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Ask HN: What do you use Machine Learning for?

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Re: Ask HN: What do you use Machine Learning for?

#11
post #7

I use it as something to worry about not knowing how to use, and how that might make me unemployable in a few years, while also having no obvious need for it at all, and therefore no easy avenue towards learning it, especially since it requires math skills which have completely rusted over because I also never need those, so I'd have to start like 2 levels down the ladder to work my way back up to it. I've found it v…

I feel with you :D

Re: Ask HN: What do you use Machine Learning for?

#16
Use it in my software engineer screening service to determine if a user should answer more questions on a particular topic and dive deeper into a particular subject. Using Azure ML, been working out well so far. Went from messing around for days with other ML libraries to up and running within 20 minutes on Azure.

Re: Ask HN: What do you use Machine Learning for?

#18
post #7

I use it as something to worry about not knowing how to use, and how that might make me unemployable in a few years, while also having no obvious need for it at all, and therefore no easy avenue towards learning it, especially since it requires math skills which have completely rusted over because I also never need those, so I'd have to start like 2 levels down the ladder to work my way back up to it. I've found it v…

+1

I find it frustratingly hard to learn ML on my own, when I don't have a real problem to solve, just exercises.

Re: Ask HN: What do you use Machine Learning for?

#20
post #7

I use it as something to worry about not knowing how to use, and how that might make me unemployable in a few years, while also having no obvious need for it at all, and therefore no easy avenue towards learning it, especially since it requires math skills which have completely rusted over because I also never need those, so I'd have to start like 2 levels down the ladder to work my way back up to it. I've found it v…

Ha! I've been in the same position, reading what I can and looking out for a good application to try it on.

I saw a quote around here like "Data has gravity; the computation will move to it." (I think this was Nadella at Build.) This is true for ML in a way that was not true for previous computer applications (I mean, mainstream applications of computers). You could write an image filter or an audio effect (or a spreadsheet, or a mail client, etc) with no data at all (or a small amount of ad-hoc test data). But this suggests a subversion in the problem-finding process. Instead of thinking about what problems algorithms could solve, you have to look for large corpuses of data. It does feel like a paradigm shift that should engage our self-interest, if nothing else.

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