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

Ask HN: Machine learning engineers, what do you do at work?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 233 posts

Re: Ask HN: Machine learning engineers, what do you do at work?

#71

Post by soared »

schmookeeg wrote: post #66

Getting my models dunked on by people who can't open MS Outlook more than 3 tries out of 5, however, have a remarkable depth and insight into their chosen domain of expertise. It's rather humbling. Collaborating with nontechnical people is oddly my favorite part of doing MLE work right now. It wasn't the case when I did basic web/db stuff. They see me as a magician. I see them as voodoo priests and priestesses. When…

3 hours of meetings a week, that’s incredible. Sounds like your employer understands and values your time!

Re: Ask HN: Machine learning engineers, what do you do at work?

#73

Post by RSZC »

toephu2 wrote: post #3
tambourineman88 wrote: post #2

The opposite of what you’d think when studying machine learning… 95% of the job is data cleaning, joining datasets together and feature engineering. 5% is fitting and testing models.

Sounds like a Data Scientist job?

Used to do this job once upon a time - can't overstate the importance of just being knee-deep in the data all day long.

If you outsource that to somebody else, you'll miss out on all the pattern-matching eureka moments, and will never know the answers to questions you never think to ask.

Re: Ask HN: Machine learning engineers, what do you do at work?

#74

Post by visarga »

soared wrote: post #71
schmookeeg wrote: post #66

Getting my models dunked on by people who can't open MS Outlook more than 3 tries out of 5, however, have a remarkable depth and insight into their chosen domain of expertise. It's rather humbling. Collaborating with nontechnical people is oddly my favorite part of doing MLE work right now. It wasn't the case when I did basic web/db stuff. They see me as a magician. I see them as voodoo priests and priestesses. When…

3 hours of meetings a week, that’s incredible. Sounds like your employer understands and values your time!

13 meetings/week, at least one full day of work wasted for me

Re: Ask HN: Machine learning engineers, what do you do at work?

#75

Post by saulrh »

schmookeeg wrote: post #66

Getting my models dunked on by people who can't open MS Outlook more than 3 tries out of 5, however, have a remarkable depth and insight into their chosen domain of expertise. It's rather humbling. Collaborating with nontechnical people is oddly my favorite part of doing MLE work right now. It wasn't the case when I did basic web/db stuff. They see me as a magician. I see them as voodoo priests and priestesses. When…

> HIPAA my left foot.

That was my experience as well - training documentation for fresh college grads (i.e. me) directed new engineers to just... send SQL queries to production to learn. There was a process for gaining permissions, there were audit logs, but the only sign-off you needed was your manager, permission lasted 12 months, and the managers just rubber-stamped everyone.

That was ten years ago. Every time I think about it I find myself hoping that things have gotten better and knowing they haven't.

Re: Ask HN: Machine learning engineers, what do you do at work?

#76

Post by Animats »

dblohm7 wrote: post #14
tambourineman88 wrote: post #2

The opposite of what you’d think when studying machine learning… 95% of the job is data cleaning, joining datasets together and feature engineering. 5% is fitting and testing models.

As somebody whose machine learning expertise consists of the first cohort of Andrew Ng's MOOC back in 2011, I'm not too surprised. One of the big takeaways I took from that experience was the importance of getting the features right.

I remember that class. Someone from Blackrock taught it at Hacker Dojo. The good old days of support vector machines and Matlab.

Re: Ask HN: Machine learning engineers, what do you do at work?

#77

Post by wszrfcbhujnikm »

davedx wrote: post #5

pip install pytorch Environment broken Spend 4 hours fixing python environment pip install Pillow Something something incorrect cpu architecture for your Macbook Spend another 4 hours reinstalling everything from scratch after nuking every single mention of python pip install … oh time to go home!

Docker fixes this!

Re: Ask HN: Machine learning engineers, what do you do at work?

#78

Post by constantinum »

schmookeeg wrote: post #66

Getting my models dunked on by people who can't open MS Outlook more than 3 tries out of 5, however, have a remarkable depth and insight into their chosen domain of expertise. It's rather humbling. Collaborating with nontechnical people is oddly my favorite part of doing MLE work right now. It wasn't the case when I did basic web/db stuff. They see me as a magician. I see them as voodoo priests and priestesses. When…

> I tease insights out of a monstrous data lake of claims, Rx, doctor notes, vital signs

I'm curious to know the tech stack behind converting unstructured to structured data(for reporting and analysis)

Re: Ask HN: Machine learning engineers, what do you do at work?

#79

Post by fshbbdssbbgdd »

rolisz wrote: post #68
ungamedplayer wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't this what containers are for. Someone somewhere gets it configured right and then you download and run pre setup container and add your job data ? Or am I looking at the problem wrong?

But then how do you test out the latest model that came out from who knows where and has the weirdest dependencies and a super obscure command to install?

Just email all your data to the author and ask them to run it for you.

Re: Ask HN: Machine learning engineers, what do you do at work?

#80

Post by bick_nyers »

saulrh wrote: post #75
schmookeeg wrote: post #66

Getting my models dunked on by people who can't open MS Outlook more than 3 tries out of 5, however, have a remarkable depth and insight into their chosen domain of expertise. It's rather humbling. Collaborating with nontechnical people is oddly my favorite part of doing MLE work right now. It wasn't the case when I did basic web/db stuff. They see me as a magician. I see them as voodoo priests and priestesses. When…

> HIPAA my left foot. That was my experience as well - training documentation for fresh college grads (i.e. me) directed new engineers to just... send SQL queries to production to learn. There was a process for gaining permissions, there were audit logs, but the only sign-off you needed was your manager, permission lasted 12 months, and the managers just rubber-stamped everyone. That was ten years ago. Every time I t…

... you didn't have a UAT environment?
Post reply on HN