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The Lost Chapter

aarongreenspan.com

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Re: The Lost Chapter

#211

Post by bluekeybox »

billjings wrote: post #113
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…

I'm not taking sides here, but is there something about defending a billionaire that magically makes a person write in a Victorian voice?

Yes, I can confirm that from my own experience. Another fun language fact: after four bottles of beer, I start speaking with a posh British accent. After the fifth bottle, it changes into something resembling Australian with a hint of Russian, after the sixth into Irish, and then it goes downhill from there.

Re: The Lost Chapter

#213

Post by tatsuke95 »

intended wrote: post #191
cuergas wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dude, you are cracking me up. And I know you're not joking either. Thanks for bringing some life to an emotionally bereft forum. You are familiar with this term they have for the big spenders on Zynga? "Whales". What kind of person calls someone with an addiction a "whale"? Maybe some people are just too immature to be taking payments from users. Oh, it's all good. We're making people happy. No one is arguing for a "…

What? Whales is a term thats been there from the Casino days of Las Vegas. You may know its other variant - High roller. Its a historic term that has been re-purposed and used correctly for once. It has nothing to do with maturity/immaturity OR addiction. That out of the way, lets move on to addiction - Source. Please show me where zynga gets most of its money from people who are addicted, and please also show me dat…

>"Whales is a term thats been there from the Casino days of Las Vegas. You may know its other variant - High roller."

"Whales" is also used in the financial world for a person with lots of money and no knowledge of what to do with it. In other words, a mark for the clever financial "advisor".

Though, I suppose that in reality there's not much difference between the two definitions.

Re: The Lost Chapter

#214

Post by tatsuke95 »

kamaal wrote: post #204
corporalagumbo wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, here you are: People should stop trying to make entrepreneurs feel guilty for not living up to their personal ethical standards. One of the advantages of our free society is that people can choose to work on weighty issues or fluffy diversions. As long as you abide by the law, you should not be criticised for the style of business you decide to pursue. If a lot of people can make money from social networking th…

>>If a lot of people can make money from social networking then that is definitionally a good thing A lot of people make money selling drugs too. Demand, doesn't automatically make the item in demand good.

>"A lot of people make money selling drugs too."

And a lot of people enjoy taking drugs, but face the same problem of other people pushing their personal morals and ethics on them.

If I want to smoke pot and design shitty Facebook games, leave me to it.

Re: The Lost Chapter

#215

Post by GFischer »

seiji wrote: post #141
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…

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."

While grellas is indeed learned and I do appreciate his sharing with us, I disagree that trying to argue or rebut his arguments necessarily has to be wrong.

Were I to disagree with one of grellas' comments, I would actually go something like "Thank you for posting. However (rebuttal) ... :) "

Also, lawyers / advocates are much better trained than us to write arguments :) , it's their job ! but that doesn't necessarily make them automatically right.

That said, I do tend to side with grellas' point of view.

Re: The Lost Chapter

#216

Post by jamesaguilar »

patrickk wrote: post #201
jamesaguilar wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't this basically the same as saying tesla and spacex will fail because Elon Musk is a jackass?

You don't hear stories about Elon Musk shafting his friends and acquaintances, stringing them along and stealing their ideas. Apparently Musk was a bit of a jerk when x.com merged with PayPal, and is supposedly difficult to work for even today (he works 100 hour weeks, probably demands the same high standards of his employees as he does of himself), but there's none of the skeletons in the closet with Musk as there i…

Did you not read about his divorce?

Re: The Lost Chapter

#217

Post by w1ntermute »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #116
spitx wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

False equivalency. All over false equivalency. Walmart isn't a service. Walmart doesn't have access to your most intimate information like Facebook does. Heck millions of Virgin Mobile accounts have been compromised. But the potential damage isn't even in the same order of magnitude of something (hypothetically) going foul at FB, either owing to deliberate policy or accidentally. Same with JetBlue with passenger data…

Walmart probably has more actionable data - from those purchases of condoms by a married man who did not last year, to the purchases of pregnancy tests of the woman who curiously appears just after him at the till register on lunchtimes. Add in the bottles of wine and the alka seltzer the day after, the purchase of womans underwear in sizes too big for his wife but the same size as his boxers, and the bra that won't…

Uh, are you kidding me? If I'm ever buying anything questionable at Walmart, I just use cash. I usually buy condoms from Walmart, and I always use cash (and no, I'm not cheating on my girl). You're not thinking this through.

Re: The Lost Chapter

#218

Post by lifeisstillgood »

w1ntermute wrote: post #217
lifeisstillgood wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Walmart probably has more actionable data - from those purchases of condoms by a married man who did not last year, to the purchases of pregnancy tests of the woman who curiously appears just after him at the till register on lunchtimes. Add in the bottles of wine and the alka seltzer the day after, the purchase of womans underwear in sizes too big for his wife but the same size as his boxers, and the bra that won't…

Uh, are you kidding me? If I'm ever buying anything questionable at Walmart, I just use cash. I usually buy condoms from Walmart, and I always use cash (and no, I'm not cheating on my girl). You're not thinking this through.

The point I was making was that with electronic transactions, discovering or infering information about a person from their purchases has just as much value as say working out someon is gay from their friends list or choice of netflix.

Use cash. But be aware it is slowly but surely becoming a ghetto.

Re: The Lost Chapter

#219

Post by nancyhua »

corporalagumbo wrote: post #118
nancyhua wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know Zuckerberg but want to play devil's advocate to give him the benefit of the doubt until he actually gets convicted of something. > 2) It is absolutely possible to treat your fellow human beings well and find richly-deserved success - Mark Zuckerberg however does not seem capable of this. From Aaron's account, it looks like Mark does not believe that these software ideas were original or IP. If you buy th…

I appreciate that building Facebook to the point it is at now, and maintaining focus on the future company despite buy-out offers, is not trivial. Mark is clearly a talented individual. However what is good for Facebook =/= what is good for Facebook users. And one point that emerges from Greenspan's description of Mark is that the man may be a genius for cutting out friends and building an empire, but when it comes t…

I think I agree with your points assuming Mark is evil.

I am not convinced Zuckerberg's lacking "human warmth." It didn't strike me that Mark thought he was actually friends with Aaron or thought he was betraying anything- that's Aaron's perspective, which was understandable but we can't be really nice to everyone who considers themselves our friends or disagrees with us on who owns an idea.

Facebook so far hasn't done anything I really disagree with. But my feelings on privacy etc aren't that strong yet, maybe a failure of my imagination because nothing bad has really happened to me yet (knocking on wood).

Re: The Lost Chapter

#220

Post by grellas »

corporalagumbo wrote: post #179
tptacek wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Okay, here you are: People should stop trying to make entrepreneurs feel guilty for not living up to their personal ethical standards. One of the advantages of our free society is that people can choose to work on weighty issues or fluffy diversions. As long as you abide by the law, you should not be criticised for the style of business you decide to pursue. If a lot of people can make money from social networking th…

Here is my shortened version:

"What I choose to call 'Founder's Guilt Complex' is a false sense of guilt imposed on founders who are told that the only worthwhile venture is one aimed at shaking up the world - I say, relax and use your talents to build the business you want. Keep it legal and do aspire to more in life than that. But forget about the censors. Like the Puritans of old, they would put you in a straightjacket for no good reason. And for this reason too, though there may be bad actors, there is not a thing wrong with social networking as a worthwhile business endeavor."

Does this short version achieve the same goals as the original? Yes and no. Context matters a lot in writing (see, e.g., my thoughts on legal writing: http://grellas.com/articles.html). The original here is flawed in that it is in the nature of a first draft (which is the case with all my posts at HN) and could be streamlined. But when one seeks to advance an idea that is bound to meet resistance among readers who are not used to hearing it, it is important to develop it and not simply state a summary of it. If this is misplaced for the forum (my posts do seem to generate a lot of meta-discussion about "walls of text"), then that is one thing. But there is no doubt that a merely summary version of such an argument will not have the same impact as one that is illustrated and developed.

By the way, I am not thin-skinned. I have appreciated your comments in this thread as well as those of others who have taken me to task on this or that point. We can disagree and still appreciate each other.

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