
Machine Learning Crash Course - TakakiTohno
https://developers.google.com/machine-learning/crash-course
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burger_moon
There's a lot of points on this post but no comments. What do people
experienced with ML think about this course? Is it worth the time?

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manishsharan
I have a dumb question: isn't the quality of Machine Learning dependent of the
quantity and quality of training data sets ? And if were are to utilize Google
or Microsoft for ML, then the whole world ends up uploading their datasets to
these giants -- which helps these companies develop even better ML systems--
like a network effect but for data ? Would these companies not have a
tremendous advantage against any challengers or competition? Would this system
not lead to some sort of Oligopoly ?

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mattkrause
The quality of the question too.

Some people ask ML to do patently implausible things. Can you determine
whether someone is a criminal from a photo of their face? It should be
INCREDIBLY obvious that the answer to that question _must_ be "no." Even if
you do manage to guess correctly, there is has to be some confound, either a
technical one (criminal training data is lit differently from the non-criminal
ones) or a statistical one (e.g., correlation with socioeconomic status).

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diffeomorphism
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physiognomy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physiognomy)

Controversial but clearly not "patently implausible".

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mattkrause
Yes, implausible.

There is /no/ evidence that physiognomy or its cousin phrenology, the idea
that scalp shape carries information, "work." I normally appreciate
wikipedia's NPOV stance, but it's absurd that it takes two paragraphs to
mention that it is universally (or almost, apparently) regarded as psuedo-
science. I'm a neuroscience researcher, and I can't think of a single
colleague who puts any credence in these ideas; in fact, I know several who
use them as insults. As for the data, the hair-whorl things have been pretty
aggressively debunked. The "gaydar" results were driven by individual choices
in fashion, grooming, etc. I don't know if anyone has followed up on the
hockey data, but...it doesn't matter, because of the second problem.

There's a giant leap between detecting _actual criminals_ and people who _look
like_ members of groups that are, statistically more/less likely to be
involved in crime. You just can't jump between group-level priors and
individual predictions. This is especially true when some of the factors
shouldn't legally or morally be used to make predictions.

Finally, think about how weird the biology would need to be for this to work.
You'd need to have an underlying factor (genetic, presumably) that affects
both facial structure and behavior. It would need to have a strong enough
effect to reliably overcome all of the other factors that also determine
someone's appearance and behavior. It's not totally impossible, but it's an
extraordinary claim that would require extraordinary evidence and to date, no
one has found much of anything.

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diffeomorphism
Okay, "controversial" was much too generous and junk is more accurate. I just
wanted to point out that it is not something some ML research came up with on
the spot.

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chrispeel
Are these machine learning courses the only courses like this that google
provides? Is it a new thing for google to offer courses like this?

I admire their attempt to provide translations, yet it does not seem like all
languages listed are available. I.e. it seems to work much better for Spanish
than German.

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Impossible
Google has similar courses for web development and Android development among
others
([https://developers.google.com/training/](https://developers.google.com/training/)).
Many of these have made the front page of HN at some point, but ML courses
tend to get upvoted more often than web development or general programming.

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tylerwhipple
Google has had a Machine Learning Crash Course up for about a year already,
has it been updated or is this the same thing?

