alt Hacker NewsFunny item co-occurrences in 3.2M Instacart orders
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Time for me to re-post my perennial "fun banana facts" post:
Bananas are the #1 most-sold item at most grocery stores including, notably, Wal-Mart.
Bananas also have the highest standard deviation in terms of predicting if a given (known) consumer will purchase bananas in a given store run. (At least as compared to other food products and consumables.) When predicting a consumer's shop, it's generally pretty easy to make a highly educated guess about their purchasing activity and, thus, to project volumes for products. But bananas defy that wisdom, except that people in aggregate buy a lot of them. Someone who buys bananas reliably every week for months will randomly stop for months, and then start again, for no perceivable rhyme or reason. Bananas aren't seasonal purchases like berries or corn or other fruits or vegetables. Bananas also tend to be a high volume item at gas stations and convenience stores.
Bananas have to be effectively "tricked" into continuing to ripen after being prematurely picked green and then refrigerated for transit. So there are banana ripening centers that pump ethylene through a chilled chamber to get them to ripen.
My conclusion: there's nothing funny about groceries, no matter how you order them. Counterexamples welcome.
(Makes sense as I never felt the urge to laugh after looking in someone else's shopping basket.
Anyway, perhaps that's why I'm not a data analyst.)
"Banana" and "Extra Fancy Unsalted Mixed Nuts" only occurred once? They go together.
Here is a likely scenario for the baby food/ adult diapers combo: Someone who suffered so much damage during childbirth that they are still struggling with their bowels by the time their baby is on solids. Hilarious!
Edit: obligatory single down vote on author post to author content.
Using LLM embedding cosine similarity to classify products into larger categories (bricks) wasn’t something I would’ve thought of. Last I heard of word vectors was back when word2vec came out, I guess in the back of my mind I knew LLMs have something similar and it makes sense that open weight models reveal that information easily.
Are there any "funny" combinations in that list that don't involve toilet humor?
I like to think I have a sense of humor, but if this is funny, maybe I don't.
I wish they didn't know this. I wish all the stores could agree to mind their own business and sell their products ingenuously, in blissful unawareness of what any customer buys alongside what other thing, instead of following us around taking notes.
This idea sounded like it had lots of humour potential. Unfortunately, if there is in fact humour to be found in this dataset, it appears to be beyond the reach of current data science techniques.
Analyzing substitutes and complements was a mainstay of data scientists 10-20 years ago. Too mundane to mention now.
search for peas and honey!
Reminds me of that time Netflix made fun of its customers that watched bad Christmas movies over and over. It's in poor taste.
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> Much better! Some of these even made me laugh out loud. Kale and an enema? Parsley and condoms? Adult diapers and baby food?
> Small orders are less common but we still got some fun ones. Oreos and lube? Sounds like a good time!
Funny to who? Was this rated "for sure funny" by a LLM or what's going on? Why is it funny to buy Oreo and lube? I could understand "contradictions" or something like that (like buying weight loss pills + loads of candy/sodas) could be fun I guess, but just cookies and rubber? Why would someone buying kale and an enema make someone else laugh out loud?