Show HN: My ML applications book, which HN helped me write (sample chapter) [pdf]
1–10 of 38 posts
Re: Show HN: My ML applications book, which HN helped me write (sample chapter) [pdf]
#2I recently published my first book! Writing a book has been a personal goal for the longest time, and Hacker News is the main reason I got to do so.
Reading interesting posts on HN daily eventually inspired me to write my own, and posting my own writing to HN showed me there was an audience for the topics I wanted to write about.
I started blogging about Machine Learning in 2017, and posted some of my writing to HN. Many posts did not do well, but some made it to the front page, sometimes even to the top spot (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18147710 , https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16224346 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17257143).
As a consequence, my posts ended up getting over half a million reads, which was enough to put me on O'Reilly's radar. They reached out and asked me to write a book for them. I decided to write something that follows the theme of my blog posts, and focus on practical Machine Learning advice that isn't often covered in ML classes. The book took 18 months to write, and is now out. I couldn't have done it without HN.
You can find a longer description of the contents at https://www.mlpowered.com/book/.
Thank you HN!
Re: Show HN: My ML applications book, which HN helped me write (sample chapter) [pdf]
#3First of all, congratulation for finishing your book!
I've read the TOC and looks really interesting. Is the content accessible for your average software engineer who never touched ML in his career? (like me)
Re: Show HN: My ML applications book, which HN helped me write (sample chapter) [pdf]
#4I recently published my first book! Writing a book has been a personal goal for the longest time, and Hacker News is the main reason I got to do so. Reading interesting posts on HN daily eventually inspired me to write my own, and posting my own writing to HN showed me there was an audience for the topics I wanted to write about. I started blogging about Machine Learning in 2017, and posted some of my writing to HN.…
That’s great! I don’t believe it’s ever occurred to me that a publisher might reach out to a blogger.
One good use for web analytics eh.
I have a text file I’ve kept for 16 years that contains quotes from many sources and some of my own musings. I dream to one day use it to inspire myself to spout something.
Re: Show HN: My ML applications book, which HN helped me write (sample chapter) [pdf]
#5First of all, congratulation for finishing your book! I've read the TOC and looks really interesting. Is the content accessible for your average software engineer who never touched ML in his career? (like me)
It should be! The book mostly focuses on how to apply ML in practical concepts, and less about the internal workings of ML methods.
I tried to explain the vast majority of ML concepts that I mention in the book. If you'd like to dive deeper into ML theory, I have a list of recommended books in the preface (included in the PDF preview).
Re: Show HN: My ML applications book, which HN helped me write (sample chapter) [pdf]
#6Congrats on writing the book! As I'm a student of GeorgiaTech, I have access to Oreilly's Safari. I just found the book over there and am looking forward to reading it.
Re: Show HN: My ML applications book, which HN helped me write (sample chapter) [pdf]
#7I recently published my first book! Writing a book has been a personal goal for the longest time, and Hacker News is the main reason I got to do so. Reading interesting posts on HN daily eventually inspired me to write my own, and posting my own writing to HN showed me there was an audience for the topics I wanted to write about. I started blogging about Machine Learning in 2017, and posted some of my writing to HN.…
That’s great! I don’t believe it’s ever occurred to me that a publisher might reach out to a blogger. One good use for web analytics eh. I have a text file I’ve kept for 16 years that contains quotes from many sources and some of my own musings. I dream to one day use it to inspire myself to spout something.
Perhaps publish it on Github? Maybe someone will find a gem in there.
I have some musings [1] on Github too. Thoughts that I want to get out there but are too incoherent to become blog posts ...
Re: Show HN: My ML applications book, which HN helped me write (sample chapter) [pdf]
#8I read this book on the O’Reilly website using their trial period and have also pre-ordered a physical copy. It is excellent and I recommend it to anyone into practical ML.
Re: Show HN: My ML applications book, which HN helped me write (sample chapter) [pdf]
#9Congratulations to the release.
I am a little bit skeptic about your running example, the "ML Editor". A model that helps you asking "good" questions, e.g. on StackOverflow.
Isn't that like an extremely complicated problem, I would even say AI hard? How do you want to evaluate if a question is "good" (and sure thing, it's not the number of upvotes it gets)? Is there a working example of such an editor in action, because I highly doubt that this is currently possible.
Re: Show HN: My ML applications book, which HN helped me write (sample chapter) [pdf]
#10I recently published my first book! Writing a book has been a personal goal for the longest time, and Hacker News is the main reason I got to do so. Reading interesting posts on HN daily eventually inspired me to write my own, and posting my own writing to HN showed me there was an audience for the topics I wanted to write about. I started blogging about Machine Learning in 2017, and posted some of my writing to HN.…
That’s great! I don’t believe it’s ever occurred to me that a publisher might reach out to a blogger. One good use for web analytics eh. I have a text file I’ve kept for 16 years that contains quotes from many sources and some of my own musings. I dream to one day use it to inspire myself to spout something.
It's a more common origin story than you might think, and not just in tech publishing. I have a friend who wrote a comedy article as a paid guest post. The thing went wildly viral and the publishers came a-knocking to bookify his piece.