
Designing The Next-generation Review And Recommendation System
It’s unfortunate that despite of the popularity of social networks and plenty of other services that leverage network effects, the review and recommendation systems that are supposed to help users make the right decisions haven’t changed much. Thumbs-up and thumbs-down or likes and unlikes signal two things: popularity and polarization. If a YouTube video has […]

Data Is More Important Than Algorithms
Netflix Similarity Map In 2006 Netflix offered to pay a million dollar, popularly known as the Netflix Prize, to whoever could help Netflix improve their recommendation system by at least 10%. A year later Korbel team won the Progress Prize by improving Netflix’s recommendation system by 8.43%. They also gave the source code to Netflix […]

Learning From Elevators To Design Dynamic Systems
Elevators suck. They are not smart enough to know which floor you might want to go. They aren’t designed to avoid crowding in single elevator. And they make people press buttons twice, once to call an elevator and then to let it know which floor you want to go to. This all changed during my […]