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Build What Had Previously Not Been Possible

jasonlbaptiste.com

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Re: Build What Had Previously Not Been Possible

#41

Post by sesqu »

jasonlbaptiste wrote: post #4
jodrellblank wrote: post #2

I like the headline idea, but still wonder when you say: : If 9/11 happened in 2010, how much different would it have been? It took forever to know what was going on as the channels of TV and Radio weren’t fast enough. The web wasn’t ubiquitous and the ability to publish as fast as today was not there I was watching it on TV and hanging around on the Ars Technica forum, but I can't really imagine my life would have b…

Well a few things: * The tragedy would have been the same. By no means (and i don't think you are implying that I am either) saying tech today would have prevented it. * The zero delay of information flow would have made things a lot less hectic for everyone. At the time the towers fell there was a massive panic of finding where everyone was and if they were okay. I could imagine a popular hashtag emerging such as: #…

Uhh... When I came home and saw the second plane hit on TV, it took about 10 seconds before I and most of my friends were on IRC, on a moderated channel that got realtime news relays. Actually, there were several such channels, since they hit capacity pretty fast. That's how I got all the valuable information, like how there were reports that a plane was headed for the Eiffel Tower, that I could share with my offline family.

If I had wanted to let someone know I was okay, I probably would have tried SMS, found it didn't work, and then made a note of letting some blabbermouth know once I found a landline or netcafé. 'course, I didn't live in the US, so this is pretty hypothetical.

The point is, I got news (and could discuss with friends) faster back then than I probably would today.

Re: Build What Had Previously Not Been Possible

#42

Post by saturdaysaint »

Augmented reality (and similar vision-AI applications) deserves a mention here. It brings together many things that weren't possible "yesterday" - fast mobile processing, location awareness, new sensor hardware (anything from cameras to accelerometers and gyroscopes is applicable), social/web data...

Re: Build What Had Previously Not Been Possible

#44

Post by dstorrs »

jasonlbaptiste wrote: post #4
jodrellblank wrote: post #2

I like the headline idea, but still wonder when you say: : If 9/11 happened in 2010, how much different would it have been? It took forever to know what was going on as the channels of TV and Radio weren’t fast enough. The web wasn’t ubiquitous and the ability to publish as fast as today was not there I was watching it on TV and hanging around on the Ars Technica forum, but I can't really imagine my life would have b…

Well a few things: * The tragedy would have been the same. By no means (and i don't think you are implying that I am either) saying tech today would have prevented it. * The zero delay of information flow would have made things a lot less hectic for everyone. At the time the towers fell there was a massive panic of finding where everyone was and if they were okay. I could imagine a popular hashtag emerging such as: #…

I was six blocks north of the Towers when they fell. The reason it was hard to get the word out had nothing to do with the presence or absence of Twitter / FB / etc. The reason it was hard was because all the cell towers were down (literally down: many of them were on top of the Towers) and the landlines were clogged with several million people making or receiving calls.

Were this to happen in 2010, you'd see the exact same results. It might be a bit better, because more people would be using VOIP and the land-based Internet didn't go down, but that wouldn't have solved the issue.

Re: Build What Had Previously Not Been Possible

#45

Post by Eliezer »

One of the first genuinely hopeful bits of entrepreneurial thinking I've clicked to on Hackernews in quite a while, something that applies only to people who are thinking up highly original ideas likely to create lots of new economic value, and not to people doing the same stuff everyone else is doing in hopes of a quick cashout.

Re: Build What Had Previously Not Been Possible

#47

Post by todayiamme »

I loved the article, but there is subtle problem troubling me over here.

How do you build the previously impossible without knowing the real extent to what is possible, or not possible? It's one thing to see trends, but quite another to take in depth domain specific knowledge across multiple interconnected topics and form a picture out of them. I can sit here and talk about trends in a lot of industries, but questions like sustainability, future growth require that picture. You need to get it.

It takes a lot of time to do that and there really is no way to escape it. (It's pretty awesome if you fail though, at least you learn something out of it)

However, what happens if you're in a crunch and you're trying to enter an unknown field? You can't assimilate information at a reasonably fast pace, and what you do learn will have a greater probability attached to being inaccurate/flawed. Importantly, you won't have the complete means to detect it.

I am asking this because pretty often I find that most of the overlooked problems lie in the intersections of things, and I've realized that it's really important to know how to bridge that gap before jumping in.

Re: Build What Had Previously Not Been Possible

#48

Post by JunkDNA »

fookyong wrote: post #19

Off topic, but I absolutely cannot stand the way that this site renders and behaves on an iPad. What's wrong with it? It wobbles all over the place and the text looks non-native and jagged. Sort it out, Baptiste!

I noticed this too. Seems to not let you scroll to the end when you rotate from portrait to landscape and back again.

Re: Build What Had Previously Not Been Possible

#49

Post by [deleted] »

todayiamme wrote: post #47

I loved the article, but there is subtle problem troubling me over here. How do you build the previously impossible without knowing the real extent to what is possible, or not possible? It's one thing to see trends, but quite another to take in depth domain specific knowledge across multiple interconnected topics and form a picture out of them. I can sit here and talk about trends in a lot of industries, but question…

[deleted]

Re: Build What Had Previously Not Been Possible

#50

Post by mikeklaas »

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"…

Greed has done more to improve humanity's standard of living than philanthropy ever will.
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