[HN Gopher] Learn ML through live team competitions, not lectures
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       Learn ML through live team competitions, not lectures
        
       Author : henry_pulver
       Score  : 76 points
       Date   : 2022-06-11 13:57 UTC (9 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (delta-academy.xyz)
 (TXT) w3m dump (delta-academy.xyz)
        
       | sva_ wrote:
       | The price seems a bit steep to participate in a competition (60
       | USD for a month)
        
         | henry_pulver wrote:
         | If it was just 1 competition, I'd agree with you.
         | 
         | It's more a cohort-based online class that's punctuated by
         | competitions (once per week). The competitions serve to
         | motivate you to learn in a fun finale each week, rather than
         | all being about winning. :)
         | 
         | The price tag includes 12 tutorials with exercises, 4
         | competitions (incl live discussion of solutions with the
         | cohort) and expert code review from instructors on all the
         | exercises.
        
       | hetzenmat wrote:
       | Everytime I read something like "learn ML" I think about learning
       | some descendant of the ML programming language like OCaml, F# or
       | Standard ML instead of machine learning.
        
         | wawjgreen wrote:
         | that is exactly what i had thought. i think they should write
         | (MLe)
        
         | hourago wrote:
         | This is a common problem. Acronyms are short but provide less
         | information. Without the proper context it is difficult to know
         | what do they refer to.
         | 
         | In Wikipedia, your interpretation is the first result:
         | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ML
        
         | number6 wrote:
         | Not sure if you are joking or not
        
           | randomcatuser wrote:
           | Actually quite common, depending on what community you hang
           | out in! For example, in sales they use # of SQL (sales
           | qualified leads)
        
           | casion wrote:
           | Whether the parent is joking or not, I also see ML as ML
           | (Meta Language) not ML (Machine Learning).
           | 
           | I have zero exposure to machine learning, but am immersed in
           | FP so...
        
       | crimsoneer wrote:
       | At the risk of sounding like an utter moron, is anybody else
       | struggling to pay (option to add name and address to the payment
       | card are greyed out?)
        
       | Barrin92 wrote:
       | Every time I read a slogan like "learn X in Y weeks" or "learn
       | through games instead of lectures", I have to think of a Peter
       | Norvig piece: _Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years_.
       | 
       | Honestly instead of taking paid courses that promise to teach
       | incredibly difficult subjects in weeks, just take one of the
       | longer courses like Andrew Ng's that start with the fundamentals
       | and are free. Bootcamp style education is awful.
       | 
       | https://norvig.com/21-days.html
        
       | cultofmetatron wrote:
       | how does this compare to kaggle?
        
         | henry_pulver wrote:
         | Kaggle has big competitions over several months. They're
         | designed to find top machine learning talent & innovative
         | solutions to the problems they set. Typically the winners
         | aren't just learning ML, they're seasoned pros doing it as a
         | side project.
         | 
         | Our competitions are designed to teach. Each is a progression
         | in difficulty over the previous one. Also there are a set of
         | tutorials preceding each competition which get you up to speed
         | on what you'll learn in the competition.
         | 
         | Plus we're organised into a cohort so you're not competing with
         | the whole world - rather you're competing with your peers who
         | are also learning. You work in a pair on the competition. Then
         | we discuss the solutions teams came up with & what an 'ideal'
         | solution would look like (if one exists - sometimes it
         | doesn't!).
        
           | dangom wrote:
           | how much time should one dedicate per day? Is this course
           | compatible with working full-time?
        
             | henry_pulver wrote:
             | We've designed it to be very compatible with working full
             | time!
             | 
             | We suggest ~10 hours per week, although except for the 30
             | min live competition each week, all of these hours can be
             | done at times that suit you.
        
       | cosentiyes wrote:
       | > Learn reinforcement learning in 4 weeks
       | 
       | There are so many high quality, free resources online for
       | learning RL [1,2,...]. Four weeks of primarily self-guided M-F
       | study isn't nearly enough time to obtain anything more than a
       | cursory understanding of the topic. Kaggle, various gym
       | environment baselines, and workshop competitions exist for those
       | who want to compete.
       | 
       | [1] https://www.deepmind.com/learning-resources/introduction-
       | to-... [2] http://incompleteideas.net/book/the-book-2nd.html
        
       | riedel wrote:
       | We do this as part of our university practical course as well (2
       | week challenges in teams of 4, sometimes participating also in
       | external competitions). While I agree that this good for
       | learning, I would, however, say it is completary to lectures. It
       | makes no sense if people just learn to overfit some hyperparams
       | to beat a score. So rating should at least be done wisely.
       | Otherwise I think people need lectures to understand the real
       | limits of tech and actually find novel uses.
       | 
       | With many good lecture contents online I think it also would be
       | good to also switch to more live competitions at university to do
       | inverted classroom style learning. I think it is the mix that
       | matters (along with the quality)
        
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       (page generated 2022-06-11 23:00 UTC)