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

How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?

iism.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

301–310 of 428 posts

Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?

#301

Post by hejja »

alkonaut wrote: post #296
laichzeit0 wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> why is using deep learning to do something useful impossible? This is completely false. Here are some examples: Google translate. It's infinitely useful. It's not perfect, but it's good enough for me when I want to quickly check whether my translation into my second language is okay, or I'm not sure I got the meaning right of some translation. Second example: My home security cameras now uses object classification…

Yes. Google Translate is obviously a useful product, and obviously Google will have thousands of areas where they can apply AI (enough that they'd even write frameworks for it). But 99(.99)% of us work in mundane jobs doing boring CRUD apps. My post was meant in this context. You work in a company making an intranet product for the paper tissue industry. Your manager wants v3.0 to have some AI in it. No one remembers…

so what you're saying is...

you either swallow the CRUD app red pill, or you live long enough to become the "AI a la carte" manager

Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?

#302

Post by hejja »

huffmsa wrote: post #297
hejja wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

genuine question here: why is using deep learning to do something useful impossible? I can think of a bunch of potential use cases for gpt 3 alone. or do you mean its impossible to build useful models from scratch because all the "easy" problems are solved? this also seems like a limited mind set. context: I'm a ML noob

It's not impossible. But there is a very real gap between "this is cool in a research paper" and "this is deep learning that works in real life". It's a large gap, covering everything from application topics, to data quality, to the need to actually run the damn think in a production setting with scalability, availability, error handling, etc. Production applications of deep learning aren't particularly glamorous, th…

makes sense. thanks.

models I have used seem to have their usefulness greatly outweighed by performance demands.

scaling and economics are another question entirely.

Perhaps we were spoiled with democratized web tech and it's wishful thinking to want everything to be that.

Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?

#303

Post by drunkpotato »

gvjddbnvdrbv wrote: post #134
kqr wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if you were stuck with a stack based on jQuery and global variables, good luck transitioning to React without Facebook’s scale. My team is doing exactly this on my initiative and seeing some positive effects already, even though we're only like 2% of the way there. Would you mind expanding on what you think is futile about it? I wouldn't want to be the one advocating something that with hindsight will look obviousl…

There's loads written on re-writes.

I may be misreading them, but GP seems to be doing the re-write in the recommended way, small chunks at a time. I think the advice cautioning against wholesale replacement re-writes is sound, but piecemeal transition is much more achievable. I think it took about 5 years to transition Wayfair from asp to PHP one page/system/scheduled task at a time, but the result was a working system at all times that improved with the re-write. Not that I have any love for PHP, but (Classic) asp was even worse. (I can’t speak to asp.net, never used it.)

Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?

#304

Post by Havoc »

This all seems a little back to front - engineering in a vacuum. I mean sure it solves the problems the engineering team has but at the cost of making everyone else's job near impossible.

"Date scrum" isn't an anti-pattern, it's a basic requirement. e.g.

Sales staff: Please buy our product

Customer: Cool. Can I see it?

Sales staff: Not ready yet

Customer: OK when will it be ready?

Sales staff: No idea. Whenever the engineers are done "discovering the best solution". Also, please sign here to commit X millions for a solution not yet discovered that will be delivered by an unknown date.

Customer: spits out coffee

Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?

#305

Post by huffmsa »

hejja wrote: post #302
huffmsa wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not impossible. But there is a very real gap between "this is cool in a research paper" and "this is deep learning that works in real life". It's a large gap, covering everything from application topics, to data quality, to the need to actually run the damn think in a production setting with scalability, availability, error handling, etc. Production applications of deep learning aren't particularly glamorous, th…

makes sense. thanks. models I have used seem to have their usefulness greatly outweighed by performance demands. scaling and economics are another question entirely. Perhaps we were spoiled with democratized web tech and it's wishful thinking to want everything to be that.

It will get there eventually. A lot of it is hardware / deployment constrained.

Search by image and object detection and computer vision in general is cool and potentially useful, but right now, it's cumbersome as fuck to pull out your phone, find the Lens application, take a picture etc. Needs to be baked into a wearable / neuralink type setup.

But self driving applications of CV work because the cameras are always deployed and running. But the hardware is expensive.

Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?

#306

Post by RNCTX »

Havoc wrote: post #304

This all seems a little back to front - engineering in a vacuum. I mean sure it solves the problems the engineering team has but at the cost of making everyone else's job near impossible. "Date scrum" isn't an anti-pattern, it's a basic requirement. e.g. Sales staff: Please buy our product Customer: Cool. Can I see it? Sales staff: Not ready yet Customer: OK when will it be ready? Sales staff: No idea. Whenever the e…

Name it Watson, stop admitting that the solution doesn't exist, and you've got yourself a deal.

Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?

#307

Post by sbierwagen »

transcriptase wrote: post #300

Did anyone here work on implementing Bing web search into the Windows 10 start menu? I'm curious to know the decisions that led to an operating system file search prompt ignoring exact file, directory and app names in favor of trying (and generally still failing) to show irrelevant web results.

After years of low level annoyance, I looked up the regedit incantations needed to disable it. Now start menu search is amazingly snappy and only returns relevant results.

Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?

#308

Post by arcturus17 »

ashtonkem wrote: post #149
reading-at-work wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we all know the project will fail unless someone develops well-perfoming, human-level AGI before Q4/2020 This is hilarious, and makes me wonder how many similar corporate AI initiatives are under way in the world right now.

I find that a C suite member talking about AI without a specific goal in mind (“we will use AI to automate X, which will help us do Y better”) is a huge red flag.

Arguably most C-suite execs shouldn’t even be dictating the specific techniques used to reach an objective or solve a problem.

Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?

#309

Post by noisy_boy »

kristopolous wrote: post #139
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jobs where this kind of attitude prevails suck to work at. Frustration waits around every corner. And the more pointless projects and dysfunction permeates a company the more chance the other shoe will come crashing down any moment and the company will fall apart and people will lose their jobs.

Some people are busy raising a family and just need a paycheck. It's not me either but I get it.

Agreed on that. Also, sometimes it is both. One does enjoy the parts of the job that provide satisfaction because most decent programmers by heart do enjoy fruitful creation. And then sometimes there are shitty pieces of work or dealing with people who are a piece of work. In such times, it actually helps to disassociate a bit from the work and look at the monetary side - until the sky clears. The key point is _sometimes_ and the expectation that the sky _does_ clear.

To be clear, I don't suggest this to those who are in the throes of software engineering passion and their work is part of who they are - sometimes may be too many times for them.

Post reply on HN