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Comment by alex_dev | Hacker News Reader

Last I heard was Kaggle runs atop Azure and is heavily a C# shop. It'll be interesting to see the transition to Google Cloud if that's the case.

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I can confirm that Kaggle runs on Azure because I block all Microsoft IPs (to avoid the ninja Windows 10 upgrade) and must disable the blocker in order to go on the site.

As skrebbel said, don't they charge for the upgrade now? That said, Never10[1] was (still is?) a great tool to prevent the Windows 10 auto-upgrade. Also, according to the Never10 page, Microsoft now has an optional update to get rid of the GWX stuff.[2]

[1] https://www.grc.com/never10.htm

[2] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3184143

> to avoid the ninja Windows 10 upgrade

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.

This is incorrect. There was an opt-out phase where the Windows 10 install started automatically in the middle of work. I've experienced this myself, there's a moment where Windows 7 just shuts down and starts installing Windows 10 and I had to wait 30 minutes until I could press "I disagree" to the EULA and then it would start rolling back the Windows 10 it just installed.

Entirely off topic, but I thought they now charge for the Windows 10 upgrade and don't force it anymore?

They do charge now but you can get it free if you say you will use an accessibility feature.

Why not upgrade to Windows 10? It's my favorite Windows OS yet, and has me even rethinking whether I want our house to be all OS X...

This thread from a while back covers some of people's objections to Windows 10, outside the usual privacy concerns:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13555100

So you don't get windows updates?

At this point presumably a system not running Windows 10 is not getting updates anymore. Unless it's an enterprise install, in which case the ninja update is irrelevant.

I get updates on Win 7

This is a great idea. Adding it to my DNS blackhole as we speak.

It's really not a great idea. Either you don't run Windows, and it's not an issue, or you just blocked Windows Update and other important services Microsoft provide that work in tandem to keep your systems safe.

Blocking Windows Update sounds like a feature to me, not an issue.

> Either you don't run Windows, and it's not an issue,

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.

There are a shed load you can block without interefering with updates.

Yet that's not what the parent and its parent were talking about/implying. It clearly said "blocking all Microsoft IPs".

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.

Makes sense. Azure LBs do not support ICMP and all ping packets are dropped. You can't ping any Azure-hosted services. Kaggle.com fits the description.

I'm pretty sure it supports ICMP, as TCP/IP cannot work properly without it. I guess you mean ICMP echo. Also there are like four kind of Azure load balancers and this is only true for some of them.

I can ping bing.com, but does that mean bing is not hosted on Azure? [Though it redirects to pinging something like a-0001.a-msedge.net]

It may just not use the Azure LB service (e.g. running HAProxy on virtual machines instead).

They are also known to have used F#, and even provided a testimonial to this effect: http://fsharp.org/testimonials/. Can't say if it's still used, though. That's two recent high-profile acquisitions (with Jet.com) for F# shops.

> 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.

Google Cloud supports Windows, right? What would be the problem? (Honest question)

None whatsoever, unless they're heavily bought into Azure-specific services.

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.

I'd be surprised if there isn't a decent amount of C# somewhere in the Google ecosystem.

I'd be interested if anyone knows anything about this. Especially given the recent updates to for running .NET core on Linux/Mac, a company like Google could make great use of C# without needing to shell out for Windows licenses.

Relevant 10 year old blog post [1].

[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.

The IP of kaggle.com reverse DNS is cloudapp.net which is a Microsoft Azure domain so I think that this makes sense.

That's really interesting to hear. I wouldn't read too much into it, I was mostly just speculating. It's quite likely that they mostly scooped them up for the rolodex that is their user database.

In any case, congrats to the Kaggle team!

I think this may have something to do with Jeremy Howard's time as president there - I remember watching a few of his tutorials a couple of years ago when he was still at Kaggle and he was really into C#.

I wonder if Nest has support contracts for any Java 6/7 they are still using.

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