[HN Gopher] EXGBoost: Gradient Boosting in Elixir
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       EXGBoost: Gradient Boosting in Elixir
        
       Author : clessg
       Score  : 61 points
       Date   : 2023-07-26 16:42 UTC (6 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (dockyard.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (dockyard.com)
        
       | behnamoh wrote:
       | Is it just me or has HN been full of Elixir posts recently? Is
       | there a trend I'm missing?
        
         | lawik wrote:
         | There have been a few just recently. Bit of an ML boom in
         | Elixir and ML is popular right now.
         | 
         | As an Elixir-centric blogger I can tell you that Elixir
         | generally seems to do well on Hacker News. I think it has a lot
         | of overlap with interests on here. Erlang is the underpinnings
         | and Erlang is generally interesting from a comp sci standpoint.
         | Elixir's roots in Ruby line it up nicely with SaaS, startups
         | and that whole space.
        
         | impulser_ wrote:
         | Elixir has always been a well liked language on here and in
         | general. The past year there has been a lot of work on building
         | data and AI/ML libraries in Elixir.
         | 
         | Explorer, Nx, Axon, Scholar, Bumblebee, Broadway, Livebook and
         | now EXGBoost.
         | 
         | You can get pretty close to building a full stack AI
         | application in Elixir now.
         | 
         | From data ingestion and processing all the way to serving the
         | model in a Phoenix web app. All in Elixir.
         | 
         | I think it's great more languages are becoming alternates to
         | Python in data and AI/ML, more options the better.
        
       | marcosfelt wrote:
       | For the uninitiated, what is the advantage of using Elixir for
       | machine learning?
        
         | jrmiii wrote:
         | You're in luck, there was a big discussion on that just
         | yesterday. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36859785
        
         | pmarreck wrote:
         | For me it would be, first and foremost, "not having to deal
         | with Python's many idiosyncrasies". Even when I go with best-
         | practices, trying to git clone a Python project and "pip
         | install" something into a virtualenv, it's STILL hit-or-miss
         | whether it conflicts with something else. It's a very janky
         | experience and I don't like it, and this isn't even before
         | touching the language itself, which is well-covered ground
         | already: https://medium.com/nerd-for-tech/python-is-a-bad-
         | programming...
         | 
         | I am only reposting my own tweet here because I just sent an
         | answer to the exact same question to a youtuber who was
         | curious:
         | https://twitter.com/pmarreck/status/1684248660832288771?s=20
         | 
         | It has a few links.
         | 
         | There's also this podcast (which has a transcript link):
         | https://smartlogic.io/podcast/elixir-wizards/s10-e10-sean-mo...
         | 
         | Lastly, I just found https://www.thestackcanary.com/from-
         | python-pytorch-to-elixir... which explains some reasons.
        
         | mrdoops wrote:
         | Elixir is good at doing a lot of things at once on - scaling to
         | lots of machines - and not exploding catastrophically while
         | doing so.
         | 
         | Turns out this is really helpful for machine learning where you
         | want to coordinate big data pipelines and do things like
         | batching requests to a GPU resource (because GPUs want to be
         | parallelized).
         | 
         | You can do batched ML inference pretty much out of the box with
         | Nx.Serving https://hexdocs.pm/nx/Nx.Serving.html where you'd
         | have to spin up a separate third party service like
         | https://developer.nvidia.com/triton-inference-server otherwise.
        
       | victorbjorklund wrote:
       | Awesome! Been looking forward for this release!
        
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       (page generated 2023-07-26 23:02 UTC)