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All these Brilliant People at Facebook Make Me Sad

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Re: All these Brilliant People at Facebook Make Me Sad

#81

Post by 46Bit »

temphn wrote: post #61
frossie wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair to the OP, their argument isn't "since I don't use it, nobody uses it". Their argument was a (totally defensible IMHO) personal expression of disappointment about all the brain work going into something whose impact seems to have peaked (in that those who want it already have it, and the rest of us don't have a problem it can solve). Sure, Facebook is a utility to millions or even billions of people, but s…

Respectfully disagree that Facebook has peaked. Once growth settles down at 700 million users or so, they will roll out service after service. Start thinking about all the things you could do with it. Overthrowing countries is just the beginning.

Publish it's databases, in so doing likely revealing the private details of 400-600 million people and possibly giving enough details to hack/trick into their bank accounts without any problems? After all, a lot of people do fill out the data sections on Facebook - some people clearly don't find being asked to give it your life as well as your email password atall creepy. I for one welcome our new secretly spying overlords, etc.

Re: All these Brilliant People at Facebook Make Me Sad

#82

Post by gaius »

temphn wrote: post #62
dschobel wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That the afflictions cross economic boundaries is obvious, but how about access to those treatments? The fact that pharma companies pursue these issues vs some more life-threatening is a pure profit calculation based on those with the means to pay for them. But don't get me wrong, I'm a dyed in the wool free-market man so I have no issue with them applying their resources however they see fit, but let's dispense with…

The issue is that society thinks it's ok to charge $50k for a fancy car but not for a lifesaving treatment. In the former situation you have a choice, in the latter you have no choice.

Mmm, but that has unfortunate second-order effects. Why was so much effort expended on Viagra instead of a cure for AIDS? Well the elephant in the corner of the room is that drug companies need to make money to fund more research; people will buy Viagra but as soon as a cure for AIDS is discovered the governments of India and Brazil will set about mass-manufacturing it without a penny to the discoverer. Knowing this, even if they wanted to do it for the good of humanity drug companies couldn't - they'd be busted for failing their fiduciary responsibility to shareholders!

Re: All these Brilliant People at Facebook Make Me Sad

#83

Post by alabut »

edanm wrote: post #66
patio11 wrote: post #24

My mother, who was disabled by a stroke some years ago, relies on no non-medical technology as much as she relies on Facebook. It is how she keeps up with the family, who are scattered across the country (and, er, world), without which she would never get to talk to aunts/uncles/cousins since they see each other only at events/reunions and she often isn't well enough to travel. I respect that folks don't find a lot o…

I don't even think you have to go to "extreme" cases of people who are disabled in some way, and use FB to communicate. The truth is, Facebook obviously provides some value, since people use it. But because of the sheer number of users using it, the value it provides is multiplied by a lot . The overall value to the world is huge, simply because so many people derive value from it. I do agree that we hear more about…

"I don't even think you have to go to "extreme" cases of people who are disabled in some way, and use FB to communicate."

My family's found that to be true. I grew up in San Diego but all the rest of my extended family lives abroad and FB's been a huge boon. It's way richer than email and more convenient than phone or IM.

Re: All these Brilliant People at Facebook Make Me Sad

#84

Post by gaius »

jackowayed wrote: post #45
gavanwoolery wrote: post #41

"The sheer strength of their [the Facebook team's] talent is almost unmatched in our industry, past and present." I do not doubt that every employee at Facebook is a competent (or even fairly smart) person, but I kind of doubt they are the most talented people in the software industry. Most of them have not created anything mind-blowing, and many of them are simply employees because they are one or two degrees of sep…

Not everyone is willing and able to face the instability, stress, long hours, bad pay, etc. of a startup. Some that are willing and able are choosing not to do so right now but may sometime in the future. Many, probably most, of the great contributions to our field have been made by employees . Being an employee, especially an employee at a company with a ton of very smart engineers working on the cutting edge, is a…

90-95% of FB's current employees didn't join "a startup", they already had masses of funding at that point.

Re: All these Brilliant People at Facebook Make Me Sad

#86

Post by ma2rten »

wisty wrote: post #75
frossie wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair to the OP, their argument isn't "since I don't use it, nobody uses it". Their argument was a (totally defensible IMHO) personal expression of disappointment about all the brain work going into something whose impact seems to have peaked (in that those who want it already have it, and the rest of us don't have a problem it can solve). Sure, Facebook is a utility to millions or even billions of people, but s…

Facebook just doesn't have many engineers. "Over 2000 employees" (wikipedia says) just isn't that many. Compared that to Google (~20,000 to 30,000?), Microsoft (~90,000), or the IRS - over 100,000, or the Pentagon - 757,000. Facebook has an order of magnitude less than just about any other similarly sized organization. It's bigger than Wikipedia, though.

Of those 2,000 employees only about 300 are actually engineers, if I recall correctly. But the point is, I guess, more about quality then quantity.

Re: All these Brilliant People at Facebook Make Me Sad

#87

Post by ma2rten »

gubatron wrote: post #74
btipling wrote: post #7

They are doing useful things, they're helping create scalable technology that can serve 600 million people. Cassandra, HipHop, Thrift, etc are all products from those minds. In addition the kinds of problems they are solving, such as creating a platform for third party integration can be applied to many different other areas. So yeah they're working on a social network, but all the while all this good stuff is happen…

Cassandra, ha ha ha. Gotta love how inconsistent that thing is. HipHop, have you tried it? I think that technology only works for them.

No, we also use HipHop, on a scale of about 8 mostly million users. It cut down our resource and response time drastically. I have not used Cassandra, but I am sure for some use cases it's great.

Re: All these Brilliant People at Facebook Make Me Sad

#88

Post by ignifero »

I take it the post refers specifically to the bright engineers who work at Facebook. I think he's right. Take Bret Taylor for example. This guy made Google Maps while at google, a tool that seriously changed a business. While at facebook do you know what he did? He converted their APIs to the (unfinished) oauth standard and in the process also deprecated a ton of features that were available to developers. They also released 4 widgets. ZERO innovation there , in fact the platform was more feature-rich 2 years ago. Taking a look at the documentation reveals how crippled and unfocused it is at this time.

On the other hand, there's twitter. Now that's a company that could use a few good engineers to stop the embarrassing downtimes.

Re: All these Brilliant People at Facebook Make Me Sad

#89

Post by kahawe »

frossie wrote: post #58
patio11 wrote: post #24

My mother, who was disabled by a stroke some years ago, relies on no non-medical technology as much as she relies on Facebook. It is how she keeps up with the family, who are scattered across the country (and, er, world), without which she would never get to talk to aunts/uncles/cousins since they see each other only at events/reunions and she often isn't well enough to travel. I respect that folks don't find a lot o…

To be fair to the OP, their argument isn't "since I don't use it, nobody uses it". Their argument was a (totally defensible IMHO) personal expression of disappointment about all the brain work going into something whose impact seems to have peaked (in that those who want it already have it, and the rest of us don't have a problem it can solve). Sure, Facebook is a utility to millions or even billions of people, but s…

I think the point he made that "the internet is stale" resonates heavily with something I have always been feeling and wondering about the twitters, myspaces and facebooks... the whole "web 2.0" shenanigans.

Those were by no means "new inventions", it has all been there before on the web just on a different scale.. and now the non-techs are catching up and celebrating all the "great, new technology".

But the last truly revolutionary inventions and "paradigm shifts" certainly did not happen during the last 5-10 years and yes, on the whole the web IS pretty stale IMHO - and I dare to say you can see just how stale it really is by how much every new "genius" website gets praised and hyped as if it was an invention like electricity and just lifted us from the dark ages into the future.

Re: All these Brilliant People at Facebook Make Me Sad

#90

Post by Tycho »

edanm wrote: post #66
patio11 wrote: post #24

My mother, who was disabled by a stroke some years ago, relies on no non-medical technology as much as she relies on Facebook. It is how she keeps up with the family, who are scattered across the country (and, er, world), without which she would never get to talk to aunts/uncles/cousins since they see each other only at events/reunions and she often isn't well enough to travel. I respect that folks don't find a lot o…

I don't even think you have to go to "extreme" cases of people who are disabled in some way, and use FB to communicate. The truth is, Facebook obviously provides some value, since people use it. But because of the sheer number of users using it, the value it provides is multiplied by a lot . The overall value to the world is huge, simply because so many people derive value from it. I do agree that we hear more about…

On the other hand, FaceBook has built a platform where those sorts of endeavors could start from.

For instance they could put traffic info on everybody's page (with option to disable, of course), that would indicate the probability of encountering congestion on their usual travel routes in the next few hours. People could then use this info to plan their journeys better and thus relieve the strain on the roads. Since 'everyone' has Facebook and checks it multiple times per day, the service would have massive reach from the onset.

It's also big enough to sign deals like integrating FB into the cars themselves. Imagine buying a car that would read out your FB voicemail or wall posts as you drive along, voice controlled. If it wasn't something big like FB, the technology could be there but people wouldn't care.

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