econti

Hey HN - spending time adding machine learning to your product is almost never worth it for startups.

Formulating the problem, managing training data, training models, serving them, etc... for a 10% increase in some metric just isn't worth the time. Using rules + heuristics, although not optimal, does a pretty good job for a long time.

There should be a better solution between rules & hardcore ML -- an 80/20 way to add ML to any product. Just slap it on top of the rules you already have, get that 10% gain, and never think about it again.

I built an API that does just that. It's used by a few companies to do everything from shopping cart recommendations to personalized landing page hero text. It takes 10-20 lines of code to implement.

I'd love for anyone in the HN community to kick the tires on this and let me know what you think. Docs are at https://www.banditml.com/.

You can even use this api key immediately without an account to test it out: 1e9d8ef7948e545d25f189addb17dae1.

I recently read about a technique in statistics/ML called "offline policy evaluation".

The idea is that you can evaluate how new policies will perform by using historical data generated under a previous policy. For example, rather than testing a new fraud policy in an A/B test, you can use historical logs to determine if the new policy will outperform the existing one. This seems like it could be a great step before A/B testing new policies.

I whipped up some example code to test out what would be considered the "hello world" of offline policy evaluation if anyone is curious: https://github.com/banditml/offline-policy-evaluation/blob/main/examples/Inverse%20propensity%20scoring.ipynb

My question to you is -- have any of you have tried this or do any of your currently use OPE at your companies?

Hey HN, I'm Edo, one of the co-founders of Refinery (https://www.refinery.so/). We founded Refinery to make it simple to edit your website's frontend without needing to write code. Refinery is a chrome extension that lets you edit your website in-browser and then lets you push the changes live instantly.

After building a Shopify app, there were so many times when we wanted to quickly change some copy here and there, but didn’t want to have to start our dev environment, open our text editor, make the change, create a branch, create a PR, … you get it. Luckily our team is 3 software engineers, but it got us thinking around how our first marketing or sales hire would make these changes.

The current version of Refinery essentially turns your existing website into a CMS. Right now you can use Refinery to tweak copy, but more functionality is coming soon. Specifically, we’re working on adding the ability to tweak CSS, add links & tooltips to copy, and run A/B tests on different possible tweaks… all which can be done in-browser.

We’ve on-boarded a few companies in the past week where Refinery is typically being used by non-engineers (founders, PMs, & marketers) who don’t want to bother engineers with small copy tweaks.

Installation is really easy. Install our chrome extension, add a JS snippet to your head tag, and you’re good to go:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/refinery-editor/pmfpnhdkcikalnldmkmcofllbdbannhh

We’d love to hear what the HN community thinks! If you’re really keen on trying it, email me at edo@refinery.so to skip the waitlist.

Hey HN, I'm Edo, one of the co-founders of Refinery (https://www.refinery.so/). We founded Refinery to make it simple to change your React frontend without needing to write code.

Refinery is a chrome extension that lets you edit your React app in-browser and then generates the corresponding code changes automatically. To do so, we are using metaprogramming techniques and a healthy dose of human review . We’ve also started to experiment with using GPT-3 to generate code changes as well and it looks promising!

After building a Shopify app in React, there were so many times when we wanted to quickly change some copy here and there, but didn’t want to have to start our dev environment, open our text editor, make the change, create a branch, create a PR, … you get it. Luckily our team is 3 software engineers, but it got us thinking around how would our first marketing or sales hire make these changes?

The current version of Refinery essentially turns your existing Git repo into a CMS. Right now you can use Refinery to tweak copy, but more functionality is coming soon. Specifically, we’re working on adding the ability to tweak CSS, add links & tooltips to copy, and run A/B tests on different possible tweaks… all which can be done in-browser.

We’ve on-boarded a few companies in the past week where Refinery is typically being used by non-engineers (founders, PMs, & marketers) who don’t want to bother engineers with small copy tweaks. The engineers at these companies have also been happy because they can work on the cool product stuff and rubber stamp the PR’s that Refinery puts out.

Installation is really easy. Install our chrome extension (invite only at the moment), link your team’s github, and you’re good to go. We plan on supporting more browsers in the future, working our way down the most popular.

We’d love to hear what the HN community thinks! We’ll be in the comments all day. If you’re really keen on trying it, email me at edoardo.conti@gmail.com and mention hacker news and we’ll bump you to the top of the waitlist.

Would like to know what are the best options for healthcare when working for yourself in California. How much should I expect to pay?