7 ms·
Since it seems to be a thing to report that X person specializing in machine learning has moved from Y company to Z, it makes me wonder if other areas of comput
by timemachiner 9y ago
Since it seems to be a thing to report that X person specializing in machine learning has moved from Y company to Z, it makes me wonder if other areas of computer science is seen as relevant by the general public.
One rarely hears Dr. John Doe from Florida State University (or insert non-Standford university here) in Distributed systems has moved from Microsoft Research to NetApp. These are arbitrary names. The point is you rarely hear about people from other areas of CS outside of machine learning/universities outside of Stanford moving from one company to another. The field of CS is vast and there are multitude of practical and theoretical problems outside of machine learning that are worth looking into (ones that aren't currently considered hip or cool by the public).
- dejawu 9y agoI think it's fair and makes sense. A lot of Karpathy's work has been featured on HN and I find this news relevant in following what he's working on. When Scott Aaronson wrote about moving to Austin, that post made the rounds here too.
- sidlls 9y agoThis same thing is an issue in many scientific disciplines. How many people can even name an area of physics research that isn't particle physics or general relativity, for example?
- sjg007 9y agoBiomedical
- Cyph0n 9y agoWell, physics is quite complex. I think electrical engineering is similar in that regard. Personally, I am aware of the two you listed + experimental, condensed matter, and astrophysics. There is some overlap between physics and EE, so I may be aware of others.
- Animats 9y agoThere's lots of action in low-energy physics, down around absolute zero. There are jobs in semiconductor device physics.
- doomlaser 9y agoThe person being replaced is Chris Lattner, inventor of LLVM and Swift, of whom it was big news of his leaving Apple to join Tesla fairly recently.
- sjroot 9y agoInteresting. What is Chris going to do now? He was a big hire.
- dmix 9y agoLooking for a new job it seems.
- shas3 9y agoDunno if this is his real account, but it is supposedly not working out https://twitter.com/clattner_llvm/status/877341760812232704 https://twitter.com/clattner_llvm/status/877341760812232704
- extr 9y agomust be nice to post a tweet that you're looking for "interesting roles" and immediately have the replies fill up with "come to microsoft", "come to google" etc etc. strange he would just throw tesla under the bus like that. anyone know why?
- dmix 9y agoHow is he throwing them under the bus? He said it turns out he didn't fit in well at Tesla. That's just being honest. If the alternative is phony politeness and masking reality under a guise of everything went great then I prefer this approach. This is a great aspect of the software industry IMO. And if you want to get lots of job offers then build some great OSS projects like this guy. It's a great way to demonstrate your skill and attract a following which guarantees you job offers.
- 9y ago
- rockinghigh 9y agoI doubt that Andrej is known to the general public. With every decade the fields of computer science sees its share of buzz words and trendy topics. It used to be programming languages or networking, and people in these fields used to make the news: Guido van Rossum joining Google or Leslie Lamport joining Microsoft Research.
- jamesjyu 9y agoYou touched on a much wider human phenomenon: attention isn't evenly distributed. The media isn't pushed to report in proportion to an individual's impact. It's guided by trends, aka what people want to read. AI is hot. So therefore there is a huge spotlight on all angles there. You can argue whether that is actually fair (personally, I do think AI is a high beta field). Topics that don't fall under this are regarded as inside baseball.
- dmix 9y agoMedia coverage and popularity always works this way. I'm not sure why so many people perpetually can't wrap their head around it. There have been endless comments online where people are offended or surprised that x person is getting attention, but they are just like these other people who are just as good. But obviously there's more to drawing people's attention than the individual skill or a comparable position at a different company. As you mentioned this top of HN ranking is driven by joining a trendy company, leading a hugely hyped product team (the Tesla automation stuff was on the front page yesterday), and a personal with a really hot skillset. Combined of course with the usual luck and good timing. Is it really hard to see how this isn't much more interesting than someone joining a realitively standard branch of Microsoft?
- kornish 9y agoKarpathy in particular has built an excellent personal brand, lots of which is through his blog. It seems that technically backgrounded "explainers", á la Neil deGrasse Tyson or Richard Feynman, Elon Musk or even Bill Nye, can credibly straddle both expert and layperson worlds. People like to feel like they know what's going on.
- ryandrake 9y agoPart of me dies inside every time I read the phrase "personal brand". I think it's sad that it is no longer enough to be good at what you do--you need to self-promote, blog, and talk talk talk in order to make it these days. What happened to also recognizing the quiet but competent craftsmen?
- Houshalter 9y agoA lot of Karpathy's research and blog posts have been featured on HN. He made char-rnn which spawned hundreds of spin off projects that made it onto HN. He also comments here regularly and explains new research. So it makes sense that news about him would get attention here.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- matchagaucho 9y agoTesla's market cap exceeds Ford and GM. Their ability to surpass Uber is contingent on hiring talent to develop self-driving cars.