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Ask HN: What do you use Machine Learning for?

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Re: Ask HN: What do you use Machine Learning for?

#121

Post by cr0sh »

nilkn wrote: post #88
hasbroslasher wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a person (software engineer) who knows some ML and I tell this to my coworkers when they express similar sentiments: If you're worried about ML taking your job then you're not thinking straight. If the world has automated to the degree where programmers are non longer needed in 3 or 10 years then you will definitely have other things to worry about. Truckers, farmers, taxis, cops, and construction crews will like…

My understanding is that the anxiety isn't about a fear of programming being automated in the near future, but rather about ML growing into a required, essential skill for a software developer in the next few years.

> My understanding is that the anxiety isn't about a fear of programming being automated in the near future, but rather about ML growing into a required, essential skill for a software developer in the next few years.

Let's say you were an automobile assembly line worker in 1965, and you were hearing about robots taking over your job at some point. What would you do? That is, what would be the best thing you could do?

If you answer "Get an education in something that robots aren't doing, and try to get out of this career path" - go to the front of the line.

So - if you are a software developer - and worried that sometime in the future (I'd argue that "sometime" will soon mean "in 5 years, maybe less" - just as you note), ML is "rowing into a required, essential skill for a software developer" - what would you do?

Sit back, throw your hands up, and hope?

Or maybe get that education now on how ML works, how to use it, learning the hard math, etc?

Guess which route I have taken? Perhaps others should as well, if they want to continue in their careers...

Re: Ask HN: What do you use Machine Learning for?

#122

Post by CodeSheikh »

rdrey wrote: post #75
CodeSheikh wrote: post #42

Replacing project managers and introducing reward/score based AI bots that keep track of progress of individuals as function of stories they are working on, and these bots send out reminders (slack chat bots perhaps). This will can help improve productivity at large firms with multiple (and sometimes unnecessary) levels of manager hierarchies such as IBM, Dell, HP, oil companies etc. Let's be honest a certain program…

That sounds a lot like the workflow in Dave Eggers' "The Circle". I think if you read the book you'd be less likely to implement anything like this. :P

I have been meaning to read that book recommended by a friend working in tech. Apparently there's a movie out now too :)

Re: Ask HN: What do you use Machine Learning for?

#123

Post by cr0sh »

dbcurtis wrote: post #48
ashark wrote: post #7

I use it as something to worry about not knowing how to use, and how that might make me unemployable in a few years, while also having no obvious need for it at all, and therefore no easy avenue towards learning it, especially since it requires math skills which have completely rusted over because I also never need those, so I'd have to start like 2 levels down the ladder to work my way back up to it. I've found it v…

IMHO, the anxiety is well-placed. I did my first CSci homeworks on punchcards. FORTRAN was a teaching language in those days. The reason I am still relevant as a developer is that over the years I have learned to recognize progress when I see it. (Why am I the one dragging 30-year-old-luddites into the world of Python 3.x???? 2.7 is history. But I digress....) Back on point... this is one of those times in my career…

> I started the Udacity self-driving car Nano-degree. (I won't be finishing it, but that is another story.)

I'd be curious to know why myself?

I'm about 2/3rds of the way thru the second term (I'm in the November cohort), and I plan to finish the nanodegree.

What I have found, though, with this second term, is that it seems to be a rehash of the CS373 course (I took that back in 2012, when Udacity first started) - though it also has taught a few new concepts for me (I like the fact that it is mostly done in C++ - which had gotten really rusty for me - but now I am liking C++ more).

I'd also recommend the Coursera ML course - from what I know, it is basically identical (if not the same material) as the original ML Class from 2011 (I took that one, which was my intro to MOOCs). If you can wrap your mind around the programming language used (Octave - basically an open-source clone of MatLab - where the main primitive is a vector/list), you'll find it does a great job at explaining many concepts that you might have had trouble with in the past (when we got to neural networks and backprop, it finally clicked for me - same with how think in terms to figure out how to parallelize processes).

Re: Ask HN: What do you use Machine Learning for?

#124

Post by cr0sh »

bm1362 wrote: post #110
dbcurtis wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMHO, the anxiety is well-placed. I did my first CSci homeworks on punchcards. FORTRAN was a teaching language in those days. The reason I am still relevant as a developer is that over the years I have learned to recognize progress when I see it. (Why am I the one dragging 30-year-old-luddites into the world of Python 3.x???? 2.7 is history. But I digress....) Back on point... this is one of those times in my career…

Why didn't you finish? I did the 3xxx self driving course on Udacity and was considering doing the nanodegree as well. Would really love to hear your perspective.

If you can afford it, do the nanodegree.

I did the CS373 course back in 2012 - and I have found that the nanodegree (which I am taking, and I am about 2/3s of the way thru the second term) touches on more than a bit of new stuff that I didn't find covered in the CS373 course (at least back in 2012).

First term alone is worth the price, I think. Learning how to use OpenCV, TensorFlow and Keras, then using that knowledge to "drive" a virtual car (I built a version of the NVidia End-to-End CNN and trained it using CUDA and my GPU at home, using data I derived in the simulator by steering the virtual car using a steering wheel controller I bought just for that purpose).

Second term so far has felt mostly like a re-hash of what was learned in the CS373 - although, learning about extended and unscented Kalman filters for integrating LIDAR and RADAR data was not something covered in CS373 (only the basic Kalman filter - useful in itself, though).

My goal is to finish this puppy.

From what I have heard (anecdotally), when the initial class started, for the first term there were approximately 30,000 students enrolled. When term 2 started, only about 300 of those students enrolled for the new term.

So far, I'm doing pretty well with this. Considering I don't have an advanced degree, that I am a self-taught software developer, and I am going to have my 44th birthday in about a month - well, you know the story about dogs and tricks; that don't apply to me.

Re: Ask HN: What do you use Machine Learning for?

#125

Post by cr0sh »

muricula wrote: post #10
ashark wrote: post #7

I use it as something to worry about not knowing how to use, and how that might make me unemployable in a few years, while also having no obvious need for it at all, and therefore no easy avenue towards learning it, especially since it requires math skills which have completely rusted over because I also never need those, so I'd have to start like 2 levels down the ladder to work my way back up to it. I've found it v…

Machine learning is very good at solving certain types of problems -- classification being chief among them. I think the current hype is a little overblown. Yeah, great scientific advancements have been made, but that doesn't mean"AI" is about to replace all programmers. It's just another family of algorithms we have in our toolbox for when we need them.

ML can certainly do continuous problems as well, but for many problems, classification works well to solve them. Plus, most problems can be devolved to classification, and classification problems can usually be solved by simpler "classic statistical" methods (regression methods), so are easy and fast to code for (no need for any fancy neural network or deep learning or such, or massive datasets).

I don't think ML or AI (or whatever you want to call it) is going to replace programmers any time soon, either. I do think, though, that having the skills in such domains will be something that employers are going to look at in differentiating potential candidates for job placements. So if you have the knowledge or can get it now, it may prove useful in the future.

Re: Ask HN: What do you use Machine Learning for?

#126

Post by robohamburger »

ashark wrote: post #7

I use it as something to worry about not knowing how to use, and how that might make me unemployable in a few years, while also having no obvious need for it at all, and therefore no easy avenue towards learning it, especially since it requires math skills which have completely rusted over because I also never need those, so I'd have to start like 2 levels down the ladder to work my way back up to it. I've found it v…

I used to feel the same way in regards to a lot of technology. I think this is the problem with trying to be a generalist is it seems like you need to be an expert at everything. Machine learning might be a great area to specialize in these days but if it is not for you I wouldn't stress out about it.

There are also a lot of resources for ML that don't require diving off the deep end such as tutorials/intro classes on coursera. In my opinion also picking what you learn helps as well. Trying to skip straight to neural networks might not be the best place to start if you don't know anything about linear regressions or classifiers.

Re: Ask HN: What do you use Machine Learning for?

#127

Post by cr0sh »

gavinpc wrote: post #20
ashark wrote: post #7

I use it as something to worry about not knowing how to use, and how that might make me unemployable in a few years, while also having no obvious need for it at all, and therefore no easy avenue towards learning it, especially since it requires math skills which have completely rusted over because I also never need those, so I'd have to start like 2 levels down the ladder to work my way back up to it. I've found it v…

Ha! I've been in the same position, reading what I can and looking out for a good application to try it on. I saw a quote around here like "Data has gravity; the computation will move to it." (I think this was Nadella at Build.) This is true for ML in a way that was not true for previous computer applications (I mean, mainstream applications of computers). You could write an image filter or an audio effect (or a spre…

> looking out for a good application to try it on.

Self driving vehicles - or other robotics localization and similar problems. Those are fun, at least, I find them fun.

I've also considered stuff in the graphics arts - like the various "deep dreaming" things, or the various ML filtering of images (turning a painting into a "photo" for instance); there's some interesting possibilities there.

But for me - robots are where it's at. The idea of making a machine that can "do its own thing" intelligently - well, that has fascinated me ever since I was a small child and watched the original 1970s "Buck Rogers" series with my dad.

Re: Ask HN: What do you use Machine Learning for?

#128

Post by cr0sh »

mromnia wrote: post #18
ashark wrote: post #7

I use it as something to worry about not knowing how to use, and how that might make me unemployable in a few years, while also having no obvious need for it at all, and therefore no easy avenue towards learning it, especially since it requires math skills which have completely rusted over because I also never need those, so I'd have to start like 2 levels down the ladder to work my way back up to it. I've found it v…

+1 I find it frustratingly hard to learn ML on my own, when I don't have a real problem to solve, just exercises.

Hack your car! Make it drive itself!

Or - go smaller (probably safer, too!) - make a self-driving RC car!

Re: Ask HN: What do you use Machine Learning for?

#129

Post by cr0sh »

mtgx wrote: post #44
Retric wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like encryption, the math is necessary when you build it, not when you use it. You can go quite far by just treating it as a black box.

Any good resources for how to use it as a black box for online services?

I don't know of a teaching resource, but I have found TensorFlow and Keras to be like Lego when it comes to ML; I am taking the Udacity Self-Driving Car Engineer nanodegree, and in the first term we used both (after having implemented our own simple ANN library in Python - to understand the basics) - I found it to be so much simpler to implement things with (especially neural networks for deep learning).

Re: Ask HN: What do you use Machine Learning for?

#130

Post by cr0sh »

jedberg wrote: post #33

I'm not using it at this moment, but in a couple of weeks I'll have a newborn, and I was thinking of taking pictures of him every time he is upset, and then tagging the photo with what ends up being the resolution (feed, change, or nap) and seeing if I could build a classifier that could figure out what he needs just from a picture of his angry face. Semi-related, but if anyone is using the AWS tools for their AI, pl…

> I was thinking of taking pictures of him every time he is upset, and then tagging the photo

You won't be able to have anywhere near enough data for that.

Unless somewhere out there is a labeled dataset of newborn baby faces, with around 20-30,000 unique samples (the more data, the better).

Your problem isn't really that difficult; it could probably be done with a very simple neural network a few hours of training. If you wanted to be robust, you could hack the ImageNet CNN into something to do this, too.

I would suggest, though, while what you are doing sounds fun - enjoy being a father and deal with this the old fashioned way. It'll probably be more satisfying.

/heck, what do I know - I don't have kids...

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