Hacker News Reader

Comment by black_puppydog | Hacker News Reader

This feels like it's gonna be terrible for people already doing ML.

Now, the following has more than a bit of elitism, I'm aware of that, so please don't comment to point that bit out...

I'm afraid that searching for answers to specific ML questions will start feeling like trying to google some Windows problems (every few years when I make the mistake of trying to help someone out) where it's all "download this, then click here..."

I hope I'm wrong and this will only be used by people willing to go the extra mile...

View on HN

Don't be too elitist and scared, machine learning developers using Cuda and WSL are far from the windows non technical average user.

You can take a look at the Github issues for Microsoft's projects related to WSL if you don't believe me. They are normal developers like you and me.

What's scary about Googling for specific ML questions beginning to look like googling some Windows problems? This kind of dichotomy already exists between people who interact with ML only through keras and those who use a more flexible library. If you fall into the latter category it's still easy enough to find the answers to ML questions that mostly pertain to the deeper stuff. Don't even get me started on the difference between people who do and don't know statistics theory. But the point is that all of these groups do ML and they coexist just fine.

On another note. I don't think technical proficiency (or whatever your elitism-metric is) is very correlated with using Windows as the primary platform. You can Google stuff related to a Windows problem and through that learn how to work with the registry, and yes, some of the things you need to do require you to RTFM. So this elitism also suffers from being off the mark.

Doubt it. Even though you can run e.g. anaconda or pandas on Windows if I google an issue, I have no provlem getting linux-relevant results.

Hope we don't see things like: "Google announces today that to work around Windows' file path length limitations, Tensorflow's directory structure is being rewritten to use three characters or less per directory."

What sold me on NT 3.1 was the in-the-box Microsoft Transaction Server.

MTS is the single largest reason why SQLServer_Linux was a shoehorn refit, not anything like the job that it could have been.

Out of the box CICS interop was bigger than my memory of the first browsers for W/NT. Want to trade with the world and speak EDIFACT, or do X.500 real money movement? You had codes running before you could put the screws on your local IBM account rep to get out of bed for you.

I last looked at HN just as Lockdown was announced in England. The last discussion I perused was showing a project that provided secure remote access to sensitive ports. Which I think is stable CICS fayre since about ‘85 on the cross platform side I would guess at least twenty years older for anything/360.

I recently helped a friend with their museum's collection management software. The server and client were Windows based, and even with the proper dependencies and provisioning, the installs kept failing.

Some of the paths were too long and the installer could only be executed after being unpacked to root.

It's been a while since I more than casually gutted and used Windows as an app container, but I hadn't realized how much has remained the same after more than two decades.

Windows itself can deal with long paths for a long time now. The problem is the apps - they need to use newer APIs that don't e.g. deal with structs with wchar_t[MAX_PATH] fields in them. For apps written in higher-level languages, it's usually the standard library that needs to be updated - e.g. Node.js and Python already have such support. But if it's C++, then it depends on how much the app developer cares.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com