> With over a decade of modeling experience and building data science products I have never seen a product ship that relies on k-means and never seen analysis t

> With over a decade of modeling experience and building data science products I have never seen a product ship that relies on k-means and never seen analysis that isn't coming form someone junior in the field that relies on it. I used it exactly once, and it worked quite well :) But that was because I was clustering 1-dimensional data, which has a globally-optimal solution and there was a fast implementation for it available (see my post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30675594 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30675594). So it was okay in that instance to brute-force check a lot of different cluster numbers and then post-process the results with some heuristics.