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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

#141

Post by jtheory »

strlen wrote: post #49
dekayed wrote: post #8

I was reminded of the following article when I read this blog posting: http://greaterseas.com/2011/05/the-future-of-innovation/ There's a great quote by Jeff Hammerbacher (an ex-Facebooker) that is great: “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks.”

> “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks.” Said by a founder of a company (Cloudera) that commercialized an open source implementation (Hadoop) originally sponsored by Yahoo (an advertising company) of a paper (MapReduce/GFS) written by Google (an advertising company), the file system in which has been heavily improved by Facebook (an advertising company) and whic…

This is not a contradiction. The best minds of our generation are thinking about how to make people click ads -- and it's fortunate that along the way some of the technology they generate happens to also be useful elsewhere...

But that doesn't imply that most of what they produce is valuable to more worthy projects, or even much of it.

I'm trying to imagine a world in which more of those great minds were focusing their efforts directly on solving serious problems.

Re: All these Brilliant People at Facebook Make Me Sad

#143

Post by rimmjob »

scythe wrote: post #114
danking00 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know three very bright, young graduates who have decided to enter the Financial industry (i.e. Algorithmic Trading). One has a Bachelor's in Physics & CS, another a Bachelor's in Physics & Math, and the other is finishing a PhD in Astrophysics. They view the Financial industry as an intellectually stimulating game (I don't disagree), and an opportunity to make 6-figures in their early 20s. This really disappoints m…

>This really disappoints me. Sure, somebody needs to work in Finance for the sake of liquidity and other things I don't understand. But, 35% or so of my social group that are pursuing degrees in Physics are headed to Finance instead of research. Every cloud has a silver lining, and this one is as bright as it gets. Until the rise of e.g. finance and actuarial science, getting a physics or math degree meant just going…

i turned down my friends' startup offer to go work in finance. 3 years later, they are multi-millionaires and i am not. that doesn't really bother me though. what bothers me is that they are happy and doing exciting work and i am not.

Re: All these Brilliant People at Facebook Make Me Sad

#144

Post by strlen »

jtheory wrote: post #141
strlen wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks.” Said by a founder of a company (Cloudera) that commercialized an open source implementation (Hadoop) originally sponsored by Yahoo (an advertising company) of a paper (MapReduce/GFS) written by Google (an advertising company), the file system in which has been heavily improved by Facebook (an advertising company) and whic…

This is not a contradiction. The best minds of our generation are thinking about how to make people click ads -- and it's fortunate that along the way some of the technology they generate happens to also be useful elsewhere... But that doesn't imply that most of what they produce is valuable to more worthy projects, or even much of it. I'm trying to imagine a world in which more of those great minds were focusing the…

Go see papers at conferences like OSDI, POSP, SIGMOD. Note how some of the bravest ones are coming from ad serving and e-commerce companies (e.g., the ZooKeeper paper which is rather amazing). It isn't a mere accident: the technical problem that's being solved is hard and requires these kind of systems to built. The people who join those companies join to solve those kinds of problems, not accidentally decide to solve them.

The technical challenges involved in real time auctions and high volume ad serving are a serious technical problem. The optimization and machine learning work to target the ads is another hard technical problem. For many people (myself included) the technical challenge is the most important part of my work, big reason why I want to wake up and head in to the office.

When they decide to move on to another company, they'll come away with greater technical skills that could also be applied to smart meters, DNA analysis, physics, pure systems programming work and the like.

Re: All these Brilliant People at Facebook Make Me Sad

#145

Post by georgieporgie »

code_duck wrote: post #140
georgieporgie wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect that Facebook -- and its use -- will continue to change over the course of the next decade. Currently, it looks like the most promising technology for mass user interaction that has been developed. StackOverflow is basically a high signal-to-noise ratio content farm. It sells the illusion of fame in exchange for generating content. There is no meaningful social aspect to it. I don't see any signs of it evol…

Facebook is a mish-mash of previously existing communication technologies, mainly being presented to people who haven't used the prior forms extensively. A chat system, a 'twitter' like system, a limited blog with comments system, photo sharing with comments, and the familiar followers/contacts that many site have these days. While amazingly successful, I'd hesitate to call Facebook 'a technology'. They haven't pione…

Facebook is a mish-mash of previously existing communication technologies, mainly being presented to people who haven't used the prior forms extensively.

Alternatively: Facebook is a collection of wide-ranging social technologies combined in a tasteful, approachable manner, which has captured the interest of a wider range of the general public than anything before it, by a wide margin.

Re: All these Brilliant People at Facebook Make Me Sad

#146

Post by cma »

syllogism wrote: post #108
cma wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not comparing Facebook to meth, but I just want to point out that the same form of argument you just made would also apply to meth.

For an addict, each meth use is delivering an enormous amount of negative value. There's also the terrible negative value the addict may create for other people. The same argument about multiplication would suggest that your intuition under-estimates the total negative effects of meth on the world.

I was referring to the markets part.

Re: All these Brilliant People at Facebook Make Me Sad

#147

Post by skidooer »

kahawe wrote: post #89
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…

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 tru…

The Web 2.0 movement was about opening up the data in computer consumable formats and APIs. Nothing more.

While exchanging data over the internet is obviously nothing new, having large organizations provide easy programmable access to their private databases was somewhat revolutionary. The whole App craze was born out of being able to create new interfaces to existing services, thanks to Web 2.0.

Web 2.0 was nothing new from a technical perspective, but it was a revolutionary social shift.

Re: All these Brilliant People at Facebook Make Me Sad

#148

Post by mahyarm »

dschobel wrote: post #3

Is it any worse than the reams of medical researchers working on giving old affluent men hard-ons and their hair back? I doubt it...

Other than rogaine, hair implants, a couple of other drugs and turning off your testosterone production, what else is there in hair loss research?

Re: All these Brilliant People at Facebook Make Me Sad

#149

Post by mahyarm »

dschobel wrote: post #3

Is it any worse than the reams of medical researchers working on giving old affluent men hard-ons and their hair back? I doubt it...

Other than rogaine, hair implants, a couple of other drugs and turning off your testosterone production, what else is there in hair loss research?

Re: All these Brilliant People at Facebook Make Me Sad

#150

Post by JabavuAdams »

It's interesting to see that most comments here focus on justifying Facebook's importance, rather than questioning the other half of the argument: are FB's employees really that brilliant?

It just seems that what they're doing is not that hard, compared to what people do in other engineering disciplines.

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