Hacker News Reader

Comment by finolex1 | Hacker News Reader

I don't think it's half as bad as that. Google Flights, Translate, the G-Suite, Firebase and TensorFlow have all been good products/software, though perhaps not world-changing.

View on HN

Google Flights was an acquisition of ITA.

Firebase was an acquisition too.

wasn't Docs an acquisition too? dunno about Sheets but it wouldn't surprise me at this point

yes, docs came from writely. sheets came from xl2web.

Tensorflow was also an aquihire.

You're conflating Google Brain with Deepmind. Tensorflow was decidedly not an "acquihire".

this is not correct. TF was originated and written by Jeff Dean and some other folks after their experience with distbelief.

Youtube too

Not the application itself. ITA was mainly acquired for their data, Flights was developed from the ground up.

True enough. When I get unhappy over cancellation of Wave, Buzz, etc., I should remember that a good part of my career in the last four years has been made around TensorFlow and Keras.

I am a huge fan of TensorFlow.js, the examples, docs, etc. are really good. But, I am nervous about jumping in too deep in case it disappears. Regular TensorFlow is here to stay for the long term.

Translate has been around as long as I can remember. It works exactly how I remember translate.altavista.com working-except I can’t remember whether alta vista could detect language.

The Google Translate android app has a magic camera that recognizes translates and replaces the text in real time in the video feed. That's pretty cool.

So does Google Translate on iPhone. But that was originally Word Lens, then google brought them and for a time the lens app became free then they added the functionality to the Google Translate app.

There has been a staggering amount of innovation in machine translation. Google has some of the leading groups in research for neural machine translation and they put a lot of it into production.

Saying that it works just like Altavista's Bablefish of yore is ridiculous, at least for the European languages I am familiar with. Translation quality as offered by all major services is leagues ahead compared to the state of, say, three years ago.

(Disclaimer: I work on a competitor to Google Translate)

I meant UI...copy paste text on left side and output on right side. Of course there’s been innovation underneath. My comment wouldn't be two sentences if I had any knowledge about how alta vista or google translate work(ed) underneath.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com