Ask HN: How should I implement sentiment analysis with no money?

[penguinium]

I'm making a product and hosting on a very cheap server I can afford. One feature uses the sentiment of user input.

So far, I'm doing it with an old, bulky neural network running as a process on the same web server. It works okay, but I think that will scale very poorly.

So I'm considering other options. I can use a small, fast naive sentiment classifier (like TextBlob), but it has really bad accuracy. Alternatively, I can use free credits on the Google Cloud sentiment API until I get a customer and can afford to set my own fast, accurate analysis server up. But I don't know if I will have enough cloud credits to get me to that point, without getting squeezed.

So I'm not sure what to do. Do you have any ideas?

[hcta]

Do it client-side with tensorflow.js

[ethanwillis]

Another spin on this is to make it a DAPP(decentralized app) where users pay for invocations. Look at something like iExec.

I was toying a few years ago with iExec to do some bioinformatics algorithms at a low cost on an infrastructure that users could pay for, but that I wouldn't have to pay to host.

The benefit of this is that it doesn't have to just be client side. It can also be backend as well.

[penguinium]

Oh that's interesting! But won't a big model heavily slow down the website? Is there a model that you think might be tractable for this sorta thing?

[beaconstudios]

if you run it in a web worker, it should run on a separate thread to the website itself so it shouldn't cause the website any issues unless the model eats all the user's RAM.

[penguinium]

Is it reliable for mobile users? What if they visit another page before the model finishes evaluating?

[beaconstudios]

1. You'd have to try it out with your model

2. Then presumably they don't get their result, but that's to be expected if they navigate away

[ApolloRising]

Can you self host some of it? How much can you afford, you left that part out so it is hard to figure out what would fit in your budget.

[penguinium]

~$40 a month