
BayesDB – a probabilistic programming platform - kaivi
http://probcomp.csail.mit.edu/bayesdb/
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zellyn
FWIW, I was trying to figure out if this was the Church successor (no, that's
"Venture"), and found
[http://probcomp.csail.mit.edu/](http://probcomp.csail.mit.edu/), which gives
an overview.

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andy_ppp
Wow this looks great, I've been thinking about something that does exactly
this for a while.

Apps that start to order everything by your preferences built up over time
start to become possible and automatically repeating past uses. E.g. A new
report completed and its 70% percent certain you move reports to a certain
folder, it just happens.

Needs a lot of UI thought to be easy to override...

Anyway, I'd be interested to see how performant this is.

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phunge
Have a look at DeepDive too:
[http://deepdive.stanford.edu/](http://deepdive.stanford.edu/), this looks
very similar at first glance. The approach of treating data
integration&extraction as a statistical inference problem is IMHO a big idea
on the rise.

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nkozyra
A lot of talk about this being aimed at "non-technical" people, but these
types of interfaces are still widely needed for developers, too. It can make
trivial jobs much, much faster to complete both programmatically and through a
GUI. Technical folks like abstractions too!

I like this quite a bit, although the similarity to SQL might pose more
problems than it's worth in the long run.

That and AmazonML's striking similarity to Excel/CSV (not to mention the crop
of ML-on-demand providers) show these types of interfaces and user experiences
are a pretty glaring need right now in data science / ML / classification.

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jghn
I saw them present a while back and someone in the audience asked "why SQL"
stating that all innovative projects like this end up coming up with their own
query language. The response was that everyone knows SQL so it's easy to get
started and that they want to enable access from environments like Python and
R for more advanced querying.

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murbard2
In addition, SQL design is simply really good. It's of the few successful
declarative language: you get what you describe. It's also a total, in that
all programs terminate. These are really good characteristics to have.

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nkozyra
SQL _is_ really good. My issue is you run into inconsistencies in the way you
expect a function to work (when they're shared semantically across SQL and BQL
in this case) and that eventually leads to confusion. Like working in the
Arduino language versus C.

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mayneack
previous discussion. They've come a long way
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6864339](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6864339)

