Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

threadreaderapp.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 331 posts

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

#171

Post by ak39 »

CodeWriter23 wrote: post #133
gnicholas wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bounced as soon as I couldn’t find pricing information.

I have nothing to do with the website/product in question, but could you explain a bit more why you would "bounce" (assuming bounce means you would lose interest) if you didn't immediately see pricing information?

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

#172

Post by asfdsfggtfd »

blowski wrote: post #144
asfdsfggtfd wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we don't tie GA or any other usage analytics to individual users You may not identify individual users but Google probably do... > we should put this somewhere more prominent You should make it opt in by default. Or stop doing it!

IANAL, but have worked on GDPR a fair bit. Google Analytics is already GDPR compliant, as long as: * you are not pushing any unencrypted customer data to them in the clear * you're careful regards who has access to your Google Analytics data You can (and most businesses will) argue that you need to know how your website is used. It's a completely standard practice that doesn't put user privacy at risk. Moreover, Goog…

This isn't about law it is about ethics.

I wouldn't like it if someone followed me around meatspace with a clipboard all day. I don't like it online either.

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

#173

Post by smcl »

esrauch wrote: post #155
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?

6am or later? Even if they played it safe with the usual business hours of 9-6 in the users locale (since companies generally know your location) it’d be fine. I'd be relatively forgiving for a US company who doesn't really know where I live sending me stuff at these times - they've no way to know what is "sensible". However I was getting pestered by Vodafone in my country at 2am nearly daily for a while

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

#174

Post by dvfjsdhgfv »

mjburgess wrote: post #165
dvfjsdhgfv wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, these are two main approaches to AI, with expert systems being the "old" AI and ML being the "modern" AI. In the old approach, you knew exactly what you wanted to achieve, and very often you had a relatively clear idea how to do it; the challenge was to construct the solution manually. In the new approach you are not so much concerned with how to do it as you train on some dataset anyway. The results are less pr…

I think we do have a good-enough understanding of "understanding" to characterize what is required. However this is to be found in the textbooks of neuroscience, not in the machine manufacture manuals of a silicon lithography plant. There isn't as much mystery as there seems. When a neuroscientist asks "how does a animal perceive the world?" the answer is reasonably methodologically obvious. When a computer scientist…

There is a huge difference between perception and understanding.

http://news.itu.int/reality-check-not-nearly-close-strong-ai...

> Marcus also observes “a bias in the field which is to assume that everything is learnt.” Marcus makes the argument that human beings do not learn everything by ‘trial-and-error’ – that part of our knowledge is innate, learnt over evolution – leading him to suggest that “we need more innateness if we are going to build intelligent agents … It’s not learning trial-by-trial in the way that our contemporary machines are.”

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

#176

Post by vidarh »

ak39 wrote: post #171
CodeWriter23 wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bounced as soon as I couldn’t find pricing information.

I have nothing to do with the website/product in question, but could you explain a bit more why you would "bounce" (assuming bounce means you would lose interest) if you didn't immediately see pricing information?

For me, I almost always bounce if I don't immediately see pricing information as it is an important signal with respect to whether or not this is something that's targeted towards me and/or whether or not they think I'll get sticker shock if they show it to me right away. In either case, the lack of readily available pricing makes me negatively inclined to spend more time looking into a product where I don't know if I'd ever consider paying whatever price they don't want to tell me.

It doesn't need to be a lot of detail, or precise. Even just a "from $..." or "plans starting at ..." would be enough.

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

#177

Post by 40four »

I don't get this article at all. The author does not really back up their argument with any examples of ML. What in the world does common marketing practice & seemingly basic SQL queries have to do with AI/ML? What am I missing here? To me, this just sounds like a "Get off my lawn" type of rant. "Why do we need the newfangled AI when we still have good ole' SQL & bash!(waving fist in the air)"

On the other hand comments are talking about hiring data scientists for months if not a year or more (yikes!) To clean data & wait for it ... perform linear regression. To me this sounds like a great application of machine learning. Couldn't someone train some models to clean the data, then do one of the things ML does best, linear regression, in a fraction of the time the human data scientists could do it in?

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

#178

Post by vidarh »

gnicholas wrote: post #60
mindhash wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems pretty cool. I found a good difference reading your education product. It was easy on eyes. I read a lot of blogs. Thought you could add a wp plugin if it doesn't exist. Also you must have a ml/ai roadmap for tracking user interactions, etc for possibility of further personalization. Leaving aside the buzz of ai/ml, I think every business has opportunity to apply ml/ai. It doesn't happen often but when it…

It's true, we could use AI or ML to do stuff not related to the core product. But these investors thought that we should be using ML in the coloring algorithm itself. Even if this made sense to do (that is, if it improved reading ability for people compared with our current product), it would be much harder to explain. Right now, it's easy to say it's a color gradient that wraps from one line to the next, guiding you…

If you can apply any kind of approach that automatically feeds measurements of user success back in to an algorithm to automatically adjust e.g. the colors used for the gradient based on measuring what works best, you can justify saying you're using machine learning.

I think people are too often too quick to assume that machine learning necessarily implies deep learning and neural networks, when often it can reasonably be reduced to simple statistical approaches.

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

#179

Post by Traubenfuchs »

adriand wrote: post #170
JepZ wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is just how larger corporations work. They probably decided they wanted to be part of that future market about AI and therefore want to invest in AI/ML startups. Someone sold your company internally as being a nice fit for the AI portfolio, but when you answered the question about ML with "No" the door was shut. From someone who makes large trade deals as his daily business, I learned "Never say 'No'" (during a…

You should never mislead a potential investor. Why would you want an investor who is misaligned with your core technology/strategic direction?

$$$

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

#180

Post by dzmien »

smcl wrote: post #173
esrauch wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What time would be better?

6am or later? Even if they played it safe with the usual business hours of 9-6 in the users locale (since companies generally know your location) it’d be fine. I'd be relatively forgiving for a US company who doesn't really know where I live sending me stuff at these times - they've no way to know what is "sensible". However I was getting pestered by Vodafone in my country at 2am nearly daily for a while

This is why I set "do not disturb/alarms only" when I set my alarm before going to bed.
Post reply on HN