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Real World Recommendation System

blog.fennel.ai

41–50 of 156 posts

Re: Real World Recommendation System

#41

With all of this technology applied, I am still disappointed by Netflix's recommendations – to the point of just giving up and doing something else.

This indicates that the problem is difficult to solve at scale and customized per person. Maybe the issue is with our expectations - I find other people are pretty bad at recommending things for me as well.

Maybe. Recommendation systems definitely seem to get worse as they scale. Amazon's was incredible circa 2000. Pandora seems to be getting worse and more repetitive. Netflix kept getting better and better until they ended their contest and since then they seem to have only become worse.

Re: Real World Recommendation System

#42
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll never understand why people think this is a valid criticism of an article, rather than pointing out an issue they have with the actual content of the article. There's nothing inherently wrong with a company sharing info about the space they operate in. In fact, it should be encouraged as long as what they share is useful.

It's a short-hand for the treatment of the subject being pretty shallow and non-descript, which seems to apply to this article exactly. I read this and didn't learn anything.

Do you work on recommendations or something similar as part of your job? I don't and I found the article interesting.

Re: Real World Recommendation System

#44

> As a result, primary databases (e.g. MySQL, Mongo etc.) almost never work I mean it does. As far as I'm aware Facebook's ad platform is mostly backed by hundreds of thousands of Mysql instances. But more importantly this post really doesn't describe issues of scale. Sure it has the stages of recommendation, that might or might not be correct, but it doesn't describe how all of those processes are scheduled, coordin…

Meta is relatively open (and open source) in how they handle stuff, including ranking, scoring and filtering described in the original article, but also fast inverted indexes and approximate nearest neighbors in high-dimensional spaces. See, for instance, Unicorn [1,2] or (at a lower level) FAISS [3].

[1] http://people.csail.mit.edu/matei/courses/2015/6.S897/readin...

[2] https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3394486.3403305

[3] https://faiss.ai/

Re: Real World Recommendation System

#45

Is there any recommendation system people we actually happy with? They all seem to suck in my experience

TikTok

Why TikTok in particular? What is the engineering story behind TikTok's recommendation system? How did they get it right?

Re: Real World Recommendation System

#46
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll never understand why people think this is a valid criticism of an article, rather than pointing out an issue they have with the actual content of the article. There's nothing inherently wrong with a company sharing info about the space they operate in. In fact, it should be encouraged as long as what they share is useful.

It's a short-hand for the treatment of the subject being pretty shallow and non-descript, which seems to apply to this article exactly. I read this and didn't learn anything.

Saying the article is "pretty shallow and non-descript: is much shorter and more useful than what they posted.

Re: Real World Recommendation System

#49

All I know is that Facebook's recommendation systems always show me things that I hate to see. I suppose they may "work" at scale, but at an individual level it's epic failure.

FB needs an Ad-Rev-Share-Model with ALL of its users... Imagine if FB were to pay a fraction% of how yur data was used and paid you for it... It may be a small amount, but in super 4th world countries, it could affect change in their lives... Now imagine that this becomes big... and it works well. Now imagine that the populous is aware of the hand of god above them just pressing keys to affect land masses (yes I am r…

Like many NFT/crypto posts, I have absolutely no idea whether this is serious or a parody.

Re: Real World Recommendation System

#50
post #4

The main issue with deploying these systems right now is the technical overhead to develop them out. Existing solutions are either paid and require you to share your valuable data, or open source but either abandoned (rip Crab) or inextensible (most rely on their own DB or postgres). I’d love to see a lightweight, flexible recommendation system at a low level, specifically the scoring portion. There are a few flexibl…

I think we've done a pretty good job on the scoring side with a fast and simple to use API that runs in-process: https://improve.ai
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