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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?

#141

Post by bsg75 »

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 would not have expected to find my same definition so common as to be the top comment.

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

#142

Post by klancaster »

lj3 wrote: post #134
klancaster wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this point, it is university research. The work has been published, and we are in clinical trials in prep for commercialization.

Is this just for melanoma, or has it expanded into pap smear and bronch territory? My mother's a cytotech and every couple of years somebody claims they're going to replace her with a shell script. Hasn't happened yet, though.

We are expanding it to a number of skin and ocular diseases.

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

#144

Post by dbcurtis »

cr0sh wrote: post #123
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…

> 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) - th…

OK, since a couple people are curious I'll spend the bandwidth. It really is an issue of personal circumstances, not any failing of the Udacity course.

I like the video lectures a lot, and got a lot out of them. I like the quizes and short problems. The large projects are a little too color-by-numbers for my taste, I really would like to see an incremental exercise step in between in order to flesh out understanding more solidly, but if I had enough time I could probably fill than in myself.

But as I said above, my decision not to follow through is mostly personal circumstances. When I signed up for the course I was casting around for something new to do and thought the course would add to my robotics knowledge and cred. By the time my class cohort started, I was working at a robotics startup. Aside from the startup taking a lot of time and energy, doing robots by day, robots at night, and robots on the weekend just got to be a bit much. Something in my life had to give, and Udacity didn't make the cut this time.

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

#145

Post by froindt »

sevensor wrote: post #99

Burning CPU cycles on an opaque, needlessly complicated model created by a canny professor who realized that putting ML in grant proposals gets you 5x the cash compared to regression.

Unfortunately I bet this will be the case for the next few years until funding agencies figure out not everything has to be done with machine learning.

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

#146

Post by adictator »

cr0sh wrote: post #131
adictator wrote: post #3

Not me, but a friend of mine heads a company that uses drones to identify defects / damage on containers. He uses ML to process the images captured by the drones, which is fed through an ML processor to detect such damages & flag them for insurance claims purposes.

By containers, do you mean shipping containers? Sounds interesting!

Oh yes, these are large shipping containers and they are at sea & get checked at every port they touch.

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

#147

Post by greatNespresso »

repied wrote: post #119
greatNespresso wrote: post #67

Trying to predict horse racing

Is that working?

I am still lacking data to test it more thoroughly, but as of now it is promising enough for me to keep working on it. And it's a fun way to learn. What do you work on ?

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

#148

Post by kuboris »

klancaster wrote: post #29

We analyze images of skin lesions and give a probability whether they are malignant melanoma. The analysis is performed on-board on mobile phones.

Thats super cool. We built a simmilar simple app on a Hackathon. We are getting 90% Accuracy nowadays. We opensourced it at https://github.com/kuboris/smartoscope We should add an App for download as soon as our Android developer fixes some minor bugs. The plan is to make it open to use any model so people can train and provide their own. Any advice ? :)

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

#149

Post by agibsonccc »

Fraud detection (credit cards, online banking)

Detecting illegal mining activity via satellite

network intrusion (packet analysis)

Predicting machine failure

Stock market trend prediction (up/down)

Simbox fraud

Finding similar parts for large vehicles to help engineers

I can keep going, but this is a sample I've seen over the years. We mainly do work in time series data for enterprise basically mostly "things google doesn't do". A bulk of what we do doesn't appear in research papers because it's not "GAN art" eg: "the current hype".

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

#150

Post by sjg007 »

jameslk wrote: post #80
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…

This is true of the software engineering profession in general. I think there's a quote somewhere stating "the half-life of a software engineer is 2-5 years." There's constantly new programming languages, new frameworks, new platforms, new tools, new paradigms etc. It becomes harder and harder to keep up with all that as you age and have more responsibilities and require more stability having a mortgage and offspring…

"Those who are still in school or fresh out of it will be up-to-date with the latest theory and trends. "

The theory doesn't change that fast... also trends? Maybe in terms of a new JS library.. but I think it's more of new grads will work for cheap and will take more bullshit. They also are more likely to move to/for the job.

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