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
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.
I see this sort of application having a lot of use in the kinds of derivative pop music developed by ensembles of songwriters and manufactured purely to generate radio hits. Bacon's Triptych of George Dyer is genius. The average person listening to Taylor Swift just does not care about Bacon's Triptych of George Dyer.
In a way, Magenta's job is not besting Bach. By the definition of Bach (a human being who changes the way we view and enjoy music), a non-human being cannot best Bach. Magenta's job is besting a much simpler, if equally challenging role - Max Martin, or the writers of "Let it Go".
As it turns out, this kind of music is already pretty formulaic. Much has been written on repetitive chord progressions being spammed across hundreds of famous singles. In a way, artists shouldn't fear the potential of these technologies besting them - they should thank them.
Freed now are artists from loading their albums with eye-rollingly generic lead singles that they immediately get sick of ("Stairway to Heaven", "Creep", "Smells Like Teen Spirit") because record labels know that's what will get the most radio play. You can just let the machine do those. Now, an artists' reputation is determined purely by his relative mettle against other human artists.
The average person listening to Taylor Swift is thinking about Taylor Swift, and not what they're listening to.
Pop is maybe 75% performance, sex, status, and charisma. The music isn't irrelevant, but it only really needs to be a committee-produced mashup of contemporary cliches to do its job.
The rest is posing and attitude.
>As it turns out, this kind of music is already pretty formulaic.
But it's less formulaic than it sounds. Discovering that it uses Standard Chord Sequence Number 7 (from the small standard pop set) won't get you close to an interesting song.
A lot of creative detail goes into the production, arrangement, and the vocal performance. Not the MIDI file.
Basically there are huge gaps between a MIDI cliche machine - buildable now, and not particularly difficult - to a full virtual artist who produces even moderately successful tracks without human help, to a musical AI genius who produces completely new musical styles that capture the human imagination for centuries.
You need a model of mind to do that last one, and we're at least 50 to 100 years away from that.
> The average person listening to Taylor Swift is thinking about Taylor Swift, and not what they're listening to.
I think this is a grand oversimplification. Personality certainly _contributes_ to pop stardom, but the music is still #1. Before anyone knew who Taylor Swift was, they connected with her through one or more song.
> A lot of creative detail goes into the production, arrangement, and the vocal performance. Not the MIDI file.
Of course, but even having an autonomous "songwriter" that could write _a_ hit would be a gamechanger for music (though obviously most immediately applicable to top 40 / pop)
> You need a model of mind to do that last one
I disagree. Machines already produce what would otherwise be considered "experimental" music, you just need some deep reinforcement learning to know what has mass appeal.
I disagree about the songs creep and smells like teen spirit being generic. These were exceptionallu crafted pop songs that expressed heart wrenching emotion. Nothing like the typical pop song at all.
Even if the musical output was impressive, I can't think of people developing a deep relationship with it outside of novelty.
There are plenty of times and places where people want high quality "music" but don't want to actually engage with it on any level - the music that tells you you're still connected when you're waiting for a conference call, the low volume background music in some retail environments, the music in a lift. If "pleasant musical noise" could be generated automatically and to a sufficient quality I think there'd be a pretty decent market for it.
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.
Being able to add to the song with commands like 'add a psytrance bass line', even within predefined parameters, to dynamically generate an entirely new bass line from other songs in the genre.
Maybe you could instantly add an improvised violin melody by telling it a style given that the chords/key from the human band are consistent.
Sentiment analysers could tweak the music based on crowd reaction towards musician defined goals and learn those pre-sets over time.
If music is a synchronisation layer between humans, maybe machine learning could help us to synchronize even more closely.
Part of it is no longer having eighty linear feet of ten-foot high bookcases anymore, part of it is just that the Kindle is so damned convenient for most books, and Safari only slightly less so. (And it's not as if I don't visit bookstore at all -- I walked out of a used bookstore the other day with a monograph on NLP and a copy of The Grand Strategy of Phillip II, both of which were serendipitous finds.)
But there's definitely a crowding-out effect with e-books, or even Amazon's many books for a penny (plus S&H). With Amazon, I no longer have to search widely for a particular book or topic, but that also means I'm not going to randomly wander through other sections and suddenly discover buried gold. In a certain sense, I have more information about a narrow segment of the market -- the specific book I'm looking for -- but less information about the market in general.
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.
I'm not sure what you are angry about, but please let me try and clarify a few things:
>A better app that doesn't crash as much
Working on it. Worth noting that it's free to download.
>Thousands of free decks
Memorang has about 5 million free flashcards currently as part of the crowdsourced ecosystem. You can get content in 4 ways: creating, importing, searching, and purchasing. You can import from Quizlet, Excel, Anki, StudyBlue, and Cram, or collaborate in groups on common topics.
>An open ecosystem
While I think we could do a better job with content discovery, the collaboration tools on Memorang do not exist on Anki. If you wanted to work together on an Anki deck, it would have to be with some combination of dropbox or git. My opinion is that Anki is pretty antisocial.
>Source code
I think HN readers know more than anyone that there's nothing wrong with not open sourcing your company's code. Developers need to eat too. That being said, we are open to making our API publicly available to build learning applications on top of.
>Doesn't spam your email
I welcome your suggestions regarding email and onboarding. Currently we send a welcome email and account verification. Over the course of 1-2 weeks we give short snippets of how to use certain learning modes on the platform. You can unsubscribe from emails at any time via the unsubscribe link or via your account settings.
>Isn't an obvious monetisation of anki's general premise
It's worth pointing out that the creator of Anki has made tens of millions of dollars off of charging for downloads. I'm not sure what "premise" you are referring to - but ours is that the core learning application should be free and not a paid download.
>How anyone thinks that paywalling a bunch of flashcards is a good idea (when anki offers them free) is beyond me
Crowdsourced content is free on both Anki and Memorang, so I think you may have missed that the "paywalled" flashcards are actually an optional upgrade. As a bit of background, we've spent thousands of dollars on content creation and are committed to continuously upgrading and maintaining that content. For example, our USMLE Step 1 and MCAT content are one-time purchases for lifetime access and we maintain updates to stay current with the latest medical information at no extra charge. Users are happy to pay for that level of trust and security.
I hope the above information helps you better understand what we are doing.
"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"?
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.
I'm apologising, sincerely, to anyone who took offense to the fact that the programmer was a female. It wasn't my intention to cause hurt and I've updated the parody with a hopefully less controversial male protagonist. For context, the original poem has a female as the main character which is why the female sprung to mind in my poem.
As for the lack of wit, well, I'd suggest that's a more subjective thing....
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
Ashley, I find your objections to be valid. If we're bemoaning the state of gender equality in tech then it is everyone's duty to provide a space where stereotypes are not indulged in, people are not judged based on extrinsic factors and the discomforts of the minority are taken seriously.
Thank you for making the effort to point out my mistake and for accepting my apology gracefully.
One-line posts rarely contribute anything. This is an off-topic jab with no support. Even examples and support for each would not make this post appropriate since this submission is about the petition, not the progress Obama has made on his promises.
and you're doing such a good job of policing the rest of the thread , too!
The petition site was implemented by Obama's cabinet. It was made as a way to make it seem as if his cabinet was more technologically savyy than others(along with "THE FIRST PRESIDENT WITH A SMARTPHONE!"), and allowed for people to think that the platform would increase transparency in governance.
Obama's cabinet decides how to respond to petitions. I think the parent of your reply, although simple in its' phrasing, is pertinent to the discussion at hand.
Ones' history does play out in the judgment that people make, and the fact that the President has broken OTHER promises is probably good reason to suspect his intentions in the future (such as the promise of a real reply@100k)
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.
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.
ashleyblackmore, the initial news stories seemed to imply voluntary, wide-scale, direct access to Google's (and other's) data by the NSA. I genuinely thought that sounded wrong and against the bent of Google--both its execs and the rank and file employees. In the last few days, more recent stories have indicated that it's more like compelled, limited FISA requests, which all US companies are legally required to respond to. See Yahoo's recent post at http://yahoo.tumblr.com/post/52491403007/setting-the-record-... which also points in this direction.
Compelled and limited is a very different story than voluntary, wide-scale, and direct. Do I like FISA? No, I think it sucks. FISA orders come with a gag order, and laws that compel secrecy like that should be struck down, in my opinion. But in recent days, you've heard the CEO of Google say that they haven't gotten the sort of broad requests that (say) Verizon got, and that Google can and does push back on requests that they consider too broad.
I think the proper response to this issue should be frustration with bad laws, and calling your Senator or Representative in Congress to tell them that.
