9 ms·

Google is acquiring Kaggle

810 points by Perados 10y ago

sullyj3 10y ago
How could a company called "Google" not acquire a company called "Kaggle"? This makes me giggle.
moizsajid 10y ago
Really excited about this acquisition! Might open new avenues for the data science community.
throw_away_777 10y ago
Congrats to the Kaggle team! One great thing about Kaggle was that the team listened and sought out feedback from users (even if they didn't always follow the feedback). I hope that doesn't change with the acquisition.
- nojvek 10y ago
  It's amazing how focused Google is on AI compared to the other giants. I think it's a great investment on Google's part and congrats to Kaggle. I hope the mission of the site doesn't change. I think Facebook did a great job with whatsapp and instagram. I expect the same with Kaggle.
danaliv 10y ago
Whoever named this company has literally never spoken to a woman.
- nojvek 10y ago
  Care to explain what kaggle means to a woman? Do you mean kegel, the exercise?
- ScottBurson 10y ago
  I think the name is a little odd too. Does anyone know how they came up with it?
  - Danylon 10y ago
    > I didn’t have any money when I started the company to purchase a domain name so I built an algorithm that iterated phonetic domain names and printed out a list of what was available. My wife and I went through the list and “Kaggle” was the one we picked. It’s algorithmically generated. > It’s a terrible name because most Americans pronounce it “kagel” [rhymes with “bagel”] which sounds like the pelvic floor exercises. Australians pronounce it “kaggel” [rhymes with “haggle”]. -- Anthony Goldbloom, http://www.intelfreepress.com/news/a-marketplace-for-data-scientists/5256/ http://www.intelfreepress.com/news/a-marketplace-for-data-sc...
    - jacques_chester 10y ago
      As an Australian living in the US, it never occurred to me that it would be called anything but the latter.
      - cr0sh 10y ago
        As a self-described redneck in Arizona - the latter seems most appropriate. Why anyone would pronounce it to rhyme with "bagel" makes no sense to me (same as pronouncing "gif" with a soft "G"); IIRC (and I am no linguist), in english there's a rule about how something is pronounced based on surrounding letters - and I think that double consonant vs singular consonant preceded by a vowel is one of those rules. I'm sure there are exceptions, after all (it's english...) - but I have a feeling that if you looked at such words you would find the general pattern to fit. Again - I am willing to admit that I really don't know what I am talking about; I'm not a linguist, I'm not an expert in english. I'm just some guy who last studied english in high school years ago...
        ScottBurson 10y ago
        I feel the same way about "GIF". Alas, the inventor of the GIF format insists on the soft "G" [0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIF#Pronunciation_of_GIF https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIF#Pronunciation_of_GIF
Nydhal 10y ago
I'm not sure if this is good or bad news. I wonder what google motives are and how they will influence kaggle if this becomes reality.
- sonabinu 10y ago
  Hate to think that some of the beauty of Kaggle being independent will be lost but that's likely
- seangrogg 10y ago
  As with many of Google's hires chances are they see it less about acquiring a "product" and more about getting access to what that product produces - an extremely large number of leads in a high-demand space that they're currently trying to ramp up themselves.
  - leblancfg 10y ago
    Interesting, though, as they never needed to own that platform to mine it for hiring leads.
nafizh 10y ago
This must imply Kaggle has some internal software that Google want?
- deepnotderp 10y ago
  Nah, they just want a good recruiting station.
- snissn 10y ago
  I am wondering if it's a marketing and recruiting play
- sunilkumarc 10y ago
  According to the article, Google mainly wants the Kaggle community.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
dthal 10y ago
Well, supposing this is correct...Congratulations to Anthony and the rest of the Kaggle team! Those guys do a great job. Hopefully they get rewarded for it.
deepnotderp 10y ago
Only Google can spend this much on what's ultimately a recruiting project.
- soheil 10y ago
  They have 500,000 developers, do the math at 30% commission for each assuming a $180k salary that's $50k even if they hire 0.1% of them that adds up to $50k * 500 = 25m they probably paid a few times more than that but not a few hundred times, which therefore makes this a pretty sweet deal for Google assuming the community keeps growing.
  - gpawl 10y ago
    do you have buy kaggle to hire kaggle members?
    - soheil 10y ago
      Well I'm not sure if they expose their members' contact info or if it'd be easy for Google to advertise on their site as effectively.
  - throw_away_777 10y ago
    That 500,000 developers is a vanity metric. The real number is around 50,000 who have completed a challenge, and around 5,000 who are active on the site. Also of those 5,000 users the large majority are employed somewhere else.
- trhway 10y ago
  giving that acquihires in AI seem to go like $10M/head, Google access to that Rolodex would pay out pretty quickly
- asafira 10y ago
  You don't think this would drive data scientists to use Google's cloud platform? I.e., if the most well-known data science competition uses the platform, then they will use it after the fact since it's what they know best. Right?
jph00 10y ago
Why does the article say that Ben Hamner was involved in the founding in 2010? He joined years later. Some basic fact checking would be nice, even in tech articles... (Ben has been a great contributor, mind you.)
- kornish 10y ago
  Probably because Crunchbase has Ben's title as "Co-founder & CTO", which is also what his LinkedIn says. It's not unheard of for people who came on ex-post facto to be offered cofounder titles to sweeten the deal or for other reasons (titles are cheaper than equity, I suppose). Edit: just rechecked and his LinkedIn notes Nov 2011 as the start date for Kaggle. Guess it was easier to condense it into one sentence than to explain the difference to TechCrunch's audience?
- redcalx 10y ago
  Yeh as I recall Jeremy Howard was chief boffin at the start, and left some time later to start his own biomedical data analysis company (also in SF).
  - kornish 10y ago
    Funny thing: the comment you're replying to was posted by Jeremy Howard. Pardon if I'm missing some tongue-in-cheekiness.
    - redcalx 10y ago
      heh. I was unaware :)
ebbv 10y ago
Guess that means Kaggle users can expect it to be shut down in the next five years.
- sireat 10y ago
  Sadly I think 5 years to sunset is an optimistic estimate.
pizza 10y ago
Deep Mind keeps acquiring appendages
huula 10y ago
Don't know why. Just don't think this is going to happen.
kornish 10y ago
This is obviously a talent acquisition in more ways than one (the Kaggle team, but also their ability to source machine learning talent). I wonder to what degree it's also a Tensorflow promotion move? It seems like Google is very interested in growing a community around it. 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.
- manojlds 10y ago
  Why does Google want to promote TensorFlow? To make people use more of their cloud offerings?
  - nostrademons 10y ago
    Likely to avoid their mistake with MapReduce, where by around 2011 candidates were coming in to interviews and saying "MapReduce? That's sorta like Hadoop, right?" 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.
    - xapata 10y ago
      More specifically, Amazon Elastic MapReduce (EMR) beat Google to market. By years, if I recall correctly.
      - xapata 10y ago
        Does the downvote indicate my memory is faulty? 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.
        10y ago
soheil 10y ago
I'm a little sad about this, what will Google do with this? Are they going to drain its soul? I think at a minimum the people behind Kaggle won't feel the same urge to keep building , maintaining and growing it the same way as before, specially as the $$$ flows in their pockets. It will probably change direction by people at Google in control and I'm not sure if that's a good thing since they didn't just built something like this on their own or a better version of it if they were really good at doing stuff like this themselves.
- ehsankia 10y ago
  They just officially announced it at NEXT. It was presented by Fei Fei Li, who is known for the ImageNet project, which one one of the first big open datasets that really helped advance this field. The way she presented the news is that they will aim to advance that vision, but we'll have to wait an see how their vision pans out.
iamseiko 10y ago
That's disappointing. Google will probably keep the service alive for recruiting and the consumer base, while most of it's technologies will probably be shut off. Being owned by Google might also mean that some companies might not want to post challenges on Kaggle anymore, like Facebook or Microsoft.
- halflings 10y ago
  What is kaggle's technology really? The notebooks? It's a rather experimental feature that doesn't work all that well most of the time, and shouldn't be going nowhere as a lot of people still appreciate them. I agree for big companies though, even if that doesn't make a whole lot of sense (as there's no private info involved here, the competitions being in the open including the data provided by these companies).
- myth_drannon 10y ago
  Some people spend years competing and trying to get top rankings. It was a great signal to show to recruiters/potential employers. If Google shuts it down, all this work will be gone.
- inlined 10y ago
  I really don't understand this assumption that all acquisitions are going to lead to disaster. I work in the Firebase team at Google and couldn't be happier that they've joined (it's what got me to return to Google). Google doubled down on the product and it's grown in ways that Firebase could never have achieved on its own. All while integrating into the broader ecosystem of Cloud. Firebase then acquired DivShot and people cried doom. Yes DivShot was shut down--after completely rearchitecting Firebase's CLI and Hosting to have DivShot's open source web hosting framework with the features of both product lines. The CEO of DivShot now runs Firebase Hosting's product line and has massive resources at his disposal to push his (great) agenda of simple and speedy static web services.
outericky 10y ago
Best of luck to the Kaggle team. We attended a data scientist conference they presented at in 2012 which led to our YC application, and formation for SimpleLegal. Hats off...
jboggan 10y ago
I have a soft spot in my heart for Kaggle. I was motivated to get into the software industry 5 years ago when they ran their first Facebook hiring challenge. How else to break into an industry I had no degree in? I didn't do so well in the competition but it got me coding every day and it gave me enough to talk about that I figured I could sell all my things and ride a motorcycle to California and start knocking on doors. It worked, after a fashion. I also have a soft spot in my heart for Kaggle because I interviewed there during my first month in San Francisco and it was absolutely the worst interview of my life.
- jpatokal 10y ago
  Don't leave us hanging like that, why was it so bad?
- infinityplus1 10y ago
  Please tell us the story about your worst interview. I'm curious.
  - jboggan 10y ago
    This was about 5 years ago. It was a mess from the get-go since I was applying for a data scientist position. At the time I didn't have the slightest idea what working as a data scientist entailed, nor that despite 7 years unsuccessfully pursuing a PhD in bioinformatics I wasn't sufficiently statistically oriented to excel as one. I just knew that I was good at math and had taught myself enough Perl and Ruby to be dangerous. I should have been applying for software/data engineer roles but I didn't know what that work was like at the time. The only engineer I knew had lived across the country from me and seemed more like a god than a regular human. So after doing not-terribly in Kaggle's machine learning competition (which I did through some unholy Perl scripting and this bizarre network propagation model which had nothing to do with any normal machine learning techniques) I viewed Kaggle as a dream job. I think I did some phone interviews, I let them know that I was already local (crashing on couches and staying in transient hotels), and they scheduled me for some in-person interviews. Waking up with flea bites from the dogs staying in my transient hotel next door to The Armory, I walked outside to find my motorcycle placed upright on its stand but somewhat demolished and a large pile of its broken parts piled politely on the seat. No note. I had about 20 minutes to make it to my interview. This would have been sufficient lane-splitting with a functional motorcycle, yet I hadn't left myself enough time to take public transportation instead of my busted ride. I brushed the jetsam off and tried to ride to the interview. I had no left or right footpegs; my clutch lever was bent; my front brake lever had snapped off and was barely two inches long; my handlebars had been wrenched into a 135* bend forward and upward on the righthand side. As I rode this shambling contraption to my interview with my left foot anchored on top of the shift lever and my right foot reached back on the passenger peg I must have resembled a Street Fighter character diving forward in some sort of headlong right hook. I couldn't shift out of 1st and I couldn't really brake. I arrived at the interview miraculously on-time but absolutely drenched in sweat from the harrowing journey through hostile traffic. So we'll start with that good first impression. My interviewers seemed to all have PhDs and significant post-doc experience and more than half of my interviews consisted of questions about why I dropped out of my PhD program. I mean, repeated hammering about it. I didn't really want to talk about it in great detail because I was emotional about it, mainly because my research supervisor died unexpectedly at the age of 42 and the whole situation still makes me sad to this day. So instead of actually asking questions about the company, or the role, or my skills, about half the time was spent being grilled about this sad story of my graduate career. So I was in a wonderful mood at that point and was happy to finally move on to the technical assessment because I was worried about tearing up in front of the interviewer. THE TECHNICAL ASSESSMENT: a bunch of softball questions that I don't remember followed by a standard algorithms question. Come to think of it I don't think I got any statistics/ML questions because we got stuck on the algorithms question. The problem was that I never took CS courses, nor had I studied the CLRS book at the time, so I didn't know the "expected" way of doing some problems. I tend to get too creative. The problem: given a list (n) of words (as strings of size k), return all sets of anagrams. The somewhat clever O(n k ln k) solution is to sort all the strings and then look at all the sorted strings that have multiple words mapping to them. The cleverer solution is to build a dictionary for each word, using the letters as keys and the number of times each appears as the value. This is linear to construct on the word length though it takes a memory penalty that is usually nugatory. But oh no, I didn't think of either of these bog-standard solutions off the bat. Not having ever practiced this problem I immediately got creative, having too much fun with it. My initial thought was to create a dictionary where the keys were integers and the values were arrays of words. The integer keys were produced by reading the characters of the word in sequence, mapping the alphabet to the first 26 prime numbers, and taking the product of all the primes represented by the characters in the word. By the fundamental theorem of arithmetic (a.k.a. unique factorization of primes), any anagram would create the same integer key, and all words mapping to that key would get pushed into the value array. Voila, and a very compact data structure to boot! This was really, really bad. Basing the correctness of your interview solution on Euclid's Elements is never going to get you any traction with software engineers. As we all know, engineers are allowed to interview candidates to make themselves feel smarter and more fortunate for already having a job. Getting into an argument about prime number factorization with a candidate isn't going to support either of those goals. So I was gloating a bit, feeling good for finding such a nice clean solution after that bit of emotional wrenching, figuring I had explained it well with a little math flair and eager to move on to the next problem. "Um, are you sure that works? Will the numbers always work out like that?" 'Yes, that's why I chose the first 26 prime numbers, it wouldn't work with composite numbers.' ". . . Could you do it a different way? Could you do it another way that isn't this solution?" 'Could I do it slower than this? Sure, but why?' It seemed like they had a list of possible answers on their interview script and I had gone way off of it. Now, the funny thing was I couldn't think of the sorting solution or the comparing dictionary solution, and I had a correct and well-explained answer that was superior in runtime and memory requirements (and before you object with arbitrary length words and integer overflow I'm just going to stop you with replacing the product of the primes with the sum of their logs and . . . I can explain but this margin is too small to contain). I could only think of really dumb things, like calculating every possible permutation of every single word and comparing them exactly. In fact I was kind of taking a perverse delight in trying to figure out the most inefficient way I could answer their question, seeing how I was very certain there was no better answer than what I had already come up with first. They kept asking me, "is there another way you could do this? Faster than comparing all permutations?" and I kept returning to my prime number solution and they kept saying "but is there ANOTHER WAY you could do this?" Round and round this went and I never got the solution they were looking for, whatever it was. I don't even remember the rest of the interview process as I had the distinct feeling that it ended prematurely. I didn't catch that at the time since this was to be the first of my in-person interviews in the tech world, but looking back I'm sure they hadn't originally planned on hustling me out the door after a half-hearted tour of the loft workspace. There are of course two sides to every story, and I'm sure there's someone from Kaggle who tells a story about a leather-clad sweaty-toothed madman who kept prattling on about his dead professor trying to score sympathy points and who gesticulated wildly for an hour while screaming FUNDAMENTAL THEOREM OF ARITHMETIC in a poorly disguised Southern accent. But, regardless of their perspective I can definitely assert that was the worst interview I'd ever had. I went 'home' to buy some calamine lotion, call my insurance company, and tell my mom that the interview at the 'dream job' didn't quite pan out.
inopinatus 10y ago
Hopefully there will be no uncertainties in the acquisition. If not they can form a team to fix them. But I'm joking around: this is a Google-Kaggle niggle gaggle giggle.
codesternews 10y ago
This is worst news I read today. Kaggle independently serve more purpose to community than a baby of some large giants. I love kaggle and I am very disappointed that google acquire everything we love.
chis 10y ago
DrivenData.org is a solid competitor without much publicity. Maybe they'll take over some of the traffic if Kaggle changes for the worse.
qkhhly 10y ago
Google probably want to use Kaggle as Google cloud entry point for the data scientist community. Kaggle has a lot of student and entry level data scientist. Getting those users to start to use Google cloud could potentially drive the growth of lots of potential customers.
- leblancfg 10y ago
  I think you hit the nail straight on the head. Sure, Tensorflow will also probably get pushed in the form of tutorials, etc. but I certainly think it's rather related to bring a way to popularize GCS.
nstart 10y ago
This could well end up being a fantastic move for Google to also acquire customers in its platform. If Kaggle moved large pieces of its competition to be automatically hosted on GCE it might be a good win for Google. So like Kaggle's "kernels", GCE machine learning tools would become an extension that's usable with it in a really simple way. Not entirely sure what that might look like, but it feels like this kind of integration would be the best for both parties.
itsjamesfoster 10y ago
good move.
marcelsalathe 10y ago
https://www.crowdAI.org https://www.crowdAI.org is an open source alternative. Disclaimer, my research group at EPFL started the platform, because we think there should be a community-based open source version that is open to anyone. Always looking for contributors! Edit (1): Github https://github.com/crowdAI/crowdai https://github.com/crowdAI/crowdai Edit (2): We're currently re-designing the whole site to look & feel better.
- wapz 10y ago
  I just looked at the site and it sounds real exciting (but way too difficult for me). Can I ask how you guys are funded? I saw that there is a ~$2000 payout for the winner of the most recent challenge.
  - marcelsalathe 10y ago
    The platform itself is funded by institutional research funding we get at EPFL. For some of the monetary prizes, these typically come from the corresponding projects.
joelthelion 10y ago
Yuck.
macca321 10y ago
Congrats to Jeff and the rest of the team. I'd be interested to hear how much .NET survives the transition!
alantrrs 10y ago
Since we're sharing alternatives: https://empiricalci.com https://empiricalci.com is a dashboard to keep track of your experiments & compare them on public benchmarks.
rochak 10y ago
Good luck to Kaggle's employees. They have done a phenomenal job.
conjectures 10y ago
Kaggle is a great idea, but it's steadily getting more annoying to use. 1) Cruft on all landing pages and having to click through to get to the comps page which is the site. 2) Annoying focus on exploratory notebooks. Inevitably they aren't powerful enough and people link through to external sites. 3) Forcing the use of 3rd party compute platforms to enter comps. Half the fun for me is messing around with my own ideas and this just gets in the way. These should be optional rather than required. 4) Poor incentives. Many of the comps have tiny prizes for the value of work that gets done. They're also concentrated way too much at the top. Unless there's something I want to try out, the expected value of participating is way too low to do it just for the giggles.
- carlmcqueen 10y ago
  I do analytics for a huge corporation and have been quite happy however some of my peers who are unhappy with the pay here participate in Kaggle for the opportunity to do well and get a better (higher paying) job. Some of the inherent value of the work for the small prize pool is more the opportunity of doing well and being recognized for that work. Data Science, or trendy statistics, is inherently fun which is also what makes kaggle fun. Discovery in data will always be popular among people who love to solve problems. To your other points, I don't disagree with you-- all the steps just to participate are becoming more work than its worth, at least for me. I do a lot of the same problems asked in kaggle naturally at work.
  - gedrap 10y ago
    >>> participate in Kaggle for the opportunity to do well and get a better (higher paying) job Obviously it's anecdotal data at best, but still curious, what are the results? Because it sounds very similar to the frequently given advice for software engineers 'push code to github to land a great job'.
    - throwawaymarch8 10y ago
      I can say anecdotally that my ranking on Kaggle helped me recently land a good data scientist job offer, transitioning from academia. I have spent a lot of time on Kaggle though, probably it would have been more efficient (but less fun) to spend that time spamming job boards and studying machine learning, stats, and computer science.
mostafab 10y ago
good news, I did not like the whole Kaggle concept anyway: thousands of people over-engineering solutions for one problem, paid peanuts, while there are more rewarding problems than talent available. It was a huge waste of scarce brainpower. I am launching my Kaggle alternative, landing page here: http://startcrowd.club/ http://startcrowd.club/ Thanks Google for eliminating my competitor.
andi_satria77 10y ago
Google mengakuisisi Kaggle
luckystartup 10y ago
> Kaggle, which has about half a million data scientists on its platform, ... Are there really that many data scientists? I thought it was a niche specialty. Is there enough work for that many people?
- govg 10y ago
  A lot of them are academics who participate out of interest, and I'm sure a significant amount are regular software engineers trying to get their hands dirty with ML.
- codezero 10y ago
  I think they mean unique users.
- rcar 10y ago
  Think they maybe put a 0 in the wrong spot. Kaggle's leaderboard only shows ~50k: https://www.kaggle.com/rankings https://www.kaggle.com/rankings
gumboshoes 10y ago
The Kragle has been sold?! http://vignette1.wikia.nocookie.net/evil/images/c/c0/Kragle.jpg/revision/latest/scale-to-width-down/250?cb=20150810035915 http://vignette1.wikia.nocookie.net/evil/images/c/c0/Kragle....
maverick_iceman 10y ago
Anyone knows what was the price?
EternalData 10y ago
I think having a dataset on who is really interested in machine learning and applying it in practice can only help Google. Plus, if they kind of lurk on the side, you don't get enough of the Google brand overwhelming Kaggle so that it disrupts the community, but in the back of the minds of people going into competitions and who are in the know, it might help incentivize people who think "Hey, Google is really interested in this".
alxvio 10y ago
Just announced at Google Next '17. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_K1YoMHpbk&feature=youtu.be https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_K1YoMHpbk&feature=youtu.be
jader201 10y ago
Official announcements: Google: https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2017/03/welcome-Kaggle-to-Google-Cloud.html https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2017/03/welcome-Kaggle-... (HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13822635 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13822635) Kaggle: http://blog.kaggle.com/2017/03/08/kaggle-joins-google-cloud/ http://blog.kaggle.com/2017/03/08/kaggle-joins-google-cloud/ (HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13822727 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13822727)
tzs 10y ago
I wonder if that's the only one they want, or if they are also going to try to get other relics such the Knife of Exact Zero, the Fleece-Crested Scepter of Que-Teep, or the Orb of Ti-Teleest?

810 points by Perados 10y ago

sullyj3 10y ago

How could a company called "Google" not acquire a company called "Kaggle"? This makes me giggle.

moizsajid 10y ago

Really excited about this acquisition! Might open new avenues for the data science community.

throw_away_777 10y ago

Congrats to the Kaggle team! One great thing about Kaggle was that the team listened and sought out feedback from users (even if they didn't always follow the feedback). I hope that doesn't change with the acquisition.

nojvek 10y ago
It's amazing how focused Google is on AI compared to the other giants. I think it's a great investment on Google's part and congrats to Kaggle. I hope the mission of the site doesn't change. I think Facebook did a great job with whatsapp and instagram. I expect the same with Kaggle.

danaliv 10y ago

Whoever named this company has literally never spoken to a woman.

nojvek 10y ago
Care to explain what kaggle means to a woman? Do you mean kegel, the exercise?
ScottBurson 10y ago
I think the name is a little odd too. Does anyone know how they came up with it?
- Danylon 10y ago
  > I didn’t have any money when I started the company to purchase a domain name so I built an algorithm that iterated phonetic domain names and printed out a list of what was available. My wife and I went through the list and “Kaggle” was the one we picked. It’s algorithmically generated. > It’s a terrible name because most Americans pronounce it “kagel” [rhymes with “bagel”] which sounds like the pelvic floor exercises. Australians pronounce it “kaggel” [rhymes with “haggle”]. -- Anthony Goldbloom, http://www.intelfreepress.com/news/a-marketplace-for-data-scientists/5256/ http://www.intelfreepress.com/news/a-marketplace-for-data-sc...
  - jacques_chester 10y ago
    As an Australian living in the US, it never occurred to me that it would be called anything but the latter.
    - cr0sh 10y ago
      As a self-described redneck in Arizona - the latter seems most appropriate. Why anyone would pronounce it to rhyme with "bagel" makes no sense to me (same as pronouncing "gif" with a soft "G"); IIRC (and I am no linguist), in english there's a rule about how something is pronounced based on surrounding letters - and I think that double consonant vs singular consonant preceded by a vowel is one of those rules. I'm sure there are exceptions, after all (it's english...) - but I have a feeling that if you looked at such words you would find the general pattern to fit. Again - I am willing to admit that I really don't know what I am talking about; I'm not a linguist, I'm not an expert in english. I'm just some guy who last studied english in high school years ago...
      - ScottBurson 10y ago
        I feel the same way about "GIF". Alas, the inventor of the GIF format insists on the soft "G" [0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIF#Pronunciation_of_GIF https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIF#Pronunciation_of_GIF

Nydhal 10y ago

I'm not sure if this is good or bad news. I wonder what google motives are and how they will influence kaggle if this becomes reality.

sonabinu 10y ago
Hate to think that some of the beauty of Kaggle being independent will be lost but that's likely
seangrogg 10y ago
As with many of Google's hires chances are they see it less about acquiring a "product" and more about getting access to what that product produces - an extremely large number of leads in a high-demand space that they're currently trying to ramp up themselves.
- leblancfg 10y ago
  Interesting, though, as they never needed to own that platform to mine it for hiring leads.

nafizh 10y ago

This must imply Kaggle has some internal software that Google want?

deepnotderp 10y ago
Nah, they just want a good recruiting station.
snissn 10y ago
I am wondering if it's a marketing and recruiting play
sunilkumarc 10y ago
According to the article, Google mainly wants the Kaggle community.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

dthal 10y ago

Well, supposing this is correct...Congratulations to Anthony and the rest of the Kaggle team! Those guys do a great job. Hopefully they get rewarded for it.

deepnotderp 10y ago

Only Google can spend this much on what's ultimately a recruiting project.

soheil 10y ago
They have 500,000 developers, do the math at 30% commission for each assuming a $180k salary that's $50k even if they hire 0.1% of them that adds up to $50k * 500 = 25m they probably paid a few times more than that but not a few hundred times, which therefore makes this a pretty sweet deal for Google assuming the community keeps growing.
- gpawl 10y ago
  do you have buy kaggle to hire kaggle members?
  - soheil 10y ago
    Well I'm not sure if they expose their members' contact info or if it'd be easy for Google to advertise on their site as effectively.
- throw_away_777 10y ago
  That 500,000 developers is a vanity metric. The real number is around 50,000 who have completed a challenge, and around 5,000 who are active on the site. Also of those 5,000 users the large majority are employed somewhere else.
trhway 10y ago
giving that acquihires in AI seem to go like $10M/head, Google access to that Rolodex would pay out pretty quickly
asafira 10y ago
You don't think this would drive data scientists to use Google's cloud platform? I.e., if the most well-known data science competition uses the platform, then they will use it after the fact since it's what they know best. Right?

jph00 10y ago

Why does the article say that Ben Hamner was involved in the founding in 2010? He joined years later. Some basic fact checking would be nice, even in tech articles... (Ben has been a great contributor, mind you.)

kornish 10y ago
Probably because Crunchbase has Ben's title as "Co-founder & CTO", which is also what his LinkedIn says. It's not unheard of for people who came on ex-post facto to be offered cofounder titles to sweeten the deal or for other reasons (titles are cheaper than equity, I suppose). Edit: just rechecked and his LinkedIn notes Nov 2011 as the start date for Kaggle. Guess it was easier to condense it into one sentence than to explain the difference to TechCrunch's audience?
redcalx 10y ago
Yeh as I recall Jeremy Howard was chief boffin at the start, and left some time later to start his own biomedical data analysis company (also in SF).
- kornish 10y ago
  Funny thing: the comment you're replying to was posted by Jeremy Howard. Pardon if I'm missing some tongue-in-cheekiness.
  - redcalx 10y ago
    heh. I was unaware :)

ebbv 10y ago

Guess that means Kaggle users can expect it to be shut down in the next five years.

sireat 10y ago
Sadly I think 5 years to sunset is an optimistic estimate.

pizza 10y ago

Deep Mind keeps acquiring appendages

huula 10y ago

Don't know why. Just don't think this is going to happen.

kornish 10y ago

This is obviously a talent acquisition in more ways than one (the Kaggle team, but also their ability to source machine learning talent). I wonder to what degree it's also a Tensorflow promotion move? It seems like Google is very interested in growing a community around it. 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.

manojlds 10y ago
Why does Google want to promote TensorFlow? To make people use more of their cloud offerings?
- nostrademons 10y ago
  Likely to avoid their mistake with MapReduce, where by around 2011 candidates were coming in to interviews and saying "MapReduce? That's sorta like Hadoop, right?" 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.
  - xapata 10y ago
    More specifically, Amazon Elastic MapReduce (EMR) beat Google to market. By years, if I recall correctly.
    - xapata 10y ago
      Does the downvote indicate my memory is faulty? 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.
      - 10y ago

soheil 10y ago

I'm a little sad about this, what will Google do with this? Are they going to drain its soul? I think at a minimum the people behind Kaggle won't feel the same urge to keep building , maintaining and growing it the same way as before, specially as the $$$ flows in their pockets. It will probably change direction by people at Google in control and I'm not sure if that's a good thing since they didn't just built something like this on their own or a better version of it if they were really good at doing stuff like this themselves.

ehsankia 10y ago
They just officially announced it at NEXT. It was presented by Fei Fei Li, who is known for the ImageNet project, which one one of the first big open datasets that really helped advance this field. The way she presented the news is that they will aim to advance that vision, but we'll have to wait an see how their vision pans out.

iamseiko 10y ago

That's disappointing. Google will probably keep the service alive for recruiting and the consumer base, while most of it's technologies will probably be shut off. Being owned by Google might also mean that some companies might not want to post challenges on Kaggle anymore, like Facebook or Microsoft.

halflings 10y ago
What is kaggle's technology really? The notebooks? It's a rather experimental feature that doesn't work all that well most of the time, and shouldn't be going nowhere as a lot of people still appreciate them. I agree for big companies though, even if that doesn't make a whole lot of sense (as there's no private info involved here, the competitions being in the open including the data provided by these companies).
myth_drannon 10y ago
Some people spend years competing and trying to get top rankings. It was a great signal to show to recruiters/potential employers. If Google shuts it down, all this work will be gone.
inlined 10y ago
I really don't understand this assumption that all acquisitions are going to lead to disaster. I work in the Firebase team at Google and couldn't be happier that they've joined (it's what got me to return to Google). Google doubled down on the product and it's grown in ways that Firebase could never have achieved on its own. All while integrating into the broader ecosystem of Cloud. Firebase then acquired DivShot and people cried doom. Yes DivShot was shut down--after completely rearchitecting Firebase's CLI and Hosting to have DivShot's open source web hosting framework with the features of both product lines. The CEO of DivShot now runs Firebase Hosting's product line and has massive resources at his disposal to push his (great) agenda of simple and speedy static web services.

outericky 10y ago

Best of luck to the Kaggle team. We attended a data scientist conference they presented at in 2012 which led to our YC application, and formation for SimpleLegal. Hats off...

jboggan 10y ago

I have a soft spot in my heart for Kaggle. I was motivated to get into the software industry 5 years ago when they ran their first Facebook hiring challenge. How else to break into an industry I had no degree in? I didn't do so well in the competition but it got me coding every day and it gave me enough to talk about that I figured I could sell all my things and ride a motorcycle to California and start knocking on doors. It worked, after a fashion. I also have a soft spot in my heart for Kaggle because I interviewed there during my first month in San Francisco and it was absolutely the worst interview of my life.

jpatokal 10y ago
Don't leave us hanging like that, why was it so bad?
infinityplus1 10y ago
Please tell us the story about your worst interview. I'm curious.
- jboggan 10y ago
  This was about 5 years ago. It was a mess from the get-go since I was applying for a data scientist position. At the time I didn't have the slightest idea what working as a data scientist entailed, nor that despite 7 years unsuccessfully pursuing a PhD in bioinformatics I wasn't sufficiently statistically oriented to excel as one. I just knew that I was good at math and had taught myself enough Perl and Ruby to be dangerous. I should have been applying for software/data engineer roles but I didn't know what that work was like at the time. The only engineer I knew had lived across the country from me and seemed more like a god than a regular human. So after doing not-terribly in Kaggle's machine learning competition (which I did through some unholy Perl scripting and this bizarre network propagation model which had nothing to do with any normal machine learning techniques) I viewed Kaggle as a dream job. I think I did some phone interviews, I let them know that I was already local (crashing on couches and staying in transient hotels), and they scheduled me for some in-person interviews. Waking up with flea bites from the dogs staying in my transient hotel next door to The Armory, I walked outside to find my motorcycle placed upright on its stand but somewhat demolished and a large pile of its broken parts piled politely on the seat. No note. I had about 20 minutes to make it to my interview. This would have been sufficient lane-splitting with a functional motorcycle, yet I hadn't left myself enough time to take public transportation instead of my busted ride. I brushed the jetsam off and tried to ride to the interview. I had no left or right footpegs; my clutch lever was bent; my front brake lever had snapped off and was barely two inches long; my handlebars had been wrenched into a 135* bend forward and upward on the righthand side. As I rode this shambling contraption to my interview with my left foot anchored on top of the shift lever and my right foot reached back on the passenger peg I must have resembled a Street Fighter character diving forward in some sort of headlong right hook. I couldn't shift out of 1st and I couldn't really brake. I arrived at the interview miraculously on-time but absolutely drenched in sweat from the harrowing journey through hostile traffic. So we'll start with that good first impression. My interviewers seemed to all have PhDs and significant post-doc experience and more than half of my interviews consisted of questions about why I dropped out of my PhD program. I mean, repeated hammering about it. I didn't really want to talk about it in great detail because I was emotional about it, mainly because my research supervisor died unexpectedly at the age of 42 and the whole situation still makes me sad to this day. So instead of actually asking questions about the company, or the role, or my skills, about half the time was spent being grilled about this sad story of my graduate career. So I was in a wonderful mood at that point and was happy to finally move on to the technical assessment because I was worried about tearing up in front of the interviewer. THE TECHNICAL ASSESSMENT: a bunch of softball questions that I don't remember followed by a standard algorithms question. Come to think of it I don't think I got any statistics/ML questions because we got stuck on the algorithms question. The problem was that I never took CS courses, nor had I studied the CLRS book at the time, so I didn't know the "expected" way of doing some problems. I tend to get too creative. The problem: given a list (n) of words (as strings of size k), return all sets of anagrams. The somewhat clever O(n k ln k) solution is to sort all the strings and then look at all the sorted strings that have multiple words mapping to them. The cleverer solution is to build a dictionary for each word, using the letters as keys and the number of times each appears as the value. This is linear to construct on the word length though it takes a memory penalty that is usually nugatory. But oh no, I didn't think of either of these bog-standard solutions off the bat. Not having ever practiced this problem I immediately got creative, having too much fun with it. My initial thought was to create a dictionary where the keys were integers and the values were arrays of words. The integer keys were produced by reading the characters of the word in sequence, mapping the alphabet to the first 26 prime numbers, and taking the product of all the primes represented by the characters in the word. By the fundamental theorem of arithmetic (a.k.a. unique factorization of primes), any anagram would create the same integer key, and all words mapping to that key would get pushed into the value array. Voila, and a very compact data structure to boot! This was really, really bad. Basing the correctness of your interview solution on Euclid's Elements is never going to get you any traction with software engineers. As we all know, engineers are allowed to interview candidates to make themselves feel smarter and more fortunate for already having a job. Getting into an argument about prime number factorization with a candidate isn't going to support either of those goals. So I was gloating a bit, feeling good for finding such a nice clean solution after that bit of emotional wrenching, figuring I had explained it well with a little math flair and eager to move on to the next problem. "Um, are you sure that works? Will the numbers always work out like that?" 'Yes, that's why I chose the first 26 prime numbers, it wouldn't work with composite numbers.' ". . . Could you do it a different way? Could you do it another way that isn't this solution?" 'Could I do it slower than this? Sure, but why?' It seemed like they had a list of possible answers on their interview script and I had gone way off of it. Now, the funny thing was I couldn't think of the sorting solution or the comparing dictionary solution, and I had a correct and well-explained answer that was superior in runtime and memory requirements (and before you object with arbitrary length words and integer overflow I'm just going to stop you with replacing the product of the primes with the sum of their logs and . . . I can explain but this margin is too small to contain). I could only think of really dumb things, like calculating every possible permutation of every single word and comparing them exactly. In fact I was kind of taking a perverse delight in trying to figure out the most inefficient way I could answer their question, seeing how I was very certain there was no better answer than what I had already come up with first. They kept asking me, "is there another way you could do this? Faster than comparing all permutations?" and I kept returning to my prime number solution and they kept saying "but is there ANOTHER WAY you could do this?" Round and round this went and I never got the solution they were looking for, whatever it was. I don't even remember the rest of the interview process as I had the distinct feeling that it ended prematurely. I didn't catch that at the time since this was to be the first of my in-person interviews in the tech world, but looking back I'm sure they hadn't originally planned on hustling me out the door after a half-hearted tour of the loft workspace. There are of course two sides to every story, and I'm sure there's someone from Kaggle who tells a story about a leather-clad sweaty-toothed madman who kept prattling on about his dead professor trying to score sympathy points and who gesticulated wildly for an hour while screaming FUNDAMENTAL THEOREM OF ARITHMETIC in a poorly disguised Southern accent. But, regardless of their perspective I can definitely assert that was the worst interview I'd ever had. I went 'home' to buy some calamine lotion, call my insurance company, and tell my mom that the interview at the 'dream job' didn't quite pan out.

inopinatus 10y ago

Hopefully there will be no uncertainties in the acquisition. If not they can form a team to fix them. But I'm joking around: this is a Google-Kaggle niggle gaggle giggle.

codesternews 10y ago

This is worst news I read today. Kaggle independently serve more purpose to community than a baby of some large giants. I love kaggle and I am very disappointed that google acquire everything we love.

chis 10y ago

DrivenData.org is a solid competitor without much publicity. Maybe they'll take over some of the traffic if Kaggle changes for the worse.

qkhhly 10y ago

Google probably want to use Kaggle as Google cloud entry point for the data scientist community. Kaggle has a lot of student and entry level data scientist. Getting those users to start to use Google cloud could potentially drive the growth of lots of potential customers.

leblancfg 10y ago
I think you hit the nail straight on the head. Sure, Tensorflow will also probably get pushed in the form of tutorials, etc. but I certainly think it's rather related to bring a way to popularize GCS.

nstart 10y ago

This could well end up being a fantastic move for Google to also acquire customers in its platform. If Kaggle moved large pieces of its competition to be automatically hosted on GCE it might be a good win for Google. So like Kaggle's "kernels", GCE machine learning tools would become an extension that's usable with it in a really simple way. Not entirely sure what that might look like, but it feels like this kind of integration would be the best for both parties.

itsjamesfoster 10y ago

good move.

marcelsalathe 10y ago

https://www.crowdAI.org https://www.crowdAI.org is an open source alternative. Disclaimer, my research group at EPFL started the platform, because we think there should be a community-based open source version that is open to anyone. Always looking for contributors! Edit (1): Github https://github.com/crowdAI/crowdai https://github.com/crowdAI/crowdai Edit (2): We're currently re-designing the whole site to look & feel better.

wapz 10y ago
I just looked at the site and it sounds real exciting (but way too difficult for me). Can I ask how you guys are funded? I saw that there is a ~$2000 payout for the winner of the most recent challenge.
- marcelsalathe 10y ago
  The platform itself is funded by institutional research funding we get at EPFL. For some of the monetary prizes, these typically come from the corresponding projects.

joelthelion 10y ago

Yuck.

macca321 10y ago

Congrats to Jeff and the rest of the team. I'd be interested to hear how much .NET survives the transition!

alantrrs 10y ago

Since we're sharing alternatives: https://empiricalci.com https://empiricalci.com is a dashboard to keep track of your experiments & compare them on public benchmarks.

rochak 10y ago

Good luck to Kaggle's employees. They have done a phenomenal job.

conjectures 10y ago

Kaggle is a great idea, but it's steadily getting more annoying to use. 1) Cruft on all landing pages and having to click through to get to the comps page which is the site. 2) Annoying focus on exploratory notebooks. Inevitably they aren't powerful enough and people link through to external sites. 3) Forcing the use of 3rd party compute platforms to enter comps. Half the fun for me is messing around with my own ideas and this just gets in the way. These should be optional rather than required. 4) Poor incentives. Many of the comps have tiny prizes for the value of work that gets done. They're also concentrated way too much at the top. Unless there's something I want to try out, the expected value of participating is way too low to do it just for the giggles.

carlmcqueen 10y ago
I do analytics for a huge corporation and have been quite happy however some of my peers who are unhappy with the pay here participate in Kaggle for the opportunity to do well and get a better (higher paying) job. Some of the inherent value of the work for the small prize pool is more the opportunity of doing well and being recognized for that work. Data Science, or trendy statistics, is inherently fun which is also what makes kaggle fun. Discovery in data will always be popular among people who love to solve problems. To your other points, I don't disagree with you-- all the steps just to participate are becoming more work than its worth, at least for me. I do a lot of the same problems asked in kaggle naturally at work.
- gedrap 10y ago
  >>> participate in Kaggle for the opportunity to do well and get a better (higher paying) job Obviously it's anecdotal data at best, but still curious, what are the results? Because it sounds very similar to the frequently given advice for software engineers 'push code to github to land a great job'.
  - throwawaymarch8 10y ago
    I can say anecdotally that my ranking on Kaggle helped me recently land a good data scientist job offer, transitioning from academia. I have spent a lot of time on Kaggle though, probably it would have been more efficient (but less fun) to spend that time spamming job boards and studying machine learning, stats, and computer science.

mostafab 10y ago

good news, I did not like the whole Kaggle concept anyway: thousands of people over-engineering solutions for one problem, paid peanuts, while there are more rewarding problems than talent available. It was a huge waste of scarce brainpower. I am launching my Kaggle alternative, landing page here: http://startcrowd.club/ http://startcrowd.club/ Thanks Google for eliminating my competitor.

andi_satria77 10y ago

Google mengakuisisi Kaggle

luckystartup 10y ago

> Kaggle, which has about half a million data scientists on its platform, ... Are there really that many data scientists? I thought it was a niche specialty. Is there enough work for that many people?

govg 10y ago
A lot of them are academics who participate out of interest, and I'm sure a significant amount are regular software engineers trying to get their hands dirty with ML.
codezero 10y ago
I think they mean unique users.
rcar 10y ago
Think they maybe put a 0 in the wrong spot. Kaggle's leaderboard only shows ~50k: https://www.kaggle.com/rankings https://www.kaggle.com/rankings

gumboshoes 10y ago

The Kragle has been sold?! http://vignette1.wikia.nocookie.net/evil/images/c/c0/Kragle.jpg/revision/latest/scale-to-width-down/250?cb=20150810035915 http://vignette1.wikia.nocookie.net/evil/images/c/c0/Kragle....

maverick_iceman 10y ago

Anyone knows what was the price?

EternalData 10y ago

I think having a dataset on who is really interested in machine learning and applying it in practice can only help Google. Plus, if they kind of lurk on the side, you don't get enough of the Google brand overwhelming Kaggle so that it disrupts the community, but in the back of the minds of people going into competitions and who are in the know, it might help incentivize people who think "Hey, Google is really interested in this".

alxvio 10y ago

Just announced at Google Next '17. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_K1YoMHpbk&feature=youtu.be https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_K1YoMHpbk&feature=youtu.be

jader201 10y ago

Official announcements: Google: https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2017/03/welcome-Kaggle-to-Google-Cloud.html https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2017/03/welcome-Kaggle-... (HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13822635 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13822635) Kaggle: http://blog.kaggle.com/2017/03/08/kaggle-joins-google-cloud/ http://blog.kaggle.com/2017/03/08/kaggle-joins-google-cloud/ (HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13822727 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13822727)

tzs 10y ago

I wonder if that's the only one they want, or if they are also going to try to get other relics such the Knife of Exact Zero, the Fleece-Crested Scepter of Que-Teep, or the Orb of Ti-Teleest?