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Comment by mbrookes | Hacker News Reader

Not exactly.

The time you spend on the course, and the time spent by your instance running workloads are two completely separate things.

Your cost per-hour is accurate (plus a few bucks for an IP address), but the number of hours is off by an order of magnitude.

Also, I'm paying double that per instance per month for SSD using the provided scripts to build the instances. It's the smallest part of the cost, but I mention it because it can take newcomers to EC2 by surprise if they have an instance shut-down but consuming disk space.

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I'm going through this course, but using Google cloud instead of AWS. I can confirm that at least the first Jupyter notebook works well for me.

I had to adapt the aws-install.sh script, but it was easy enough. I ended up using a snapshot instead of a persistent volume, as the monthly cost when you're not running is much cheaper. So I have a script to create a new instance and then restore that snapshot. It's faster than installing the dependencies each time).

Google Cloud has a $300 free trial for new users: https://cloud.google.com/free/

(Disclosure: I work for Google, but have no involvement in Google Cloud other than being a happy user)

Any chance you can share the adapted scripts? I assume they are easy to make, but the less barriers to entry the better.

Sure:

1) Create the instance the first time: https://gist.github.com/rahimnathwani/40ed3b6f496d377e3d17de...

2) SSH into the instance and run this script (replace anaconda mirror if your instance isn't in Asia, and definitely set the password hash): https://gist.github.com/rahimnathwani/b63ebc5900b832743d9e22...

3) After you've tested the server, snapshot the disk (using the web console) and destroy the instance and the persistent disk.

4) Run this script to recreate the instance and disk from the snapshot (replace with your snapshot name): https://gist.github.com/rahimnathwani/9019df33d4ad7ec4607413...

Buy a laptop with a GPU. If you are serious about learning AI, it's worth spending few hundred dollars to get a proper workstation.

I heard that nowadays it's possible to buy a laptop and a external GPU?

I have a mac, is it possible to really buy an external GPU??

Yes, but GPUs should only be consider for acceleration when there is insufficient local CPU power to accomplish something valuable. Otherwise, it's like buying a Ferrari to get groceries.

https://www.journaldulapin.com/2014/12/04/a-nvidia-maxwell-c...

https://tompaw.net/cuda-on-thunderbolt-egpu/

http://xlr8yourmac.com/tips/MBP_ThunderBoltVideoCard.htm

AKiTio Node | Thunderbolt3 External PCIe Box for GPUs https://www.amazon.com/dp/B06WD8KS52

Gigabyte GeForce GTX 1080 XTREME Gaming Premium Pack Video Card (GV-N1080XTREME-8GD Premium Pack) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01HHC9Q3U

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