HN helped me write (sample chapter) [pdf]

#14
Congratulations on sticking with it and getting it done!

I am going to purchase the book because I have never done any ML and I started working at a company that I think may benefit from applying ML to some of its products. I hope to use the book as a starting point for diving deeper into specifics of ML.

Does it matter to you where the book is purchased?

Re: Show HN: My ML applications book, which HN helped me write (sample chapter) [pdf]

#15

I recently published my first book! Writing a book has been a personal goal for the longest time, and Hacker News is the main reason I got to do so. Reading interesting posts on HN daily eventually inspired me to write my own, and posting my own writing to HN showed me there was an audience for the topics I wanted to write about. I started blogging about Machine Learning in 2017, and posted some of my writing to HN.…

That’s great! I don’t believe it’s ever occurred to me that a publisher might reach out to a blogger. One good use for web analytics eh. I have a text file I’ve kept for 16 years that contains quotes from many sources and some of my own musings. I dream to one day use it to inspire myself to spout something.

I got approached by \newline based on a Github repo.

Took me 3-4 months to convert it into a book and I made ~10k with it.

Re: Show HN: My ML applications book, which HN helped me write (sample chapter) [pdf]

#16
post #6

Congrats on writing the book! As I'm a student of GeorgiaTech, I have access to Oreilly's Safari. I just found the book over there and am looking forward to reading it.

GATech student here! I've added it to my playlist, I've got a couple more shiny reads if you want to check it out.

https://learning.oreilly.com/playlists/0c80dca0-2137-4cae-98...

Re: Show HN: My ML applications book, which HN helped me write (sample chapter) [pdf]

#17

I recently published my first book! Writing a book has been a personal goal for the longest time, and Hacker News is the main reason I got to do so. Reading interesting posts on HN daily eventually inspired me to write my own, and posting my own writing to HN showed me there was an audience for the topics I wanted to write about. I started blogging about Machine Learning in 2017, and posted some of my writing to HN.…

Congrats! Did O'Reilly give you valuable technical feedback while you were writing the book? I was in talks with publishers, but decided to self-publish (https://leanpub.com/beautiful-spark/) because I didn't get the impression that the book publishers would be able to help at all with deeply technical issues.

Re: Show HN: My ML applications book, which HN helped me write (sample chapter) [pdf]

#19

Congratulations on sticking with it and getting it done! I am going to purchase the book because I have never done any ML and I started working at a company that I think may benefit from applying ML to some of its products. I hope to use the book as a starting point for diving deeper into specifics of ML. Does it matter to you where the book is purchased?

Not at all, choose whichever platform and medium will give you the best reading experience.

I hope you find the book helpful, please reach out if you have any questions or feedback.

Re: Show HN: My ML applications book, which HN helped me write (sample chapter) [pdf]

#20

Congratulations to the release. I am a little bit skeptic about your running example, the "ML Editor". A model that helps you asking "good" questions, e.g. on StackOverflow. Isn't that like an extremely complicated problem, I would even say AI hard? How do you want to evaluate if a question is "good" (and sure thing, it's not the number of upvotes it gets)? Is there a working example of such an editor in action, beca…

Didn't read the book yet, but from your description absolutely agree on the trickiness of the problem - it almost requires solving the "proper artificial intelligence" problem first, like you say. However, I imagine it could be applied to refine an existing question? There certainly exist "obviously poor" questions on SO, and it's a good first step to make otherwise poor question "look" like a good question - trivial…

Yes, this is the approach in the book. The concept of question quality is nuanced, and does not have a clear definition. It can be easy to feel like you've solved the problem by just throwing in ML and calling it a day, but producing something useful is a real challenge.

The book covers multiple aspect of that process, from choosing an ML approach that isn't too simple or ambitious, to iterating on a model within the context of its final use case (i.e rather than only optimizing for a metric, testing how the model helps with its end goal).

In my experience, I've found that it is often those challenges that make or break the quality of an ML product, so the book focuses on tools to make complex problems more tractable, and less risky.

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