PredictionIO, a machine learning server for software developers & data engineers | Hacker News Reader

PredictionIO, a machine learning server for software developers & data engineers

prediction.io

96 pointstilt46 comments

I got an email from them just because im "staring" the Meteor repo on Github... I really hate when people send me mail that i didnt signup for!

same to me as well just because I'd posted a few rails repo for own reference.

People should stop doing that, I hate that trend.

I've received similar email about possible integration with Pyramid framework last week. So I created sample package [1] but haven't got any reply yet.. Hate when people don't respond to emails. [1] https://github.com/hanula/pyramid_predictionio

I got an email like grandparent and I replied asking about licensing. They replied, but it took a a little over 2 weeks before they replied. So, they will probably reply, just not promptly.

Yep, same here, "I noticed that you are engaged in Meteor on github".

I also received an email about this: https://www.dropbox.com/s/40aqdk5hjdm0i4y/Screenshot%202013-...

While I'm not a huge fan of people spamming email address they grabbed from Github (Yes I know I can hide my email) I have been contacted because of my GitHub account (because of activity/repos/etc) in the past and had no problem with it. I just don't like mindless spamming which this appears to be. That said where do you draw the line (and do you think this email crosses said line)? (I'm genuinely curious)

I was considering replying to the email until I saw this comment and realized that it was not even tailored spam.

Depending on where the company resides it's actually illegal do this.[1]

[1] - http://www.campaignmonitor.com/guides/permission/spam/

It's not illegal in the US unless they don't provide opt-out and the various other things CAN-SPAM demands. That said, starring a repo could potentially be considered forming a relationship and relationship messages are exempt from those rules.

The project looks good, however I got this same e-mail, I was planning to test the PHP-SDK and the Python-SDK and test the product, however now I see, I was just the target of a github SPAM. =/

Same, asking about suggestions in terms of best practice to integrate PredictionIO in some PHP frameworks.

If I like the product, I may open-source some plugin or wrapper around their SDK for specifics product or framework, but asking will not make it happens faster.

I also got an unsolicited email from them asking for feedback on the product. I didn't really mind since it is relevant to my area, but it was still a bit odd.

Got a mail also related to my experience is rails, I wanted to look into it and I still do, it is a little spammy.

One wonders if they are using ML to harvest/choose the spam list.

Add me to the list. I got the same email, except it was in regards to Rails.

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6574087

How is this better than using other frameworks such as scikit learn? it is hard to tell what extra value they provide from the copy on their website.

What other frameworks are out there (other than the one you mentioned) that are worth looking into?

There's waffles http://waffles.sourceforge.net/

and vowpal wabbit https://github.com/JohnLangford/vowpal_wabbit/wiki

LensKit: http://lenskit.grouplens.org which also prominently features in the currently running 'Intro to Recommender Systems' MOOC on Coursera.

The MOOC course is very interesting. Do you know if there's a way to get enrolled? It looks like the registration is closed and there's no upcoming offerings available currently. Thanks.

I think the juggernaut here is WEKA [0], I've seen it used in the real world far more than anything else.

[0] - http://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/ml/weka/

Since the authors claim that it is "Built on top of scalable frameworks such as Hadoop and Cascading" I guess that it is aiming to be production-ready while scikit is mostly for prototyping.

In that case then what is the added value compared to Mahout, the Hadoop-based ML framework?

I'm always extremely skeptical of such initiatives, because ML is not a magical black box where you put your data in one end and you get results on the other end. Automating the trivial parts of ML, ie. providing an API to a ML library, is a week-end project, but that in itself is useless. If you don't automate the hard parts of ML, such as feature engineering, then you're not providing any value at all.

Scikit-learn is a library of machine learning algorithms. PredicitionIO does the stuff around machine learning you need to get a system into production. It provides a REST API to interact with the system and it handles data storage and retrieval as well. I think it has fewer algorithms than scikit-learn. This may or may not be a problem depending on your use case.

This has already been posted to Hackernews! Having said, I used Prediction.io all day today, (against a few years of Shopify Ecommerce order data) and it is the easiest way to break into machine learning. Props to the Predictionio team!

Cool. Let me know what you are coming up with.

Just being curious, what kind of metrics are you interested in predicting for Shopify? I would give away my car in exchange for a few years of Shopify order data :)

To be clear: This is data from my store on Shopify. Not Shopify itself. I want to be able to do Amazon style email recommendations / up sells :)

Lot's of discussion over here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6574087 as well

Also got an email, because I'm "engaged" with Django framework on Github but I hadn't starred PredictionIO at this point. Sent a reply, no response. Seems they just want visibility among devs and are using the fact they're open-source as an excuse to directly contact people. Good product or not I really don't like being deceived.

> r = cli.get_itemrec_topn("myEngine", 5, {"pio_latlng":[37.9, 91.2]})

Without the preceding comment I'm sure this line of code is clear as crystal to whomever wrote it. To me it might as well be hieroglyphics. If you write an API, do not abbreviate the public methods.

Totally unrelated, but looking in the source for PredictionIO (which is Scala) they've got this really deep directory nesting before you can find the code. That's something that always annoyed me about typical Java apps.. is that also a common thing in the Scala world?

If you use the sbt build tool, which is by far the most popular in the Scala world, you have to use Maven-style directory layout which is the originator of the horror you refer to (see http://www.scala-sbt.org/release/docs/Getting-Started/Direct...). Most Scala projects don't bother with the com/foo/mystuff directory structure part, retaining just the mystuff directory, which is a small saving.

It's an annoying vestige, but I typically don't navigate the directory structure to find files anyway. Instead I use projectile in Emacs. I'm sure other editors have similar systems.

I also received a spam email from them after contributing to Rails and sent them an email about it. PredictionIO people: your fellow developers aren't idiots. You wouldn't want to be spammed after contributing to open source projects, so don't spam us.

Recently exposed to http://0xdata.com/ at Strata NYC and was very impressed. Just another to add to the list of great open source modeling and prediction tools.

GitHub link - https://github.com/PredictionIO/PredictionIO

Is this similar to Myrrix?

http://myrrix.com/

Out of curiosity, is the voice-over in the demo video computer-generated?

I'm pretty sure it's not. I'm interested in TTS and have never heard anything that good yet.

I'm pretty sure it's just really well recorded. The voice changes in tone to emphasize different words, which isn't a feature in any text-to-speech program I know of.

All that said, every time I read a comment in this thread, I hear it in that voice now.

Video was by the good folk at http://www.wyzowl.com/ I am pretty sure it was a genuine voiceover but might be wrong!

yes, i also received email from them. But when i see this symbol in email subject

<>

i found that this is some kind of promotional email.

Interesting - the article has ~61 points and ~20 rants :-)

got the same email. Pretty targetted spamming and annoying. Good product, SPAM is just pushy.

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