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The Lost Chapter

aarongreenspan.com

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Re: The Lost Chapter

#141

Post by seiji »

mattmanser wrote: post #103
corporalagumbo wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jeez, did you have to write all that? Anyway, although I think you are focusing on the weakest part of Greenspan's argument - the point where he comes closest to bitterness - I was wondering if you'd like to invest $20,000 in my new venture. I'd like to sell crack heroin to junkies in Detroit. I'm sure as a fellow champion of guilt-free founder consciences, you will support my endeavour as I give gangbangers the chan…

Careful, you'll bring the HN grellas lovers down on you. While I always despair at his inability to say something succinctly, he generally always makes an excellent point. Facebook provides an excellent service to most people in the world and it does so at a level that your $20,000 cannot buy. While we as a more discerning social customer may see it as extremely low value, the production values are actually extremely…

Careful, you'll bring the HN grellas lovers down on you.

grellas is the most selfless and erudite among us. Attempting to argue, rebut, or piddlepaddle one of his comments reflects more on the commenter than on the point they are trying to make.

The only proper response to a grellas comment is "Thank you."

Re: The Lost Chapter

#142

Post by zingahgud »

Have a look at the last IM exchange between Greenspan and Zuckerberg on the idea of protecting the privacy of students' home adresses from being accessible to any student at any university using Facebook. It is toward the end of the timeline.pdf document. The problem: Thanks to some sloppy php, anyone at any univeristy could download a .csv file of all of someone contacts including their home addresses and other private information, if that person had ever requested to export her data to csv format. Greenspan wanted this security hole fixed promptly. Zuckerberg didn't care; he just fired off an email to someone else (same guy who wrote the sloppy php?) and put it out of his mind. Then when Greenspan made others aware of the problem, Zuckerberg was upset because [un]"savvy" users might learn of security holes in Facebook. What a terrible thing that would be. We see that same sort of denigrating view of users and concealment attitude continuing at Facebook to this day.

Say what you will about Greenspan but at least the guy is responsible. We can't say the same for Zuckerberg. The kid is reckless and unremorseful.

Re: The Lost Chapter

#144

Post by waterlesscloud »

kevinalexbrown wrote: post #70

I'm not going to publicly speculate on either party's moral character. But I did skim the transcripts, and I noticed one curious fact: Zuckerberg starts and ends most of the conversations. To clarify: I'm not sure precisely why I find it interesting, it was just one of those phenomena that raised an eyebrow, and passed my "don't publicly engage in debates about people's character whom I haven't personally met"-test.…

Most, I guess. But even though I wasn't really paying attention to that I did make note of the fact that the conversation about how much Z was paying people was started by ThinkComp.

Re: The Lost Chapter

#145

Post by pyoung »

moocow01 wrote: post #111
grellas wrote: post #77

Institutional investors made the mistake - again, and again, and again - of validating Mark's duplicitousness by pouring literally billions of dollars into his company, and then billions more into startups seeking to emulate it. Some of their investments created out of thin air industries that contribute absolutely nothing to, and in many cases even detract from, society. . . . Most mind-boggling of all, it's been cl…

Hes referring to the opportunity cost. If our society is focused on rewarding those that make little trinkets to distract everyone, I guess so be it but I think the argument is that we'd rather invest those people in solving the things we are trying to distract ourselves from. To people that have been unfortunate enough to experience real poverty, medical problems, and other struggles, the equivalency of a company wh…

Is there really an opportunity cost? There are tons of companies, non-profits, and academic research being conducted in the medical and other more worthy spaces. It's not like the existence of Facebook changes that. Also, the tech talent wars are really only driving up the costs of Computer engineers who are interested in the social web. It's not like this impacts non-profits very much, they are still getting talented people, they just don't happen to be in the market for CS engineers.

Re: The Lost Chapter

#146

Post by zingahgud »

corporalagumbo wrote: post #102
lifeisstillgood wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a free society, he is free to write as much as he likes and you are free to neither read nor reply to it. The base of his argument is offending a persons preferences is not sufficient to self censor ones own actions - and I agree. I also agree where he said any legal start up is fine and free of guilt - but don't worry I would be behind any start up or government initiative that gave away heroin to Junkies. The so…

As I argue in my other reply, legal and ethical boundaries on the internet are still poorly if at all defined.

That is the understatement of the century.

Re: The Lost Chapter

#147

Post by tptacek »

freshhawk wrote: post #133
grellas wrote: post #77

Institutional investors made the mistake - again, and again, and again - of validating Mark's duplicitousness by pouring literally billions of dollars into his company, and then billions more into startups seeking to emulate it. Some of their investments created out of thin air industries that contribute absolutely nothing to, and in many cases even detract from, society. . . . Most mind-boggling of all, it's been cl…

There is a label already, "ethical". Argue all you want over the ethics of facebook, or if entrepreneurs have any duty to act ethically, not unethically, not illegally or just not get caught. You don't need a new label though. You sure did write a lot complaining about people using their free speech to criticize businesses they feel are either harmful or a waste of resources because this is a "free country". I was un…

Only in places like Hacker News is there a consensus opinion that Facebook is "a new addictive and time wasting form of entertainment who's contribution society is null or negative". Facebook has increased the number of interactions I have with my extended family by roughly a factor of infinity --- and I'm one of those nerds who's run a mailing list for his family since the mid '90s.

A more concise way to say what 'grellas said is that these complaints about Facebook have nothing to do with ethics and everything to do with fashion. They are just a new way of proclaiming to the world that "I don't even own a television".

Concern for masses frittering away hours on meaningless entertainments is at least as old as the mechanical player piano. Despite the countervailing evidence of the Salk Vaccine, the ARPA IMP, Google, stem cell transplants, McGee's _On Food And Cooking_, and everything else society has managed to accomplished while beset by the horrors of entertainment, you are welcome to hold the view that you are better not only than the people who avail themselves of that entertainment, but also the people who manage to produce and maintain it using computer systems running at a scale unimaginable just a decade or two before.

Just do it with better writing, because the bar for articulating this particular concern is set very high; you might start with _Infinite Jest_.

Re: The Lost Chapter

#148

Post by lotharbot »

corporalagumbo wrote: post #121
mattmanser wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Careful, you'll bring the HN grellas lovers down on you. While I always despair at his inability to say something succinctly, he generally always makes an excellent point. Facebook provides an excellent service to most people in the world and it does so at a level that your $20,000 cannot buy. While we as a more discerning social customer may see it as extremely low value, the production values are actually extremely…

Also, just to make sure I'm understanding you: are you saying that there is a group of people on HN who will vigorously downvote me or anyone else simply for satirically rebutting a laughably verbose comment from a popular user? Hmm, and I thought I was finished with primary school.

There are people on HN who will vigorously downvote you for unnecessary disparaging comments like "Jeez, did you have to write all that?", "laughably verbose" [0], or "I thought I was finished with primary school."

While those lines may not technically violate the letter of the guidelines [1], they violate the spirit of the section that says "please reply to the argument instead of calling names". Note that the next part of the guidelines gives an example of how one can and should remove an extraneous cheap shot from their argument.

Your comment history shows you are capable of producing a much higher signal-to-noise ratio than in the last few comments. Please hold yourself to a higher standard. Satirical rebuttals can be a joy to read when done right.

[0] because grellas has established himself as someone who makes lengthy, meaningful contributions, "tl;dr" type complaints will be considerably less well received than they might be in response to a genuinely too-long post from one with a less valuable contribution history. Particularly yours, because it was phrased so... thoughtlessly.

[1] http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: The Lost Chapter

#149

Post by tptacek »

corporalagumbo wrote: post #81
grellas wrote: post #77

Institutional investors made the mistake - again, and again, and again - of validating Mark's duplicitousness by pouring literally billions of dollars into his company, and then billions more into startups seeking to emulate it. Some of their investments created out of thin air industries that contribute absolutely nothing to, and in many cases even detract from, society. . . . Most mind-boggling of all, it's been cl…

Jeez, did you have to write all that? Anyway, although I think you are focusing on the weakest part of Greenspan's argument - the point where he comes closest to bitterness - I was wondering if you'd like to invest $20,000 in my new venture. I'd like to sell crack heroin to junkies in Detroit. I'm sure as a fellow champion of guilt-free founder consciences, you will support my endeavour as I give gangbangers the chan…

Ok, Corporal A. Gumbo: Write it better.

Do it and I'll donate $1000 that I promise I was not going to donate anyways to Partners In Health.

There's an idea common to forums that I don't frequent that I recently learned of called an "ideological Turing test". The idea is to take a group of people divided along a controversy, and to get each side to anonymously write a coherent argument that capture's the other side's perspective. Then everyone tries to tell, "which is the real argument, and which is the cunning fake?".

In that spirit: if you think you understand what 'grellas is trying to say so well, go ahead and take a whack at saying it better, and demonstrate that you actually grok his perspective.

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