pouët.net

I have always been highly interested in machine learning, and have pursued multiple projects in that direction myself; among them the Tinybrain project, and the infamous Project Prophecy which, among other things, landed me a job at Google.

Now I stumbled upon PyBrain. It's a library for Python and it's really impressive. As in, really REALLY impressive.

So I just had to tell you guys about that.

If you want to be impressed too, check out their learning example videos here.

Well, you will be impressed if you have tried to implement machine learning yourself and found out how tricky it is. Otherwise, it's still a nice video to watch methinks, especially the second one. The first one is also interesting: You can hear German and Swiss engineers talk something that resembles English :]

I do have to admit I envy the guys who do this stuff as their day-to-day job. On the other hand, who knows how tedious that job may be at times. Quite likely they have some kind of stupid boss somewhere above them in their university hierarchy (it's always like that, those institutions are all corrupted).

So then again, I'm happy to be unsubjected to any stupid bosses and free to do whatever I like, each day, all the time.

looks interesting.... Let's try it !

i'm still baffled you don't feel any shame leeching off of other people's hard earned incomes. and calling other people corrupt in the same post!

(naturally, i'll take it all back if you, in fact, won the lottery instead of just abusing social security)

Wait... what!?

well, shit. google is now able to publish ads that actually look like interesting comments.

I've heard python is getting less and less support due to it's internals not being compatible with decent multithreading. Discuss.

i heard multithreading is so last tuesday.

I'm not sure I'm impressed by Tinybrain, but I know I'm surprised that Google found it interesting.

Although of course you said that this Project Prophecy is what Google showed an interest in, not Tinybrain. D'oh. But what's that, then?

i'm not sure if i missed something, but that looks like pretty average computer science to me... my professor did show a very similar thing in a lecture about the basics of neuorinformatics years ago...

What i wonder is that you hear stories of people not getting into Google because the interviewer is a hitler, and then they invite a.. pouet troll?

Invited doesn't mean accepted. To my personal (limited) experience, they invite anyone with a good record who doesn't mind relocating to e.g. zurich (pretty small crowd already), and then they shoot off 90% in the applications. Then again, isn't that what you would do?

Or as Bill Gates if you hire all A people, they'll also hire A people. But if you hire B people, they'll hire the C people and then it's all over.

Well, most people who get sorted out are glad anyways since they don't want to work with Mr. and Mrs. Asshole anyways..?

not so sure, i think they're just jealous.

that said i think it's bad practice: imho it's much better to give applicants a positive feeling about the company even if you turn them down. you never know what the future brings, and the more people who think your company is cool, the better.

i think you're overestimating the amount of philosophically deducted long term planning the average hr person cares to put into the average unsuccessfull job interview by a rather large margin

hcdlt: I was a little underwhelmed, too. PyBrain looks like a library of textbook AI algorithms, which may be very useful but is hardly breaking new ground in the field.

doom, that's OK though! they don't seem to pretend to do anything different than that. they claim that what makes pybrain different is not the algorithms, but the library's ease of use (an undervalued quality anyway, so ups to that).

havoc, maybe i am, but we're not talking about hiring average people. we're talking well paid and skilled engineers by a company whose success depends on those people's skill. my personal (very recent) experience applying for comparable positions in the eindhoven region comfirms this, too: many HR people actually *do* go to great lengths to make you feel comfortable, even if they end up turning you down instead. the one company that denied me gave me a very positive feeling nevertheless: in fact, i'm convinced that i would probably dislike working there even more than they would dislike having me. and if either me or they change in the next, say, 10 years, i wouldn't at all mind knocking on their doors again. conveying the message this way did not cost them a lot of energy. imho it's mostly an attitude thing.

skrebbel: I know. The first video makes it clear that there's nothing cutting-edge there on the AI side. It's just that the vibrator made it sound like there was, like I should be impressed by watching the second video, as if it's somehow not something we've seen over and over again for years. But yes, a clever library that makes textbook AI routines more accessible is a good thing, no doubt. Anything that brings us closer to judgment day gets a from me.