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Comment by jrochkind1 | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand, what does training a machine learning algorithm like Pilot have in common with teaching a student or child? Teaching them programming? Don't you teach a student or child with lectures and exersizes and practice, not with trying to simply have them read terrabytes of existing code of varying sophistication and figuring they'll know how to program on the other end? What am I missing?

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> Don't you teach a student or child with lectures and exersizes

That's not how I learned to program or speak English.

What are the ways you believe how you learned to program is similar to training a machine-learning model? Just that they both consist of "looking at examples", in the broadest sense?

I learned to program by doing programming exersizes (some self-devised, like making simple text games). To accomplish these exersizes, I read programming manuals (in, say, BASIC or Logo); I also looked at simple examples in the languages I was working in.

I did not start by reading huge quantities of source code, including sophisticated programs well beyond my current understanding, in all manner of languages and platforms. This seems very different to training a machine-learning model to me.

> I did not start by reading huge quantities of source code, including sophisticated programs well beyond my current understanding, in all manner of languages and platforms. This seems very different to training a machine-learning model to me.

I don't really see how the complexity (which is subjective) of the source code one reads makes the training different.

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