Comment by syllogism | Hacker News Reader

Comment by syllogism | Hacker News Reader

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Thanks for the love :). For the record yes we've been working hard, but also yes, we've been doing well from it.

I will say that people are using spaCy for free because that is what we asked them to do. I chose to make the library free and open-source when I first released it because I had the idea that I would be able to make that work out for me, if I could make this thing that would be useful to people and if they could be convinced to adopt it. And in order to convince people to adopt it, we've been telling people that spaCy will stay free and that we'll continue to work on it. So everything's going to plan here. Even if things weren't working out well for us (and they are), the fault would be entirely ours. I don't think we'd have any right to suddenly say, "Oh none of you jerks are paying, how unfair".

(For the record, we make money from sales of our annotation tool, Prodigy: https://prodi.gy . If you're reading this and you like spaCy, check it out ;)

I want to personally thank you for your work, and let you know I couldn’t have done an important project of mine if spaCy didn’t exist, and if it were not a free resource.

Your project was 1 of the 2 instrumental tools in my project to structure the transcripts of every word said on the floor of the New York State Senate over the past ~30 years in order to develop a topic-based “proximity” heuristic (based on CorEx, the 2nd instrumental tool) for which state senators were focused on which issues, based on the things they actually said on the record, not based on their press statements or their voting records (the latter of which doesn’t capture all the information you’d hope it would due to procedural nuances too obscure to detail here).

Thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

This sounds super cool, is there a public link to your work? I'd love to check it out

I haven’t written about it or made results publicly available yet, but I do intend to. I can make a note of the email in your profile and ping you with a link when it is available if you’d like.

How about posting it to HN?

Oh wow, Prodigy looks amazing. I need a tool for audio annotation, and looks like you guys built just the right thing for me.

Please invest more in SEO; I didn't find you guys two weeks ago when I researched different options for audio annotation :D.

The only thing that Prodigy is missing is a team based workflow. We've been on the beta list for awhile for it, and are excited for it to come out- but without having a concept of users we've had to use other tools that aren't as polished on the annotation side but which hit our compliance needs.

This. Wholly agree. Currently running a large labelling task with 12 labelers.

Using Amazon ground truth which works fine (although seems quite MVP outside the core functionality e.g wrt reporting or user creation).

What tool have you had success with?

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