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The sad truth about Facebook

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Re: The sad truth about Facebook

#111

Post by chopsueyar »

nir wrote: post #109

One reason I like HN is that comments seem to lean more towards the Perceptive (vs Judgmental) end of the scale in the Myers-Briggs sense, compared to other sites. So it's sad to see many of the responses in this thread. Myhrvold/Lyons/Newsweek aren't the issue here, the issue is what you choose to do with your life. In 1983 Steve Jobs recruited Pepsi's president to Apple by asking him to choose between changing the…

In 1983 Steve Jobs recruited Pepsi's president to Apple by asking him to choose between changing the world and selling sugared water. Much of Valley's current output is closer to sugared water than to the Macintosh.

Beautiful summation.

Re: The sad truth about Facebook

#112

Post by chopsueyar »

rbanffy wrote: post #81

It's kind of amusing to watch the ad-hominem arguments take flight. While it's true Daniel Lyons is Fake Steve Jobs and that Nathan Myhrvold runs a company focused on thinking up ideas that could lead to products after some research and patent them before spending a dime making any real progress beyond writing them down, while at the same time extorting those who do, the argument against companies like Facebook or Zy…

Not sure if you were paying attention, but Zuckerberg was on Oprah, and he is giving the state of New Jersey $100 million in Facebook stock, in a matching grant.

How much stock has Google given NJ?

Re: The sad truth about Facebook

#113

Post by WalterBright »

chopsueyar wrote: post #110
WalterBright wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Check out FidoNet http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FidoNet , a hobbyist produced global decentralized fault tolerant network, controlled by nobody. If the internet never existed, it's quite probable FidoNet would have grown up and fit into the same ecological niche.

Fidonet is a network like bittorrent is a network. I think you are getting downvoted because of the hardware/software distinction, or lack thereof.

The internet used to run over the phone lines, too. It's a protocol.

Re: The sad truth about Facebook

#114

Post by WalterBright »

poet wrote: post #108
WalterBright wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of those networks also evolved gateways to interconnect to each other. The history of technology is often one that starts out with proprietary interfaces that evolve under user pressure to standardized, open interfaces. We see that playing out yet again in the iPhone vs Android competition. As soon as there were two computers, people tried to connect them. The more they got connected, the more universal people w…

The idea that a decentralized fault tolerant network is such a novel concept that it required a government to think of it doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Even the telephone system is decentralized. There are decentralized fault tolerant systems all around us as examples. It doesn't require the government to think of it, it requires the government to implement it. It would be a massively stupid decision from a busi…

FidoNet is the counterexample that shows the government was not required to implement a global, decentralized, fault tolerant network.

Before that, the phone system was a national, decentralized, fault tolerant network built without benefit of government funding, research, or protocols.

Re: The sad truth about Facebook

#115

Post by CamperBob »

WalterBright wrote: post #114
poet wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea that a decentralized fault tolerant network is such a novel concept that it required a government to think of it doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Even the telephone system is decentralized. There are decentralized fault tolerant systems all around us as examples. It doesn't require the government to think of it, it requires the government to implement it. It would be a massively stupid decision from a busi…

FidoNet is the counterexample that shows the government was not required to implement a global, decentralized, fault tolerant network. Before that, the phone system was a national, decentralized, fault tolerant network built without benefit of government funding, research, or protocols.

Before that, the phone system was a national, decentralized, fault tolerant network built without benefit of government funding, research, or protocols.

Which phone network are you talking about? Certainly not any I'm familiar with.

I'm no evangelist for government-financed R&D, but I don't think you could possibly have picked a worse example (http://www.corp.att.com/history/history3.html) for your argument.

Re: The sad truth about Facebook

#116

Post by CamperBob »

WalterBright wrote: post #99
WalterBright wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For another example, the telegraph and telephone networks in the US were built with private funding. Even the transatlantic cables were private ventures (at enormous cost).

I'm curious about all the downvotes with no comments. If the facts are wrong, say so.

You might read a bit about the history of the Bell System before lecturing us all about how the telephone network was built and paid for.

Re: The sad truth about Facebook

#117

Post by WalterBright »

CamperBob wrote: post #116
WalterBright wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious about all the downvotes with no comments. If the facts are wrong, say so.

You might read a bit about the history of the Bell System before lecturing us all about how the telephone network was built and paid for.

There's a lot more to it than AT&T's version. See http://www.cato.org/pubs/journal/cjv14n2-6.html

I don't see anything in AT&T's link suggesting it was paid for by the government.

Re: The sad truth about Facebook

#118

Post by nivertech »

EdiX wrote: post #92
nivertech wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the funding todays goes to: 1)"OSI Level 7" (Social Networking, Web 2.0, Mobile Apps and Widgets companies). 2)"OSI Level 6" (Cloud, Big Data and BI/Analytics). "OSI Layers 1-5" are more capital intensive and they are heavily underfunded. My startup somewhere between the "OSI layers 5 and 6" and I fully agree with the people quoted in the article. While using non-mainstream and exotic programming languages is…

You are not talking about the Open Systems Interconnection model, right? That's a protocol stack that died in the '90s and has been supplanted by a networking stack that was deliberately designed to not be like the OSI model. http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3439

If you didn't noticed, I always put "OSI Layer N" in the double quotes. It's just an example of well known stack. My comment has nothing to do with networking protocols.

Recently some people refer to it, to explain some concepts. Some even comparing Peninsula in Bay Area to OSI, where is San-Francisco is "OSI Level 7" and Cupertino is "OSI Level 1" ;)

Re: The sad truth about Facebook

#119

Post by pley »

timr wrote: post #34
iamelgringo wrote: post #6

Complete poppycock. Running Hackers and Founders SV, I think I have a pretty decent picture of what Silicon Valley is like on the ground floor, and as far as I'm concerned it's pretty frigging amazing. There's tons of small teams doing amazing things with Big Data and real time analytics like Factual (making Open Data easier to manage and use), MixPanel (Real Time analytics for applications). There's a number of comp…

Yeah, this is one of those debates that's going to generate a lot of heat, but not much light. Because, frankly, for every guy who thinks that it's a crime that the valley isn't 95% about battery technology and semiconductor startups, there's a guy who wants to breathlessly pronounce Twitter a "new communications protocol" (Twitter is a web service -- it uses the same protocols as everyone else on the web -- and it's…

    For that matter, so are most of the common "big data" applications (grinding through log files)
Dude you work at Yelp in Search? Seriously?

What about companies like Palantir? or Cloudera?

I understand Yelp's Log file might be full of shit, but there are countless companies out there which use the same Big Data technology for doing interesting analysis, right from companies like walmart who do transaction analysis to pharmaceuticals like pfizer which use the same technology in developing new drugs. Just because your log file is crap does not means all log files are crap.

Has HN affected your brain or what? You say you received PhD in Computational Biology? I seriously doubt that now.

http://www.cloudera.com/blog/2009/10/analyzing-human-genomes...

Oh btw Yelp is surely one of those useless Web 2.0 companies like posterous. (at least facebook is building social infrastructure and drawing people towards internet ) Last heard you were accused of blackmailing restaurants. How is that working for you.

Before talking crap about Big Data, go out and read about its credible applications.

Re: The sad truth about Facebook

#120

Post by borism »

zaphar wrote: post #105
poet wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Erm, it's most certainly a fact. Government funded projects produced the Internet, while commercial companies were producing centralized, circuit switched networks. It's self evident that no one else was doing it; every single commercial company in the world at the time was pursuing a drastically different design philosophy (the reason being that circuit switched networks were making money). As an aside, it's not rea…

I was typing it on my mobile phone. Which is not a good enough excuse I know but it's the only excuse I have. Also I wasn't disputing whether Government funding produced the internet. What I disagreed with was the notion that the Internet deserved to be produced and therefore the Government was beholden to fund it. Such a discussion wouldn't be a debate that lent itself to the use of evidence for claims since its pri…

> What I disagreed with was the notion that the Internet deserved to be produced

quite pointless argument to have on the Internet

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