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Giving Away Our Recommendation Engine

blog.mortardata.com

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Re: Giving Away Our Recommendation Engine

#21

Post by icambron »

contingencies wrote: post #10

So 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 f…

I suspect you're being downvoted for having a dismissive tone in the same breath as you admit to not understanding the problem space. My guess is that the marketing copy on the site isn't targeted towards you, so it shouldn't surprise you that you don't understand it, whereas their target customers know all sorts of things about, say, Pig. That's fine, but then your comment should read like, "Can someone explain to me what this is for?" Instead, your comment is dripping with condescending snark, lecturing someone or another about how this thing you don't understand probably isn't useful, and incredulous that you don't understand something on the internet.

Imagine opening an advanced textbook on a subject you don't understand, reading two paragraphs of it, and throwing up your hands in disgust because what does this even mean?

Re: Giving Away Our Recommendation Engine

#22

Post by dllthomas »

showerst wrote: post #11
gmisra wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The code is all released under the Apache 2.0 license, so calling such an action "disingenuous" is itself disingenuous, (imo).

I'm not trying to start a flame war over the use of the word open, and I think it's great that they're releasing code that others can learn from. It's just that making a big press release and blog post that brags about open sourcing, vs the reality that you can't actually do anything substantial with the code without paying for it... it seems off to me. I get what they're trying to do, but to me the whole point of OS…

To my mind it depends a little on what functionality is behind the account. If this is a huge chunk of functionality, that presently depends on their infrastructure but doesn't have to, then I think that's fine (though certainly enough to self-host would be better). If this is basically a thin wrapper and all the actual functionality is in their proprietary server code, then it's hugely disingenuous.

Re: Giving Away Our Recommendation Engine

#23

Post by mck- »

Fwiw, here are two light-weight feature-based recommendation engines I built for Node.js (for situations where you have the cold-start problem and therefore can't rely on user/item based collaborative filtering): Alike [1] and Look-Alike [2]

[1] https://github.com/axiomzen/Alike

[2] https://github.com/axiomzen/Look-Alike

Re: Giving Away Our Recommendation Engine

#24

Post by contingencies »

icambron wrote: post #21
contingencies wrote: post #10

So 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 f…

I suspect you're being downvoted for having a dismissive tone in the same breath as you admit to not understanding the problem space. My guess is that the marketing copy on the site isn't targeted towards you, so it shouldn't surprise you that you don't understand it, whereas their target customers know all sorts of things about, say, Pig. That's fine, but then your comment should read like, "Can someone explain to m…

Apologies, condescending snark was not the intent (I can't even see where you see that, actually!). In response to your more salient points, it could be argued that a web+EC2 layer on top of existing software is hardly an advanced textbook. Likewise, their announcement's stated intent is to gain customers, so feedback on what's unclear should be well within an acceptable scope of discussion. Finally, I doubt any of us are excluded from their intended market as software people move frequently between problem domains.

Re: Giving Away Our Recommendation Engine

#25

Post by rjurney »

showerst wrote: post #11
gmisra wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The code is all released under the Apache 2.0 license, so calling such an action "disingenuous" is itself disingenuous, (imo).

I'm not trying to start a flame war over the use of the word open, and I think it's great that they're releasing code that others can learn from. It's just that making a big press release and blog post that brags about open sourcing, vs the reality that you can't actually do anything substantial with the code without paying for it... it seems off to me. I get what they're trying to do, but to me the whole point of OS…

You can easily run the Pig code they released yourself.

Re: Giving Away Our Recommendation Engine

#26

Post by rjurney »

dllthomas wrote: post #22
showerst wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not trying to start a flame war over the use of the word open, and I think it's great that they're releasing code that others can learn from. It's just that making a big press release and blog post that brags about open sourcing, vs the reality that you can't actually do anything substantial with the code without paying for it... it seems off to me. I get what they're trying to do, but to me the whole point of OS…

To my mind it depends a little on what functionality is behind the account. If this is a huge chunk of functionality, that presently depends on their infrastructure but doesn't have to, then I think that's fine (though certainly enough to self-host would be better). If this is basically a thin wrapper and all the actual functionality is in their proprietary server code, then it's hugely disingenuous.

The code does not depend on the infrastructure. You can execute the Pig code locally on your machine, or on your own hadoop cluster. This really is a 'free' give-away of code.

Re: Giving Away Our Recommendation Engine

#27

Post by erichmond »

contingencies wrote: post #24
icambron wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect you're being downvoted for having a dismissive tone in the same breath as you admit to not understanding the problem space. My guess is that the marketing copy on the site isn't targeted towards you, so it shouldn't surprise you that you don't understand it, whereas their target customers know all sorts of things about, say, Pig. That's fine, but then your comment should read like, "Can someone explain to m…

Apologies, condescending snark was not the intent (I can't even see where you see that, actually!). In response to your more salient points, it could be argued that a web+EC2 layer on top of existing software is hardly an advanced textbook . Likewise, their announcement's stated intent is to gain customers, so feedback on what's unclear should be well within an acceptable scope of discussion. Finally, I doubt any of…

For the record, this reply seems as snarky and dismissive as the first. Hopefully some constructive criticism.

Re: Giving Away Our Recommendation Engine

#28

Post by kirushik »

ethanbond wrote: post #6
showerst wrote: post #5

Earlier 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…

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.

It's opensourced under Apache 2.0 license. That means, it's free as in freedom, with all the legal ability to be forked and profited from. AFAIK, the only substantial difference between Apache 2.0 and GPLv3 is that APL2 is not copyleft license. That means, one's fork is not even required to remain opensourced (as far as it contains a reference to original APL-licensed version).

So either Mortar opensourced some feature-crippled fragment of their platform, and it relies on features from their proprietary platform heavily; or the statement of requirement Mortar account is property of the Tutorial's approach, not the opensourced code itself.

Re: Giving Away Our Recommendation Engine

#29

Post by rjurney »

forgottenpass wrote: post #8
gmisra wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can run the code on your local machine, on Amazon ElasticMapReduce, or on your own Hadoop cluster. This really is a give-away of useful open source code.

Re: Giving Away Our Recommendation Engine

#30

Post by rjurney »

contingencies wrote: post #14
alexhawdon wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.coursera.org/course/recsys will provide you with a good introduction to the topic

Thanks. For others who are interested, that course apparently uses a different piece of software called LensKit http://lenskit.grouplens.org/ Could anyone summarize the difference between Pig and LensKit when applied to recommendation systems?

The mortar recommendation system is written in Pig, and can scale to any data size, even petabytes. The lenskit tool cannot.
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