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Marc Andreessen would beg to differ :)

On a recent a16z podcast, Andreessen said:

“It's possible that [being a VC] is quite literally timeless, and when the AIs are doing everything else, that may be one of the last remaining fields that people are still doing."

Interestingly, his justification is not that VCs are measurably good at what they do, but rather that they appear to be so bad at what they do:

“Every great venture capitalist in the last 70 years has missed most of the great companies of his generation... if it was a science, you could eventually dial it in and have somebody who gets 8 out of 10 [right]. There's an intangibility to it, there's a taste aspect, the human relationship aspect, the psychology — by the way a lot of it is psychological analysis."

The podcast in question: https://youtu.be/qpBDB2NjaWY

(Personally, I’m not quite sure he actually believes this - but watching him is a certain kind of masterclass in using spicy takes to generate publicity / awareness / buzz. And by talking about him I’m participating in his clever scheme.)


Even his justification for why AI can't become a VC sounds like you could just go by random chance and have the same chance at success which means even the personal touch he is trying to advocate is useless. A monkey could do his job.


That sounds more like him trying to justify all of the possible harms to society as a whole to his peers.

"It'll screw everyone else, but we'll be okay, so..."


Ignore celebrities.


The way I’d read that take is that being a “good” VC is about having enough money to spread around and enough networking connections to generate the right leads. After that pretty much any idiot can do the job.

Tldr AI can replace labor but not capital. More news at 11.


Well it is capital. It's just different capital.


The author is Leif Wenar, Professor of Philosophy (as well as Humanities, Political Science, and Law) at Stanford.

He’s the author of the book Blood Oil: Tyrants, Violence, and the Rules that Run the World (about which Peter Singer wrote: “Philosophers rarely write big books that could change the world, but Blood Oil is such a book.”)

Wenar studied philosophy at Harvard with John Rawls and Robert Nozick, and was Karl Popper’s research assistant.


(2015)

According to web.archive.org this is from Nov 2015:

https://web.archive.org/web/20151108010026/https://playbook....


It was discussed here previously:

> Startup Playbook (November 5, 2015 — 1202 points, 232 comments):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10514729

> Startup Playbook (2015) (January 16, 2019 — 640 points, 55 comments):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18917362


If you're on a Mac, you can find the exact processor model number by opening Terminal.app and entering

  sysctl -n machdep.cpu.brand_string
this will return something like

  Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-4650U CPU @ 1.70GHz
(Found on http://osxdaily.com/2011/07/15/get-cpu-info-via-command-line... )


Exactly the same output for me. Assuming that's not the only hardwired output from that command, is your password also hunter2? B^>


Don Stewart has given possibly the best answer to this question on StackOverflow: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6398996/good-haskell-sour...


Thanks, I almost lost hope that I will get a sensible answer. I don't buy the argument that real world code cannot be pretty; what would be the reason to use Haskell, then?


@liuliu - in the last graph, there's quite a jump from epoch 26 to 27. I'm curious to find out what might be causing this.


That's when learning rate changed to a smaller number. The graph mainly shows that with different initialization scheme, the network starts descending initially faster.


According to the reporter, this abandoned theme park is a harbinger of doom for China's economy. But couldn't it instead be viewed as evidence of entrepreneurial risk-taking activity? Taking risks, by definition, involves projects that don't pan out.

Imagine if, every time a silicon valley startup abandoned 100k lines of code to pursue a better idea, reporters swooped in and pointed this out as evidence of impending doom.

(Note that I'm not addressing, and certainly not condoning, China's societal/governance problems, e.g. whether the land was taken unfairly from the farmers, etc. That's a whole 'nother ball of wax.)


"Imagine if, every time a silicon valley startup abandoned 100k lines of code to pursue a better idea, reporters swooped in and pointed this out as evidence of impending doom."

Don't we just get "the bubble is bursting!" articles instead?


Also note, it was years ago. The China of 2002 was nothing like the China of 2012 - it had a completely different set of problems.


The threat of prison is supposed to make people more likely to pay back their debts.


And not take on too much debt to begin with.


Steelcase makes motorized desks. Joel Spolsky uses them at Fog Creek. His article on them is here (with links to steelcase)

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/06/06.html


Is it just me, or does this look uncomfortably similar to the celebrated iA3 template for wordpress, designed by Information Architects?

http://store.informationarchitects.jp/product/ia³-template http://www.informationarchitects.jp/en/100e2r/


Speaking as a visual designer, I would advise you that iA's template is heads above, and actually starts you off with the "stunning" typography this template attempts to describe and demonstrate.

Type freaks will tell you that the key to setting text is all in the negative space. The homepage in particular uses white space around the headline and button in a very static, uninteresting way. The huge misalignment of items in the footer looks like something got broken. Know why? Because although the footer category heads are evenly distributed into four divs, the text contained in each column has a different visual weight. The third column should be optically aligned (meaning you need to eyeball it), so there doesn't appear to be a gaping space to the right of the "Connect" list.

Moreover, the 'About Space' block is crashing into the text on the left. Even the Space logo is poorly kerned, causing the A to float in an ambiguous way.

Take away what you can from the article submitted as there are some sensible tips, but don't don't pay for this template hoping for something competently designed. My design advice is to trust your eyes. Designers use some rules of thumb but looking carefully for the places where the rules fail is how you get to be great at setting type. Even a great template can't guarantee to make _your_ content look great.


It's probably not an intentional ripoff but more like an intellectual cul-de-sac - following certain typographic rules to their logical conclusion leads to the same design.

The designer Garrett Dimon had a similar design for a long time (and his Sifter app has remnants of that style) and so did my personal blog, back when I used to write a lot more.

http://alabut.com/nonsense/2005/03/ruby-self-tutorial-day-1-...


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