Four short links: 19 April 2017
Featured Snippets, Text Summarization, VC's Business Model, and Aphyr's Tools
- Google’s Featured Snippets Screw Your Site — Google declined to answer specific questions for this story, including whether it was shooting itself in the foot by destroying its best sources of information. (via BoingBoing)
- Taming Recurrent Neural Networks for Better Summarization — interesting and readable article explaining a new paper on automatic text summarization.
- How Venture Capital Works (Slideshare) — great post that explains the VC “liquidity Ponzi scheme” (to use Steve Blank’s words). VCs raise money on the expectation of delivering at least 4x gross return.
- Aphyr Uses This — The safety analysis work I do is CPU and memory intensive, and readily parallelizable. Comcast gave me an OSS research grant to build a machine for that work, so my desktop is a ridiculous 48-way Xeon (2x E5-2697v2), with 128GB of ECC DDR3 and 11 TB of miscellaneous SSDs & spinning rust. The motherboard is wonky and refuses to find half the disks on boot. You can crash the box by using certain USB ports. We have a complicated relationship.
