If you really want to learn machine learning you should pursue a PhD. You might be able to do very simple stuff and follow tutorials because there are very high level tools around, but to really know what's going on and how to use it to produce new products and services, you need to master it properly.
Ask HN: How can a front-end developer dive into machine learning?
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Re: Ask HN: How can a front-end developer dive into machine learning?
#12If you really want to learn machine learning you should pursue a PhD. You might be able to do very simple stuff and follow tutorials because there are very high level tools around, but to really know what's going on and how to use it to produce new products and services, you need to master it properly.
This is not true and harmful to the progress of the field: http://www.fast.ai/2017/03/17/not-commoditized-no-phd/
Re: Ask HN: How can a front-end developer dive into machine learning?
#13it depends if you want to be a data engineer (lots of need for that), software engineer that developers code for data scientists (Software Engineer: Machine Learner - also lots of demand), or a data scientist. the latter, 'might' be a challenge. I started looking into linkedin profiles of data scientists of top tech companies after I realized there were more wharton mba's as data scientists than there where people wh…
What are the primary skills of the 'Wharton data scientists' you are talking about? Is it excel, SQL, R, Python?
I 'presume' its the fact that wharton has a lot of great stat classes. stats stats stats, not r python sql
Re: Ask HN: How can a front-end developer dive into machine learning?
#14If you really want to learn machine learning you should pursue a PhD. You might be able to do very simple stuff and follow tutorials because there are very high level tools around, but to really know what's going on and how to use it to produce new products and services, you need to master it properly.
This is not true and harmful to the progress of the field: http://www.fast.ai/2017/03/17/not-commoditized-no-phd/
While it may not require a Ph.D, effective use of Machine Learning does require Ph.D like scientific skills. Even the link you mention talks about reading research papers and building good models does require scientific rigor.
Re: Ask HN: How can a front-end developer dive into machine learning?
#15Re: Ask HN: How can a front-end developer dive into machine learning?
#16it depends if you want to be a data engineer (lots of need for that), software engineer that developers code for data scientists (Software Engineer: Machine Learner - also lots of demand), or a data scientist. the latter, 'might' be a challenge. I started looking into linkedin profiles of data scientists of top tech companies after I realized there were more wharton mba's as data scientists than there where people wh…
That's probably because "data scientist" isn't a job description, it's a trendy title for a whole constellation of jobs that involve looking at data. I would expect that the Wharton grads are probably doing work that is fundamentally different from most people with hardcore academic stats backgrounds.
Re: Ask HN: How can a front-end developer dive into machine learning?
#17If you really want to learn machine learning you should pursue a PhD. You might be able to do very simple stuff and follow tutorials because there are very high level tools around, but to really know what's going on and how to use it to produce new products and services, you need to master it properly.
This is not true and harmful to the progress of the field: http://www.fast.ai/2017/03/17/not-commoditized-no-phd/
Well the article builds around a very superficial view of ML.
If you want to do simple recommendation systems or spam filters than O.k. Those are solved problems, hence commoditized.
If you want to build novel things, you really need academic-grade ML.
If you want another argument, I came from working in VC and startups, and they think they understand ML. Boy, they really don't. They are like kids pretending to play a guitar that can't strike a single chord right.
Re: Ask HN: How can a front-end developer dive into machine learning?
#18http://course.fast.ai
Its hands down the best course to get your hands dirty with latest , state of art stuff, and then learn how it works. It has completely different approach to most courses. It is top down.
Do this first, you can immediately apply it to cool stuff like image classification , nlp etc.
The assignments have additional resources where you can get into more detailed math (but the course doesn't dumb things down, but gives more intuitive explanations) and dive even deeper.
Re: Ask HN: How can a front-end developer dive into machine learning?
#19face first, feets pushing
Re: Ask HN: How can a front-end developer dive into machine learning?
#20Dan Shiffman created a Youtube playlist titled "Intelligence and Learning", which might be a good place to start. This is the link to his channel https://www.youtube.com/user/shiffman
Thanks for sharing this. I immediately like his energy...I find KNN and TSP very interesting problems and I see he has a videos on those...bon weekend!