Hacker News Reader

Comment by freedomben | Hacker News Reader

Really neat. That's some really great work there.

Maybe an off-topic comment, but as an older developer I'm increasingly feeling left-behind by newer advances, especially AI/ML. I remember the feeling of being a student and junior dev and feeling that a lot of code and frameworks and such was "magic." When I got more experience/education it stopped being magic and started being brilliant. I'm almost back to where everything new and cool is "magic" again.

View on HN

That's how I felt until I watched a few videos about the low level details of neural networks. It's just basic statistics and calculus! Not just in a "it's turtles all the way down" kind of way, but in a "18th century king could have hired Leibniz and a thousand monks to run training on papyrus" kind of way.

Relative to impact, no other field of CS has implementation details as underwhelming as deep learning IMO. The magic is in the GPU and the high level libraries that let you make entire models with a few lines of Python.

You never need to stop learning. I can say with some confidence that the author of this article had not used TensorFlow.js 12 months ago.

Yes but one needs some time away from the computer especially when they have a family, eg. young children to spend time with. I personally accept that I’ll never catch up with all the new technologies but hope get to toy with the most significant parts in the future. At the same time I want to give the offline life a chance, there are old technologies such as acoustic instruments and phisical medium painting that are rewarding as the new stuff and they offer a different perspective into processes, sometimes deliberately slow and deep

You can if you can find just 10 minutes. See my reply above.

You think other people don’t have families or things to do away from the computer?

Woe is you

Ive been doing this technology thing for a long time, at some point other things become more important and take a higher priority. Im still holding onto a full time programming job but in my free time I do other things. If you’re young and excited about all this, good for you and enjoy the ride. At some point you might change your priorities if other things become more important. Cheers

I personally still love programming and perhaps when my kids are grown I’ll do it more in my spare time again.

I agree though. I don’t have a choice but to cram my learning into work. Thankfully I work with an awesome team and we love to experiment, so I learn pretty much weekly if not daily. The learnings are small, but arguably the important parts of programming are in those details. I’m content for now.

If I tried to set aside time for programming in my spare time, I’d have to sacrifice 1) time with family 2) time to exercise 3) time to take care of myself away from a screen 3) time to shut off. I want more of all of those, not less.

I do have friends without kids who program 10+ hours most days. They love it. I just need another 24 hours in each day, I guess.

> I do have friends without kids who program 10+ hours most days. They love it. I just need another 24 hours in each day, I guess.

I agree that once one has a family priorities change. Regarding the friends who program 10+ hours most days who don't have a family to go to, I think I was just like this a while ago. But thinking back I really think that is not a sustainable thing, especially if coupled with bad habits such as eating whatever comes your way and ignoring any physical exercise the body needs. It really does not look too healthy to me and wish I realized this a bit sooner than I did.

Likewise, I’m glad to have new priorities. I think what I miss is the progress and freedom to pick what I learn. These days I have to fit in what I can as I’m able to, which isn’t quite as engaging or exciting. At the same time, it’s a lot more sustainable.

Here's a 4-part video series by 3blue1brown : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aircAruvnKk Explains the big picture in an intuitive way

I was feeling the same way with programming flash loans and yield farming during spring, and mostly this summer, but I got up to speed!

Its been fun programming and deploying smart contracts! It feels like I'm not keeping up, but then I realize it hasn’t really been that long and it’s never been so easy to directly convert productivity into convertible money, over the internet

Kind of reminds me of "cookie clicker" / incremental games except in real life

haha brrrr

Anyone who reads this can recognize any object in their room right now in less than 5 minutes of their time if they want to using TensorFlow.js model creation in the browser. ML is not so hard to get started with these days. Check this short tutorial on how to make a custom object classification model in minutes for a quick prototype if you are up for the challenge (5 mins of your time): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z05bjEEgVQc&feature=youtu.be...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com