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Comment by patrickaljord | Hacker News Reader

In case you didn't notice, this is clever advertising for Microsoft Azure. Both authors work for Microsoft. I could count 3 mentions of Azure, two direct links to Azure products, 1 quote from a Microsoft researcher, 1 quote from a Microsoft dev advocate and 1 embedded Bing maps. You've just been played by Microsoft marketing. Also, Tom Dale works for Microsoft himself so it's just one big family story.

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Tom Dale working for MS makes it likely that this was a reverse-engineering effort.

As in, they knew who they were looking for from the start, and just worked with the data to find the known conclusion.

Also, there's no actual machine learning in this really, except calling out to a hosted language processing service...

A nice case of parallel construction.

Noticed it, but I like(d) the ad / package / presentation.

Personally, I think this is "good" marketing.

Kudos to you for noticing but! I think they should add some kind of disclosure.

This is the kind of PR (rather than marketing) that I despise, because it is deceiving.

I mean, its annoying that it wasn't clearly stated that it was a MS article, but from the beginning I thought it was fairly clear that it was an advertisement for something, and all the Microsoft references was a pretty strong hint it was for them.

Do we know for a fact that this was a marketing tactic conceived and developed by the Marketing group at Microsoft? Versus simply these three individuals, of their own accord, wanting to show off the tools in a fun(?) way?

Does it matter? If you're showing off something that depends on your company's product then you're advertising for them, regardless of whether you're paid for it directly.

Yes, it does matter. I'd question the intentions of a marketing department very differently than I would 3 developers who appreciate a given set of tools and want to share them with other developers.

That’s awfully cynical. Other than wondering exactly why they used those Azure services (which makes sense now that I know they work for Microsoft), nothing else about Microsoft stood out for me when I read through.

Edit: I’m not sure how that was worthy of a downvote. Not everything is a conspiracy, but thanks for valuing contradictory options.

>>That’s awfully cynical.

Perhaps so, but that doesn't make it not true.

http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

>That’s awfully cynical.

The world is awfully exploitative and cunning. The world of business doubly so.

The article is fun and well written, and it showcases how the marketed tools/services can actually be used to accomplish something interesting. As long as the content is useful, should I care if it was written as a way to advertise a product or not? This is so much better than doorslaming ads in one's face.

Am I the only one that skimmed the story so fast that I didn't notice the MS associations?

I could tell it wasn't going to be a super deep dive or deeply technical just from a look at layout/style of the post -- but it wasn't supposed to be super deeply technical right? Kind of just like a fun post.

They were extremely helpful in making the "conclusion" bits on the end of every section very obvious though (I aim to write like that as well, to save readers time), so I basically only read those, and skipped to the bottom where they unveiled and clicked the button...

Fuckkkk, the ads are evolving. South Park is right!! I didn't realize it.

Marketing for Twitter? (Bad sarcasm)

Compulsory XKCD link: https://xkcd.com/810/

Ah, who is whoishorsejs.com

Thank goodness. I was worried that we were going to see another doxing like the one that drove whythe luckystiff away.

Technically any project showcasing a specific technology could be considered advertising though.

Marketing for EmberJS perhaps ? :P

This is really telling because the twitter api already tells you the source of a tweet anyway (android/tweetdeck/hootsuite). It's like they didn't even try.

What's the relevance of this? The article points this out, no?

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