Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

Machine learning is powerful in many domains, but it's giving engineers license to be lazy. I don't know why everyone isn't using NNs and the likes as augments to existing code so that they keep what already works fine, but rather, they feel they can just replace it, which leads to all the problems we see now in Google, in autocorrect, and so on.


>Machine learning is powerful in many domains, but it's giving engineers license to be lazy.

The problem is that if you do machine learning, you just throw data at it to correct wrong behaviors. It's difficult to marry this with a logical approach, like dictionary frequency. Which one do you weight how much? 50:50? What if the user dislikes one of the two models more often, do you add another layer of machine learning here?


remember Watson in jeopardy? Even when it got the question wrong you’d often see the right answer in the list of possibilities it showed.

Users need a way to train/override the ML to “fix” mistakes.




Consider applying for YC's Fall 2026 batch! Applications are open till July 27.

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: