Live data from Hacker News

Amazon’s own ‘Machine Learning University’ now available to all developers

aws.amazon.com

11–20 of 109 posts

Re: Amazon’s own ‘Machine Learning University’ now available to all developers

#12

All that machine learning and they still send me reviews for products I haven’t received.

All that machine learning and they still think I would like to re-buy every product I've ever purchased.

Well it might be true for certain products. But I find it funny how they recommend me my phone or my laptop. Those aren't things you usually buy in bulk.

Re: Amazon’s own ‘Machine Learning University’ now available to all developers

#15
post #4

I loved AMZN's cloud certifications. Not a Data Scientist / ML Developer, nor am I trying to be, but I love sitting for these exams as I believe the amount of study gives you enough credibility to have thoughtful conversations with specialists. Looking forward to reading sentiment to see if the curriculum is industry relevant and worthwhile!

The "credibility" point is important. As I say in all data MOOC-related HN threads, these types of courses will not make you an expert, but they're very good at giving a background on the terminology so it's less arcane.

The AWS certs are really good.

You don't become an expert, but get a good feeling for things to look out for when building your services.

Re: Amazon’s own ‘Machine Learning University’ now available to all developers

#16
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All that machine learning and they still think I would like to re-buy every product I've ever purchased.

Well it might be true for certain products. But I find it funny how they recommend me my phone or my laptop. Those aren't things you usually buy in bulk.

See this thread by patio11 for a good explanation as to why this isn't as dumb as it looks: https://mobile.twitter.com/patio11/status/982208307057246209

Re: Amazon’s own ‘Machine Learning University’ now available to all developers

#18
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All that machine learning and they still think I would like to re-buy every product I've ever purchased.

Google has the same problem. I was searching for information about Apache Chainsaw the other day, and at one point forgot to put the word "apache" in as a search term. Ended up with adverts for actual chainsaws for like a week.

I've always been frustrated about this as well, but I realized that it's often not Google's intention to care about this error.

We're the product, willing or not, and the metric some chainsaw companies care about is simply 'searched "chainsaw"'. Google is happy to sell our eyes based on that, whether or not it converts into actual sales.

In fact, for Google to deduce further and use ML to say "this user actually isn't looking for a chainsaw despite that search," and the reverse of "this user is looking for a chainsaw despite not searching it," probably wouldn't go over well for an advertiser paying for views. It turns Google into more of a black box, and would appear less trustworthy or understandable.

Re: Amazon’s own ‘Machine Learning University’ now available to all developers

#20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All that machine learning and they still think I would like to re-buy every product I've ever purchased.

My guess is that they are really bad at de-duping products. Product ids vs skus and all that jazz is historically not handled well in recommender systems, and those product not recognized as variants of already purchased products end up being the closest in the "graph" to be recommended so shoot to the top.

But what really drives me nuts is textbooks. The data is practically handed to them with ISBNs. How hard could it possibly be for someone to tweak the algorithm so it doesn't suggest to me every edition of every text book I've ever purchased? Beyond the customer annoyance factor, this is a business issue. There is a virtually 0% chance that any textbook suggestion will be converted to a sale. That takes up valuable suggestion real estate on the user's screen and keeps me from seeing a suggestion that I might actually be interested in buying.
Post reply on HN