Author: Rauf Aliev

I’m currently listening to a training video, apparently with an American in the lead role, where multi channel is pronounced as ‘maltAI chenl’. By the way, that’s the norm. Here’s a song about it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2oEmPP5dTM

We have a store here where all the prices are twice as high as usual, and yet it’s insanely popular. Why? Because hardly anyone buys anything expensive at full price. But people still buy, and that’s what the business model relies on. The store is called Michaels. In Russia, the closest equivalent in terms of assortment is “Leonardo”.

In the USA, you can almost always find a 50% coupon at Michaels – though true, it’s one coupon per bill, but you can select the most expensive item, and unfortunately, buy the rest at full price. But you can go either with a partner or in a small group, or even enter the store a couple of times. Every receipt gives 25% off on the next purchase. Thus, with a bit of savvy, you can buy everything for less than half the price tag. But! There’s a ton of little things being sold that you’d want to purchase. Well, you come to the cashier with a basket, you won’t be ringing up a separate bill for each individual glue stick or pencil.

There’s a ton of people who don’t bother with coupons. “They’re above that” 🙂 As a result, it results in an interesting model: the store effectively has two prices: for the casual/wealthy and for the prepared/economical shoppers. I think that the first group is quite large, although it feels like everyone here uses coupons.

It’s interesting how Google works: if you search for site:http://domain/folder1/folder2/* it shows 85 results, none of which include http://domain/folder1/folder2/folder3/folder4/file. This somewhat implies that this URL does not exist on Google at all – I clicked through all ten pages of results. But not at all – it does exist if you request it directly. If you type in site:http://domain/folder1/folder2/folder3/folder4/* it brings up this URL.

In a year and a half in the USA, I have not used any online stores other than Amazon, Walmart, and eBay. This speaks to how the market is divided, using myself as an example.

So I walk out of the office to the parking lot, and there he is…

Published an article about Concept-aware search: recognizing facets in a query. Inside, there’s a demo showing the difference between how default search works and the same search but with my logic on top. It’s called, feel the difference 🙂

The idea is this: if you are searching for something with the query “red dress size 39”, you should not be shown products with all these words in the description or title, but products filtered by the tag “red”, “dress”, and “size 39”. For the Russian language, it will still require some more work, while it already works for English.

Welcome!

Please help me come up with a name) I’ve created a search prototype that automatically sets facets. For example, when searching for blue armada jacket XXL, it actually searches by the keyword jacket, and the other three words are used for facets (color=blue, brand=armada, size=XXL).

The rough draft name is Automatic Search Facet Discovery, but I’m worried it could be confused with automatically creating facets based on content during indexing.

Google searches don’t yield any articles or products, or maybe I’m just not searching well.

Perhaps somebody has some thoughts?)

How far technology has come 🙂 I’ve been having some battery issues, went on Dell’s website, it suggested I download a diagnostic tool. The diagnosis came back with “Battery’s bad, we’ll send you a new one for free, your laptop is under warranty, all good. Enter your address.” I did. Now waiting for the new one. I’m not used to this kind of service. Normally, you have to go somewhere and prove something to someone.

I wonder how the situation with quadcopters will evolve. Look, everything is progressing towards batteries lasting for days, and the operator can be at any distance from the drone. Essentially, it all comes down to the batteries. In five or fifteen years, there will be plenty of them.

This means that from that moment on, privacy in the open air will cease to exist. You step into your kitchen, and there’s a camera hanging outside the window watching you. There are no real means to counter this: it’s not like you can shoot at them with a pistol. And even if you knock it down, the data has already been sent to the network, and the owner has lost a hundred bucks.

Legally banning them is also pointless: it’s impossible to identify the owner with powerful batteries in place. Overall, with a sufficiently smart payload, a drone can easily escape if it is small, can move in any direction, and can do so swiftly and unpredictably.

What do you think, will this change people’s lives? Option #1: everyone ignores the lack of privacy and just lives honestly and openly (I doubt it). Option #2: People will start hiding what’s interesting to capture better. Option #3: Some form of countermeasures will be developed. Example: combat automaton drones that launch when an “intruder” approaches. We would then observe occasional drone fights 🙂

However, there is also a fourth option. Only a small group of people who already do not need drones will be able to afford them. And the rest will quietly plant rice and solve completely different problems.

The guys next to me are fine-tuning an automated watering system for window plants on a Raspberry PI, and they are having some issues with the humidity sensors. They don’t work very consistently. Well, the reason why is quite clear. I just suggested an idea to them – to place the plants on scales and water them when the weight drops below a certain value (meaning that the soil is drying out).

And from there, an interesting discussion ensued. What contributes to a plant’s mass? After all, trees grow, taking mass from somewhere. Where from?

There are few options: soil, water, carbon dioxide. What decreases and in what proportion? If a plant gains a kilogram in weight, by how much should the soil get lighter?

PDF on the topic http://www.eurohydro.com/pdf/articles/gb_plant-food4.pdf