Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Build What Had Previously Not Been Possible

jasonlbaptiste.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 67 posts

Re: Build What Had Previously Not Been Possible

#31

Post by polynomial »

jasonlbaptiste wrote: post #7
jsmcgd wrote: post #3

Generally good advice - although I would say that there are things that haven't been built today that could have been built yesterday and that could be the building blocks of tomorrow. Facebook and YouTube are two examples that weren't built using state of the art technology, that could have been built a few years earlier. I think their success was in their execution not the conception of the ideas as they weren't ac…

YouTube is actually interesting. They attribute their rise to a few building blocks: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nssfmTo7SZg I wouldn't put all of these as some sort of future stack building blocks, but there were enough things there that made something possible, that wasn't possible before: easy video sharing. 1- broadband in the home 2- emergence of flash, so no codecs required 3- proliferation of digital camera…

I'll just leave this here. http://bit.ly/cOGT5n

Re: Build What Had Previously Not Been Possible

#32

Post by asmosoinio »

polynomial wrote: post #31
jasonlbaptiste wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

YouTube is actually interesting. They attribute their rise to a few building blocks: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nssfmTo7SZg I wouldn't put all of these as some sort of future stack building blocks, but there were enough things there that made something possible, that wasn't possible before: easy video sharing. 1- broadband in the home 2- emergence of flash, so no codecs required 3- proliferation of digital camera…

I'll just leave this here. http://bit.ly/cOGT5n

Full link: http://www.youtube.com/v/kfEzHdWKOoQ

Re: Build What Had Previously Not Been Possible

#33

Post by ynniv »

BobbyH wrote: post #9
jasonlbaptiste wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you put Hadoop under scaleable to billions?

Yeah, Hadoop is parallelizable by design, so it's just a matter of renting out EC2 clusters. In any case, I'm not talking about competing with Cloudera, but using Hadoop in some new specific vertical. For instance, an ad network that uses Hadoop could mine user/user-clickstream data better and get more clicks. That would be using Hadoop as a building block. You could also use Hadoop to power awesome analytics on, say…

It is off topic and my (irrelevant) personal preference, but please, pretty pretty please, find something more beneficial to humanity than convincing people to purchase things that they don't need. Innovation is exciting when it is about ending a war, or reducing pollution, or creating cheaper energy, or making it easier to find information. Every time people talk about "mining the clickstream to increase ad revenue" I have the temporary urge to abandon computing become a farmer.

kthxbye

Re: Build What Had Previously Not Been Possible

#34

Post by jeromec »

Hey Jason (or anyone else) SMS was mentioned as part of immediate communications. Is this true yet today? A sticking point for me with SMS was that messages were randomly subject to hours of delay upon being sent because of the SMS distribution system. It's because of that along with knowing that far more robust (and free) email on devices was on the way that I never got behind SMS. However, I now have something in mind which could apply SMS, since it's available to more phone types, but it needs to be immediate. I did a check on Google, and the FAQ at Twilio as well, but can't find whether this potential lag is still there. Does anyone have insight on this?

Re: Build What Had Previously Not Been Possible

#35

Post by zrail »

jeromec wrote: post #34

Hey Jason (or anyone else) SMS was mentioned as part of immediate communications. Is this true yet today? A sticking point for me with SMS was that messages were randomly subject to hours of delay upon being sent because of the SMS distribution system. It's because of that along with knowing that far more robust (and free) email on devices was on the way that I never got behind SMS. However, I now have something in m…

SMS is not guaranteed to deliver, either within a certain time boundary or even at all. I can only really speak from my own limited experience on AT&T and Verizon, but those delays seem to largely be gone. I haven't had a message delay in quite a long time. If it's going to deliver at all, it'll deliver within seconds.

Re: Build What Had Previously Not Been Possible

#36

Post by BobbyH »

ynniv wrote: post #33
BobbyH wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, Hadoop is parallelizable by design, so it's just a matter of renting out EC2 clusters. In any case, I'm not talking about competing with Cloudera, but using Hadoop in some new specific vertical. For instance, an ad network that uses Hadoop could mine user/user-clickstream data better and get more clicks. That would be using Hadoop as a building block. You could also use Hadoop to power awesome analytics on, say…

It is off topic and my (irrelevant) personal preference, but please, pretty pretty please, find something more beneficial to humanity than convincing people to purchase things that they don't need. Innovation is exciting when it is about ending a war, or reducing pollution, or creating cheaper energy, or making it easier to find information. Every time people talk about "mining the clickstream to increase ad revenue"…

You could also use Hadoop to analyze data from, say, a global network of distributed pollution sensors to find factories that are polluting. Anyway, the point I was trying to make is that Hadoop is a nice building block. You could use Hadoop to mine any large data set, my examples were arbitrary.

Re: Build What Had Previously Not Been Possible

#37

Post by jeromec »

zrail wrote: post #35
jeromec wrote: post #34

Hey Jason (or anyone else) SMS was mentioned as part of immediate communications. Is this true yet today? A sticking point for me with SMS was that messages were randomly subject to hours of delay upon being sent because of the SMS distribution system. It's because of that along with knowing that far more robust (and free) email on devices was on the way that I never got behind SMS. However, I now have something in m…

SMS is not guaranteed to deliver, either within a certain time boundary or even at all. I can only really speak from my own limited experience on AT&T and Verizon, but those delays seem to largely be gone. I haven't had a message delay in quite a long time. If it's going to deliver at all, it'll deliver within seconds.

Yeah, I imagine the technology should have improved from a few years ago when the delays seemed prevalent. You're also right that some messages may not go through at all. I'll probably need to research deeper into the current technology and issues surrounding SMS.

Re: Build What Had Previously Not Been Possible

#38

Post by Qz »

patio11 wrote: post #15
oozcitak wrote: post #13

Also worth considering: Build what is possible today in US but not in Europe/Asia. i.e. Watch what your fellow US entrepreneurs are working on and adopt it to your local.

There are any number of opportunities to bring e.g. Japan into the 21st century. By the by, this is true for lots of folks demographically dissimilar to this forum in the US. JavaScript is cutting edge in my market, no joke.

Why would we want to bring Japan back from the 22nd century to this mess?

Re: Build What Had Previously Not Been Possible

#39

Post by jasonlbaptiste »

jeromec wrote: post #34

Hey Jason (or anyone else) SMS was mentioned as part of immediate communications. Is this true yet today? A sticking point for me with SMS was that messages were randomly subject to hours of delay upon being sent because of the SMS distribution system. It's because of that along with knowing that far more robust (and free) email on devices was on the way that I never got behind SMS. However, I now have something in m…

I think it's at the point of immediate, but subject to delays just like any other technology. I haven't had an SMS delay in quite a while.

I would curious to see more insight into the history of SMS, technology behind it,etc. Wikipedia does an okay job. Correct me if I'm wrong, but SMS does not use the data network? I have been able to send sms messages with no data service before.

Re: Build What Had Previously Not Been Possible

#40

Post by jeromec »

jasonlbaptiste wrote: post #39
jeromec wrote: post #34

Hey Jason (or anyone else) SMS was mentioned as part of immediate communications. Is this true yet today? A sticking point for me with SMS was that messages were randomly subject to hours of delay upon being sent because of the SMS distribution system. It's because of that along with knowing that far more robust (and free) email on devices was on the way that I never got behind SMS. However, I now have something in m…

I think it's at the point of immediate, but subject to delays just like any other technology. I haven't had an SMS delay in quite a while. I would curious to see more insight into the history of SMS, technology behind it,etc. Wikipedia does an okay job. Correct me if I'm wrong, but SMS does not use the data network? I have been able to send sms messages with no data service before.

Yes, from when I looked into it the bottleneck seemed to be the SMSC (short message service center), which receives the message then sends it out to users when they are available. Apparently, SMSC's often became overloaded with the popularity of SMS. You're right, SMS I believe takes place on a separate mobile network rather than the open Internet, which is why it's subject to the fees and different behavior. I'm at a point where I'm torn between writing SMS technology off in favor of email, or considering it for certain things, because we're still a long way away from everyone comfortably accessing their email via mobile.
Post reply on HN