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I'm torn. On the one hand that's really cool to get everything configured and up and running so students can get to the interesting parts. On the other hand,

I'm torn. On the one hand that's really cool to get everything configured and up and running so students can get to the interesting parts. On the other hand, learning how to configure your own environment is kind of an essential part of working with any tool that forces you to understand at least some of the structure involved.

chrxr 8y ago
That is a fair point. Please see my reply to my post.
- da_chicken 8y ago
  Ah, that wasn't there when I replied. I do understand the dilemma. I work at a K-12 and the office next to mine is where they put together the science lab kits for students. It takes a fair bit of understanding to do that correctly sometimes, and that preparation work is some knowledge the students seem to miss out on in order to get to the subject matter. My coworker has mentioned on more than one occasion that with certain modules it feels like she does most of the work and the students just do the final step.
  - chrxr 8y ago
    I can appreciate that feeling; my father was an electronics teacher in secondary school in the UK. It is true that we had to deal with some issues that might not have occurred had students gone through the process of setting up the environment themselves, like have to rebuild the machine of the student who uninstalled Cuda.
mikepurvis 8y ago
If you're already exposed to what the working system looks like and you later on have to follow the setup tutorial to get it going yourself, that's much easier than starting from scratch. And it's more motivating too, since you know more of what the end result will give you vs hoping that it helps you solve the problem at hand.
commandlinefan 8y ago
On the third hand, it's helpful (maybe ideal) to see somebody else do it, see what it looks like and how it ought to behave before trying to set it up yourself. But of course, at some point, you should do everything yourself.
sametmax 8y ago
If you have 100 students, you will have 100 different mistakes to debug in the setup. A setup is not a program, there is rarely an easy way to pinpoint a problem, and so it takes a lot of time to setup just one, let alone a 100. When the number of hours are limited, it's best to skip it entirely, and just provide a solid paper tutorial.
- nightski 8y ago
  I'm so glad my college had class sizes of 10-15 and not 100, what a waste of money.
  - chrxr 8y ago
    Average class size of those using JupyterHub was more like 30, excluding two very large, very popular classes. Worth remembering all the classes have labs and sections which are much smaller.
  - akhilcacharya 8y ago
    > what a waste of money. Uh, you know its Harvard we're talking about right?
    - nightski 8y ago
      Yes, especially because it's Harvard. It should be better than that given its cost and endowment.
nl 8y ago
(Professional ML developer here) It's almost a waste of time teaching people to setup a deep learning stack. NVidia will break everything you do with every release and any instructions you write will be outdated in weeks. For example, the TensorFlow/CUDA/CuDNN installation changes continually because you can't install the default releases of any of them and get a working system.

chrxr 8y ago

That is a fair point. Please see my reply to my post.

da_chicken 8y ago
Ah, that wasn't there when I replied. I do understand the dilemma. I work at a K-12 and the office next to mine is where they put together the science lab kits for students. It takes a fair bit of understanding to do that correctly sometimes, and that preparation work is some knowledge the students seem to miss out on in order to get to the subject matter. My coworker has mentioned on more than one occasion that with certain modules it feels like she does most of the work and the students just do the final step.
- chrxr 8y ago
  I can appreciate that feeling; my father was an electronics teacher in secondary school in the UK. It is true that we had to deal with some issues that might not have occurred had students gone through the process of setting up the environment themselves, like have to rebuild the machine of the student who uninstalled Cuda.

mikepurvis 8y ago

If you're already exposed to what the working system looks like and you later on have to follow the setup tutorial to get it going yourself, that's much easier than starting from scratch. And it's more motivating too, since you know more of what the end result will give you vs hoping that it helps you solve the problem at hand.

commandlinefan 8y ago

On the third hand, it's helpful (maybe ideal) to see somebody else do it, see what it looks like and how it ought to behave before trying to set it up yourself. But of course, at some point, you should do everything yourself.

sametmax 8y ago

If you have 100 students, you will have 100 different mistakes to debug in the setup. A setup is not a program, there is rarely an easy way to pinpoint a problem, and so it takes a lot of time to setup just one, let alone a 100. When the number of hours are limited, it's best to skip it entirely, and just provide a solid paper tutorial.

nightski 8y ago
I'm so glad my college had class sizes of 10-15 and not 100, what a waste of money.
- chrxr 8y ago
  Average class size of those using JupyterHub was more like 30, excluding two very large, very popular classes. Worth remembering all the classes have labs and sections which are much smaller.
- akhilcacharya 8y ago
  > what a waste of money. Uh, you know its Harvard we're talking about right?
  - nightski 8y ago
    Yes, especially because it's Harvard. It should be better than that given its cost and endowment.

nl 8y ago

(Professional ML developer here) It's almost a waste of time teaching people to setup a deep learning stack. NVidia will break everything you do with every release and any instructions you write will be outdated in weeks. For example, the TensorFlow/CUDA/CuDNN installation changes continually because you can't install the default releases of any of them and get a working system.