You probably don't need AI/ML. You can make do with well written SQL scripts • Hacker News Board

Re: You probably don't need AI/ML. You can make do with well written SQL scripts

#151

Post by arghwhat » Mon, Apr 23, 2018, 8:57 AM UTC

gnicholas wrote: post #40

My startup was approached by a corporate VC that wanted to make a strategic investment. Based on the attendee list from our meeting, which included very high up folks from the company, I felt good going in. They expressed interest in our technology that makes reading on screen easier [1], but they were surprised to learn that we didn't use machine learning to accomplish this. I indicated that it was actually quite ef…

You should definitely have made something up.

Up front, many investors only seek buzzwords before they shift focus to numbers. Be a sales(wo)man, and feed them the ones they want. Later on, once you end up making them money, they're not going to care much about what technologies are involved.

I wish you the best of luck with your startup in the future.

(P.S. I had a FOUC on your webpage. The icons in the "want more" section were missing, and haphazardly popping in. Might want to fix that.)

Re: You probably don't need AI/ML. You can make do with well written SQL scripts

#152

Post by adaml_623 » Mon, Apr 23, 2018, 9:01 AM UTC

donatj wrote: post #29

I almost took a "big data" data scientist job about a year ago with a local company. After talking to a number of their engineers, it became quite clear to me that instead of a data scientist, they just badly needed a DBA / someone with ownership and a complete vision of the data structure. They had no foreign keys, poorly 'designed' indexes, and tons of redundant tables with no rhyme or reason to them. They'd organi…

I'll bet they found they got 10 times more applicants for a data scientist role as opposed to a dba/sql/data engineer.

Re: You probably don't need AI/ML. You can make do with well written SQL scripts

#153

Post by oblio » Mon, Apr 23, 2018, 9:02 AM UTC

treydey wrote: post #145

sixdimensional wrote: post #34

Well, we are in the peak of a wave of hype about AI/ML, maybe even just past that peak. Many fundamental technological advancements in the field of AI/ML have sort of coalesced together at the current time to form a strong feature set that can be more broadly applied by a wider audience, not just those hardcore computer scientists who invented the technology. I've been in the thick of this previously, facing a comple…

I disagree that this is the peak of AI/ML. Companies are desperately looking for PhDs in AI that can fulfill their business needs. I think we're about to see a lot more applications of AI/ML.

Companies are also looking for "blockchain developers to fulfill their business needs" :)

Re: You probably don't need AI/ML. You can make do with well written SQL scripts

#154

Post by guiriduro » Mon, Apr 23, 2018, 9:12 AM UTC

fny wrote: post #106

gnicholas wrote: post #40

My startup was approached by a corporate VC that wanted to make a strategic investment. Based on the attendee list from our meeting, which included very high up folks from the company, I felt good going in. They expressed interest in our technology that makes reading on screen easier [1], but they were surprised to learn that we didn't use machine learning to accomplish this. I indicated that it was actually quite ef…

Great product idea! I'm glad people find it useful. Hypotheses: > corporate VC that wanted to make a strategic investment They want to put money in your company to make sure they don't have to compete with you or compete with someone else who might buy you down the line. > They kept prodding around on the ML stuff, and how we might be able to use ML to accomplish roughly the same thing. They're looking for secret sau…

> They're looking for secret sauce, barriers, friction. Something patentable.

While that may be true, I'd suggest the VC's are just looking for a later exit when a greater fool buys them out. They're betting on the ML investment market getting hotter, and providing you meet the criteria of being a growing startup (by some metric) nominally in the ML field and that field attracts more investment dollars later - even whether or not you succeed as a bottom line business, or whether your business success comes from ML or not - doesn't necessarily matter.

Re: You probably don't need AI/ML. You can make do with well written SQL scripts

#155

Post by esrauch » Mon, Apr 23, 2018, 9:14 AM UTC

smcl wrote: post #115

"Set this as a CRON that fires at 2AM everyday, period with less activity and traffic. People wake up to emails reminding them about their abandoned carts" Hah I wondered why I got so many notifications in the middle of the night. Now I know that it's from people who think they're helping - not realising that it actually sours my opinion on their company/product.

What time would be better?

Re: You probably don't need AI/ML. You can make do with well written SQL scripts

#156

Post by ZgjimDida » Mon, Apr 23, 2018, 9:17 AM UTC

gnicholas wrote: post #57

db1 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I went to your website, and I can't figure out what your product is or does. I had to click in to individuals before I figured out what it does. Why not put "BeeLine Reader makes reading on-screen easier, faster, and more enjoyable. We use a simple cognitive trick — an eye-guiding color gradient — to pull your eyes from one line to the next." on your front page? Maybe you guys have already done some kind of testing a…

Appreciate the feedback. We recently redesigned the website to offer silos, and one of the goals was to make the landing page not offer too many specifics that would make some audiences bounce. But perhaps your suggestion is just what we need to do. Thanks for taking the time to share! One lesson learned: I should have linked to the /individual page instead of the generic landing page in my comment. Updating link now…

I agree with the comment above. I wanted to ask you what your product does, then I thought "why should I ask you when I can check the website out". Then I checked the website and I didn't find a description.

I think it will be very helpful to have a simple description in your site. First impression matters.

p.s. I like the idea of your product.

Re: You probably don't need AI/ML. You can make do with well written SQL scripts

#157

Post by debarshri » Mon, Apr 23, 2018, 9:27 AM UTC

Isn't machine learning a concept, whereas sql or anything else is more about how you implement. I have in past seen a well season sql developer implementing collaborative filtering like algorithms.

Re: You probably don't need AI/ML. You can make do with well written SQL scripts

#158

Post by dmichulke » Mon, Apr 23, 2018, 9:49 AM UTC

halflings wrote: post #128

sverhagen wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Newbie question: would you not design ML systems to be able to explain themselves? Alike: hey, query planner, what's your query plan?

There is something close to what you're describing: 1) You train a complex ML model (say, deep neural net) to get the job done, solve your problem with high accuracy. 2) When you want to explain one of your model's results, you train a simpler more explainable model (say, linear regression) in the neighborhood of that point, such that it is locally similar to the more complex model. The task is too complex to be expl…

E.g., lime:

https://github.com/marcotcr/lime

Re: You probably don't need AI/ML. You can make do with well written SQL scripts

#159

Post by ju-st » Mon, Apr 23, 2018, 9:53 AM UTC

reacharavindh wrote: post #123

halflings wrote: post #119

This could've been a valid criticism of people that use ML where it's not appropriate, but it ended up being a bit of an irrational rant, and a dishonest one too: > I mean, why send a letter with breast pumps to a man that just bought a pair of sneakers? It doesn't even make sense. Typical open rate for most marketing emails is anywhere between 7 - 10%. But when we do our work well, we saw close to 25 - 30%. How do y…

But, that might be in the realm of SQL too. Find out what items were frequently bought with the item that this customer bought, and send them as recommendations.. Rule-based does not always mean that a user is sitting down writing that tennis balls and tennis shoes are related items. Don't you think?

Such a simple system would recommend many items that are frequently bought by everyone (like bread, toilet paper, batteries). You would have to weight the items in some fancy way to get useful recommendations... And I have just described the introducing slides of a applied machine learning university lecture.

Re: You probably don't need AI/ML. You can make do with well written SQL scripts

#160

Post by kriro » Mon, Apr 23, 2018, 9:58 AM UTC

The article doesn't convince me.

It can be summarized as "don't overengineer" but quite frankly these days ML/DL is so easy to apply from a technical point of view (taking care of the data or fully grasping the things you apply is another issue) that I don't see why one wouldn't at least try to use it. I don't see why a ML-algorithm couldn't grab the first name for example. I mean if your argument is "just use SQL" my counterargument is "I agree but I can just try ML as SQL on steroids". If you already have well curated data that you run the SQL on you might as well play around with it in an ML setting. "Customer with largest basket" might work fine but why not try to prod the data to check for other interesting things. Same for the POD example. Why not at least try to see if a combination of variables might yield more interesting results than the simple stuff that might work. Occams razor should not cut out all curiosity :D

I like the overall idea of "try the simple stuff first" but quite frankly these days you can run very good ML with pretty much all it takes to do SQL queries (assuming you train your models on a separate machine).