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

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

#91
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!

If you're still doing ML locally in 2024 and also use an ARM macbook, you're asking for trouble.

What can I say, I enjoy pain!?

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

#92
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can recommend using conda, more specifically mambaforge/micromamba (no licensing issues when used at work). This works way better than pip, as it does more checks/dependency checking, so it does not break as easily as pip, though this makes it definitely way slower when installing something. It also supports updating your environment to the newest versions of all packages. It's no silver bullet and mixing it with pip…

I had a bad experience with Conda: - If they're so good at dependency management, why is Conda installed through a magical shell script? - It's slow as molasses. - Choosing between Anaconda/Miniconda... When forced to use Python, I prefer Poetry, or just pip with freezing the dependencies. The Python people probably can't even imagine how great dependency management is in all the other languages...

rye and uv, while "experimental", are orders of magnitude better than poetry and pip IMHO.

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

#93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just use conda.

Then you get one of my favorites: NVIDIA- has failed because it couldn't communicate with the NVIDIA driver. Make sure that the latest NVIDIA driver is installed and running.

Iirc I originally used conda because I couldn’t get faiss to work in venv, lol. That was a while ago though

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

#94
post #10
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe pip should not work by default (but python -m venv then pip install should)

Legends say there were times when you'd have a program.c file and just run cc program.c, and then could just execute the compiled result. Funny that programmer's job is highly automatable, yet we invent ourselves tons of intermediate layers which we absolutely have to deal with manually.

I actually did a small C project a couple of years ago, the spartan simplicity there can have its own pain too, like having to maintain a Makefile. LOL. It’s swings and roundabouts!

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

#95
post #3

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?

“Scientist”? Is this like Software Engineer?

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

#96
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!

Do people doing ML/DS not use conda anymore?

I can't point at a single reason, but I got sick of it.

The interminable solves were awful. Mamba made it better, but can still be slow.

Plenty of more esoteric packages are on PyPI but not Conda. (Yes, you can install pip packages in a conda env file.)

Many packages have a default version and a conda-forge version; it's not always clear which you should use.

In Github CI, it takes extra time to install.

Upon installation it (by default) wants to mess around with your .bashrc and start every shell in a "base" environment.

It's operated by another company instead of the Python Software Foundation.

idk, none of these are deal-breakers, but I switched to venv and have not considered going back.

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

#98
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

There were a couple "not prod" environments, but they were either replicated directly from prod or so poorly maintained that they were unusable (empty tables, wrong schemas, off by multiple DB major versions, etc), no middle ground. So institutional culture was to just run everything against prod (for bare selects that could be copied and pasted into the textbox in the prod-access web tool) or a prod replica (for anything that needed a db connection). The training docs actually did specify Real Production, and first-week tasks included gaining Real Production access. If I walked in and was handed that training documentation today I'd raise hell and/or quit on the spot, but that was my first job out of college - it was basically everyone's first job out of college, they strongly preferred hiring new graduates - and I'd just had to give up on my PhD so I didn't have the confidence, energy, or pull to do anything about it, even bail out.

That was also the company where prod pushes happened once a month, over the weekend, and were all hands on deck in case of hiccups. It was an extraordinarily strong lesson in how not to organize software development.

(edit: if what you're really asking is "did every engineer have write access to production", the answer was, I believe, that only managers did, and they were at least not totally careless with it. not, like, actually responsible, no "formal post-mortem for why we had to use break-glass access", but it generally only got brought out to unbreak prod pushes. Still miserable.)

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

#99
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like a Data Scientist job?

A good DS can double as an MLE.

And sometimes, a good MLE can double as a DS.

Personally I think we calcified the roles around data a little too soon but that's probably because there was such demand and the space is wide.

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

#100
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!

Why do ML, especially nowadays on a Mac, when you can do it on an Ubuntu based machine.

Surely work can provide that?

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