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A comment on Hacker's guide to Neural Networks. Parent comment

Re:Hacker's guide to Neural Networks by tacos on Monday March 23, 2015 @06:52AM (#9250246)
Are you planning on getting work done? Or are you looking forward to digging into the source of yet another GNU tool that is stuck 20 years in the past?

"One of the biggest new features for the Octave 3.8.x release series is a graphical user interface. It is the one thing that users have requested most often over the last few years and now it is almost ready."

If you're planning on spending more than a few hours in the tool, consider spending the $200 on the one that's from this century.

I picked up Matlab late and wish I'd done so sooner. It's a REPL for higher-level thinking and quick experimentation. It makes some hard things very very simple and some simple things very hard. They've dropped the price and fixed a lot of shit in the last 5 years. It's replaced a lot of goofing around in Python and Excel for me.

Edit: I have a love/hate relationship with R and more of a love relationship with Python but they don't do ANYTHING like what Matlab does.

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Re:Hacker's guide to Neural Networks by GordyMD on Monday March 23, 2015 @07:19AM (#9250311)
Isn't Octave built with Matlab compatibility in mind? And Octave 3.8.0 was released back in December 2013 - so the GUI is already present, and from this decade. It's a great open source alternative to Matlab in my eyes for anyone that does not want to stump up $200.

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/MATLAB_Programming/Differences_...

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Re:Hacker's guide to Neural Networks by tacos on Monday March 23, 2015 @07:38AM (#9250360)
Since you linked to several thousand words explaining the differences between the languages, as well as the following quote: "The plan is for the GUI to be considered stable with version 4.0" then I'll assume you haven't used either product. I assure you that I did not spend $4k just to insult the open source community.

Love open source, glad they're doing it, much love to the devs -- and life is just too fucking short. If you're broke or screwing around--ok, maybe. If you're sitting in it more than an hour a week, maybe Photoshop is worth the $10/month vs GIMP, dig?

And if you're in school and get it for free or are interested in getting up to speed with the state of the art in machine learning and qualify for the personal license at under 200 bucks? I can't think of a better tool.

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Re:Hacker's guide to Neural Networks by profinger on Monday March 23, 2015 @11:09AM (#9251313)
For the record, Photoshop > (GIMP)x10000 IMHO. (Just finally glad I found someone that may agree)

I've not used Matlab but I've used Octave (during the ml class from Andrew Ng) and it wasn't too awful. Occasionally very frustrating though so if Matlab solves those frustrations I could see it being worth it if you're going to spend time in it!

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Re:Hacker's guide to Neural Networks by GordyMD on Monday March 23, 2015 @08:17AM (#9250465)
Several thousand? Evidently you like to exaggerate. The content is circa 1000 words - but the point it makes in relation to this context is delivered in the first sentence.

I've used both before. Matlab in my CompSci BS and MS and Octave in my professional career.

I'm just making the point that your critique of Octave seems a little harsh, and to the Leyman skews the reality - that Octave is an open source alternative. Yes, a little rough around the edges if you intend to use the visual aspects of the tool, but for matrix multiplication etc it has its use cases.

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Re:Hacker's guide to Neural Networks by tacos on Monday March 23, 2015 @10:40AM (#9251156)
The page you link is actually a shortened form and links to the real list: http://wiki.octave.org/FAQ#How_is_Octave_different_from_Matl... which comes in at 2,662 words.

The parts you say are good about Octave are EXACTLY the stuff I use Python and R for. If you want to use a Matlab library or toolkit, maybe cut in paste some code from a paper, do a quick 'what if' thing -- Octave just doesn't cut it.

(My point in speaking up here isn't to diss Octave it's to re-center the reality around Matlab.)

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