When I think about what I want the future to look like and what's missing now, a smarter news aggregator isn't on the top 10 list. I have no problem wasting infinite amounts of time with existing entertainment technologies. At the same time, thousands of engineers clearly disagree with me as they are risking their livelihoods and investing their their talents in that field.

I do find the whole field boring. Making a news aggregator that's X% better than existing ones doesn't improve the world a whole lot, or even offer a compelling consumer value proposition.

I don't want to sound like I'm against all consumer entertainment tech. It's clearly something that people enjoy, and it's exciting for some people to make. But this particular application is one whose value I am very skeptical of.

Completely agree that a news aggregator isn't one of the world's 10 most pressing needs. It isn't in the top 100 either.

But Prismatic has told me about articles that make me better at what I do. Depending how widespread that experience is, they may be having a larger impact on our 10 most pressing needs than most teams that attack those needs directly.

Thank you for the kind words! Indeed, the NLP and ML behind Prismatic are pretty intricate. Not just because they use something mathematically sophisticated, but you have to make a lot of good decisions about what can be tackled with a simple approach and when to spend a month thinking about a harder problem.