Giving Away Our Recommendation Engine
blog.mortardata.com
Giving Away Our Recommendation Engine
1–10 of 45 posts
Re: Giving Away Our Recommendation Engine
#2I'm sure plenty of good karma (even the non-HN kind) is headed your way - kudos.
Re: Giving Away Our Recommendation Engine
#3I'm curious what the business case was for open sourcing the code. Maybe to create an ecosystem?
Re: Giving Away Our Recommendation Engine
#4I'm curious what the business case was for open sourcing the code. Maybe to create an ecosystem?
"We’re giving over a year’s worth of work on our recommendation engine away because we want to earn your business on our platform."
Re: Giving Away Our Recommendation Engine
#5I'm curious what the business case was for open sourcing the code. Maybe to create an ecosystem?
From the "What you'll need" section of the first tutorial -
A Mortar account. You can sign up for a free Public account with Mortar here. If you want to keep your customized recommendation engine code private, you will need a Solo-level account ($99/month). Beyond that, you'll only pay for your actual usage of AWS cloud services (we never add an upcharge).
Kudos for the open source, but it looks like to actually use this for business you'll still need to pay. Unless i'm misreading it, "Open source but you'll still have to go through our platform" is pretty disingenuous.
Re: Giving Away Our Recommendation Engine
#6I'm curious what the business case was for open sourcing the code. Maybe to create an ecosystem?
From the "What you'll need" section of the first tutorial - A Mortar account. You can sign up for a free Public account with Mortar here. If you want to keep your customized recommendation engine code private, you will need a Solo-level account ($99/month). Beyond that, you'll only pay for your actual usage of AWS cloud services (we never add an upcharge). Kudos for the open source, but it looks like to actually use…
It reads like "open source but not free to make proprietary." First, it's awesome just to see source as something to learn from. Second, it seems reasonable they don't want people forking, modifying then profiting from their work without contributing back to it - either by also releasing source or by paying.
I think it's a nice model actually.
Re: Giving Away Our Recommendation Engine
#7I'm curious what the business case was for open sourcing the code. Maybe to create an ecosystem?
From the "What you'll need" section of the first tutorial - A Mortar account. You can sign up for a free Public account with Mortar here. If you want to keep your customized recommendation engine code private, you will need a Solo-level account ($99/month). Beyond that, you'll only pay for your actual usage of AWS cloud services (we never add an upcharge). Kudos for the open source, but it looks like to actually use…
The code is all released under the Apache 2.0 license, so calling such an action "disingenuous" is itself disingenuous, (imo).
Re: Giving Away Our Recommendation Engine
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
From the "What you'll need" section of the first tutorial - A Mortar account. You can sign up for a free Public account with Mortar here. If you want to keep your customized recommendation engine code private, you will need a Solo-level account ($99/month). Beyond that, you'll only pay for your actual usage of AWS cloud services (we never add an upcharge). Kudos for the open source, but it looks like to actually use…
The code is all released under the Apache 2.0 license, so calling such an action "disingenuous" is itself disingenuous, (imo).
The code is all released under Apache, but is all the code needed to use this thing released? If the parent poster is accurate that a user still needs to engage with their platform, this conversation is just pedantics and sophistry over what "open" means.
Re: Giving Away Our Recommendation Engine
#9FWIW we've been using the mortar platform to run large pig jobs without a fuss at http://datadog.com and we've been very happy with it. Glad to see them contribute their recommender code too.
Re: Giving Away Our Recommendation Engine
#10So hang on, what exactly is a recommendation engine?
They give examples of LinkedIn (people you may know) and Amazon (presumably other people who bought this, so-and-so's list of such-a-subject books).
That makes sense, though the segment of businesses that may actually benefit seems limited. Social stuff, sure. Most of us? What's the minimum recommendable-entity/category-or-user threshold that this makes sense for? Is success with these sorts of engines merely a reflector of poor UI design in your normal UX? (Of the above examples, the first seems very unidimensional - in that it's basically a simple graph distance - and the latter also rather rudimentary and often irrelevant).
So what exactly is this thing providing? Graph analysis? I think not. It reads more like some kind of raw timestamped user behavioural event data processing to infer relationships between users or products they interact with. Reading through the docs it seems this is a layer on top of Apache Pig (https://pig.apache.org/) - a high-level language for expressing data analysis programs, coupled with infrastructure for evaluating these programs. I think clarity in explaining this thing could be improved, particularly selling clearly what a recommendation is and when its useful. Using phrases like "award winning" doesn't help.
PS. Why all the downvotes? Sheesh.