Matt Hackett

I obsess over the engineering and dissemination of technology for creative people. I'm happily torn between work on the visible (marketing) and the invisible (architecture, management) components of media-product-making machinery. Most recently, I saw as Tumblr's team grew from 10 to 110 and monthly audience from 25 million to 150 million from my vantage point as VP Engineering and later Head of Brand Strategy. More about Matt Hackett

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Advertisements for Architecture 0089

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Facebook Developer Conference, via Casey Newton.

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Welcome to Dan's post-apocalyptic cafe! Finest service in all of NeoProvidence.

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👋🇯🇵 Tokyo!

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But instead of helping process the thousands of donors who showed up to help the victims of Sunday's mass shooting, Ayala himself became a victim of the gunman who attacked the Pulse nightclub in Orlando.

Rodolfo Ayala: Blood bank employee - Orlando Sentinel

You will cry, but you have to read these profiles.

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Everyone who walked through the doors of Pulse last night showed up pre-terrorized. Fifty people and counting survived a lifetime of cultural terrorism, and then lost their lives in an instant because someone was angry at two men kissing.

What It Costs to Be Gay in Public - Dave Holmes on Orlando Shooting

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The trimmings of the 19th and 21st centuries

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Some of my characters are, no doubt, pretty beastly, but I really don't care, they are outside my inner self like the mournful monsters of a cathedral facade—demons placed there merely to show that they have been booted out.

—Vladimir Nabokov

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Most Startups Aren't Crap

VCs say the darndest things. 

Mostly, their jabs and knocks against founders and others VCs are kept behind closed doors. But, occasionally, they’re aired publicly. In the national press.

Like this little gem:

Right now, most of the things VCs have funded are mostly crap and largely worthless.

The cynical reading of this might be that every other VC, save for Chamath’s, is funding crappy startups. 

But, there’s another way to think about this brash comment that might be more constructive; namely, this:

VC is crap for most startups.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise. Or even be controversial. 

The data is pretty clear. And tho we celebrate the .07% of VC backed companies who’ve reached Unicorn status, we often dismiss the remaining 99.93% as collateral damage on the road Disruptiontown.

And that’s too bad.

Many of those failed startups represented sincere aspirations from founders to put their own unique dent in the universe. What they’d hoped would be a painkiller in raising VC money to solve some short term challenge around hiring, or sales or growth quickly turns into a gateway drug. And VC money is a powerfully addictive substance.

As with drugs, and as the data highlights, VC money tends to ruin far more companies than it saves. 

Rather than heaping blame on “crappy” startups for diverting precious VC dollars from the truly worthy agents of disruption, perhaps VCs should get real about the crappy product they’re offering startups. 

Now, that’s a Vanity Fair article I’d like to read.

[matthew]

When you have large amounts of data, your appetite for hypotheses tends to get even larger. And if it’s growing faster than the statistical strength of the data, then many of your inferences are likely to be false. They are likely to be white noise. In a classical database, you have maybe a few thousand people in them. You can think of those as the rows of the database. And the columns would be the features of those people: their age, height, weight, income, et cetera. Now, the number of combinations of these columns grows exponentially with the number of columns. So if you have many, many columns—and we do in modern databases—you’ll get up into millions and millions of attributes for each person. Now, if I start allowing myself to look at all of the combinations of these features—if you live in Beijing, and you ride bike to work, and you work in a certain job, and are a certain age—what’s the probability you will have a certain disease or you will like my advertisement? Now I’m getting combinations of millions of attributes, and the number of such combinations is exponential; it gets to be the size of the number of atoms in the universe. Those are the hypotheses that I’m willing to consider. And for any particular database, I will find some combination of columns that will predict perfectly any outcome, just by chance alone. If I just look at all the people who have a heart attack and compare them to all the people that don’t have a heart attack, and I’m looking for combinations of the columns that predict heart attacks, I will find all kinds of spurious combinations of columns, because there are huge numbers of them. So it’s like having billions of monkeys typing. One of them will write Shakespeare.

Machine-Learning Maestro Michael Jordan on the Delusions of Big Data and Other Huge Engineering Efforts - IEEE Spectrum

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The strange thing [with VR] is that normally, in the history of culture, we have new stories and narrations and then we start to develop a tool. Or we have visions of wondrous new architecture—like, let’s say, the museum in Bilbao, or the opera house in Sydney—and technology makes it possible to fulfill these dreams. So you have the content first, and then the technology follows suit. In this case, we do have a technology, but we don’t have any clear idea how to fill it with content.

Werner Herzog Talks Virtual Reality - The New Yorker

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A lot to love in Brasilla, interior-wise this Modernist confessional 💯🔥 (at Catedral de Brasília)

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Late work night at Beme HQ = Katz's delivery

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Sydney (left), Pacific Ocean (right), Dad (center)

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Melbourne is all about alleys and arcades (at Degraves Laneway, Melbourne)

[matthew]

"I've been here 12 years and it's disgusting," said Janine Whiteson, mother of a fifth grader at the school. "We have 650 kids, and most of them are really little. Who knows what kind of people will come in. It's disgraceful."

A mother describing the terror wrought on an NYC block by ... bicycles.

Citi Bike Station in UES School's Play Space Is a Hazard, Parents Say - Upper East Side - DNAinfo.com New York