It seems to me more like an old school product-and-media acquisition: Google like the product, and love the audience. This is a good way to get both.
The whole thing is strange.
2) If Google is trying to recruit people from Kaggle accounts, why not simply index the accounts?
Neither approach requires purchasing Kaggle at all.
Only Kaggle has the full data to be able to make an accurate decision. I don't really think indexing account pages is even remotely enough to find the really talented people among the noise.
I think Google acquired Kaggle for one of the following two reasons: 1) they wanted to expand their talent acquisition reach[1], or 2) they wanted to build a platform like Kaggle aimed at Google Cloud, but figured out that it was just easier to acquire Kaggle itself.
[1]: Google will NEVER be satisfied with its talent pool given their size and rate of expansion. The company is prepared to do a ton -- perhaps even acquiring Kaggle -- to get the best of the best, wherever they are.
What ninja upgrade? You always had to opt-in. Yes, they were really pushing the offer annoyingly hard, but I had no problems whatsoever to keep one of my machines on Windows 7.
Anyway, you can stop doing so now, the time for a free upgrade is over.
Not a solution for those of us who run Windows boxes for various reasons...
And to clarify, I plan on occasionally letting updates through (I'm already on Windows 10) but this is a great way to prevent data collection / backdoor activation, which I hadn't considered. Seems like the simplest way to add a lot of privacy to Windows.
And considering the Windows 10 upgrade was being pushed through Windows Update I'm not sure how you'd want to prevent that specific update by blocking an IP and not interfere with Windows Update as a whole.
> At Kaggle we initially chose F# for our core data analysis algorithms because of its expressiveness. We’ve been so happy with the choice that we’ve found ourselves moving more and more of our application out of C# and into F#. The F# code is consistently shorter, easier to read, easier to refactor, and, because of the strong typing, contains far fewer bugs.
> As our data analysis tools have developed, we’ve seen domain-specific constructs emerge very naturally; as our codebase gets larger, we become more productive.
> The fact that F# targets the CLR was also critical - even though we have a large existing code base in C#, getting started with F# was an easy decision because we knew we could use new modules right away.
The idea that if you do C# you must be on Azure (or the other way around) has been outdated since Azure started. The first startup I ran tech at hosted C# on Mono in Docker containers on DigitalOcean and had devs on all 3 major OSes.
[1]: http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/06/rhino-on-rails.html?...
Don't know how true this still holds, but there was a time at least where it sounds like anything outside of C++, JVM languages and Python was off limits.
In any case, congrats to the Kaggle team!
There's value in controlling mindshare; keep everything proprietary too long, and people just use open-source clones that may be inferior but can actually be used by the majority of the talent pool.
I believe I was already using EMR when Google's MapReduce service was announced. I'm not referring to their internal tool, but the external service.
...which is sorta my point. People remember the version of the technology that makes it accessible to them, not the first one that comes out. When Google keeps thing proprietary forever and only releases academic papers, people quickly forget just how far ahead they were.
Kind of reminds me of the genius move by Tesla to crowdsource collection of self-driving car information. Experts want to get where they have the data to train their models, and if Tesla propels itself ahead of the pack for number of miles of real-world training data, then that makes them very attractive to talent.
It's worrying since it suggests that google might be planning to make it, or at least parts of it proprietary in the future....
For the record, I don't think that google will, but I'm still worried about the possibility....
They made angular and they didn't some how proprietary it.
The more worrisome stuff is when they close shop on services or completely change a framework.
TensorFlow isn't a service so we don't need to worry. And I doubt they would change TensorFlow so much like angular 1 to 2 to 3 kinda deal. If it does happen Keras library abstract it iirc.
I think their goals is to get people to use their cloud services imo. They do the same with their nexus without the SD card to push people to the cloud.
Also I think it's almost like the idea of controlling a framework instead of being on the whim of some other company. I'm looking at Oracle and Java here.
Facebook have their NN. Google have their owns. So they don't have politics to deal with.
And the hardware advantage is easily negated. For example, our startup is building something like this.
Vertical integration is powerful, and by open-sourcing Tensorflow Google is achieving useful synergies in sales and recruiting. At their vast scale, even small ROIs (as a percentage) can be massive.
That would be the Google-only Tensorflow acceleration hardware they have.
For example: some friends who run a seed-stage biotech deep learning startup were offered a considerable discount by the Google Cloud folks. Their ask? That the company switch to Google Cloud, rewrite some proprietary software in Tensorflow, and heavily publicize both moves.
I wonder if we'll see Kaggle gain a specific bent towards that ecosystem.