The monster imagery made my day, and yeah, it would match pretty well my own impression of many acquiring companies. I doubt Yahoo fully understood Tumblr for example, and even after promising not to ruin it, weren’t able to help themselves from giving it a damn good bruising
Eno worked on a number of projects to generate music years ago, with Bloom and similar: http://www.generativemusic.com/. A quick fiddle with that can definitely generate some banal hold/elevator music.
People want and need other people around, doing human things. Even if the musical output was impressive, I can't think of people developing a deep relationship with it outside of novelty. Algorithms are cold, and music is usually very much the opposite - I can see an "uncanny valley" effect cropping up with the imitative forms: people hearing something that is supposed to come across as laden with emotion, instead leads people to revulsion. What do we get out of computers composing songs that are supposed to relate to the fragility of the human condition?
Sure, the algorithms, once sufficiently advanced, could probably trick us into thinking that certain examples of generative music were made by a person and then later reveal its algorithmic origin to prove that "the humans are stupid" and "the google algorithms are clever" but what are we actually proving here?
Can a computer devise new artistic forms that have some genuine impact on people - can a computer come up with Bacon's Triptych of George Dyer outside of regurgitating fragments of what it already has seen? What do we get out of a computer aping the alcohol-fuelled sweaty anarchic performances of The Black Lips?
The interesting stuff will be to see if this goes to other places that music has not yet gone - some new composition method - manipulation of frequency in ways that humans have not yet devised.
Interesting how Teichmueller has a bunch of stuff named after him, yet there's very little information about him to be had. There are some references on Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.de/scholar?q=%22o+teichmueller%22&btn.... He is certainly published in more than a single journal, however.
On the other hand, Felix Hausdorff, who also appears to have worked in the same field (though topology is probably a far broader field than I can understand) has plenty of information readily available. This is conjecture, but the mere lack of solid information on Teichmueller could lend credence to some of what you say.
"Over the last seven years, I’ve discovered and invested very early in a handful of highly valuable companies (Wish, Lyft, Zenpayroll, Postmates, AngelList, Plated, Styleseat, Klout, etc.) as well as plenty of disasters."
Any middle ground between "highly valuable" and "disaster"?
I don't want to get into a flame war, but no, that isn't what I meant. In general, in the mainstream, people will typically think of men when they think of programmers. Something like 'Neckbeard Hacker' on twitter being just one obvious stereotype, however outmoded that particular one may be. I don't need to argue that point, but in light of it, it came across as a rather odd choice of protagonist, considering the normative view, and the subject being a 'bad programmer'.
I don't really think svs meant any offence, especially having now seen the original poem. I also don't think we can live in a society where everybody has perfectly-formed liberal views. At the same time, I'm not down with this "why are people so easily offended"/"turn down your offence-o-meter" argument that one hears when this comes up, mainly because it is a trivially easy card to play when you aren't the target of the stereotyping
A "poem" with typos, a dearth of wit and worst of of all, questionable content: why is the terrible programmer a woman? A woman doesn't normally spring to mind when discussing programming, but oh, when we're discussing something where someone is missing a rudimentary, fundamental lack of understanding (all variables have the same name), a woman is chosen.
Heh, did you get out of the wrong side of bed today? I don't spend all day reading HN comments - sorry if my knowledge of responses to Matt Cutts' posts isn't as comprehensive and magnificent as your own. When I posted this, nobody else had said anything.
Thought twice about posting this, but am I the only one who feels really queasy about someone like Matt Cutts jumping directly into conversations about their own company on HN (especially when it could be connoted as being part of damage control)? He's hardly rank-and-file. I think it is plain old creepy, YMMV.
I hope he is being ironic. After all, it says THIS page is why the internet sucks. Otherwise, the sense of entitlement is ridiculous. He has a free, hosted blog because it is ad-supported. He must be taking the mickey
Once again, "Black Keys and Mad Men" is different to "your personal history, your friends, what you look like, what your friends look like, what you like, what your friends like, who you talk to, what you talk about, what your friends talk about, which services you subscribe to, where you went to school, where you worked, when you worked, when you graduated, when you began a relationship, when you ended a relationship, your sexual preferences..."
Facebook doesn't need any apologists, least of all from the HN community. Whether the article is linkbait or not, Facebook does need constant critique. Om Malik points out that Facebook Home means a new kind of persistent data-gathering wrapped in a trendy (?) skin that most facebook users will want to try out. It is bad enough that a billion people blithely use their web and phone apps without them having something that sinks its hooks in deeper
It doesn't work for me on my year-old thinkpad, or on my desktop, or on my server, and it is broken on two other computers I know of. Hibernation issues in Ubuntu aren't exactly an uncommon problem: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/hibernate