Maybe it's all the marketing going to my brain, but how often do you get to say (or type) a phrase like that and mean it? This spammer is, indeed, kind of awesome:
Two winters ago I left a position as a system administrator that was paying pretty well and moved cross-country to a region with less jobs than where I moved from. Three months later, I was still unemployed, broke, and bored... I dreamed up an idea: I would write [machine learning] software that would take a given document and generate book suggestions based on its content.
I think that most programmers would agree with me that we put in longer hours on code when we're not working for anybody. We don't stop learning, either. To us, unemployment is a brief sprint of academia spent in our home office, the local coffee shop, or our parents' house...
Two and a half days later I had a working prototype that could generate a book recommendation from a given tweet...
Four months later and I had generated over $7,000 in sales for Amazon with over $400 commission for myself.
