Machine learning for hackers

What Hacker News says

1. simbolitOct 2023
   I suppose you being here means that you are already fluent in some programming languages. If so, I would start here:

   Conway & Miles - Machine Learning for Hackers: Case Studies and Algorithms to Get You Started

   Once you read and understood this, I'd do an online course...

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2. davmreNov 2015
   Andrew Ng's Coursera ML course is supposed to be pretty accessible. I've also heard good things about Machine Learning for Hackers (http://www.amazon.com/Machine-Learning-Hackers-Drew-Conway/d...).

   Ultimately, ML is a mathematical discipline. You can ask for a gentle approach that gets you to the foot of the mountain, but "if you want to learn about nature, to appreciate nature, it is necessary to understand the language that she speaks in." If you want to be more than an amateur, there's not much substitute for getting comfortable with math at the level of, say, Kevin Murphy's book.

   The good news is that the required math is fairly elementary - calculus, linear algebra, probability and statistics, all freshmen or maybe sophomore-level topics - so it shouldn't be beyond reach of a motivated developer able to set aside some time to learn. MOOCs and organizing study groups with friends/co-workers can help a lot here as well.

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3. mindcrimeAug 2015
   The Four Steps to the Epiphany - Steve Blank

   Steve Jobs - Walter Isaacson

   Artificial Life - Steven Levy

   On Writing - Stephen King

   Machine Learning for Hackers - Drew Conway and John Myles White

   How Doctors Think - Jerome Goopman

   Cholesterol Clarity: What The HDL Is Wrong With My Numbers? - Jimmy Moore & Eric C. Westman

   Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco - Bryan Burrough & John Helyar

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4. SanderMakDec 2013
   Skip the Packt books and get 'Machine learning for hackers' from O'Reilly.
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5. nwenzelMar 2013
   I found Machine Learning for Hackers to be good as a practical, case study based book for learning to apply and understand what is going on in several machine learning problems.

   http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920018483.do http://www.amazon.com/Machine-Learning-for-Hackers-ebook/dp/...

   It's definitely a practical approach. There's a lot of explanation but, despite coming from two PhD candidates, it certainly did not read like an academic paper.

   It's also case study based, not necessarily algorithm based.

   As a bonus, I used that book to teach myself R. I don't think it's meant to be an intro to R tutorial, but it worked for me.

   All three are positives in my book.

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6. jclosDec 2012
   From my experience (I haven't read all of them) they cover things that are so different there isn't any real order. From this bundle, "Think Stats" might be a good first book, and then you can branch out to "Programming Collective Intelligence" and "Machine Learning for Hackers", which are more or less the same thing, except the first one is in Python and the second one in R (and slightly more advanced), or "Data Analysis with open source tools", which is more statistics oriented and more advanced than "Think Stats". The R books are interesting if you want to really get into R because I don't think they go into much details from a stats point of view and the videos are, in my opinion (I haven't watched them), not worth buying because they cover topics you can find in hundreds of free online lectures.
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