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What's Actually Wrong with Yahoo's Purchase of Summly

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Re: What's Actually Wrong with Yahoo's Purchase of Summly

#141
post #134
post #68

If "brogrammer" is a thing, this picture is next to its definition in the dictionary: http://hackingdistributed.com/images/egs-small.jpg

It's funny I had him as a professor, and it must be him, but I don't remember him looking anything like that picture.

It's funny what a few days of teaching Operating Systems will do to a man.

Re: What's Actually Wrong with Yahoo's Purchase of Summly

#142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why, because he's wearing sunglasses? Color of his shirt? He has short hair? Is near water? Which is the trigger?

The Oakleys, the beach, the looking off to the side. It's not any one thing, it's the totality of the circumstances.

For the record: not Oakleys, not at a beach, but yes, looking to the side.

If we're done picking on looks and personal issues, something I tried to avoid very carefully in the article, perhaps we can focus on content and ideas?

Re: What's Actually Wrong with Yahoo's Purchase of Summly

#143
post #50

As a fellow 17-year-old, I have nothing less than respect for Nick. You're obviously doing something right if you sell your company for $30M before you're an adult. Who cares if he's not an AI researcher? The scholar who wrote this article can't bash this kid's product until he actually builds something useful. If he came up with a revolutionary AI theory, great. But the people who take an experimental idea and see t…

> The scholar who wrote this article can't bash this kid's product until he actually builds something useful. What kind of logic is that?

It's not logic. I just think it's messed up to ridicule someone for making something cool and getting a nice payday for it.

Re: What's Actually Wrong with Yahoo's Purchase of Summly

#144
This is the second article from the same author that is well reasoned and factually incorrect (the first was the MongoDB hate). Check http://blogs.wsj.com/tech-europe/2013/03/26/what-does-30-mil... to see there is some research going on there. Also, glue or not, a successful mobile, one that has an audience is worth some money...

Re: What's Actually Wrong with Yahoo's Purchase of Summly

#145

What this really underscores is that conventional capitalism provides little incentive for fundamental innovation. I'm not as convinced as you may be, but there certainly seems to have been a decline in past decades, in terms of private funding for basic research. At one time, Bell Labs, Xerox, IBM, HP and others did quite a bit of basic, fundamental research. IBM still do, last I saw, but here's the question... if i…

“Based on the NYSE index data, the mean duration of holding period by US investors was around 7 years in 1940. This stayed the same for the next 35 years. The average holding period had fallen to under 2 years by the time of the 1987 crash. By the turn of the century it had fallen to below one year. It was around 7 months by 2007.

Similar pattern exists in the UK also as shown in the chart above. There the average duration has fallen from around 5 years in the mid-1960s to less than 7.5 months in 2007.

Over the past 15 years even in international equity markets, holding periods have fallen. The Chinese market was red hot until few months ago. However the duration for the Shanghai stock market index is close to just 6 months.This shows that Chinese investors do not have a long term horizon.”

http://topforeignstocks.com/2010/09/06/duration-of-stock-hol...

Re: What's Actually Wrong with Yahoo's Purchase of Summly

#146
post #16

This is my (pessimistic) take on this Summly thing. I think the following scenario happened: 15 year old kid does something with computers and for some reason the press is all over it. Some smart investors thinks; "hey, I can use this to make money". They invest money into this 15 year old which gives him more press coverage. Wait a few years and the investor gets his buddies at Yahoo to buy it for a substantial amou…

That was my thought exactly, this story sounded like an investor bailout.

Re: What's Actually Wrong with Yahoo's Purchase of Summly

#147
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's more like Yahoo! is overpaying for app development teams. They have to, as they are way behind in mobile and nobody good wants to work there.

But $30M for two developers?

And paying out all the other investors, presumably.

Re: What's Actually Wrong with Yahoo's Purchase of Summly

#148
Whoa, I had an idea creating something like that in 2011. And I thought "it's stupid, noone would use it except me" and "google or yahoo would probably build a much better one and have 10x more engineers iterating on it".

Which brings me to the point: Why did Yahoo buy this, instead of building it themselves? Are they really that thin with engineering talent?

Re: What's Actually Wrong with Yahoo's Purchase of Summly

#149

" But it's critical to keep tabs on the ratio known as 'glue versus thought.' Sure, both imply progress and both are necessary. But the former is eminently mundane, replaceable, and outsource-able. The latter is typically what gives a company its edge, what is generally regarded as a competitive advantage. " I am in finance. I am glue. I take existing people, things (read: capital), and ideas and bolt them together.…

"I am in finance. I am glue."

If you are glue, there is a terrible problem. When you are in finance you should be in the "Thought". You should think on who can pay the bills and who can not, so you could give loans to them or not.

You should be on thinking what is going to be the future and the business strategies that makes sense, business that are sound and solid versus scams to get people's money.

The fact that you consider yourself glue is the main problem. We are in a society when finance means "too big to fail", "we make bad decisions but do not pay for it", and "if people can not pay back its loans(because we lended irresponsibly) , we have to lower the requirements for loans even more".

Re: What's Actually Wrong with Yahoo's Purchase of Summly

#150
To see why Yahoo is doomed, let's compare and contrast Yahoo's recent acquisition of Summly with Google's DNNResearch.

Summly - Sloppy mobile app that licenses technology from SRI.

DNNResearch - Groundbreaking fundamental CS Research into Deep Neural Networks that won Merck's Kaggle Competition.

Enough said.

Edit links -

http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/12/google-scoops-up-neural-net...

http://blog.kaggle.com/2012/11/01/deep-learning-how-i-did-it...

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