
Ask HN: Novice getting started with Tensonflow - thatgerhard
Coming from a web background (PHP,JS), what would be the easiest way for me to get started with tensorflow?<p>I find the setup quite daunting..
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brudgers
That's a common feeling because setting up tech is daunting. Tools like
Tensorflow are developed at companies like Google for use by teams of
engineers...or individuals with access to support teams. Companies like Google
don't design products like Tensorflow to hide all the necessary complexity and
don't document the products for less technical users.

When a product like Tensorflow is released by Google, many early adopters are
working in environments with institutional knowledge about sophisticated
tools. For them, Tensorflow is easy to use relative to what they were using
before but it's not easy to use like an iPhone or other consumer technology.

So what might this mean for you? Well if setting it up is daunting you will
learn a lot by doing it even if you never really get it set up quite right or
abandon it as too much bother or become an expert. Or to put it another way,
when technology X requires technology Y which requires technology Z, maybe I
wind up learning more about Y and Z than X and get back to X in a year or two
once I have the background and if I don't come back then it is sometimes that
X wasn't really as interesting as I thought but going through the process
makes picking up technology W easier.

So my random advice from the internet is stick with it because it is daunting
and see where it goes. One of my favorite essays is by Peter Norvig who is a
Principal Engineer at Google:
[http://norvig.com/21-days.html](http://norvig.com/21-days.html)

Good luck.

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thatgerhard
Thanks for the reply, I guess my weekend is planned lol

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brudgers
Direct advice: for Tensorflow, use Python because it will mean swimming with
the current in the middle of the channel.

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I_am_neo
You are a (Insert unix OS here) user I hope...?

Python version 3 works well for me. Hardware wise as of right now a nvidia
cuda card compute level 3.0 or greater is needed for running on gpu. That
means basically a Ge-force 710 or better, also tensorflow runs on a cpu (for
now) but that does affect performance.

