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Comment by noelwelsh | Hacker News Reader

Couple of points:

- Benchmarking against Weka, R, and Python is not exactly pitting your product against stiff competition. Skytree (skytree.net) is another company in the same space with the same focus. Benchmarking against them would be interesting.

- I thought it was amusing that in a company of < 20 people the five founders thought it necessary to adopt such grandiose titles: CEO (fine), CTO, Director of Engineering, Chief Scientist, Director of Data Science (exactly how are the hairs split between these four?)

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Thanks for the comments.

(1) We chose to do our original benchmarks against R, Weka and sklearn because these are the tools that the vast majority of people currently use. You'd be amazed how many companies use Weka! That said, we do benchmark favorably against the other competition. We will be publishing a series of blog posts with these benchmarks. Stay tuned!

(2) Our titles in fact do mark a clear delineation between our respective roles and responsibilities, and this is well understood within the company. Perhaps the titles are a bit grandiose, but we have a very big vision for this company.

I think the second point was completely unnecessary. I didn't find it amusing or funny, just sarcastic. Yes, sarcastic, but not funny. I guess you consider wise.io your competition, don't you?

Speaking as someone with some years experience in ML to me there is a world of difference between the front page for wise.io and mynaweb.com (presuming these are the competing sites).

The Myna page explicitly states it uses multi armed bandit algorithms, the algorithm fits the properties of the following claims. Wise's use of 'patent-pending', 'machine learning technology' and 'deploy machine intelligence' gives the impression of hiding shortcomings with jargon.

I don't think wise.io are competition for Myna. The tech does fairly different things, and I think we're targeting completely different markets.

As for whether my comment was misplaced or not -- I guess that's up to the community to decide if they care to do such a thing. I do admit it was a bit snarky, but I also genuinely do find the titles a bit amusing.

Tying in to another post on the front page right now, I do think that generalists are advantageous in early stage companies, and titles tend to be more appropriate with specialisation.

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