Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Susan Wojcicki has died

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 523 posts

Re: Susan Wojcicki has died

#271

Post by marcuskane2 »

ghaff wrote: post #207
lchengify wrote: post #73

Was shocked to hear this news. I worked for Google years ago but I was in the NYC office, so we didn't run into the YouTube folks much. Opinions about YouTube may be mixed here on HN, but it is objectively one of the most successful businesses in tech or media to emerge in the past 15 years. If it weren't buried inside Alphabet, Youtube would be worth on the order of $400 billion, more than Disney and Comcast combine…

To a fairly casual observer like myself, YouTube early on looked like mostly a platform for massive video copyright infringement--especially before home video became so relatively cheap and easy. I don't use it nearly as much as some here but it definitely transformed into something much different for the most part and managed to make it work as a business (at least as part of Google).

To a less casual observer like myself, early YouTube looked like a bastion of protection for fair use of copyrighted material.

Sadly, the copyright cartel swiftly attacked and all the regular people lost their rights. It seems like the lesson learned is that the copyright-owning corporations can't be trusted to play fairly or meet in the middle on fair use. We really need to just abolish copyright laws entirely.

Re: Susan Wojcicki has died

#272

Post by coffeebeqn »

theGnuMe wrote: post #211
chr1 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Health is only temporary, and everyone in your family is going to die, until someone makes a trillion dollar startup to cure aging. So it is fundamentally wrong to put health, family, and work as things opposing each other, ultimately they are all needed on a way to get all of the galaxy filled with life. And as Susan have shown one can both do great work, and have a big family with 5 children.

Living in poverty and Being broke is stressful too. Living in a shit family as well.

Yes the upside of being rich and stressed is that it’s all your choice. You could retire at any moment if you wished to

Re: Susan Wojcicki has died

#273

Post by zarzavat »

cowsup wrote: post #124
tomohelix wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I am a callous person, but I have never agreed to this "don't speak ill of the dead" thing. People live and die. It is inevitable. To the grieving family, I can understand why refraining from insulting the dearly departed is necessary. They are grieving and can be irrational. No need to make things worse for them. But between unrelated people? Why can't I discuss the legacy of the dead? We are defined by our de…

I feel like there's an unwritten "recently" in there. If you were to speak ill of Colonel Sanders, nobody would berate you for speaking ill of the dead. But when a CEO like Wojcicki, who made changes that were unpopular to the end-users (but helped turn YouTube into an actual profitable company) dies, it's considered very impolite to use that opportunity to bad-mouth decisions she made. When her son died earlier this…

She was a public figure. If millions of people around the world know your name then when you die, people will have things to say. Some will be good, some will be bad.

The custom about “not speaking ill of the dead” makes sense in a small IRL community, not for internationally famous people.

Re: Susan Wojcicki has died

#274

Post by CoastalCoder »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #251
mrkramer wrote: post #138

Such a devastating news from the human therefore emotional perspective; just 6 months after her freshman son overdosed, now she is gone too. I hope they will be reunited in the afterlife.

[flagged]

I'm not a Christian, but IIUC (apologies if I get this wrong):

They hold that none of us can ever be good enough for God's standards. That's why Jesus' atoning sacrifice is such a big deal.

So pick the person you hold in highest regard, and they're still too sinful to merit eternal life. And pick the worst person you can imagine, and Jesus' sacrifice is enough to cover them too.

Re: Susan Wojcicki has died

#275

Post by coffeebeqn »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #229
sva_ wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Troper's autopsy found high concentrations of cocaine, amphetamine, alprazolam (Xanax), What a strange mix.

The amphetamine is almost assuredly from the cocaine, so that just means they were doing coke and Xanax. Xanax as a party drug is just strange in general.

Maybe it was the end of the night? People take benzos to calm down and/or sleep. And I guess some people to just feel like zombies

Re: Susan Wojcicki has died

#276

Post by cpncrunch »

svnt wrote: post #262
cpncrunch wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

She starts exercising at 530 and goes to bed at 10. Im assuming she wakes up 30 mins before, and it takes her an hour to get to sleep.

They weren’t arguing the specific times, but the article itself reads as if AI generated and not as a real report of someone’s schedule, by someone who would know that person’s schedule. The follow-on conclusion from that is that the times are highly suspect.

Yes, i think youre correct. I cant find an original source.

Re: Susan Wojcicki has died

#277

Post by [deleted] »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #226
darby_nine wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think maybe the above poster is referencing the music product, but that's just a guess.

No, it was the movie channel. I tried it out, because YT Premium had a particular show I wanted to see. The biggest issue that I had, was that I couldn't find shows that I wanted to see. YT kept shoving a bunch of stuff into the UI that I wasn't interested in. All my searches were littered with results that were not relevant to me. I suspect they were paid. The Apple App Store has the same problem. It's infuriating.…

[deleted]

Re: Susan Wojcicki has died

#278

Post by CamperBob2 »

pavlov wrote: post #162
lotsofpulp wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is not an “algorithm” unique to YouTube. See 24/7 news channels for a much earlier example. It is simply the nature of loosening standards on broadly available media, and throughout history, even strict standards have not always prevented the “bad” stuff from getting through.

News channels don’t show random 30-minute programs created by viewers themselves. YouTube does. Fox News and CNN may have low journalistic standards, but at least they have some. They also have liability. (Fox paid $787 million to a voting equipment manufacturer as settlement for lies they published in relation to the 2020 election.) YouTube has neither. Their algorithm will happily promote any nonsense that has trac…

How do you fix this without doing something even worse?

Re: Susan Wojcicki has died

#279

Post by NelsonMinar »

I admired Susan in the early days, long before Youtube. She did a remarkable job earning respect and leadership roles in a company that mostly only valued engineers. Also she was kind and humane in a way that was not entirely common at the company.

Re: Susan Wojcicki has died

#280

Post by mrkramer »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #251
mrkramer wrote: post #138

Such a devastating news from the human therefore emotional perspective; just 6 months after her freshman son overdosed, now she is gone too. I hope they will be reunited in the afterlife.

[flagged]

Yea, God will judge her because she banned XY content or whatever....Google is liberal company which operates in the capitalistic liberal democratic USA and that's how YouTube is run. It's very hard to balance the freedom of speech and the artistic expression or whatever else you want to balance, there is no silver bullet.
Post reply on HN