Live data from Hacker News

Propel – Machine learning for Javascript

propelml.org

51–60 of 64 posts

Re: Propel – Machine learning for Javascript

#51
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no python vs python3 decision to make. There's no (sane) reason to pick Python 2 in 2018 for new projects. Conda installer comes with Python prepackaged. So it's really a single exe and one CMD to get a Tensorflow env setup. And, of course, you have access to numpy, pandas, jupyter, PIL ...

+ virtualenv I always forget to set that up. Also I never learned python packaging, with npm it was trivial.

If you use pipenv it takes care of the virtualenv stuff behind the scenes for you.

Re: Propel – Machine learning for Javascript

#52
post #26
post #9

This could a fun way to learn ML using just your browser. I'm still skeptic about the performance but for prototyping it could be viable. One thing bothering me about reading the API is the inconsistent way of adding semicolons. Not an important thing I'm sure and as my personal opinion I'd much rather have the examples without them. To me they are just waste of time. Also it makes the code look more like Python. Any…

Python doesn't use semicolons as statement terminators. C does.

Though they’re rarely used in practice, the Python grammar does allow the use of semicolons to separate multiple statements on the same line. https://docs.python.org/3/reference/compound_stmts.html

Re: Propel – Machine learning for Javascript

#53
post #42

this project does not work out of the box via npm install. seems like you have to get all babel.js with it and maybe use a typescript executor like ts-node ES2015 imports took javascript back to 2008, before node and npm made it awesome. use NPM and require if you are building tools for other people, that way they can implement your work without adding compilers and obscure configurations to their build. don't nobody…

Although propel itself is written in typescript, supporting users that want to write javascript is an explicit design goal. The npm package contains "vanilla" javascript that targets node.js 8.x and later.

Re: Propel – Machine learning for Javascript

#55
post #5

That's totally exciting! Thanks to the author for enriching the ML ecosystem in JavaScript :) I didn't explore the full API yet, but already seeing the plotting functionality for functions is a tremendous win for ML in JavaScript. In case anyone is interested in doing ML in JS in 2018, there exists a larger article which I wrote a couple of weeks ago that tries to convey the state of the art of Machine Learning in Ja…

If I had heard someone talking about ML in Javascript a few years ago I would think it was a joke, probably because my professors seem to love to make fun of javascript, PHP.

https://github.com/php-ai/php-ml

Re: Propel – Machine learning for Javascript

#56

It binds directly to the TensorFlow C API, if you run it in NodeJS, which is awesome. I get tired of having to setup a python env anytime I want to play around with ML.

So now you'll have to setup a nodeJS env? I don't really see the difference.

The difference is now you don't have to setup a python env.

Re: Propel – Machine learning for Javascript

#57

Going back to the Tensorflow C API and adding plotting + networking + async capability is a smart engineering choice. Will this project expand faster than Tensorflow Python to make it worth investing in? We will see in the coming months :)

Python has a larger ecosystem for data intensive application and pratictoners. As a language it's very easy to learn for JavaScript devs. The only "killer" feature JS may bring to the table would be client side, browser based inference that leverages GPU. But we're eons away from that.

Also JS has possibilities for better interactive visualization using D3 and other things.

Re: Propel – Machine learning for Javascript

#58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

pipenv --three shell pipenv install pkg_1 pkg_ pkg_3 etc. Seems pretty easy to me. Plus, no one should be using Python 2 for any new project now, so that's not even a decision to bother with anymore.

What's pipenv? Same as conda? Not using the system python also means installing python3 beforehand.

Pipenv is like virtualenv's but improved: https://docs.pipenv.org/

Conda is like pip, but focused only on the sciences/data stuff. Pip has everything that Conda has and more as it's the standard packaging solution for Python.

Re: Propel – Machine learning for Javascript

#59
post #9

This could a fun way to learn ML using just your browser. I'm still skeptic about the performance but for prototyping it could be viable. One thing bothering me about reading the API is the inconsistent way of adding semicolons. Not an important thing I'm sure and as my personal opinion I'd much rather have the examples without them. To me they are just waste of time. Also it makes the code look more like Python. Any…

You will hate to hear that there is a serious proposal to make semicolons mandatory in the next version of ECMAScript.

No, there isn't. I am on TC39.

Re: Propel – Machine learning for Javascript

#60
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Arguably the only "killer" feature Python has is the ecosystem. There are efforts to build out a similar ecosystem for JS. For example https://github.com/jacobbogers/libRmath.js is a typescript port of R's core math library https://svn.r-project.org/R/trunk/src/nmath/

And the full force of the entire machine learning research community (except for a few still on Lua/Torch).

We JS folks just need 1 good deep-learning system in JS. I really want that system to be propel as it leverages the work that has gone in on tensorflow. Let that piece fall into place, and just watch as the last bastion of python gets overrun.
Post reply on HN