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

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

#221

Post by rorykoehler »

collyw wrote: post #141
rorykoehler wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They invest in future potential. What you can do now is nearly irrelevant besides showing vision and competency. The next big thing isn't going to come from a couple of clever sql scripts.

Neither will the next big failure. What has AI really given us so far? Amazon / Youtube recommendations and some self driving cars that have crashed in unexpected ways. (Have they managed to debug that yet?)

From a VC perspective failure has a maximum downside of whatever you invested. Success has a limitless upside. That's why 9 out of 10 companies failing isn't an issue.

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

#222

Post by DataWorker »

chongli wrote: post #210
giantsloth wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a quaint sentiment, but marketing, sales, PR is all about misleading and creating unnecessary want. This is a major tenant of running a business and living under capitalism. There is also a moral argument for doing what you need to do in order to survive the difficulties of the market in order to survive it and change it into something more akin to your honest attitude about it.

I think you'll find that a lot of stem people tend to lean Kantian in their ethics. This implies that misleading people for any reason -- even "for their own good" -- is frowned upon.

He did say marketing, sales and PR but your point still stands.

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

#223

Post by purerandomness »

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?

* So I just randomly came to your website because I slacked off and should actually do work.

* I know that I will forget I even clicked on that link. The page has 3.5 seconds to convince me to stay longer.

* I'm mildly intrigued and form, in my head, a price I'd be willing to pay for the product.

* I scan the navbar for a pricing link to see if my expectation matches reality. I find nothing.

* The site obviously doesn't value my time, so why should I stay?

It's disrespectful.

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

#224

Post by fny »

gnicholas wrote: post #130
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!

We're totally open to making this opt-in. I'm curious how we should gather usage data, which some of our nonprofit funders require us to report for their impact questionnaire. How can we know how much the tools are being used if it's opt-in? Or are there other systems (other than Google) that raise fewer concerns? I really appreciate all the candid advice in this thread and hope that we — and others in similar situat…

A few other meandering thoughts, you'll need to be the one to figure out what makes sense.

- You're already not getting data from people with ad-blockers, consider also respecting Do Not Track[0] - Be transparent about what you track and how it's used - The data collected from opt-in users might end up being enough to build convincing enough reports for impact questionnaires? - Your privacy policy seems confused: "We think the best way to ensure that your personal information stays safe is to never collect any in the first place" then "we only use Google Analytics, which gathers information about our site users and generates aggregate reports to help us figure out who is using our site and extensions, and in what ways"

[0]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Navigator/d...

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

#225

Post by thrownaway954 »

piyush_soni wrote: post #175

Now write an SQL Query to find all photographs that have me and my wife sitting in a boat in them.

no problem:

select * from photos p inner join tags t where t.tag in('you','your wife','boat')

point being is "crap in, crap out". if you properly tag/label your data, you can accomplish anything with sql or machine learning.

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

#226

Post by edraferi »

philliphaydon wrote: post #47
edraferi wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The catch it the “and looking at our data” part. ML is basically a collection of thorough ways to look at your data, understand the patterns and infer what that means for the future. In your example, you should absolutely start by cleaning your data up and run some basic SQL aggregations and plotting volume over time. So you look that that and notice (1) volume is increasing over time, (2) some holidays bump a few da…

Haha, I wanted to have a bar graph which were by day of week: Bar 1: Last years deliveries. Bar 2: Predicted this years deliveries (based on % of increase from other markets if no previous years, or percentage of growth from last 2 years) Bar 3: Actual deliveries. Then another graph: Bar 1: Average processing time from previous year. Bar 2: Average processing time for current year. I'm terrible with graphs and such t…

You're absolutely on the right track. There are well-established statistics tools that formalize your intuition and carry it forward to its logical conclusion.

> "by day of week"

This means you have a time series with daily resolution (one observation per day) and you expect Weekly Seasonality to matter. Model this as 7-period lag in your daily series.

> based on % of increase from other markets if no previous years

There are multiple markets, each with their own time series? Congratulations, you have Panel Data [0]. Do some regions have similar trends? Need to account for that correlation, maybe try a Mixed Model [1]

> percentage of growth from last 2 years

So there's a trend component (constant growth over time). Easy enough to fit the I term of an ARIMA model for this. You'll need to do some custom work to integrate this with your cross-regional correlations though.

> Average processing time

You'll want to model this at least as well as you're modelling the demand. That means seasonal effects, correlations between factories / warehouses, etc. PS any time you're dealing with a two-day weekend you'd better use at least 3 years of data in case major holidays happened to fall on a Saturday and Sunday, blindsiding you when it shows up on Monday this year.

> show the holidays

You'll definitely need to put together a calendar of major holidays for each region. These models will calculate the effect for each holiday. Specifically, the effect of the holiday AFTER accounting for the day of week, overall growth, time of year (season), and region. You might even get nifty charts like [2]

===============

Anyway that's the basics. You can take graduate math courses in just this kind of modelling. Easier - you can contract a decent statistician for a couple weeks to build the model for you. They'll be delighted that you can produce SQL queries with the relevant data, and their models will help you get a lot more value out of those queries.

===============

Resources 4 U

Generic time series reference:

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panel_data

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed_model

[2] https://assets.digitalocean.com/articles/eng_python/prophet/...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoregressive_integrated_movi...

R tutorials:

[4] https://www.datascience.com/blog/introduction-to-forecasting...

[5] https://cran.r-project.org/web/views/TimeSeries.html (Particularly the "Forecasting and Univariate Modeling" section for your problem)

Python tutorials:

[6] https://machinelearningmastery.com/arima-for-time-series-for...

[7] http://www.seanabu.com/2016/03/22/time-series-seasonal-ARIMA...

[8] https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/a-guide-to-...

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

#227

Post by thrownaway954 »

Piskvorrr wrote: post #184
piyush_soni wrote: post #175

Now write an SQL Query to find all photographs that have me and my wife sitting in a boat in them.

...minus the ones which are obviously a toaster, while the AI insists they're you and your wife sitting in a boat ;) Now what?

select * from photos p inner join tags t where t.tag in('you','your wife','boat') and not in('toaster')

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

#228

Post by carlmr »

JepZ wrote: post #189
adriand wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Well, nobody wants a misaligned investor. But I had the impression the negotiations already failed, because one buzzword could not be satisfied. My comment was meant more as advice to overcome such problematic situations during negotiations, than to mislead someone about what you are actually doing.

I remember every dishwasher and washing machine had "fuzzy logic" in the 90s (at least according to stickers). Just because it was the AI/ML/Deep Learning/Big Data/IoT of the time.

No, fuzzy logic won't make your washing machine better. Yes, you can implement some stuff in fuzzy logic.

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

#229

Post by dahart »

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…

> you need to be more transparent and up front about what how and why you're using analytics

That's a new one to me. Is this Facebook changing the landscape right now, or have you been expecting this for a while? Do you have sites in mind that warn about GA?

Pretty much all websites use GA or something like it, and in my experience it's extremely rare to be warned about it. It always goes in the privacy policy, which you should be able to find. But I'm not sure I've ever seen an advance warning that analytics was taking place. I suppose it's assumed, but in any case appears to be normal and acceptable to not warn people that logging and searching of those logs exists.

Cookies are a different story, since the EU passed legislation requiring notice of their presence.

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

#230

Post by dahart »

asfdsfggtfd wrote: post #127
gnicholas wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Appreciate the feedback! Regarding analytics, I think this is some A/B testing, which I don't think is even active in the current version (though still in the sources). More importantly, we don't tie GA or any other usage analytics to individual users. We basically just use it to see where the extension is used and where people are blacklisting sites. We use this data to make the extension run better on more sites. W…

> 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!

> You should make it opt in by default. Or stop doing it!

What? Can you post some examples of sites that already do this? Everybody has analytics on their landing pages, and I don't think I've ever personally seen an opt-in.

What you can find are thousands of examples of site policy pages that say something like: "by choosing to visit our site, you are sharing information with us that we log for the purposes of improving our customer experience. By using our service, you agree to this logging. If you don't want to be logged, then please don't use our service."

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