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Facebook open-sources deep-learning modules

research.facebook.com

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Re: Facebook open-sources deep-learning modules

#71

Post by DannyBee »

tim333 wrote: post #69
DannyBee wrote: post #27

Sadly, this has facebook's new, horrible patent clause. For those who aren't aware, it says 1. If facebook sues you, and you counterclaim over patents (whether about software or not), you will lose rights under all these patent grants. So essentially you can't defend yourself. This is different than the typical apache style patent grant, which instead would say "if you sue me over patents in apache licensed software…

As I read it is basically says you can use Facebook's patents unless you turn around and sue them in which case the deal's off. I'm not sure it's that awful - I mean how many companies are planing to use Facebook's patents and then sue them?

You should read it again :) It requires no lawsuits to lose patents As written, if you make blog posts saying their patents are crap, you've lost.

(and the other provisions are not defensive, they don't require you sue facebook to lose patents)

Re: Facebook open-sources deep-learning modules

#72

Post by technologia »

chubot wrote: post #50
technologia wrote: post #21

We've been using Torch for a while at work, really appreciate Facebook doing this. Some of us had a hard time adjusting to Lua, but it was well worth it.

I'm curious what your team experience was with Lua. IIRC, Lua is even more liberal than Python in that if you mistype a variable name, it will silently give you 'nil' rather than throwing an exception. Also, the prototype system is a little wonky. It seems overly flexible and makes you do too much work yourself, which would make it hard on a large team all getting started at once. If Torch gets popular I wonder if so…

So some of our team were a bit disoriented with the lack of reference counting and for others it was their first foray into functional programming.

Our team first picked up the Little Schemer and then jumped directly to lua.

Re: Facebook open-sources deep-learning modules

#73

Post by technologia »

Houshalter wrote: post #61
technologia wrote: post #21

We've been using Torch for a while at work, really appreciate Facebook doing this. Some of us had a hard time adjusting to Lua, but it was well worth it.

Torch is really cool. I wish I could use it more. Sadly it isn't supported on Windows.

Initially we had to use Windows for some client requirements, because of that we used Vagrant+Docker to deploy torch. You might want to try that if you can use VMs.

Re: Facebook open-sources deep-learning modules

#74

Post by technologia »

muser wrote: post #52
technologia wrote: post #21

We've been using Torch for a while at work, really appreciate Facebook doing this. Some of us had a hard time adjusting to Lua, but it was well worth it.

Could you provide some steps how you could bring everyone one board? We are still having python/R migration issues.

Most of our people came from a stats background using R or python (more focused on Scipy/numpy than any other package).

A few of us had some experience with Lua before with game programming, so we took it on ourselves to teach the others Scheme (almost like an intro to programming class) and then teach how Lua worked in comparison.

I guess we lucked out because they were able to pick it up quickly after the education on functional programming.

Re: Facebook open-sources deep-learning modules

#75

Post by technologia »

psykotic wrote: post #54
chubot wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious what your team experience was with Lua. IIRC, Lua is even more liberal than Python in that if you mistype a variable name, it will silently give you 'nil' rather than throwing an exception. Also, the prototype system is a little wonky. It seems overly flexible and makes you do too much work yourself, which would make it hard on a large team all getting started at once. If Torch gets popular I wonder if so…

> IIRC, Lua is even more liberal than Python in that if you mistype a variable name, it will silently give you 'nil' rather than throwing an exception. Like most things in Lua, that is easy to customize. You can just add an __index metamethod to environment tables. There are various 'strict' modules which do just that.

Thats what we love about Lua, it gives us control of the side effects.

Re: Facebook open-sources deep-learning modules

#76

Post by tdaltonc »

bpodgursky wrote: post #31

I appreciate that Facebook open-sources their libraries, but they have an awful habit of dumping source code on Github and then continuing to develop it internally without pushing those changes back out. For example, Facebook open-sourced Thrift, then proceeded to develop it internally, and recently released out a fork of thrift, not merging anything back into the original tree. Likewise, they open-sourced Corona a f…

They've done a good job keeping up PlanOut.

https://github.com/facebook/planout

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