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Scrolling HN, I saw the two words I'm always weary of - "from scratch". Mostly because I will click on the link, hoping to learn the mathematics behind a partic
by tsumnia 7y ago
Scrolling HN, I saw the two words I'm always weary of - "from scratch". Mostly because I will click on the link, hoping to learn the mathematics behind a particular algorithm, only to see they've import sklearn and skip over all the explaining of how things are ACTUALLY getting done. Not that these types of tutorials do not have their place, but its irksome to see "from scratch" including most of the hard part being done.
With that, thank you Victor. Specifically because you did not do this at all and instead wrote a very easy to follow guide. I think this type of learning material will be very useful for CS and mathematics. The idea that very complicated algorithms must be explicitly implemented and then walked through, rather than symbols in a white paper will help make the mathematics of CS more applicable to everyone.
And to anyone bringing up numpy, it is at a level of "prepackaged" I'm fine with. I'm not going to raise my own pigs and chickens to make a breakfast burrito, but saying I did it from scratch by microwaving a frozen one isn't going to cut it either. Numpy is like the basic ingredients to the recipe. While something like sklearn or tensorflow are perfectly acceptable, I wouldn't say that's the best method for learning CNNs.
- z3c0 7y agoI agree with you overall. This is purely speculative, but it seems that the rise of pre-packaged ML solutions has caused the meaning of "from scratch" to have changed to "with sklearn". It's easy to feel like a short python script using sklearn is "from scratch" when you were using a WYSIWYG solution before. That said, the book "Data Science from Scratch" is great, and I'd recommend it to those looking for a deeper understanding than just "import sklearn".
- Darkphibre 7y agoThanks for this writeup! Having moved into Data Science as a primary career (after 25 years architecting software), it's frustrating to try to decipher the various symbology used in Physics, Economics, Computer Science whitepapers. I need a Whitepaper Rosetta Stone. And this article is one such example.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- ericol 7y agoThis story started really bad, but what a plottwist! I saw this very same posted here in HN or Reddit last week methinks, and one of the top comments was complaining preciselly about numpy. You disarmed that point right from the start, so kudos.
- ericol 7y agoI stando corrected based on a comment form the author that is found below: Last week's post was the previous one in this series.