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Sam Altman talks with Mark Zuckerberg about how to build the future [video]

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Re: Sam Altman talks with Mark Zuckerberg about how to build the future [video]

#171

Post by ItsMattyG »

JamesBarney wrote: post #167
tedmiston wrote: post #49

Refreshing advice: Work on a problem you care about and don't worry about the rest until it's working. > Sam: So you were 19 when you started Facebook. One question we hear a lot at Y Combinator is, "I'm 19 today. I really want to do whatever I can to make the world better. What should I do?" > Mark: I always think that the most important thing that entrepreneurs should do is pick something they care about, work on i…

Donating to a http://www.givewell.org/ recommended charity is probably a more scalable way to make the world a better place.

I suspect it's probably a wash. Donating to a Givewell charity has less risk certainly, but a successful startup on the order of Facebook will change the world by multiple orders of magnitude more. The expected value is probably similar.

Re: Sam Altman talks with Mark Zuckerberg about how to build the future [video]

#172

Post by ItsMattyG »

metaphorm wrote: post #134
eatkinson wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I find that the major objection is that people think great science is done by luck. It's all a matter of luck. Well, consider Einstein. Note how many different things he did that were good. Was it all luck? Wasn't it a little too repetitive? Consider Shannon. He didn't do just information theory. Several years before, he did some other good things and some which are still locked up in the security of cryptography. H…

scientific discoveries and social network websites aren't in the same class and this reasoning doesn't apply to the latter.

The same reasoning can be applied to be people like Jack Dorsey, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk who have made several billion dollar companies.

Re: Sam Altman talks with Mark Zuckerberg about how to build the future [video]

#173

Post by metaphorm »

ItsMattyG wrote: post #172
metaphorm wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

scientific discoveries and social network websites aren't in the same class and this reasoning doesn't apply to the latter.

The same reasoning can be applied to be people like Jack Dorsey, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk who have made several billion dollar companies.

can it? explain.

Re: Sam Altman talks with Mark Zuckerberg about how to build the future [video]

#174

Post by sp527 »

janvdberg wrote: post #97
zouhair wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And also be extremely lucky.

In this [1] Tim Ferris podcast Peter Thiel states about Zuckerberg (paraphrasing here): "the more time you spent with him the more you realise it is not luck." [1] http://fourhourworkweek.com/2014/09/09/peter-thiel/

I think Zuckerberg's success had more to do with being able to identify valuable contributors and convince them to join the Facebook team. He isn't responsible for generating many of the important features or business decisions, though he certainly has to approve of them. In that way, his primary skillset is very similar to that of Jobs and other successful entrepreneurs.

Re: Sam Altman talks with Mark Zuckerberg about how to build the future [video]

#175

Post by perseusprime11 »

jomamaxx wrote: post #154
perseusprime11 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. Think if Friendster & Myspace were on top of things, they would have bested Facebook. What made them suscpetible for disruption?

Friendster was a clumsy product. MySpace was limited in features, and a fugly interface. Neither had talented people. Zuck started at Harvard. That was his core user base. The Ivy League. Basically marquis 'customers' in social. Think of how massively that affected recruiting and attention? The network effect of Ivy League x 1000. It would have been trivial for him to get investment. But in the end - forget culture -…

Agreed. I think the larger point I was trying to make is there is always a bit of luck somewhere somehow that contributes to overall success. In the case of Facebook, it came in the form of lousy products such as Friendster and Myspace.

Re: Sam Altman talks with Mark Zuckerberg about how to build the future [video]

#176

Post by mbm »

devy wrote: post #35

> I heard this story recently that at this conference where > someone has built a machine learning application where you > can take a picture of a lesion on someone's skin, and it can > detect instantly whether it's skin cancer with the accuracy > of the best dermatologists and doctors in the world. So who > doesn't want that, right? I wonder what that app is? Is it SkinVision[1] or IBM's proprietary medical techonol…

We've been working on this at Georgia Tech. It's an exciting area with a real opportunity to help improve care in dermatology.

Poster: http://mattmay.us/pub/dermfollow_poster.pdf

Paper: http://mattmay.us/pub/dermfollow_final_report.pdf

Re: Sam Altman talks with Mark Zuckerberg about how to build the future [video]

#177

Post by Animats »

gavinpc wrote: post #159
Animats wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"[The next computing platform] - I think that's going to be virtual reality and augmented reality." You have to listen to Zuckerberg on this, because he's good at understanding what people will put up with. I never expected that a sizable portion of the population would walk around looking at smartphones, totally losing situational awareness. Even when not playing Pokemon Go. But that became socially acceptable. The…

I agree that's a must watch, but how is it not just HoloLens + 10 years + Ridley Scott ( edit plus get me out of here)? It's a bit unfair to compare an artist's vision to a functioning (and almost shipping) device.

Technically, this AR hardware [1] could do Hyperreality.

Technology isn't the problem. It's "why bother"? Zuckerberg is thinking of AR as a social system. That implies something much more like Hyperreality than Microsoft's system. Remember, there is not, as yet, a killer app for VR, even though good hardware has been available for years now.

[1] https://www.metavision.com/

Re: Sam Altman talks with Mark Zuckerberg about how to build the future [video]

#178

Post by noblethrasher »

gordon_freeman wrote: post #168
tedmiston wrote: post #49

Refreshing advice: Work on a problem you care about and don't worry about the rest until it's working. > Sam: So you were 19 when you started Facebook. One question we hear a lot at Y Combinator is, "I'm 19 today. I really want to do whatever I can to make the world better. What should I do?" > Mark: I always think that the most important thing that entrepreneurs should do is pick something they care about, work on i…

Okay so I don't agree with "don't actually commit to turning it into a company until it's working" part. Airbnb example comes to mind where all the founders exhausted all their credit cards to fund user acquisitions and when that did not work kept trying other innovative means to keep the company afloat. If they would have followed this advice, there would not have been an AirBnB. I agree with the part that says " en…

During an interview[1] (with one of the AirBnB founders no less), pg offered the general advice that startups should search for success using a hill climbing algorithm, and not worry about dangerous local maximums; only to be immediately confronted with the counter example of AirBnB (the cereal episode).

That company just seems to be an outlier in multiple categories.

[1] http://youtu.be/nrWavoJsEks at about 7:00

Re: Sam Altman talks with Mark Zuckerberg about how to build the future [video]

#179

Post by doomlaser »

jomamaxx wrote: post #154
perseusprime11 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. Think if Friendster & Myspace were on top of things, they would have bested Facebook. What made them suscpetible for disruption?

Friendster was a clumsy product. MySpace was limited in features, and a fugly interface. Neither had talented people. Zuck started at Harvard. That was his core user base. The Ivy League. Basically marquis 'customers' in social. Think of how massively that affected recruiting and attention? The network effect of Ivy League x 1000. It would have been trivial for him to get investment. But in the end - forget culture -…

Yes, Facebook had better strategy. They embraced new tech to streamline the pain factor of navigating the website, whereas MySpace tried to optimize for discrete page views to serve more ads. MySpace would serve an entire interstitial page load with nothing but ads to get to different parts of its interface, whereas Facebook would embrace ways to jump to your friends' profiles or read your messages quickly, often without reloading the page.

It reminds me of how Google won the search engine war by delivering a more streamlined, less exploitative product.

And then of course there were a couple innovations that neither MySpace or Friendster had: photos with tags of your friends, and the concept of the News feed. It's hard to imagine a social network without those features, but they didn't exist before Facebook introduced them.

Re: Sam Altman talks with Mark Zuckerberg about how to build the future [video]

#180

Post by k__ »

dang wrote: post #111
o0-0o wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He gave his own facebook stock to his own charity. If you've ever owned a corporation, you know just how cynical, contriving, and conceitful that move is.

That's a generically cynical statement that you don't seem to have any specific basis for. In such cases, for HN purposes you should practice the Principle of Charity and err on the side of giving others the benefit of the doubt. It won't affect Zuckerberg much, but it will make this community better.

Well, some people believe in charity, some in socialism.

I'm more for a democratic guided way to spend money beneficial, than one rich person deciding what needs to be done with it.

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