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MILA and the future of Theano

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Re: MILA and the future of Theano

#31

Post by namelost »

alexasmyths wrote: post #13
pesenti wrote: post #2

Reminds me of Chrome. Lots of competing alternatives. Google comes late yet still manage to take over the market organically very quickly by producing a superior and more robust alternative.

" by producing a superior and more robust alternative." In a commodity market - those with brand and distribution will win. Chrome isn't really that much better than others. It may be in some areas, not in others. But when the 'company that owns the web' is promoting it, they can get any number of downloads they chose to as long as the product is competitive. And distribution is one thing, brands have incredible powe…

Not now, but at the time of its introduction, Chrome was significantly better than everything else. Once they added extensions at least.

Chrome was the first web browser that didn't crash and didn't need to be frequently restarted. Chrome was immune to memory leaks, Flash was sandboxed, each tab was sandboxed, etc. It was a revolution.

Re: MILA and the future of Theano

#32

Post by yongjik »

pesenti wrote: post #2

Reminds me of Chrome. Lots of competing alternatives. Google comes late yet still manage to take over the market organically very quickly by producing a superior and more robust alternative.

Anybody else has the feeling that PyTorch is to TensorFlow what Chrome was to other browsers? I started PyTorch about a month ago and was impressed how effortless everything was compared to TF.

Re: MILA and the future of Theano

#33

Post by dnautics »

zeroxfe wrote: post #27
alexasmyths wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

" by producing a superior and more robust alternative." In a commodity market - those with brand and distribution will win. Chrome isn't really that much better than others. It may be in some areas, not in others. But when the 'company that owns the web' is promoting it, they can get any number of downloads they chose to as long as the product is competitive. And distribution is one thing, brands have incredible powe…

> Chrome isn't really that much better than others. The point is that it was much better than the others when it came out. It spurred the competition into actually competing. (If you remember, IE had >80% of the market at the time, and was horrendous.)

I don't know why this is being downvoted. I moved to chrome because ff performance was abysmal (and moved back when Chrome's v8 jit kept taking 100% cpu and locking my Linux laptop)

Re: MILA and the future of Theano

#34

Post by diab0lic »

make3 wrote: post #8
jsweojtj wrote: post #6

I'm curious what will happen with PyMC... incorporate another library? Is there an easily swappable library that does what Theano does?

Tensorflow does everything Theano does, but with the backing of the big G. That's basically why Theano is being sunsetted.

As I understand it Tensorflow does not handle a large number of variables very well[0], which is the killer feature of NUTS in pymc3. This makes it a bit of a non-starter for pymc3.

[0] https://github.com/pymc-devs/pymc3/issues/1650

Re: MILA and the future of Theano

#35

Post by [deleted] »

zeroxfe wrote: post #27
alexasmyths wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

" by producing a superior and more robust alternative." In a commodity market - those with brand and distribution will win. Chrome isn't really that much better than others. It may be in some areas, not in others. But when the 'company that owns the web' is promoting it, they can get any number of downloads they chose to as long as the product is competitive. And distribution is one thing, brands have incredible powe…

> Chrome isn't really that much better than others. The point is that it was much better than the others when it came out. It spurred the competition into actually competing. (If you remember, IE had >80% of the market at the time, and was horrendous.)

[deleted]

Re: MILA and the future of Theano

#36

Post by nextos »

cryptoz wrote: post #14
nextos wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess this is quite natural. Once some key ideas have been laid out, it's easy for a big corp like Google (whose expertise is on software engineering & algorithms for data processing) to chip in and produce something better. Research organizations like the University of Montreal cannot compete with that.

> Research organizations like the University of Toronto cannot compete with that. This is true; note that in this case it is Université de Montréal.

Sorry, I tend to mix both. Edited.

Re: MILA and the future of Theano

#37

Post by makmanalp »

pesenti wrote: post #2

Reminds me of Chrome. Lots of competing alternatives. Google comes late yet still manage to take over the market organically very quickly by producing a superior and more robust alternative.

Hah, that sounded almost like "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" :-)

Re: MILA and the future of Theano

#38

Post by jonstokes »

mintplant wrote: post #29
jonstokes wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, this. The seemingly increasing HN practice of rewriting submission titles and headlines strikes me as the ultimate in IT support nerd "just move"-ism.

I disagree, the original title is too vague. Perhaps "MILA to stop working on Theano".

The original title is less precise, but it's not even remotely inaccurate or even "vague" by any reasonable definition of the term.

If you want to know about the future of Theano, that tells you about it.

If a title is misleading clickbait, then sure, fix it. But if you're making subjective judgment calls about whether you think the level of imprecision is appropriate or not, and so on, that's way over the line.

Again, the original title is 100% appropriate for the post, because it describes exactly what the post lays out. It may not be as precise as you personally want it, but this is how the author chose to package it and that should be respected.

Re: MILA and the future of Theano

#39

Post by PNWChris »

clickok wrote: post #22
pesenti wrote: post #2

Reminds me of Chrome. Lots of competing alternatives. Google comes late yet still manage to take over the market organically very quickly by producing a superior and more robust alternative.

It's something of a pattern for Google. Existing products (say, Theano and Torch) were revolutionary, but had a number of pain points that were difficult to remove[0]. TensorFlow is essentially Theano without those problems, and with the guarantee of continued relevance thanks to Google's backing[1]. And of course, they reap the benefits of making it "open-source" while keeping a closed version for private use, simil…

This is going to sound wildly ignorant, is Google Ultron a real thing?!

I just remember it as a joke "super secret ultimate browser used by NASA" from that "Tales of IT" green text story [0].

[0]: https://imgur.com/gallery/iJD8f

edit: Whoops, it was mentioned in part 2 - https://imgur.com/gallery/AOz0d

Re: MILA and the future of Theano

#40

Post by dang »

jonstokes wrote: post #26
jwilk wrote: post #15

Please use the original title ("MILA and the future of Theano").

Yes, this. The seemingly increasing HN practice of rewriting submission titles and headlines strikes me as the ultimate in IT support nerd "just move"-ism.

It has been going on since the beginning, which is why there's a rule about it and also why people ignore the rule.

We changed the title from "Theano not to be developed further". Submitters: please don't editorialize like this. It breaks the rule.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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