Harimwakairi

Your success in delivering great software will depend as much on your ability to work with people as it will the technical skills you so carefully husband.

I wish I could upvote this more than once.

"An attempt to go hard on machine learning and apply it everywhere will probably work out pretty badly. I haven't the slightest idea what new and novel problem I'd solve with it that doesn't have a better solution through a more straight-forward approach."

Assuming they have the money, isn't this exactly the kind of reason Google should train up a wide spectrum of engineers from different teams and then see how they apply machine learning to their respective domains? It would be foolish for Google's management to think they can divine a priori all the best possible uses of ML in their various lines of business. Why not tool up a bunch of smart people, set them loose, and see what works?

Yep. Thank god for runtime permissions, at least.

In Silicon Valley, yes.

While I completely agree that attendance at a four-year university is overhyped as The Key to Success, the idea that "you can always go back to college" is flawed. While people do go back to school all the time, calling a multiyear timeout on making money is extremely difficult once you start acquiring real responsibilities, and working a real job while in school is no cakewalk.

source: I dropped out, worked as an engineer, then went back and graduated at 29.

Yahoo's fantasy football software creates millions of machine-written summaries of their fantasy football matches after each week of play. They're several paragraphs long and point out interesting things about the particulars of the teams' performance.

I would imagine that given the "All-22" camera footage from a football game, it would be possible to construct a piece of software to monitor what was going on (visually identify players by name/number, determine who has the ball, etc.) and then convert that model to a stream of English text.

Making it nuanced and entertaining, on the other hand, would be a challenge. :)

True, but Microsoft is such an enterprise company that it fits their customer base really well (e.g. "I don't care if it's pretty, I just need an inexpensive-to-build app for my 3,000 workers that runs on either platform").

"They have every logo on here except Apple," was the first thing I thought upon seeing the page.

No, it isn't.

Poetry is an entirely separate discipline with a long list of associated skills, some of which overlap with those possessed by a good programmer. You're not a poet unless you're a poet, so just call yourself a good coder for fuck's sake. It's not like it's less prestigious.

source: published poet who works as a software engineer.

Probably depends on the performance of the initial resident. :)

How easy will it be to reverse engineer these and use them for other purposes? And is anyone else old enough to remember Cue Cat?

Ask Netscape how they feel about Microsoft giving Internet Explorer away.

You make a good point, but surely you'd admit that you're not versed on every possible danger that a toy could present. For example, what if we discover a year from now that a particular paint or varnish that we thought was completely safe is actually toxic?

I would imagine that both our governments pay experts to research such things, and making their conclusions more accessible seems like a useful enterprise.

Do people just throw the name "Google" into headlines now as a means to grab attention? Google neither invented nor popularized the open office, which has been around since the 1960's.

I love that every month or two someone who missed it the first time rediscovers this article, has the "holy crap!" moment, and posts it to HN. :)

While I agree with you that anti-patent rhetoric often spawns ridiculous headlines with unread articles beneath them, do you not feel that Amazon's patent in this case is a little odd?

Here's the abstract, for those who tl;dr'ed the article:

"Disclosed are various embodiments of a studio arrangement and a method of capturing images and/or video. One embodiment of the disclosure includes a front light source aimed at a background, an image capture position located between the background and the front light source, an elevated platform positioned between the image capture position and the background, and at least one rear light source positioned between the elevated platform and the background. A subject can be photographed and/or filmed on the elevated platform to achieve a desired effect of a substantially seamless background where a rear edge of the elevated platform is imperceptible to an image capture device positioned at the image capture position."

It appears that they've managed to patent the idea of setting up two lights, a white background, and a small pedestal for the object to be photographed. Isn't it a logical certainty that this has been done before? How is this an innovation worthy of legal protection?

Upvoted. There are tons of hardworking poor kids at less prestigious schools, and tons of grade-grubbing slacks and practice field All-Americans at the selective ones.

If you have zero time to weed a large pile down to a small one and thus no other choice, I can see this being a logical step. However, if you're hiring for any engineering position and the application form doesn't ask for a link to something the candidate has built (be it on Github, Sourceforge, or just on the web in general), you're likely missing out on the most important metric.

hopTo Inc., Campbell, California (http://hopto.com/careers)

I'm a team lead at hopTo, and we're currently hiring mobile developers and people with a Windows background. The latter is my team, and if you're someone who's bored with his/her current enterprise-level job coding for the Microsoft stack and want something more challenging, I'd love to talk with you.

Our product involves some low-level hackery in C++/C# on the Windows side, stuff like coding messages ourselves and feeding them to window handles, custom drivers, and other bits. We need people who have a solid background with Windows architecture (MFC, Windows Forms, etc) and the drive to learn the rest. If you're looking to move up from a standard .Net job, this is a way to do it.

In return, we offer solid salaries and stock shares (we're a public company!), a flat hierarchy with a great team, four weeks off, and very competitive games of FIFA on our XBox. Additionally, we hate overtime. I've never once been asked to stay late and crunch, though my work is fun enough that I'll sometimes hack on the weekends anyway.

If you're interested, please email a resume to andrew at hopto.com, along with a link to something you've built (either a web site, or a Github repo, or whatever).