
Announcing algorithm development support for Python 3, JavaScript, Rust, and Ruby - felix_thursday
http://blog.algorithmia.com/2016/05/algorithmia-now-supports-python-3-javascript-rust-ruby/
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codelitt
I said this in a reddit thread[1], but I really just have a philosophical
aversion to this. The industry has moved forward because of open source code.
If I come up with a great algorithm, it is in my best interest to share it
with others, have it improved upon, and contribute to the community. What if
something like quick sort were only available if I paid someone for the
snippet/service?

I might pay to use a service that allowed an implementation not in my projects
language (and it's faster, I can't be bothered to write it, etc), but close
sourcing or licensing of algorithms seems to go against the entire ethos of
the community.

Especially in the wake of Oracle v Google and the implications that it could
have on APIs, I really think to purposefully close off algorithms is just
another step in a really bad direction.

[1]:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/ruby/comments/4k4fpr/algorithmia_no...](https://www.reddit.com/r/ruby/comments/4k4fpr/algorithmia_now_supports_ruby_algorithm/d3cclt6)

~~~
tomc1985
This doesn't even look like pay-for-a-snippet (which I agree is a pretty
audacious business model). They sell you a black box, which you interact with
through REST.

As a firm believer that knowledge -- particularly theory -- should be free,
Algorithmia is repulsive. As a developer their black-box model (and not simply
giving me source) is a no-go.

~~~
anowell
While I also generally prefer to choose open source services over closed
source ones, it seems to me there is a place for both....

That said, over 75% of algorithms on the site are open source. Perhaps that's
not obvious enough?

[disclaimer: I'm an engineer at Algorithmia]

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TheCowboy
This feels a little like PR spam, and I noticed it received a lot of upvotes
in a short amount of time without any comments.

Would anyone who upvoted this mind explaining the significance of Algorithmia
in general? The marketing itself seems to misuse the idea of an algorithm.

I remember the last time they popped up on HN someone pointed out how the
licenses Algorithmia uses are one-sided. Has this situation improved at all,
so developers aren't at a legal disadvantage?

~~~
doppenhe
[founder]

The idea behind algorithmia is to expose algorithms, functions and ML models
through an API so that they can be adapted from any language you as the
developer feel comfortable in. Today we added a number of different languages
our platform supports - expanding the number of developers that can contribute
to our platform. The larger the library the more you can do with it.

Regarding the licenses. We support 4 types of licenses currently 3 FOSS and 1
Algorithmia Platform. The Algorithmia Platform takes no rights other than
giving us permission to run your code on our platform and provide it as a
service. At no point do we take ANY ownership of your IP. The only thing that
can be seen as a restriction is that once you put an algorithm in our platform
that version will always be there - this is just to guarantee to anybody
building on top of our API that the code will always be there for them.

Regarding upvotes - HN has serious voting ring detection behind it and this
climbed the ranks naturally since posted this morning. We are avid
participants in this community with no intention of manipulating what is of
interest.

~~~
TheCowboy
Thanks for responding. That makes it more salient. I see this as useful for
cases where there is a niche need for some SaaS, but not enough demand to
necessitate a full-blown startup around it requiring multiple developer
salaries?

I'd just softly suggest to make sure that the problem you're solving doesn't
get lost in the marketing. Often I'll visit the sites of startups and not be
able to quickly discern what it is they're doing, even after clicking their
"about" page. Don't feel like it's repetitive to keep explaining this when
most people aren't your customers yet.

~~~
doppenhe
I appreciate you taking the time to give us feedback. At the core of
Algorithmia we look to operationalize for scale. You can develop your own
algorithms and use us as your infrastructure never having to worry about
spinning up a machine again. You can mix and match work from others regardless
of language. You can open source it all and make it available (caveat we still
charge for running on our infrastructure) or you can make it closed source and
share with no one. The algorithm developer is always in control, we just look
to facilitate actually using these algorithms, libraries, ml models and
functions vs reading about it in an academic paper or trying to resolve every
dependency under the sun. The truth is that getting things up and running can
take hours to days and Algorithmia turns it into seconds. This is how we
beleive we are liberating knowledge... By making applicable and usable to
developers in their day to day.

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gbersac
I wonder why they chosed to support rust, ruby and scala.

Shouldn't they support c an c++ over rust ?Shouldn't they support c#,
coffeescript and go before scala or ruby ?

All the latter programming languager are more mature, more used than the
supported languages.

~~~
anowell
[As one of the developers in charge of this feature...]

That's a fair question.

Rust was a personal itch, but it also provided a good test for supporting
native compilation while providing an excellent dependency management story.
We learned a lot from Rust that will apply to C/C++ and we're talking about
how we want to address the dependency management story of that ecosystem (and
we still need to build a C/C++ client library).

Scala support came alongside Java (and because we're a Scala shop). Ruby was
low-hanging fruit because the client already existed. Coffeescript support
would be pretty easy to add on top of Javascript pending some demand and
interest. C# (on mono) and Go are both interesting languages for us to
reasonably land that didn't make this round.

We definitely have more to announce on this front soon. And by all means, we
love hearing our users request their favorite languages. :-)

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kristianp
That sharing bar covers the text if the browser width is less than 1290px and
it's not closeable. Pretty annoying.

~~~
doppenhe
thanks for reporting - looking into this now.

~~~
kristianp
It's still there, 4 days later.

