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Re:Show HN: An easy-to-use Text Analysis API – NLP and Machi... by LambdaAlmighty on Tuesday February 18, 2014 @09:55AM (#7258367)
Sorry, don't understand your last sentence.

It seems to contradict the paragraph before -- ML as a service seems a terrible idea for the reasons you just listed (among others). What's "Hella Neat" about that?

Re:Show HN: An easy-to-use Text Analysis API – NLP and Machi... by phillmv on Tuesday February 18, 2014 @11:24AM (#7258962)
The problem mostly stems from the vast risk you take on from making a large investment in an unstable/unproven platform vendor.

Servers are relatively fungible, given ops automation; it's painful but not the end of the world if you have to migrate away.

But the technology is still relatively immature in that building your own ML service in house - and having it scale, etc - is still a big pain.

I would immensely prefer it if we first brought ML libraries up to a higher level of maturity - as simple as apt-get install and adding `includes ActiveLearning::Bayes` to your models.

But if a client came to me tomorrow and said "there's this great Amazon API that we're thinking of using" I wouldn't consider that insane on first principles.