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

Real World Recommendation System

blog.fennel.ai

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 156 posts

Re: Real World Recommendation System

#81

Post by hetspookjee »

jedberg wrote: post #74
oofbey wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They pioneered using the cloud to run at massive scale. Which is to say they were AWS's biggest early customer? Doesn't really seem like Netflix should get the credit for that one.

It was a lot more than that. They developed systems and techniques that even Amazon adopted and are still adopting to this day. They also created a ton of open source tools for other people to use the cloud: https://netflix.github.io Netflix tech even spawned a company to sell their open source tools: https://www.armory.io And they codified the entire practice of Chaos Engineering: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos…

That stockphoto on the front page of armory.io manages to trigger al kinds of spammy website triggers for me.

Re: Real World Recommendation System

#82

Post by troiskaer »

oofbey wrote: post #65
troiskaer wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

as well as to ML - Netflix Prize ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netflix_Prize ) and Metaflow ( https://github.com/Netflix/metaflow )

No question they've done some things that have had some impact on others in the industry. But none of them are particularly important. It's all relative. Companies like Twitter, Uber, AirBnb have all released open source projects or figured things out how to solve hard problems in ways that others have emulated. But for every other one of the FAA(N)G companies, I can barely work a day as a developer without touching…

> But none of them are particularly important

Nowhere was the argument made that somehow Netflix was more influential than Twitter/Uber/AirBnB, but your counter-argument that somehow it's less influential because you haven't heard of/used some projects directly holds no ground.

Re: Real World Recommendation System

#83

Post by HWR_14 »

imilk wrote: post #46
notafraudster wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It provides more information. It's shallow and non-descript because it's an ad is the argument. I don't know if I believe that here. It's a blurry line with sponsored content.

Re: Real World Recommendation System

#84

Post by samstave »

ParanoidShroom wrote: post #67
samstave wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>With "Zuck Bucks" (I still am not sure if true) I expected more from this place than to believe every click bait FB news. Of all the UX people and tons of money they throw to into research... Yes the best option was... "Zuck bucks". Don't get played ffs

You >quoted with no commentary.. so your point is :: TROLL?

Re: Real World Recommendation System

#85

Post by oofbey »

hbn wrote: post #79
vincentmarle wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a point in time when FAANG offered the best compensation packages for engineers (Netflix was one of them) - so that's where the term originated from but while it's outdated in many respects (Microsoft is not included, Facebook is now Meta, Google is now Alphabet etc etc) it's still sticky for some reason.

> Facebook is now Meta, Google is now Alphabet Eh, the new parent company names aren't really what people know them as still. I don't think most people are even aware that Google has a parent company. I have a friend that works at Google, and that's what we say. I don't think him or anyone would ever say he works at Alphabet.

Yeah, Meta will likely stick because Zuckerberg and crew are actively trying to run away from the dumpster fire they lit with Facebook.

But Google is still Google, and probably always will be. Just like Youtube is still Google, and Waymo is still Google.

Re: Real World Recommendation System

#87

Post by patmorgan23 »

oofbey wrote: post #68
jedberg wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FAANG was created by the TV personality Jim Cramer to talk about high growth tech stocks. At the time Netflix was doubling every year. It was based purely on finance. It's now been taken over by the tech industry to be shorthand for places that are highly selective in their hiring and tend to work on cutting edge tech at scale. That being said, the impact of Netflix on tech is pretty big. They pioneered using the clo…

> They pioneered using the cloud to run at massive scale. Which is to say they were AWS's biggest early customer? Doesn't really seem like Netflix should get the credit for that one.

They were pretty influential in refining the microservices architecture

Re: Real World Recommendation System

#88

Post by troiskaer »

lysecret wrote: post #61

Interesting post. On thing to note, this seems to be about "on request" ranking. E.g. googleing something and in 500ms you need the recommended content. However, a lot of usecases are time insensitive rankings. Like recommending content on netflix, spotify etc. (spotifys discover weekly even has a one week! request time :D). In which case you can just run your ranking and store the recs in your DB and its much much e…

This is pretty much what both Netflix and Spotify do. I would argue that there isn't a canonical recommendations stack that FAANG is converging towards, and that's a direct corollary of differing business requirements and organizational structure.

Re: Real World Recommendation System

#90

Post by efsavage »

KaiserPro wrote: post #17

> 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…

> mostly backed by hundreds of thousands of Mysql instances

Kind of. It's part of the recipe but one you find at these large tech companies (I've worked at FB and GOOG) is they have the resources to bend even large/standard projects like MySQL to their will, while ideally preserving the good ideas that made them popular in the first place. There are wrappers/layers/modifications/etc that eventually evolve to subsume the original software, such that is acting more like a library than a standalone service/application. So, for example, while your data might eventually sit in a MySQL table, you'll never know, and likely didn't write anything specific to MySQL (or even SQL) to get there.

Post reply on HN