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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?

#111

Post by zxexz »

vergessenmir wrote: post #100
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!

Why do ML, especially nowadays on a Mac, when you can do it on an Ubuntu based machine. Surely work can provide that?

Why Ubuntu specifically? Not even being snarky. Calling out a specific distro, vs. the operating system itself. I've had more pain setting up ML environments with Ubuntu than a MacBook, personally - though pure Debian has been the easiest to get stable from scratch. Ubuntu usually screws me over one way or another after a month or so. I think I've spend a cumulative month of my life tracking down things related to changes inn netplan, cloud-init, etc. Not to mention Ubuntu Pro spam being incessant, as official policy of Canonical [0]. I first used the distro all the way back at Warty Warthog, and it was my daily driver from Feisty until ~Xenial. I think it was the Silicon Valley ad in the MotD that was the last straw for me.

[0] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ubuntu-meta/+bug/1...

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

#112

Post by blitzar »

sigmoid10 wrote: post #9
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!

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

Nahh im l33t - intel macbook and no troubles.

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

#113

Post by fragmede »

jshbmllr wrote: post #31
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!

I do this... but air-gapped :(

that sounds very painful.

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

#114

Post by aulin »

chudi wrote: post #46
KeplerBoy wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you not consider LLMs as a part of machine learning?

Probably it's because we are not training them anymore and just using with prompts. Seems like more of a swe regular type of job

except regular swe is way more fun than writing prompts

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

#115

Post by loftyal »

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!

...and people criticise node's node_modules. At least you don't spend hours doing this

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

#117

Post by ismailmaj »

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.

This was very important with classical machine learning, now with deep learning, feature engineering became useless as the model can learn the relevant features by itself.

However, having a quality and diverse dataset is more important now than ever.

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

#118

Post by RamblingCTO »

loftyal wrote: post #115
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!

...and people criticise node's node_modules. At least you don't spend hours doing this

But you do because your local node_modules and upstream are out of sync and CI is broken. Happens at least once a month just before a release of course. I'd rather have my code failing locally than trying to debug what's out of sync on upstream.

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

#119

Post by maxlamb »

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?

Sounds like a data engineer job to me
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