Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is hiring ML talent in that industry any more difficult than generally?
It appears to be not too difficult. Many people are interested in the quantity of data to work with.
of course they are
Ask HN: What do you use Machine Learning for?
161–165 of 165 posts
Re: Ask HN: What do you use Machine Learning for?
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
Hey - that's a perfectly reasonable answer, and I glad for you on the startup bit (sounds fun).
You're right on the "color by numbers" part - but I think there's a couple of reasons for it. I think that the purpose of the course isn't geared only to ML and self-driving vehicle purposes, but also as a means toward general software development. So they don't expect everyone to be at the self-starting coder level.
Secondly, if they were to, say, have you code each project from scratch with only a bare outline of what is needed, I think they'd have to likely expand the course (more lessons to teach things more in depth), as well as extend the time for the lessons; all of this would mean the course would be much longer, and that students would have to dedicate even more time to the effort, beyond what they already are doing.
Some could do that, but I think that many wouldn't be able to; they have to strike a balance somewhere, and this has been their answer. Plus, I have a feeling that many of their students are currently students going to university in some manner, and not all of them in the United States, but abroad internationally. Many of these students are likely struggling just to make the payments for this nanodegree as-is (and may have contributed to the drop-out rate from term 1 to term 2). Making the course longer and more expensive might put it completely out of reach for those students.
Re: Ask HN: What do you use Machine Learning for?
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
hedge fund
How large of a dataset are you looking at? I'm curious as to whether Lending Club's publicly available data will be lengthy enough to get meaningful accurate results for general 5-10 year loan predictions. Though it is nice that a economic crash happened to occur in the middle.
of course more data is always better, but there are plenty of flexible models that can learn form small data, so just try the lending club data and if your model isn't learning anything choose a more flexible one...
Re: Ask HN: What do you use Machine Learning for?
#164Re: Ask HN: What do you use Machine Learning for?
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
A nice email / phone capture portal you have there. Does anybody know what the value of such lists are? Having no other information with them I can't imagine it is much.
I don't store this information after we send the response, but that would be one way to make money if you don't care about being an asshole to your users. This is mostly a joke and I don't make any money from it.
Likely fair enough - I'm just suspicious of anything that takes contact details when it could just hold the late open and let me know when it's done