
Ask HN: Does an in-browser neural network have any practical use? - sameercharles
I am thinking of starting a small site which will allow users to train and predict locally within a browser. No downloads and training data will stay local and private (never sent to the server). Everything should happen using the local resources.<p>This web application should allow training data of type JSON or CSV. Perhaps it can also allow streaming from the local file system. I think we can support all types of Feed Forward and Recurrent Neural Networks with this application.<p>Technically it’s all possible but are there any practical uses for such a thing to exist?
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PaulHoule
It would be educational.

So far as getting inference done it would be hard to compete with the "big
boys" who are trying to get special-purpose hardware into phones and such.

Myself I am through with implementing neural network trainers by hand. If you
have to compute all the derivatives by hand sooner or later you are going to
drop a factor of 3 on the floor or you will become so afraid of doing that
you'll never change anything that will force you to recalculate.

(That's what I get for working on a "deep learning" project that was
commercialized just before Tensorflow, PyTorch, etc. got big. C++, SIMD
instructions, you name it...)

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sameercharles
Thanks @PaulHoule, I agree. Not very keen on competing with the big boys, if
something is useful people will use it.

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moocowtruck
finding out where the user might click next and slapping an ad there

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sameercharles
Well.. that doesn't really add any value ;-)

