Show HN: My ML applications book, which HN helped me write (sample chapter) [pdf]

I recently published my first book! Writing a book has been a personal goal for the longest time, and Hacker News is the main reason I got to do so.<p>Reading interesting posts on HN daily eventually inspired me to write my own, and posting my own writing to HN showed me there was an audience for the topics I wanted to write about.<p>I started blogging about Machine Learning in 2017, and posted some of my writing to HN. Many posts did not do well, but some made it to the front page, sometimes even to the top spot (see <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=18147710" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=18147710</a> , <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=16224346" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=16224346</a> and <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=17257143" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=17257143</a>).<p>As a consequence, my posts ended up getting over half a million reads, which was enough to put me on O&#x27;Reilly&#x27;s radar. They reached out and asked me to write a book for them. I decided to write something that follows the theme of my blog posts, and focus on practical Machine Learning advice that isn&#x27;t often covered in ML classes. The book took 18 months to write, and is now out. I couldn&#x27;t have done it without HN.<p>You can find a longer description of the contents at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mlpowered.com&#x2F;book&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mlpowered.com&#x2F;book&#x2F;</a>.<p>Thank you HN!

Congrats on writing the book! As I&#x27;m a student of GeorgiaTech, I have access to Oreilly&#x27;s Safari. I just found the book over there and am looking forward to reading it.

First of all, congratulation for finishing your book!<p>I&#x27;ve read the TOC and looks really interesting. Is the content accessible for your average software engineer who never touched ML in his career? (like me)

Congratulations to the release.<p>I am a little bit skeptic about your running example, the &quot;ML Editor&quot;. A model that helps you asking &quot;good&quot; questions, e.g. on StackOverflow.<p>Isn&#x27;t that like an extremely complicated problem, I would even say AI hard? How do you want to evaluate if a question is &quot;good&quot; (and sure thing, it&#x27;s <i>not</i> the number of upvotes it gets)? Is there a working example of such an editor in action, because I highly doubt that this is currently possible.

For what I’ve been reading recently, there will be some big consolidation in the sector this decade, with a handful of industries faring much better than others because of diminished return on investments, incoming regulations and marginal tech improvements?

I found installing everything to get up and running with this to be effectively impossible; I think using tensorflow 1.15(and therefore requiring everyone to download Python &lt;= 3.6) to have been a mistake. I&#x27;ve tried quite hard to get the environment running but eventually it always fails. A shame, this looked quite interesting.

Congratulations on sticking with it and getting it done!<p>I am going to purchase the book because I have never done any ML and I started working at a company that I think may benefit from applying ML to some of its products. I hope to use the book as a starting point for diving deeper into specifics of ML.<p>Does it matter to you where the book is purchased?

Congratulations!<p>Do you have a slack or some other place to group together readers of this book to discuss? I&#x27;d love to poke other readers&#x27; (and yours) brains as I go through this.

I read this book on the O’Reilly website using their trial period and have also pre-ordered a physical copy. It is excellent and I recommend it to anyone into practical ML.

Looks great, I think I will pick this up. Can I ask a strange question, what font is used for the text in the book? It&#x27;s very pleasant to look at!