wingcommander, can you let us know, what you would have done differently to improve the accuracy?

I'm willing to bet most startups or businesses in general do not have a statistician on staff. Or even as a personal contact.

I kind of think the basic-ness is the point here. The article is mainly about identifying the opportunity, finding and cleaning the data, making some choices about what to feed into the model, and applying results.

Having worked in business-related mathematics (did an MS in industrial engineering/ops research), I have definitely noticed how critical the "non-technical" aspects are, and how much mileage you can get out of relatively basic stuff if you do those steps well (and how little mileage you get out of sophisticated stuff if you haven't).

you must be fun at parties

I didn't intend any disrespect.

I just think the title was a bit sensationalist.

When you know more than someone else does about a topic, the best way to comment on that topic here is to share some of what you know. Then we all learn.

Comments that are only dismissive, or are supercilious about knowing more than others, are deprecated here. It would be a good idea to read the following which describe what we're looking for on the site:

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

Oh, and welcome to Hacker News! (I'm a moderator here.)