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This feels a little like PR spam, and I noticed it received a lot of upvotes in a short amount of time without any comments. Would anyone who upvoted this mind

This feels a little like PR spam, and I noticed it received a lot of upvotes in a short amount of time without any comments. Would anyone who upvoted this mind explaining the significance of Algorithmia in general? The marketing itself seems to misuse the idea of an algorithm. I remember the last time they popped up on HN someone pointed out how the licenses Algorithmia uses are one-sided. Has this situation improved at all, so developers aren't at a legal disadvantage?

proksoup 10y ago
Off topic: would it be insane for HN (or other platforms like it) to show publicly the users that up vote? To allow the crowd to assist in researching and identifying vote spam? I suppose there could be negative consequences from that ....
- kevin_thibedeau 10y ago
  They could expose anonymized user names that can't be correlated with an account. Maybe just assign everyone a random secondary ID for aggregate reporting along with some coarse info on account age to make throwaways more obvious.
doppenhe 10y ago
[founder] The idea behind algorithmia is to expose algorithms, functions and ML models through an API so that they can be adapted from any language you as the developer feel comfortable in. Today we added a number of different languages our platform supports - expanding the number of developers that can contribute to our platform. The larger the library the more you can do with it. Regarding the licenses. We support 4 types of licenses currently 3 FOSS and 1 Algorithmia Platform. The Algorithmia Platform takes no rights other than giving us permission to run your code on our platform and provide it as a service. At no point do we take ANY ownership of your IP. The only thing that can be seen as a restriction is that once you put an algorithm in our platform that version will always be there - this is just to guarantee to anybody building on top of our API that the code will always be there for them. Regarding upvotes - HN has serious voting ring detection behind it and this climbed the ranks naturally since posted this morning. We are avid participants in this community with no intention of manipulating what is of interest.
- speedkills 10y ago
  So can I write a sweet left pad algorithm and allow people to depend on it in a multitude of languages now?
  - newjersey 10y ago
    As much as I like to make fun of node js and everything it stands for, the kik/left pad debacle materialized due to incompetence/malice on npm's part. That being said, I agree with thee other posters here. If I could downvote article submissions I would downvote this one. OP, the world doesn't need this. Please stop. Thanks!
- TheCowboy 10y ago
  Thanks for responding. That makes it more salient. I see this as useful for cases where there is a niche need for some SaaS, but not enough demand to necessitate a full-blown startup around it requiring multiple developer salaries? I'd just softly suggest to make sure that the problem you're solving doesn't get lost in the marketing. Often I'll visit the sites of startups and not be able to quickly discern what it is they're doing, even after clicking their "about" page. Don't feel like it's repetitive to keep explaining this when most people aren't your customers yet.
  - doppenhe 10y ago
    I appreciate you taking the time to give us feedback. At the core of Algorithmia we look to operationalize for scale. You can develop your own algorithms and use us as your infrastructure never having to worry about spinning up a machine again. You can mix and match work from others regardless of language. You can open source it all and make it available (caveat we still charge for running on our infrastructure) or you can make it closed source and share with no one. The algorithm developer is always in control, we just look to facilitate actually using these algorithms, libraries, ml models and functions vs reading about it in an academic paper or trying to resolve every dependency under the sun. The truth is that getting things up and running can take hours to days and Algorithmia turns it into seconds. This is how we beleive we are liberating knowledge... By making applicable and usable to developers in their day to day.
williamstein 10y ago
FWIW I upvoted this because I'm very curious what other people on HN will think of it.

proksoup 10y ago

Off topic: would it be insane for HN (or other platforms like it) to show publicly the users that up vote? To allow the crowd to assist in researching and identifying vote spam? I suppose there could be negative consequences from that ....

kevin_thibedeau 10y ago
They could expose anonymized user names that can't be correlated with an account. Maybe just assign everyone a random secondary ID for aggregate reporting along with some coarse info on account age to make throwaways more obvious.

doppenhe 10y ago

[founder] The idea behind algorithmia is to expose algorithms, functions and ML models through an API so that they can be adapted from any language you as the developer feel comfortable in. Today we added a number of different languages our platform supports - expanding the number of developers that can contribute to our platform. The larger the library the more you can do with it. Regarding the licenses. We support 4 types of licenses currently 3 FOSS and 1 Algorithmia Platform. The Algorithmia Platform takes no rights other than giving us permission to run your code on our platform and provide it as a service. At no point do we take ANY ownership of your IP. The only thing that can be seen as a restriction is that once you put an algorithm in our platform that version will always be there - this is just to guarantee to anybody building on top of our API that the code will always be there for them. Regarding upvotes - HN has serious voting ring detection behind it and this climbed the ranks naturally since posted this morning. We are avid participants in this community with no intention of manipulating what is of interest.

speedkills 10y ago
So can I write a sweet left pad algorithm and allow people to depend on it in a multitude of languages now?
- newjersey 10y ago
  As much as I like to make fun of node js and everything it stands for, the kik/left pad debacle materialized due to incompetence/malice on npm's part. That being said, I agree with thee other posters here. If I could downvote article submissions I would downvote this one. OP, the world doesn't need this. Please stop. Thanks!
TheCowboy 10y ago
Thanks for responding. That makes it more salient. I see this as useful for cases where there is a niche need for some SaaS, but not enough demand to necessitate a full-blown startup around it requiring multiple developer salaries? I'd just softly suggest to make sure that the problem you're solving doesn't get lost in the marketing. Often I'll visit the sites of startups and not be able to quickly discern what it is they're doing, even after clicking their "about" page. Don't feel like it's repetitive to keep explaining this when most people aren't your customers yet.
- doppenhe 10y ago
  I appreciate you taking the time to give us feedback. At the core of Algorithmia we look to operationalize for scale. You can develop your own algorithms and use us as your infrastructure never having to worry about spinning up a machine again. You can mix and match work from others regardless of language. You can open source it all and make it available (caveat we still charge for running on our infrastructure) or you can make it closed source and share with no one. The algorithm developer is always in control, we just look to facilitate actually using these algorithms, libraries, ml models and functions vs reading about it in an academic paper or trying to resolve every dependency under the sun. The truth is that getting things up and running can take hours to days and Algorithmia turns it into seconds. This is how we beleive we are liberating knowledge... By making applicable and usable to developers in their day to day.

williamstein 10y ago

FWIW I upvoted this because I'm very curious what other people on HN will think of it.