Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Engineers from non-CS background, how did you pivot into ML/AI?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 142 posts

Re: Ask HN: Engineers from non-CS background, how did you pivot into ML/AI?

#71

Post by imh »

Stop focusing on MOOCs and youtube videos and study textbooks. Do exercises. Treat it like academic studying, and you'll end up with a decent education. It's important, because it's often easier to make a thing work okay than to understand why it works, so you'll get false confidence working through a tutorial. But then you want to apply that to something else and it doesn't work quite right, you won't know why it doesn't work and how to fix it.

Get some textbook suggestions and make a minimum of reading 5-10 pages per day. In about a month or two, you're done with a 300 page book. Repeat that for a few years and you're an expert. Once you have the foundations, read papers too, but don't skip straight trying to using AlphaZero to solve a curve fitting problem.

Re: Ask HN: Engineers from non-CS background, how did you pivot into ML/AI?

#73

Post by edouard-harris »

bhollan wrote: post #70

I'm not sure how this will be received, but I'm learning a lot through following Jeremy Howard. He's a huge PyTorch fan and he's spent the last 3 years trying to figure out what people like you need. He launched a course called FastAI and a DL library by the same name. His aim is to help anybody do it that wants to, with or without code. MOOC: http://course.fast.ai I just found a resource a few months ago that I'd lo…

Hey there - I'm one of the cofounders of SharpestMinds. AMA!

EDIT: Also, I strongly concur with the fast.ai recommendation for deep learning, especially if you're starting from a background in software.

Re: Ask HN: Engineers from non-CS background, how did you pivot into ML/AI?

#74

Post by boltzmannbrain »

imh wrote: post #71

Stop focusing on MOOCs and youtube videos and study textbooks. Do exercises. Treat it like academic studying, and you'll end up with a decent education. It's important, because it's often easier to make a thing work okay than to understand why it works, so you'll get false confidence working through a tutorial. But then you want to apply that to something else and it doesn't work quite right, you won't know why it do…

> study textbooks. Do exercises. Treat it like academic studying

This. Highly recommend Russel & Norvig [1] for high-level intuition and motivation. Then Bishop's "Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning" [2] and Koller's PGM book [3] for the fundamentals.

Avoid MOOCs, but there are useful lecture videos, e.g. Hugo Larochelle on belief propagation [4].

FWIW this is coming from a mechanical engineer by training, but self-taught programmer and AI researcher. I've been working in industry as an AI research engineer for ~6 years.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Artificial-Intelligence-Modern-Approa...

[2] https://www.amazon.com/Pattern-Recognition-Learning-Informat...

[3] https://www.amazon.com/Probabilistic-Graphical-Models-Princi...

[4] https://youtu.be/-z5lKPHcumo

Re: Ask HN: Engineers from non-CS background, how did you pivot into ML/AI?

#76

Post by imrank1 »

imh wrote: post #71

Stop focusing on MOOCs and youtube videos and study textbooks. Do exercises. Treat it like academic studying, and you'll end up with a decent education. It's important, because it's often easier to make a thing work okay than to understand why it works, so you'll get false confidence working through a tutorial. But then you want to apply that to something else and it doesn't work quite right, you won't know why it do…

I think moocs are usefull to jump start you but after that you need to do more. I studied CS and did find the deeplearning.ai course helpful in getting started. Without it much of the ML content was not easy to grokk. But now that I"ve gone through that I get the gist of what papers are talking about. After you do a MOOC though you have to continue with doing real work as in exercises, Kaggle competitions and just playing with things.

Re: Ask HN: Engineers from non-CS background, how did you pivot into ML/AI?

#77

Post by heinrichf »

fnbr wrote: post #46

My background is that of an econometrician (ie quantitative economist), and I now work as a Research Engineer at one of the FAANG research divisions. I think the advice about getting in as a hardware engineer is solid. At my workplace, there's a ton of need for people working on specialized hardware for DL, and for people working on the software that works with it (optimizing compilers, etc). If you are looking to br…

> Then, it's just a matter of getting interviews

Are you implying that, once prepared well enough, the contents of the interviews are simpler than getting actually noticed in the pile of applicants ?

Re: Ask HN: Engineers from non-CS background, how did you pivot into ML/AI?

#78

Post by TrueSelfDao »

goodmattg wrote: post #47

This is my issue with the phrase "AI/ML" as a catch all. You have an excellent general skillset, but "AI/ML" encapsulates a wide spectrum of jobs. ML-SWE: SWE with ML focus - building architecture around models, feature engineering, distributed training, etc. Relatively limited ML knowledge needed (IMO). The math won't be helpful for this role. Much more important to have SWE background. If you want this, keep buildi…

Can you let me know a bit more about the SWE-focused ML path? While I'm interested in ML, I'm slightly more interested in the systems that are built around it. In particular, are there resources that can help me get up to speed in designing (distributed and HW-accelerated) ML systems.

Re: Ask HN: Engineers from non-CS background, how did you pivot into ML/AI?

#80

Post by trentmb »

imh wrote: post #71

Stop focusing on MOOCs and youtube videos and study textbooks. Do exercises. Treat it like academic studying, and you'll end up with a decent education. It's important, because it's often easier to make a thing work okay than to understand why it works, so you'll get false confidence working through a tutorial. But then you want to apply that to something else and it doesn't work quite right, you won't know why it do…

> Stop focusing on MOOCs and youtube videos and study textbooks.

I'd be ecstatic if I never again see a comment about how folks suddenly and completely understand a class they failed years ago after watching a 3blue1brown video.

Post reply on HN