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Julie Rubicon

facebook.com

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Re: Julie Rubicon

#121

Post by Falcon9 »

state wrote: post #116
Falcon9 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I enjoyed it, though less than Ready Player One which has a similar vibe. I was amused that my Google-employed friend docked it a star for showing Google as a nerdy utopia which she did not feel began to accurately reflect the truth of the company.

Interesting! It was the exact opposite for me. Couldn't get through Ready Player One, but couldn't quite put my finer on exactly why.

The writing is poorer in RPO, but the exuberance and energy of the story itself made that not matter for me.

Re: Julie Rubicon

#122

Post by Thane2600 »

i thought the following into existence yesterday and read the post today. that facebook uses users as a layer of abstraction above one brain. a brain of brains. putting queries (thoughts) into the system (brain) and obtaining a result that is the average of many.

Re: Julie Rubicon

#124

Post by oolongCat »

maxaf wrote: post #23

I'm "technical" and "hands-on", yet I was gullible enough to believe the story, IM-ed it to my wife, and was surprised when she hadn't panicked like I did. I read way too much science fiction. Back to work now! Kind of relieved though.

Sigh I did the same, sent her the link as I was reading the article halfway.

Once I finished, when they repeated the name Julie I scrolled up, came back here and boom, fiction. lol

Re: Julie Rubicon

#126

Post by sangnoir »

chatmasta wrote: post #7
arielweisberg wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I started to wonder if it was real around the point that it theorized without explanation the predictive powers of the in house tool and I was pretty convinced it was fiction about the point where they were going to start a company within a company using bitcoin. Using Facebook internal data to trade in ways no one can match isn't far fetched. Makes me wonder if Facebook should pivot to be a hedge fund based on signa…

I've wondered that before as well. Same for Google. Both companies have absolute treasure troves of data that could certainly be used for trading signals. Interestingly, the data could be equally effective for building actuarial models and selling insurance to customers (I believe Google has stated an interest in this in the past). Does anyone know what the SEC implications would be for a company using its proprietar…

> Both companies have absolute treasure troves of data that could certainly be used for trading signals.

Here's what Eric Shmidt had to say on the subject:"There are many, many things that Google could do, that we chose not to do. One day we had a conversation where we figured we could just try to predict the stock market. And then we decided it was illegal. So we stopped doing that."

Re: Julie Rubicon

#127

Post by phpnode »

dynofuz wrote: post #84

reminds me of the movie primer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primer_%28film%29

Yeah it's really similar, not just in premise, the writing style really reminded me of the narration in that awesome film.

Re: Julie Rubicon

#129

Post by mat_jack1 »

It's funny that I've received the notification for the HN500 while I was reading "Mr. Penumbra's 24h bookstore" and noticed it after having finished the book. Clicked the link and the author was Robin Sloan as in the book :)

Apart from the funny combination I just chime in to recommend the book here, I think most of you here would enjoy that.

Re: Julie Rubicon

#130

Post by jbscpa »

Hari Seldon and Gaal Dornick as devlopers of Psychohistory would approve. (Isaac Asimov's "Foundation" universe)

"Psychohistory is the name of a fictional science in Isaac Asimov's Foundation universe, which combined history, psychology and mathematical statistics to create a (nearly) exact science of the behavior of very large populations of people" source: Wikia

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