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That may well be true of some universities today. In 1970, they were pretty much the only place you could get hands on experience with a computer unless you s

That may well be true of some universities today. In 1970, they were pretty much the only place you could get hands on experience with a computer unless you somehow slid into a programming job in the financial industry, or a one of the few other areas that actually used them. And they were not behind the curve on the technology, although they tended to have lower end hardware than industry, because any compute was very expensive. The invoice on a 64k byte HP3000 in 1972, which on a good day could support half a dozen users actually doing any work, was over $100K. Memory upgrades to 128K ran you about $1/byte installed - maybe $8 in today's money. It was a big deal to be allowed hands on use of them.

vintermann 4y ago
It definitively is true of local universities. I've met people from the local university who have a master in machine learning, yet have never heard of docker.
- mywittyname 4y ago
  This is a good thing. Opportunity costs are incredibly important with university educations because students have a limited time to learn. Why spend the time futzing with a tool like docker? It's not foundational to machine learning, so learning that tool takes away from time that could be spent learning something more relevant. And the student may or may not use it when they get a job.
  - hnlmorg 4y ago
    Docker I can forgive, but I’ve worked with a lot of grads who haven’t even been taught the basics of using the command line.
  - vintermann 4y ago
    "Getting shit to work" is more foundational to machine learning than you would think, and containers helps a lot with that. If you want to train models on someone else's machine - and you probably will, for anything big - you need to know a little about how that sort of thing is done today. And if you want to try two different deep learning frameworks, dependent on different versions of cuda, and want them to not break each other, God help you if you try that without containers. It's not that they don't have a "course in docker". I understand that. It's that they haven't even heard of it, so they don't even know where to start to look for solutions to problems like that. I have been through that pain myself. Containers is just one of so many easy things, that make your job so much easier, I've learned the painful way in 20 years as a developer in (mostly) non-elite companies, where no one else knew it either because they hadn't been taught at the local universities, because no one there knew it either.
hnlmorg 4y ago
I was talking about 90s to modern era. Not just modern era. And having computers doesn’t mean any of the lecturers understand the modern (for that era) trends in computing. More often than not, it’s computer clubs rather than cause material that hold the really interesting content. I don’t doubt there will be exceptions to this rule. But for most people I’ve spoken to or read interviews from, this seems to have been the trend.

vintermann 4y ago

It definitively is true of local universities. I've met people from the local university who have a master in machine learning, yet have never heard of docker.

mywittyname 4y ago
This is a good thing. Opportunity costs are incredibly important with university educations because students have a limited time to learn. Why spend the time futzing with a tool like docker? It's not foundational to machine learning, so learning that tool takes away from time that could be spent learning something more relevant. And the student may or may not use it when they get a job.
- hnlmorg 4y ago
  Docker I can forgive, but I’ve worked with a lot of grads who haven’t even been taught the basics of using the command line.
- vintermann 4y ago
  "Getting shit to work" is more foundational to machine learning than you would think, and containers helps a lot with that. If you want to train models on someone else's machine - and you probably will, for anything big - you need to know a little about how that sort of thing is done today. And if you want to try two different deep learning frameworks, dependent on different versions of cuda, and want them to not break each other, God help you if you try that without containers. It's not that they don't have a "course in docker". I understand that. It's that they haven't even heard of it, so they don't even know where to start to look for solutions to problems like that. I have been through that pain myself. Containers is just one of so many easy things, that make your job so much easier, I've learned the painful way in 20 years as a developer in (mostly) non-elite companies, where no one else knew it either because they hadn't been taught at the local universities, because no one there knew it either.

hnlmorg 4y ago

I was talking about 90s to modern era. Not just modern era. And having computers doesn’t mean any of the lecturers understand the modern (for that era) trends in computing. More often than not, it’s computer clubs rather than cause material that hold the really interesting content. I don’t doubt there will be exceptions to this rule. But for most people I’ve spoken to or read interviews from, this seems to have been the trend.