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Steve Yegge, "What Would You Do With Your Own Google?" - OSCON Data 2011

O'Reilly · Youtube · 556 HN points · 16 HN comments
HN Theater has aggregated all Hacker News stories and comments that mention O'Reilly's video "Steve Yegge, "What Would You Do With Your Own Google?" - OSCON Data 2011".
Youtube Summary
It's 2021. You have a petabyte drive on your keychain, your startup company leases bulk cloud storage by the exabyte, and you have a million cores for data crunching. You even can have your own copy of the entire world's public semantic data. What do you do with it? If you're not sure yet, I've got plenty of ideas for you.

About Steve Yegge (Google):
Steve Yegge is a software engineer with over twenty years of industry experience. He has worked on everything from embedded systems to distributed systems to e-commerce, online games and much more. Steve has been at Google for the past six years, where he has worked on Ads and Music systems, and most recently on a project to organize and serve all the world's compiler output. Prior to joining Google, Steve was a Senior Engineering Manager at Amazon.com, where he spent nearly seven years leading teams in Developer Tools and Customer Service systems. Steve graduated from the University of Washington with a B.S. in Computer Science.

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May 07, 2021 · 2 points, 0 comments · submitted by maxwell
Apr 09, 2018 · 2 points, 0 comments · submitted by sthlm
This is getting serious here in southern Mexico, we just had a chikungunya outbreak a year ago and now this. These situations remind me of a talk given at Oscon Data by Steve Yegge about working on the things that matter[0]. Virus are complex and modelling molecular biology requires CS expertise, it's kind of sad that we're normally discussing the new JS frameworks instead of working on the hard(and important)problems.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKmQW_Nkfk8

meagain20000
How southern? Which state is this happening in? Chiapas?
betolink
Yes, I live in Chiapas and we have confirmed cases already.
moonchrome
>it's kind of sad that we're normally discussing the new JS frameworks instead of working on the hard(and important)problems.

What gives you the impression that people contributing to JS frameworks have the potential to meaningfully contribute to "hard problems" in molecular biology ?

vemv
On the micro level, you're right.

On the macro level, the new generations of smart talented folks are choosing CS over other career choices.

moonchrome
>the new generations of smart talented folks are choosing CS over other career choices

Umm... he is arguing that CS is exactly what people should be focusing because CS (ML/data processing, etc.) applied to existing fields and data could lead to new insights - so more smart people going to CS is a good thing (at least according to Yegge).

My point is that CS has practically nothing to do with writing JS frameworks and frankly I doubt that most people doing JS development are the kind of people that could make significant contributions to CS or mentioned sciences - maybe a fraction of the top % - but JS is a low barrier to entry, easy to get simple things done, sufficient to solve real world problems like automating CRUD TPS reports - because someone needs to do that as well. I've had the misfortune of working with that platform - JS is by far the lowest quality ecosystem I've seen* (I never really got into PHP so I can't compare).

IMO Yegge makes a stronger point suggesting that data science people are being driven to "catbook" projects instead of "important stuff" - but those people are not your everyday JS developers.

betolink
Correct, not everybody can do significant contributions to say molecular biology. My point is that we need more smart people working on the problems that matter and right now we have a lot of smart people working on http://(buzzwords).io
Like cat picture projects.

Interesting how people think the OP story is real and many people mistakeningly think Steve Yegge quit Google (he just quit the project).

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2011/07/hacker-news-fires-st...

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vKmQW_Nkfk8

> But instead they feel motivated to work for a big company on long-term useless problems.

I remember this opinion also surfacing with the Steve Yegge OSCON 2011 presentation[1]. In which he complained about Google, and all the hard working people there, focusing on social media instead of hard problems. There was a good discussion as to why these problems are not in the forefront.

[1] http://youtu.be/vKmQW_Nkfk8?t=5m47s

Subsequent discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2811818

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2011/07/hacker-news-fires-st...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2814032

mdakin
I think hard problem vs. social media problem is a false dichotomy. I wish people would focus on wise problems. High tech is too dangerous at this moment, even though it's the best stuff to work on long-term for humanity.
I closed my fb account two or three years ago, at a point when I was really virulently anti-fb. I still haven't re-opened it, but I've mellowed a bit--not that I approve of it, really--it's a disgusting panopticon at best--but it's at least sufficiently obvious that it's hard for me to feel like anyone hangs out there without understanding what the basic dynamic is.

Now, articles like this don't make me feel bad for the kids who 'have to' use facebook (not that they don't; it sucks being ostracized, we all know). Really, they make me remember this talk by Steve Yegge[1] about how stupid it is that so many smart people spend their time working on cat pictures.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKmQW_Nkfk8

That may have been some people's expectation, but as his public G+ page says[0], he still works at Google. Sergey called his piece a 'night-time aid'[1]. Also Steve's take on it [2].

That said, the OP was talking about his OSCON talk (check out from ~minute 13 onward): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKmQW_Nkfk8

[0]: https://plus.google.com/110981030061712822816/posts

[1]: http://www.nbcsandiego.com/blogs/press-here/Sergey-Brin-Stev...

[2]: https://plus.google.com/110981030061712822816/posts/AaygmbzV...

For reference, here's the Steve Yegge talk: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKmQW_Nkfk8

I thoroughly enjoyed it.

I think there is this (from my limited experience rather naive) belief that if a bunch of smart computer people get together, they can solve problems that have flummoxed biologists for long. This is something pervasive which afflicts even the smartest ones (See Steve Yegge's talk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKmQW_Nkfk8 on how The Data Mining needs to be used more to solve problems in biology).

Having spent some time in grad school foolishly believing that all biology needed was a sprinkle of math and a generous dollop of python skills, I think the problem is that in Computer Science we have problems that are sometimes insanely hard but due to the several layers of abstraction, are inherently rather deterministic and much less noisy than real-world systems. I think the best comprehensible example comes from the physical layer of most electronics where several of the modeling equations are naive approximations designed to work under specific conditions. The complexity becomes even more overwhelming when you look at biological systems: The nonlinearity especially in say genetic hacking becomes apparent when you realize that each tiny modification has so many unintended effects (making modeling in a computer environment especially difficult) which is why biologist go through the grind of running all those "boring" real world experiments in labs. I think there are quite a few research labs that are using data mining and machine learning techniques to try to solve problems but we are at most quality places well beyond needing "smart people with computer skills". After a while, fundamental research requires, like you said, money on a massive scale which VC's really can't afford.

Dn_Ab
You make good points but swing the pendulum too far the other way.

No, a bunch of smart computer people won't solve problems that have flummoxed biologists for long. But a bunch of smart computer, biology, math, physics and chemistry people will. You are right in that ignoring bench work + domain knowledge and thinking one can come in write a bunch of programs and solve cancer is not only an insult but foolish.

Not all the problems have flummoxed biologists for long. The problem of sequencing improving faster than computers is a new one. And one where computer people can help. In fact modern sequencing techniques rely on computers to be viable.

Modelling phenotype from gene sequences and predicting possible drug interaction will become real soon.

Biology is complex yes but some of it is complexity introduced in an attempt to avoid difficult but simplifying concepts like non linear PDEs. Funny that you mention electronics. See what Yuri Lazebnik has to say about this. http://protein.bio.msu.ru/biokhimiya/contents/v69/pdf/bcm_14...

Computer people can help with tools, modelling, analysis and prediction.

eshvk
I am sorry if I came off as disagreeing with your main points because I actually don't. Just to say a couple of things: At least from looking at such cross-functional bio/c.s. teams work here in Grad. school, I have seen two types:

1. Where the bio (in this case wildlife) people have extremely limited ideas about what happens during a simulation or modeling experiment, this leads to ridiculous attempts to say develop multi-agent models for hyena cooperation which if you read the paper make so many ridiculous assumptions that it doesn't really make sure what if any utility can be obtained as inferences from those models.

2. The other much more rarer situation where the bio people have a keen understanding of the basics of both C.S. and Math and are well aware of the limitations of what they are getting into. Such collaborations usually turn into using a C.S./Math (usually grad. student) person in order to delve deep into the technical specifics which the bio guy could understand with some help.

Yuri's article is interesting and while I do agree that some cross pollination of ideas (such as is happening in systems biology) is useful. I am not so sure I am that enthusiastic as he is about drawing so much hope from the engineering analogy (because there is an element of silver bulletism to it:).

I've called the kneejerk "bubble" reactions "boring" [1] and I stand by that. That doesn't mean I disagree (or agree for that matter). It just means that banal perjoratives with nothing to back them up are boring.

To call this a bubble, one must first describe what one means by a bubble. A bubble in my mind is a period of rapid growth in valuations followed by a massive devaluation on such a scale that it hinders investment and innovation.

The subprime collapse was a bubble. Many people were left underwater on their mortgages. Building in many places stopped for years. This has a knock-on effect on jobs, related industries and so on. That's a bubble.

The dotcom collapse was also a bubble. But there are several differences this time around:

1. Startup costs now, for most Internet startups, are essentially zero. 10+ years ago you had to spend $5-10M to do anything (once you paid for Sun servers, Oracle licenses and so on);

2. Lax listing requirements, particularly on the NASDAQ, helped perpetuate fraud;

3. There was no experience to draw on (from living memory at least). Now we hopefully know a little better;

4. Sarbanes-Oxley, clusterfuck that it is, has at least kept the number of Internet companies IPOing relatively low. This has some negative consequences too but it means that retail investors and mutual funds have largely been excluded from the startup scene, which honestly is a Good Thing [tm]; and

5. Now, as opposed to then, there are real businesses operating in the tech space who are generating profits on a scale not seen in probably a century or more. Apple, for example, is worth >$500B market cap now and by some estimates that's still cheap given their profits.

10+ years ago investment dried up, capital dried up and legitimate businesses couldn't start or continue to operate, which had a domino effect.

What happens if next month Facebook goes from $100B valuation to $10B? Honestly, not a lot. Late stage investors will lose their shirts. That's fine. VC is a high-risk business. Individuals who participate in the IPO will lose a lot of money. That's not ideal but so be it.

But the important thing to ask is: what will happen to the system as a whole? Startups will still start. When you can build a mobile app and business for $50k the capital markets are basically irrelevant to you. Apple, Google, Microsoft and others will remain. Life will go on.

The low cost of startups is itself a barrier to institutional investment (by pension funds and the like) because the amounts are too small. Again, that's a Good Thing [tm].

What's really happening here is a lot of money is changing hands between VCs and endowment funds and honestly in relative terms it's not that much money.

Speaking to some examples (recent and otherwise):

- Instagram: I think this purchase was overvalued but, if anything, it demonstrates just what a high-risk investment Facebook is if a company can go from nothing to being an existential threat in 2 years. I honestly believe Facebook was taking them out of the market with this buy;

- Pinterest: through affiliate and advertising revenue I see potential for this company to be a huge business with massive ability to drive traffic to commerce sites. Make no mistake, this is a real business. It's not without risk but the potential is huge;

- Youtube: I bring this one up because it went, in 18 months, from being nothing to being bought by Google for >$1.5B (IIRC). Some said now it was overpaying. Honestly, in hindsight I think that price may well have been a massive bargain.

Just because you don't see potential doesn't mean there isn't any. Just because something ends up failing doesn't mean the risk wasn't worth taking.

The reason the kneejerk bubble accusations annoy me is that they come from the sort of people who seem so averse to risk that they neve take any. That is, until the very peak of the bubble (when they finally convince themselves this can go on forever).

Please, I beg of you, if you're going to jump and down and yell "bubble" at least add something to the conversation or back it up with something. A >$1B valuation on a funding round doesn't actually mean anything.

Disclaimer: I work for Google.

EDIT: I forgot to address a couple of points.

Firstly, I too find it depressing what a lot of us are working on [2] [3]. The fact that SpaceX can revolutionize launch costs for less money than was spent on Instagram is sobering and depressing.

Secondly, it is incredibly hard to hire good engineers. I don't see this as evidence of a bubble. I see this as evidence that:

a) (good) engineering is hard;

b) when other costs (bandwidth, servers, software) go to zero, demand for manpower will go up because businesses that once weren't possible or viable will become so; and

c) in a world where anyone can be a founder, it makes no sense to stick to 90s era equity arrangements. To be honest, being an early employee is a lottery ticket and, generally speaking, a shitty deal. Last cofounder = 25-50%. First employee = 1-2%. If good talent is better off working on their own startup you shouldn't be surprised that they do.

[1]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3985393

[2]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3876897

[3]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKmQW_Nkfk8

mbesto
> he subprime collapse was a bubble.

No, that was a bubble bursting. The act of excessive lending was the bubble.

Bubbles are only boring until they pop. But they are interesting to identify because we know they do pop eventually. I think the general argument is that people are trying to head warning to those who are less fortunate about seeing the bubble begin to pop. If we all (and we don't) agree there is a bubble than who in their right mind puts a value on such a bubble'd finance valuation. Well, that's easy, the ones who seek to gain the most benefit from it. The ones who are manipulated (i.e. pensions, 401k, etc.) are the ones who get screwed and unfortunately that ends up being the less fortunate.

wtvanhest
I think the general argument is that people are trying to head warning to those who are less fortunate about seeing the bubble begin to pop.

I think people are trying to be the next "big short" without knowing enough about finance to actually predict anything. Most of the conversations are boring because the arguments that are brought up show a clear lack of understanding and are based on huge incorrect assumptions about the entire world of finance.

In general institutional investors are seeing a trend of other institutional investors worried about bubbles. To me, the contrarian that I am, this says that there is probably no bubble and that the risk of said bubble is way overblown. The assumption that institutional investors are not intelligent and did not watch the same news you did about the 2001 bubble and housing bubble is a very dangerous assumption to make.

My suggestion would be to think a little before jumping to conclusions on this. I do not know whether there is a bubble or not, but assuming one is forming, it hasn’t hit external markets yet and is largely captured in the SV echo chamber. Facebook will be the first big company to IPO from this. Whether they are a dud or not will have very limited impact on public markets since they make up such a small amount of money compared to the rest of world of finance.

If a single investor isn’t investing $500m in a single deal, it is relatively a nonissue. You may want to be worried if you see multibillion dollar investments by single entities. The top 3 asset managers manage over $5 trillion dollars. That means that 50 Facebooks could fit in just that number. That means that Instagram is a rounding error.

The world in SV seems big to you, but has yet to even remotely impact the outside world.

The big secular trend you should be looking at is the fact that everything will be automated. Everything. That will cause job loss for most, but for the hackers here, you can bet there will be a multitude of areas to save big companies and individuals both time and money. There may be a bubble in social, but there is probably not any bubble outside of that.

mbesto
> The assumption that institutional investors are not intelligent and did not watch the same news you did about the 2001 bubble and housing bubble is a very dangerous assumption to make.

How so? The only dangerous assumption I see is the constant "but it'll be better this time" that the general public irrationally believes. Are the institutional investors not aware of the impending education (lending) bubble as well? Of course they are, because they stand to make money off someone else's loss. It's the Greater Fool Theory at play.[1] Financiers make their money off predictability, and bubbles are much easier to predict (and manipulate) than straight-line growth, with much higher profit potential.

[1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_fool_theory

wtvanhest
Most large institutional investors use fundamental analysis which is not impacted by the Greater Fool Theory. (see your own wiki article).

Also, I'm not seeing a lot of, "but it'll be better/different this time". If I were, I would be considerably more worried.

eevilspock
"Firstly, I too find it depressing what a lot of us are working on [2] [3]. The fact that SpaceX can revolutionize launch costs for less money than was spent on Instagram is sobering and depressing."

This is what resonates with me most. Whether or not we are in a bubble, there certainly is more air than substance.

joering2
Good post, thank you. Now:

> Pinterest: [...]

- how do you see them dealing with copyrights of content? I don't think they will make much of profit if are willing to share $ with photography owners. The majority of value in Pinterest's user experience is that its fresh and content is created (pinned) by other users, NOT by corporations. The moment you will see every other picture a picture of an Ikea Kettle (or desk, or anything else thats been uploaded as "promoted pin") that resembles in color, shape, etc to what you were looking for, entire experience will loose its cool and Pinterest will start to stink!

> Youtube: [...]

- this was a huge gamble from many perspectives and owners had amazing amount of luck. Due to copyright issues, some board members were pressed very hard to vote with for a buy, but were strongly against (sorry I cannot back this up, but I read it somewhere couple years ago). Further, Viacom shoot itself in the foot by uploading their own material, but during discovery it clearly came up that owners knew about copyright infringement (duh!) and were willing to "slow down" with taking content down to gain more attraction. Clearly, in # of users AND eventual exit, they benefit in huge way off of Viacom content. Again, they were extremely lucky and in the light of recent Kim DotCom case, even more lucky Mashable is not interviewing them in a jail cell. But AFAIK some court cases Goog vs Viacom are still pending. As of whether it will turn out to be a huge success, I think we still need to wait. People are social today like never before. Instagram you mentioned was bought because FB was afraid of its growing userbase. As we both know, YouTube is only a little bit social -- not as social as comparing Instagram to Flickr, for example. If the userbase of the next thing (video) of sites like viddly will keep growing, and at some point owners will tell Google "fuck off, we ain't selling!", I say YouTube will be screwed. Also, if you look even further in the future, it obviously won't be as cool as today, or 3 years ago. Its like with Caddilac - they are building amazing cars for 110 years now, but if you ask your son: do you want Caddilac or Honda, guess what he will say.

cletus
> Pinterest: [...]

Pinterest is not without risk but the potential is huge and it has many obvious monetization options. Risks include:

- clones and insufficient network effect;

- spammers/marketers creating noise;

- someone does recommendation better than they do.

I suspect Pinterest will either need to or should adopt a revenue sharing model with "pinners", copyright holders, etc with revenue coming from affiliate or affiliate-like sources (ie from driving traffic to a site in the case where the same item is sold from multiple sources).

I see the wedding market being particularly huge for this. Wedding planning essentially comes down to selecting a huge number of different things (clothing, where to have the ceremony/reception, food, decorations, etc etc etc) and this could be a really great platform for hosting that sort of thing and tying it in with recommendations.

Twitter as a counterexample I view as ultimately doomed. IMHO within 5 years it will be bought by one of the big players. They haven't come up with a good way to monetize it yet because there isn't one.

> Youtube: [...]

> ... owners had amazing amount of luck ...

Every man and his dog, prior to Youtube, had been trying to do VoD (video on demand) for years. 1-2 new startups appeared every month. I certainly agree there was a timing element in play but Youtube was also the most accessible and easiest to use. Everyone else was terrified of the bandwidth costs. Youtube had the courage to burn through an incredible amount of money to become "the" place for online video-sharing. That could easily have become a disaster instead.

As far as rightsholder issues go, I think Youtube is the poster-child for "it's easier to beg for forgiveness than ask for permission".

As much as people (myself included) have criticized Facebook's privacy blunders I do agree with Zuck on one point: you need to drag people kicking and screaming into the future. What people jump up and down about today they won't blink an eyelid at 5 years from now. Innovation is brinkmanship.

joering2
> Twitter as a counterexample I view as ultimately doomed. IMHO within 5 years it will be bought by one of the big players. They haven't come up with a good way to monetize it yet because there isn't one.

didnt you just say this: Just because you don't see potential doesn't mean there isn't any in your previous post?

> As far as rightsholder issues go, I think Youtube is the poster-child for "it's easier to beg for forgiveness than ask for permission". I agree with you, but lets wait until all lawsuits settle or be resolved, and then see if they were forgiven. I am obviously not talking about the initial owners.

> you need to drag people kicking and screaming into the future. What people jump up and down about today they won't blink an eyelid at 5 years from now

It would be obvious Zack would say something like that, considering the service he is building. I am not sure if I like this approach anyways. While most people work on innovation the right way, there is lots of jaw dropping stuff coming up as well. On the privacy stuff, one day you may wake up with Police Drone in your backyard determining if that blue spot on your Google Maps picture was a swimming pool you haven't paid taxes for, or just a covered blocks of wood.

klenwell
One common factor with the dotcom and then the housing bubble was the democratization of access to previously restricted forms of economic behavior. They both liberalized of credit and investing. Day trading and online brokers that emerged with the dotcom bubble helped fuel the investment that drove it. Subprime lending and the mad financial engineering that supported it made a home mortgage available to almost anyone. Both innovations facilitated a lot of shadiness.

The other morning I caught a segment on CNBC talking about some financial company that wanted to make startups more accessible to ordinary investors. That's already a reality to some extent, at the grassroots level, with kickstarter. These seem like the sort of innovations that would again liberate a lot investment and speculation.

They're sort of unrelated to the Groupon and Facebook IPOs -- those IPOs don't have anything to do with them. And yet at the same time they are trends that draw momentum from the buzz surrounding Groupon and Facebook.

I keep looking for the next bubble, more as a casual student of human nature than any sort of financial whiz. McIPOs for the masses seems like it could deliver on that promise.

But I agree that we aren't necessarily there yet.

netcan
Here's my question:

Say it turns out that in a year or two Facebook settles onto a good solid advertising system that makes sense to advertisers. Revenues to a sustainable $5b and keeps up a nice sweet margin of 25%-30%. Expected growth is 10% for the next few years as advertisers figure out how to use it (in my opinion this was the driver of Google's growth post IPO). That's a genuine whale. As a startup story it's massive economic success in a short period of time. Even this (hypothetical) post IPO year or two seem (to me) like a success story.

But.. investors (at the present stage) are betting (according to the price) on much better results than that. 5X-10X better at least to call the investment good.

I'm not saying this will happen (I dunno). I'm asking what if*. Basically the company which didn't exist a few years ago is now a huge (& good) company. Easily worth $20bn, maybe more. But investors are losing money. How bad is that? Does the company fall apart. Is the danger bad enough for managers risk everything over & over to avoid it?

^ I'm going on media reports of Mrkt Cap/Rev/Profit of $100bn/$3.7b/$1b

stcredzero
To call this a bubble, one must first describe what one means by a bubble...Please, I beg of you, if you're going to jump and down and yell "bubble" at least add something to the conversation or back it up with something.

Is there something broken about the hiring market? 37signals might be closer to that than Google.

jsprinkles
The only recruiting mail I get aggressively is from startups and Google. That's it. I hear all the time that there is a significant talent shortage, but part of me wonders whether that's a combination of people that don't want to work at Google for whatever reason and developers with families that don't want to bet on a startup.

My colleagues in big iron, however, are much choosier about who they hire.

rpwilcox
Probably a combination of people who don't want to work for Google, developers with families that don't want to bet, and developers who don't want to/can't live in SF (or Austin, or NYC, or...)
ErikRogneby
Up here in Seattle the glut of open tech/programmer positions are at Amazon. I don't know if it's growth or their "bar raiser" policy slowing down their hiring.
jsprinkles
I imagine AWS is one big firefight, and it probably outpaced their retail business long ago. That's from outside observation, mind, and it's a guess (but an educated one).

They might be hiring at a normal rate but unable to keep up with operational demand -- which is a real pickle of a spot to be in -- or you're right, they're too choosy. I sincerely doubt there's a shortage of folks to work on Amazon and AWS.

aaronblohowiak
To understand Google recruitment, you need to understand the incentives. They want lots of people to apply, fewer to interview, and very few hires. Effectively, they are very choosy but each step of the filtering process is incentivized for high volume on the input and low volume on the pass rate. So, you get a lot of people 'recruited' that don't get job offers.

Many startups also lament 'we only end up hiring 1 out of N people we interview..' Which makes the recruiters even more desperate to get candidates willing to go through the interview process.

Now, my personal experience (and that of my friends) is that the interview:offer rate is pretty even, which suggests that some unwanted people go on LOTS of interviews...

stcredzero
To understand Google recruitment, you need to understand the incentives. They want lots of people to apply, fewer to interview, and very few hires. Effectively, they are very choosy but each step of the filtering process is incentivized for high volume on the input and low volume on the pass rate.

Then the Google hiring process is probably biased to false negatives. So applying at Google is somewhat like a scratch-off lottery, unless you have something going for you that makes you stand out.

This makes me think that networking by "doing stuff with people" is a much more effective strategy, especially if you think there's something about your CV which could be a red flagged in a system biased to false negatives.

jsprinkles
Thank you for keeping a good perspective on the bubble commentary. I've been impressed with your (always top) comments on threads such as these lately, and it is always good to consider the perspective that you are sharing.

That's all, no discussion, just a thanks from at least me and I'm sure a bunch of other folks that feel the same way. It's to the point now where I see a story like this and mentally wager that you're here, at the top, before I click.

koglerjs
You work at Google and don't see the bubble? Interesting.
wateverer
It's surprising that, you well educated folks do not know what inflation is.
Androsynth
Just because we are not in a tech-bubble doesn't mean there is no bubble. All these crazy valuations may be secondary effects from a larger, hitherto unseen bubble.

-Credit/Money: We are currently printing money to finance our lifestyle here in the US. China currently holds around 3 trillion US dollars and the dollar is only worth something as long as they don't try to cash out.

-Education: Something bad is happening and it is fueled by cheap, govt backed credit. Everyone is rushing to invest in their children's future because of the it-can-only-help-them mindset, similar to the it-can-only-go-up mindset of the housing bubble (also fueled by cheap, govt-backed credit).

-healthcare: this is a weird case and probably only local to the US. Heres the situation: We value our health, but we don't pay out of our own pockets for much, our employers do. So naturally we keep slipping down the slope of wanting more and more done for us. A huge friction coefficient is being added to our economy due to the nature of making businesses provide healthcare, meanwhile insurance companies interests are aligned with the insured because they both want as much done as possible (provided neither of them pay for it).

warmwaffles
We're in a bubble that's inside of another bubble that is floating with a few other bubbles.
aaronblohowiak
> We value our health

cardio-vascular disease, number one killer in america, is largely preventable through diet and lifestyle. being overweight (actually even high-"normal") is also significantly correlated with cancer incidence. i don't have the type 2 diabetes figures offhand, but they aren't pretty.

healthcare in america is very expensive. fat, inactive americans are a part of the reason why it is expensive (diabetics cost on average $6.6k more a year than non-diabetics..)

I agree that employer-sponsored healthcare is dumb, a relic from the difficulty in recruiting people after the war.

Apr 23, 2012 · cletus on Instagram
Congratulations on the investment. The return is nothing short of spectacular. It's a truly excellent example of execution and timing.

But the point that keeps resurfacing in my mind is SpaceX. SpaceX, from nothing, created a low-earth orbit delivery system that is revolutionizing satellite launches and (soon) the cost of getting men into space... for less than the price that a bunch of people can send photos to each other with cheesy filters [1].

It would be difficult to overstate the impact Elon Musk has had, is having and will have on humanity (and no this isn't hyperbole) through SpaceX (and maybe even Tesla). And it didn't even require, relate to or is connected with some bullshit social network.

I'm also reminded of Steve Yegge's OSCON talk [2] from some months back. The computer power we have available now is stunning. used for the right purposes it could fundamentally change humanity for the good, whether that be in bioinformatics or whatever, is hard to overstate.

Yet we're using all this power and the brightest minds on the planet... to send cat pictures. It's actually reached the point that when I get unsolicited recruitment email or read about some new startup on HN that I tune out as soon as I see the word "social".

There's something astoundingly depressing about all this.

EDIt: I should add that my issue isn't that the founders and investors sought wealth. I don't begrudge them that at all. Not by any means am I anti-capitalist. Bill Gates, as one example, is doing huge amounts of good with his accrued wealth.

The issue is more on what society values.

[1]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3857904

[2]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKmQW_Nkfk8

dbul
It would be difficult to overstate the impact Elon Musk has had, is having and will have on humanity

I can't count how many times I've seen this debate. I think last week there was a thread debating the triviality of web apps and similarly mentioned Musk.

Elon Musk may very well have developed a cat picture social network to gain the wealth required to fund his companies, but he instead worked on X.com/PayPal. Do you really believe Musk would be where he is today if he didn't gain considerable wealth from that venture? He'd likely be drawing rockets in a sketchbook while working as VP of Advertising at Google.

The Instagram founders are only wealthy enough at this point to have great credit, who knows what great investments they could make post-close?

I'm a fan of taking the simplest, reasonable route to wealth, then investing in something of greater importance, something that critics would agree improves humanity.

srconstantin
I don't believe deferred altruism is as good as it's cracked up to be, because of the importance of motivation. If you tell someone who wants to work in a homeless shelter, "Go to Walk Street instead and give away your wealth" you may be correct in theory, but in practice that person might be a terrible banker and burn out quickly. To desire money instinctively, the way most people crave hugs and candy, is actually rather rare, and most of the rich people I know desire money that way, while most of the poor people don't. I'm not sure an altruist can make himself obsessed with money in order to be a better altruist. I've seen people try and fail.
Schwolop

  I'm a fan of taking the simplest, reasonable route to wealth, then investing in something of greater importance, something that critics would agree improves humanity.
I agree with this, and have been talking to people about it under the moniker of "deferred altruism". My hypothesis is that someone who continually gives his time and/or money to worthy causes over his entire life may end up being cumulatively less world changing than someone who spends half her life making money, then switches to philanthropy or world changing ideas later.

The canonical examples are Elon Musk and Bill Gates, but of course there must be thousands of examples where the risk doesn't pay off, and the deferred altruist ends up unable to contribute much at all.

Perhaps I'm just finding a way of justifying being miserly now, but I certainly intend to pay it back in cash if I'm successful, or in time if I'm not.

chromatic
My hypothesis is that someone who continually gives his time and/or money to worthy causes over his entire life may end up being cumulatively less world changing than someone who spends half her life making money, then switches to philanthropy or world changing ideas later.

How do you know how long you're going to live, such that you can switch from miserly to altruistic halfway through?

moultano
A will?
chromatic
Perhaps. How many misers younger than middle age do you know who have wills?
ktizo
Doesn't really matter how long a specific rich individual lives for this to work. As long as there is a culture of rich people doing it, then things would average out. Especially given that the life spans of very rich people tend to be longer.
Schwolop
To an extent this was my point too - if a decent number of people do this, then the few who get mega-rich and become philanthropic will make up for the many who fail to get mega-rich, and also the few who get mega-rich but don't become philanthropic. Well... hopefully!
gizzlon
I get your point, but it's hard to shake the feeling that "deferred altruism" is just an "excuse" to keep everything to our self. Also, I strongly believe it's hard to turn generous after being very selfish for a long time. Guess that's what andrewflnr said..
Schwolop
Yep, I get your point too. But I feel that we can't pressure people into altruism so if they aren't going to give anyway, then it doesn't matter whether they fail to do so in one lump sum or fail to do so continuously.
AVTizzle
"...someone who continually gives his time and/or money to worthy causes over his entire life may end up being cumulatively less world changing than someone who spends half her life making money, then switches to philanthropy or world changing ideas later."

Couldn't have said this better myself. Thank you :)

Schwolop
Make sure you keep the emphasis on "may" - I think it's important to note that this is not a hard and fast rule, it's just a theory.
repsilat
I especially like the change in gender half way through. Almost certain it was intentional.
SimHacker
You mean spend the first half of your life as a man so you're paid more, and then change gender when it's time to give your money away? Brilliant!
Schwolop
Yeah, it was intentional. I noticed a while ago that I almost always used masculine pronouns when the gender was really irrelevant so I've been forcing myself to switch it up a bit. I think I first noticed after reading a comment on an article on Fred Wilson's blog where a guest author did this too.
astrofinch
See also:

http://80000hours.org/

Schwolop
Thanks, this is very interesting.
andrewflnr
One danger is that if you're not giving at least some in the meantime, it might be hard to part with it when "it's time". "Deferred altruism" is basically my plan, or at least I tell myself that, but this is something I worry about, so I try to give now, too.
zach
So yeah, there's a gold rush. They're great for economic expansion but kind of suck when it comes to depth of achievement.

Right now, there's a lot of low-hanging fruit in the ability of technological innovators to positively affect the everyday lives of normal people in lots of small but personally significant ways.

If you consider that goal bullshit, then yes, I imagine the current economic environment is astoundingly depressing.

Yes, there are many amazing opportunities higher up the tree, and yeah, it seems like there aren't enough multibillionaires to take the risks to chase them, and counterbalance all the "easy stuff" people are chasing.

My point is this gold-rush-like era will pass. California got started that way, after all. I bet people were pretty frickin' sick of all the n00bs and posers moving to the West Coast with crazy/stupid dreams of getting rich. It probably seemed depressing to have every single week bring more idiots panning creeks.

But three generations later, California was manufacturing a command module to put men on the moon. The expansion that started in the gold rush led to agriculture, movies and technology.

And now things are cycling around in some ways. But if you're serious about progress, you have to be patient at times.

jimmyvanhalen
Elon Musk's first start up was called Zip2. Only after selling Zip2 was he able to co-found Paypal, Tesla, SpaceX, etc. if it werent for Zip2, a online publishing company (which could've been used posting cat pictures), there wouldn't be a Paypal, Tesla or SpaceX.
sethbannon
I agree. It's quite sad that some of the best and brightest minds of our time are spending their days working to increase revenue per click of advertisements. We could achieve so much more if our focus shifted towards more meaningful endeavors.

I am, however, encouraged by the recent rise of impact entrepreneurship, where for-profit ventures tackle large societal problems. It's something we certainly need to see more of.

cletus
Actually on advertising I will have to respectfully disagree. This may be controversial but:

My opinion is that Internet advertising has done an inordinate amount of good for the world.

Advertising has allowed the creation of amazing services that are free to use. Let's imagine a world where search or GMail might otherwise cost you $20/month (completely made up number) to use. You could afford that right? Even if you could you may not pay for it (people are remarkably fickle when it comes to paid services). That's not a lot of money.

But what about to the poor or those in developing countries to whom $20/month is a significant amount of money? They get the same service you do because of advertising.

Consider that the next time a text ad at the top of Google otherwise offends your (and I'm talking the general "you" rather than you specifically) aesthetic sensibilities.

losvedir
> But what about to the poor or those in developing countries to whom $20/month is a significant amount of money? They get the same service you do because of advertising.

Well they're not paying for the service directly, but surely the advertisers want something for their money. And inflated material desires with excessive spending can certainly keep the poor poor, in a way that a fixed $n/month expense can't.

That said, advertising which directs your expenditures to more appropriate places is morally fine by me. If I search for "buy a basketball" and some start-up is able to expose me to a better, cheaper basketball than that seems useful. However, if that same query returns ads for Nike shoes, Kobe Bryant jerseys, and the All-NBA-All-The-Time cable channel, then that's bad for society, I think.

The canonical example I use for myself is grocery store coupons. I purposely ignore them. While intuitively it seems I could save money by redirecting my purchases to things that are on sale, I use my meta-intuition to know that more than likely it will convince me to buy some category or brand of good (now or on a future trip) that I wouldn't have otherwise purchased. Consequently, I see coupons as net money-losers.

I see ads in the same way. While it may get me this service for free, I imagine it planting seeds of desire in my mind for various other goods/services, such that I end up paying more over the course of my life than I would have if I just paid for the service in the first place and didn't see the ads.

lifeformed
What makes you think that "all the best and brightest minds" in this world are capable and motivated to work on the most noble tasks? If they had the passion for it they'd be doing it. If they don't have the passion for it, they wouldn't be any good at it.

Frankly, I personally have no interest in learning how to cure cancer. I have no interest for biology or formalized scientific research. I do have a passion for creating technology for people to enjoy. Does that mean my values are wrong? Should all people be pursuing what society deems the "noblest goal"?

gizzlon
But humans are not born with a "passion to do X" and then live their entire lives in a vacuum.

If it was seen as a quick way to build wealth and fame, I'm sure more people would be passionate about curing cancer.

rodly
I agree wholeheartedly with your comments on SpaceX and Elon Musk. What I don't understand is how you're relating SpaceX to the Instagram acquisition.

"Yet we're using all this power and the brightest minds on the planet... to send cat pictures."

So you're suggesting we have a problem because intelligent people don't always find the "right" ways to contribute to society? I think you should be directing your anger at those who spend their time sending cat pictures, rather than those who enable millions of people to do so simultaneously.

harscoat
"Social" gave us evolutionary fitness. Does that mean that it could have a compounded effect bigger (inclusive) impact than "revolutionizing satelite launches"?...

You can see Instagram as sending "cat pictures" or pure gossip(^)... or as improving our "theory of mind" (a window into people's mind, their beliefs & desire). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364661308... ^http://www.thepsychologist.org.uk/archive/archive_home.cfm?v...

tonyjwang
Elon Musk first made his money in Paypal and then funded SpaceX. I think Krieger and Systrom will have exciting world-changing projects in the pipeline too.

Oddly, I think the most influential path to curing cancer is making a lot of money, gaining lots of power, and having more control to allocate societal resources.

poorpointofview
SpaceX did not come from nothing. The science, technology and infrastructure that enabled SpaceX to exist was created by tax payer funded programs. I'm not saying he's not a great guy. I'm just saying he's standing on the shoulders of giants.

The taxes paid by people sending cat pictures funds the infrastructure that enables SpaceX to exist.

andrewfelix
When the OP stated something from nothing I think he/she meant tangible 'things' from investment and research(ie. rockets). As opposed to Instagram which is a form of communication and entertainment that will forever exist within a software context.

Instagram also stood on the shoulders of giants.

is74
Also keep in mind that there is a big difference between a billion dollars in the hands of someone as capable as Elon Musk (who also happens to invest all of his time and creativity), and a billion dollars in the hands of a random investor. The latter won't come close to the former in terms of returns.
caycep
then again: -the wealth Bill Gates is using was generated (in part) by software intended to create office memos and clip art.

-much of the computing power mentioned above to change humanity for good comes from infrastructure designed to sell twilight novels and, yes, send cat pictures...

the invisible hand at work...

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madhancr
agree with your sentiment. but, this is not surprising. VCs talk about 7 sins and not curing cancer
AGorilla
I wonder if making it easier for millions of people to have quicker access to larger social graphs isn't the cultural equivalent of curing cancer or privatized space travel. The effects may not be measurable but lives are undeniably enriched by easing the flow of communication. Even if it's just cat pictures (what's wrong with cats?)
pg
If it makes you feel any better, there's nothing new about this situation. One could just as well complain in the 1930s about the money and effort that were going into popular films instead of whatever other more virtuous project.

This case actually sounds like a fairly mild one. Instagram didn't have many employees, so only a few people were diverted from curing cancer to sending cat pictures.

larrys
"so only a few people were diverted from curing cancer to sending cat pictures."

I have to be reminded of this every time I get judgmental about how people spend their time simply because it isn't the way I choose to spend my time. I don't watch or follow sports, and try to avoid religious activities to the best of my ability. But after many years I finally was able to respect in the end that those things are important to others.

Back in the day you know, people were always critical about the time I spent "playing with computers" and of all things, photography. Funny how things change.

lifeformed
Yeah, and it's not like they would have be cancer researchers otherwise. Curing cancer is great, but I have no interest in doing it - my passion is in creating media and technology for people to enjoy. I think that's just as valuable to society than having me become a cog in the quest for space exploration or cancer research. We can't assume that the noblest goal should be everyone's passion or expertise.
tmsh
Things not getting better in a world whose population is increasing drastically (from ≈ 2 billion in 1930 to almost 7 billion currently) is a problem.

The real test though, in this system, is what Instagram or any successful startup does next (or are they so used to pivoting towards profitability that nobody tackles hard, virtuous problems).

cperciva
only a few people were diverted from curing cancer to sending cat pictures

Pre-acquisition, sure. But how many people will see the instagram acquisition and decide to give up on curing cancer to help people send cat pictures instead?

Mz
Burned out (and homeless) in San Diego says: I am completely ready to make that (type of) switch, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with any company being acquired. Most people don't really want to get well. They want a better drug. I am currently seriously planning to burn my health site to the ground and start something shallow and hopefully profitable, like an astrology site.

Not kidding at all.

larrys
"hopefully profitable, like an astrology site"

Instagram founders can probably afford to fund some medical research or establish a chair or even a medical center like many wealthy business people end up doing. There are many ways to help the world if you find a good way to make money.

Mz
I have cystic fibrosis, as does my 24 year old son. We have figured out how to get ourselves well. It has left me deeply in debt and homeless. And damn few people have any interest in what I have done. I get called a liar and snake oil salesman. At the moment, I don't feel like getting rich so I can make the world a better place. I feel like getting rich and then telling the world to go fuck itself should the world suddenly reverse position and find my story of recovery fascinating just because I have found fame and fortune.

Add "bitter" to my list of descriptors.

_dps
Mz, you don't know me but I've often read your comments here with interest and respect. I also know several people in the San Diego ecosystem (I was in LA for many years). I admire what you're doing with healthgazelle and if I can help let me know (email is in my profile).
Mz
While the sentiment is appreciated, I cannot imagine what to ask for. I need either a huge cash gift to wipe out my debts or to declare bankruptcy, which I am currently trying to work on through legal aid. I also need an online income. I suck at self promotion and most people have either given me well meaning advice which failed to make any real difference or pooh-poohed the idea that any of my current sites could be commercialized and monetized. While it bothers me to take the site down, my webhosting expires in May and not only can I not afford the $120-ish dollars to renew for another year but if someone gave me the money, as has happened the previous three years, I would spend it on food, not hosting service. I see little reason to continue taking verbal abuse for a project which makes no money and is of interest to very few people.

I also do not know how to get off the street in part because I have been healthier sleeping in a tent these past few months. I do not wish to remain homeless but I also do not want to rent a typical American apartment ever again. I do not know how to go from homeless to homeowner, which is probably the only hope I have for arranging a housing situation which does not contribute to my health issues.

You are more than welcome to email me. I just have no idea how it would help.

Thanks

Edit: Though I do have a non-internet business idea I am toying with. And concerned that it will go nowhere because a) I can't get a business loan in my current circumstance b) I won't qualify for a business loan if I successfully declare bankruptcy and c) I don't know if I can successfully run an IRL business given my health issues.

derefr
> While it bothers me to take the site down, my webhosting expires in May and not only can I not afford the $120-ish dollars to renew for another year but if someone gave me the money, as has happened the previous three years, I would spend it on food, not hosting service.

How about if someone offered to take over the project(s) from you? In effect equivalent to the above, but non-fungible.

Mz
Since all three of my current sites are deeply rooted in first hand personal experience, I do not see how that can be realistically accomplished. I either need a (financial) miracle within the next month which makes it worth my while to continue developing my sites or they need to die. I don't see any other reasonable alternative.

But thank you for asking.

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nmridul
How about if someone offers to host the site free for some time. And once you have recovered, you can move it your own server. Even if you are not going to update it any time in future, the information already there could be of some help to someone. Just don't take the sites down since could be providing some value to some one in the mean time. Let me know.
Mz
I will think about it however free hosting will not solve anything. Other people have paid the hosting for the last three years. Keeping the site up does not change the lack of traffic. It does not change the lack of credibility I have with the CF community. It does not change the general perception that I am some attention mongering egomaniac who got myself well as some publicity stunt. It does not change the fact that no one wants to compensate me for the information there. Given that I am currently homeless, it rubs me the wrong way that people still want to preserve the site but not give me one thin dime. Meanwhile, people in the CF community raise thousands of dollars for the CF Foundation because they are desperate for better drugs. If everyone here is so fucking idealistic, why are there zero donations?

I do not know what the answer is but at the moment I see no reason to be idealistically trying to preserve the information for the benefit of other people and I find it incredibly offensive that people are suggesting I should given that I am homeless. Either give me money, help me effectively monetize it, or say goodbye to it. If it has value, it should be worth something to people. If it is not worth something to people, then bleeding a homeless person for sympathy seems pretty freaking sick.

OzzyB
Take all the info you have on your site, dump it into a PDF, give it a title, and sell it as an e-book on Amazon -- let the site die.

If someone out there thinks your information is valuable, they can pay $15-25 bucks for it; at least then you don't have to keep paying/updating your site and you might put a few bucks in your pocket.

Mz
Thank you. Any suggestions on how I can do that within a month? Or where I can get info on how to do so? I am currently on a tablet and having trouble using my webhosting interface, though for something like this (i.e. a short term project) I could use a computer at the library for anything I can't do on my tablet.
loumf
If you search for "convert wordpress to book" you get a bunch of sites, including this one http://www.blogbooker.com/wordpress.php, which is free. There are a lot more.
polyfractal
I don't know anything about your situation or your site, but I think it comes down to a very simple business evaluation: does your site make money?

It sounds like you are not making money, so either A) fix something so it makes money or B) toss it.

Just because something is useful does not mean it is profitable. As with all things in business, you have to find someone that values your service enough to pay for it (in some capacity).

I wanted to write software for academic biologists because I'm an ex-biologist...but they don't want to pay for it. Doesn't matter how useful it is if no one is willing to pay.

So, shut it down. Kill it with fire and move on.

Mz
No, it does not make money. It gets me sympathy and condescending pats on the head. Everyone who thinks I should keep my sites out of idealism will not give me money and will not promote them. They tell me I am doing something wonderful. But they will not tell other people I am doing something wonderful and it is deserving of support.

At the moment, $1700 in donations (edit: and a few links/promos generating traffic) would convince me to keep it up for another year. That would not get me off the street but it would pay my taxes, pay the webhosting and domain name and help me and my kids eat properly for the next two weeks. In other words, it would alleviate some serious immediate stressors. But no one will blog about it and announce it to the world and tell people to support it or open their own wallet up. So I think I will try the e-book idea and then move on to other projects with an eye towards making money first and foremost.

rooshdi
You are making the assumption inventors are primarily motivated by money. I doubt this to be the case. Furthermore, the sharing of photos and memories is known to have therapeutic qualities for humanity:

http://www.photovoice.org/html/methodology3tp/therapeuticpho...

danssig
I have a feeling that people who think they could cure cancer will stick with it no matter how much money there is in cat pictures. Getting cancer probably means you're going to die and there may be little or nothing you can do to buy yourself more time. If you really believe you have the ability to stop this, it would seem crazy to go chase money instead. Imagine being that person, making the next Instagram and then dying of cancer. Oops.
mechanical_fish
You're comparing apples and oranges.

Cancer research is a gamble: You spend years of your life pipetting liquids in the hope that you'll discover something new that improves upon the current standard methods of treating cancer. The equivalent in CS is, well, CS research: You spend years of your life poring over journals in the hope that you'll discover something that dramatically improves the standards of computing.

Like a lot of research, these are highly worthwhile activities but they aren't big business. That's why, if you want to see more of them, the bottleneck isn't finding the talent: It's the funding, which generally comes from taxpayers. (I assure you from very personal experience that there is a large and consistent oversupply of people who would be willing to conduct cancer research, or any other kind of research, so long as the funding is there.)

Whereas sending cat pictures is not a gamble. It is an established business. It reliably, demonstrably, and very inexpensively improves the lives of tens of millions of average people, to the extent that it and similar businesses are consistently profitable ($355 million earned at Facebook on revenues of $1.2 billion, for example).

And cancer treatment - doing more of what we already know how to do to treat cancer - is likewise not a gamble but a business, which is presumably why it's a huge and growing sector of the economy that dwarfs Facebook and everything else that's fun – $128 billion per year in the USA alone:

http://www.cancer.gov/aboutnci/servingpeople/cancer-statisti...

For comparison: Global advertising revenue is estimated at around $420 billion per year:

http://www.reuters.com/article/2010/12/05/magnaglobal-idUSN0...

So given that the USA is only 309 million people out of seven billion, we can guess with some confidence that the world spends more on cancer treatment than on advertising of any sort, let alone on the tiny percentage of ads that suffice to pay for all the cat pictures that any cat lover could want.

xaa
They are comparable in the sense that a new Stanford CS grad might conceivably be deciding between working in cancer research or cat picture startups.

Your overall point about funding is correct, but typically the very best students and researchers don't have trouble finding funding. Thus the problem is how to attract the very best students away from Wall Street and cat picture startups, and stories like Instagram don't help with that.

Retric
Your assuming everyone is equally good at building cat picture start-ups and doing Cancer research which I don't think is particularly accurate. Also, I suspect Cancer is over funded and we would be much better off diverting 1/10th of that talent and resources to building cheap self driving cars.
SimHacker
I read that as "cheap self driving cats."
mechanical_fish
I don't really feel that the sight of one company in fifty thousand cashing out for one billion dollars has a profound influence on the career decisions of a cancer researcher. One thing that even beginners in that field understand is elementary statistics.

The simpler explanation is that any programmer -- COBOL for bankers, CRUD apps, even "maintainer of Office installations for the IT department" -- commands a salary larger than that of a decently-paid Ivy League postdoctoral researcher. With minimal effort at steering one's career, the multiplier is two; according to rumors coming from the general direction of (e.g.) Google, if you've got talent and experience the number is a multiple of three.

You don't have to win the lottery. You start winning on the day of your first paycheck and you never lose, relative to research, because programming is a safer career than research.

Be careful about cherry-picking Wall Street and Instagram when choosing examples: Those are just the sensational ones. If Wall Street disappeared tomorrow, and venture funding with it, plumbers would still make more money than the average researcher. (Remember: A lot of research work is done by grad students, whose salaries make postdocs look pampered.)

"The very best students and researchers don't have trouble finding funding" - this is like saying "talented farmers have no trouble growing food". First, you're selecting a group of winners and then looking for evidence of winning. Lo, you found some! The second problem is that this statement doesn't account for effort: Farmers work hard and take risks for the money, and researchers do as well. As a researcher who wants to succeed you must have grants in the front of your mind one third of the time, and in the back your your mind most of the rest of the time, because success is measured in grants: Your pay, promotion, rate of progress, and reputation are directly contingent on the amount of grant money you can raise. Unless you're Einstein, maybe, but see above under "winning the lottery".

Face it, society doesn't value research as highly as going concerns. When you think about it, why should that surprise anyone? Businesses are a sure thing by comparison. You turn the crank, profits fall out. Often, happiness and human health fall out, too. Nursing, for example, saves lives. It saves them one at a time, but they get saved, and it's a sure thing: You don't need to make a bet against long odds. Change a bedpan, make someone considerably happier; notice that the patient has stopped breathing, save a life. Turn the crank. Turn the wheel the world has given you.

This post reminded me of Steve Yegge's cat pictures (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKmQW_Nkfk8). In a good way.
I think these books are not really meant to be a PhD education but more of a tutorial introduction to the field. What O'Reilly is doing right now is really important. As Steve Yegge said, they are "trying to provoke a culture change."

Would-be brogrammers will find these books, read them, and graduate from cat-picture projects into more sophisticated applications that can solve real computer science problems. It matters less whether the readers of these books actually get a comprehensive understanding of the theoretical knowledge behind them, then it does that they enrich readers and spread the desire to learn and attain true understanding of the field.

Steve Yegge reference: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKmQW_Nkfk8

Drbble
You underestimate the value of ML for monetizing cat pictures.
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I recommend watching Steve Yegge's excellent presentation at O'Reilly's OSCON Data. He points out a number of books in the video, but in general this is an excellent talk about preparing to solve hard problems in bio. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKmQW_Nkfk8
mynegation
Thank you, I'll look at that once again, although AFAIR he showed covers of some O'Reilly books that, like I mentioned, were not very useful.
Is Steve Yegge Google's new secret recruiter agent? :)

A few weeks ago he publicly quit his "cat pictures" project (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKmQW_Nkfk8) to pursue more noble a quest in data mining. I loved what he said, and at first glance this seemed like a jab at the newly released Google+. But it's actually a bigger knock on Facebook since the "cat pictures" app is Facebook's primary gig, and so far it's only a side gig at Google. I wonder how many FB peeps started to wonder if there really is any meaning in cat pictures.

Now it's Amazon -- "Amazon does everything wrong, and Google does everything right", except for 3 things, one being "platforms." But his Amazon jabs are not as subtle as the cat pictures one -- "Their pay and benefits suck, although much less so lately due to local competition from Google and Facebook. But they don't have any of our perks or extras."

Maybe Steve is Google's new unofficial recruiting agent. He makes reference to it here, "I actually did a spreadsheet at one point but Legal wouldn't let me show it to anyone, even though recruiting loved it."

When you think about it, he's the perfect person to have run a psyop designed to get the Facebookers and Amazonians to lay down their cat pictures and join the Googlers building the next generation platform, while partaking in all of their perks. Google can just play it off as, "oh, that's just crazy uncle Steve on one of his rants again". I don't know what it is, but I think it's great on multiple levels :)

here is his talk, very inspiring

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKmQW_Nkfk8

nikcub
interesting - but I didn't totally buy into it. new web communication tools are helping to bring down governments and giving people new freedoms

it is like telling alexander graham bell to not waste his time on the telephone since people are just going to use it to spread gossip and rumor

majmun
But it would be so convinient for Google if they have less competition working in communication tools. and more working on projects that Google is not working on. yes longevity of life is important but quality is also important.
blhack
I think this is the highest level of tinfoil hattery I have yet seen on Hacker News.

Google gets Steve Yegge to encourage coders to work on bioinformatics because it gets rid of the competition!

(I doubt that)

majmun
It is different point of view but I just said it would be convinient, wouldn't it? i also don't know what is really going on.
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chc
But the thing is, a lot of these "new Web communication tools" are "new" only in the sense that they aren't very old, not in the more important sense that they're novel in a useful way.
Jul 27, 2011 · 6 points, 2 comments · submitted by chrisbaglieri
yanw
Dupe: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2811818
chrisbaglieri
...not to mention, a solid talk.
Jul 27, 2011 · 546 points, 130 comments · submitted by kodisha
tom_b
So I'm not really an ask me anything type guy, but I work on a bioinformatics team at an academic cancer research center. We have genomic sequencers and a software stack running 24/7/365 plus your normal collection of IT and small dev projects here.

If you have questions about what it's like to be a hacker in this type of environment, post them here and I'll share what my experience is like.

BTW, I completely wish I knew more stats and bioinformatics, so I probably should purchase the Yegge book collection myself . . .

AndrewO
How would you describe the attention to craftsmanship of software in scientific computing? The most illuminating thing about Climategate to me was the state of the software: is this kind of code widespread? Is there interest in improvement? If I went to work for a research team and suggested pairing, code reviews, version control, continuous integration, or other accepted good practices from my experience in software development how would that be received?

Also, the dilemma in my mind is whether I can stand going back to grad school in my late 20s for a career I don't really know much about. I'm not sure if you can speak to that experience, but would you say it's been rewarding?

tom_b
I haven't had much luck getting people on my team interested in code reviews. The day I started we put a ton of stuff in version control though.

In general, you should interview a team when you're trying to get a job and trust your gut on how much those practices you mention will be accepted. It's a little harder here, because for years the model was assign a dev to a project and that dev will own the entire project from start to finish. We still don't do a great job working as a team.

Craftmanship can take a back-seat to schedule. Lots of operational stuff (for grants and administrative purposes) gets pushed off to the last minute. And for research, the focus here is on the results much less than the process. The researchers don't care if you do it in a bash shell script or a clojure jewel as long as it's done - kind of like a startup. So if you can do it fast in a maintainable and cool way, all the better.

We are suffering the effects right now of some bad QC code. A non-insignificant amount of data had to be re-analyzed because of some code bugs. I would say interest is currently much higher in improvement. :-)

I did grad school (MS in CS), went to industry, and then came back. Returning was mainly lucky timing and personal network effects. But I was late 20's when I did grad school, so we're not too different. It was completely worth it for me.

Some PIs are like typical academics - they have MD/PhD (usually both) and can be somewhat dictatorial. But some are great and want your thoughts and expertise.

You could consider simply getting a job doing typical IT work in an organization like this. You're probably right that eventually you'll want some grad school (we are walking around in credential heaven here), but you could always try it out first.

PaulHoule
Software Craftsmanship is often disastrous in Computer Science departments, never mind other fields.

I remember getting a C program from one of the biggest names in both undergrad CS education and machine learning and finding it wouldn't run on 32 bit machines because it had a static array that consumed 4 GB.

Even in computer science, the product is papers, not working software, and the situation is worse in other fields.

As someone who had an academic background, I think going from "pictures of cats" to "math and science" is like going from the frying pan to the fire. Entry level positions in the math and science Juggernaut pay from 2-5x less what a junior or senior person in the social media Juggernaut gets. You can sink anywhere from 5-10 years into getting a PhD, and then you'll find that there are just enough new jobs for the children of yesterday's professors who weren't totally destroyed by their upbringing and that they've got an insurmountable advantage in the game of musical chairs.

Science and Math is a system that uses up young people, especially men, the same way that the racing industry uses thoroughbred horses. There's no realistic career path for 95% of the people who get involved... other than working on "pictures of cats" or whatever it is that pays.

Create
to add to your last paragraph, I would like to quote someone, who asked the rhetoric question at a self-celebration event at a (supposedly) flagship research institute:

"How should we make it attractive for them [young people] to spend 5,6,7 years in our field, be satisfied, learn about excitement, but finally be qualified to find other possibilities?" -- H. Schopper

What an euphemism. Almost like a scam.

cing
I worked at a bioinformatics co-op job for 8 months about 4 years ago. I had fun, but my main impression was that the field is a major clusterf*ck of databases and data management. I think you could take this list as evidence for that: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioinformatics_workflow_managem...
tom_b
This is definitely true. I deal with unstructured data, and every flavor of data storage weekly (XML, Access, Oracle, Postgres, MySQL, a few MS SQL Server instances, Excel, and plain text).

<edit> oh, and forget about stuff being normalized or making any sense . . .

CBgrad
I'm a CS guy (programmer with a heavy interest in Biology) going to get a Master's in Computational Biology (from CMU).

What's it like to be a hacker in that sort of environment? :P Really, anything you could tell me about what you do now, the state of the industry, and your experience would be really valuable.

tom_b
This is my first bioinformatics job and my first return to an academic environment since finishing a MS in CS and doing the standard industry thing. This group is mostly a core services group rather than a pure research support group.

I came in to do traditional data warehouse work, loading data from separate databases into one spot to make reports across those different datasets easier. That's most of my days now - simple data integration and reporting. Oddly enough, we are an Oracle shop because our university has a site license. But I do a little Ruby/Rails/Sinatra for a project that is reporting + some app-like enhancements. Tons of SQL for manipulating data, but it is usually simple SQL, especially compared to stuff I wrote previously in a financial corp.

A significant amount of my day is ferreting requirements out of users. I wish I was better at this.

There is a much larger amount of grunt work happening in the data management space than I expected. We deal with a huge amount of protected health information (PHI), which can be frustrating since you're usually working around data policies that require somewhat careful interpretation. Obviously, the genomic datasets are huge, so dealing with storage and clusters for data processing is often a discussion point around here.

It is an academic/research place, so it is a little more relaxed than industry. Expectations (for software) are a little low - we're talking about users who have, for the most part, kept data in spreadsheets or little Access style databases for years. And they often haven't had the budget to hire dedicated software guys, so sometimes tools are suffering from bit-rot.

Good hackers seem to be appreciated. It is below your standard industry salary, but not terribly so. I try to avoid being sucked into low-value work since "the reward for work well-done is more work."

Just like grad school, if you want to work on a specific topic or research area, make sure you get a job in a group doing that work. Once you're established, it seems easy to get some space to do some exploratory hacking.

Create
This sounds quite accurate. Just a minor thing to add: said DB vendor is heavy in politics, and getting off the Obstacle goggles is part of the cure.

And the environment will try to shoehorn "bioinformatics/medical informatics/etc" into "mostly a core services group" of technicians, like surface technicians, kitchen etc. Though in discussions, it will be admitted, that informatics/maths is one of the most promising keys to advance the medical research field. J. Quackenbush called these groups of people intellectual peasants. Unless these groups are accepted as peers, I can hardly see any true systems approach succeed.

jgmmo
Lets say I want to get in this field. I have a BBA in Econ -- but no upper level math -- would I be better off getting a BA in Math and then going off to grad school (in CS or Bio, or both..)? Or would it be a better use of time to take certain maths and then just head into a masters program?
tom_b
My co-workers have very diverse backgrounds - PhDs in bioinformatics all the way to folks with a BA in history.

They all seem to be hackers. So I would say, if you're already a hacker, you can probably find a way in somewhere given enough time regardless of your current degree level.

If you know you are going to head off to grad school, don't do another undergrad before. Many CS programs take on students who need a little remediation in math or CS background. I would guess that would be much more difficult for a MS program in biology.

You might even find that a MS in bioinformatics is the appropriate choice. There seem to be several of these programs floating around, they are multi-disciplinary to begin with, and if you can crank out a good GRE score, you can probably get in one without too much effort.

You will probably find it easier to break into the academic research world with at least a MS. But, I hear lots of buzz about commercial companies wanting to get into the sequencing business. Maybe you could just give yourself a crash course in python or ruby and a little biostatistics and sneak into one of those? Especially if you can find someone in your network already working in the field.

I recruited a friend to work with me who had a BS in history and a MBA (I teased him). But he was working in the software field already and I knew he would pick up the simple tech we were using to get work done.

david927
We're creating a group here:

http://digitalauteur.wikispaces.com

awj
I guess my biggest question is: in what way can programmers outside that specific discipline pitch in and help out? Are there relevant open source projects that could benefit from someone with a lot of programming experience and a slightly-better-than-layman science background?
nkassis
I fit the mold you are talking about. I started working for a neuroimaging lab about 1 year and a half ago. Basically I'm not a scientist at all, did Math as an undergrad but almost no stats or any of that type of vodoo stuff (topology, abstract algebra etc real math stuff is what I did ;p).

So basically I had no clue what Neuroimaging meant or did other than people get shoved in scanner, huge magnets turn and they see inside you ;p

But what I found is there are plenty of computer science problems in a field of Neuroimaging (and neuroscience) that a programmer can help with. (processing, image analysis, data mining, storage, Visualization whatever) Most labs don't really have people who's primary job is programming. Thus there a lots of tools that are just hack jobs long forgotten that no one is maintaining but everyone depends on. Those things can be helped out by good programming practice and with real programmers behind them. What sucks is getting funding for these people but Open Source can help here by pooling multiple people from many labs into common projects.

Also, if you do work with scientist, most of them will talk to you for hours about the science of what they do. You can usually ask the most stupid question and they will be happy to answer it. I've found that most people I work with are open and even more if the work you do helps them achieve their scientific goals. So in the end if you need to learn some science stuff, they will usually be helpful.

(BTW my project is in my profile, will be open source soon, waiting for some political approval process).

tom_b
My gut feeling is that there is a large need for good query/visualization tools of the datasets the sequencers produce. At least, I think if researchers could "play" interactively with data they would be pretty excited. But I am most definitely non-expert in this area, so take that with a grain of salt. I sometimes think about whether or not tools developed with column stores (e.g., the programming language J or something like KDB+) would actually be cool for data exploration.

For visualization, check out:

http://genome.ucsc.edu/

Also, a huge list of projects is at:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genome_browser

In the genomics analysis space, it seems that I hear these three tools mentioned for sequence alignment are tophat, BWA, and MapSplice.

http://bio-bwa.sourceforge.net/

http://www.netlab.uky.edu/p/bioinfo/MapSplice

http://tophat.cbcb.umd.edu/

These are actively maintained projects that I think are mostly developed inside of various academic research groups.

There is also The Cancer Genome Atlas project at:

http://cancergenome.nih.gov/

You can probably find research groups via TCGA that might appreciate some one-off development or support, but it might not be exciting from a tech viewpoint.

There is a ton of EMR (electronic medical record) data out there in free text. If you have skills or interest in things like Lucene/Solr, I would bet that almost any research hospital might appreciate your time and skills. And, if you talk to the right group, want to hire you . . .

davi
There is a new field of extracting wiring diagrams from brains at the level of individual neurons. This is what I work on.

http://openconnectomeproject.org has some introductory material. (This is not my site, it is by some people at JHU who picked up our data set and are working on it.) Massive image data sets, lots of need to develop workflow. You can browse the image data here: http://openconnectomeproject.org/catmaid/?pid=4&zp=40635...

Concretely, look at the plugins being developed by the Fiji project and pitch in, especially on the electron-microscopy-centric plugins: http://pacific.mpi-cbg.de/wiki/index.php/Category:Plugins

edit: also think about contributing to the CATMAID project, which is the software serving the browsable data set above, and perhaps will someday enable crowd-sourced markup: http://fly.mpi-cbg.de/~saalfeld/catmaid/

hirenj
Bioinformatician here: First of all, I think it's got to be clear that a lone bioinformatician, or even a group of them isn't going to go about changing the world. Essentially, when you sign up for this, you're still a cog in a machine, albeit a slightly more altruistic machine.

Here's my pet peeve in bioinformatics - If there's one thing that's poorly suited to science, it's the building of computational infrastructure. We're talking basic stuff like databases, tools etc. Sure, anyone can knock out a bit of code for a basic database, but the big problem is that there's no incentive to have decent code, or maintain it so that it lasts any longer than the person is in the lab, or has funding. So, what will be great is if existing resources are cleaned up - data is normalised and pulled out so that it is actually accessible for doing some kind of analysis on it.

If you want to do bigger work, do something actually novel, or that has any biological relevance there's no getting around collecting your own data (e.g. sequencing the crap out of a bunch of things). I'm in the process of trying to get funding now for a project of mine to make that very leap now.

I'm sure someone working on next gen sequencing (the new hotness) can pipe up with the big problems to be solved there.

polyfractal
This is a problem that is pretty endemic to acadamia in general. The revolving door of most academic labs means a lot of knowledge and tools are lost or not maintained. It is frustrating to see this happen in every single lab, but short of fixing the labor-mill mentality of acadamia, this will never go away.
nkassis
You don't always have to get new data to make a splash. I particularly like this project (it's in neuroscience but similar things probably exist in biology)

http://neurosynth.org/

They are doing meta-analysis of the neuroscience literature.

enjalot
I know a professor who has a big grant to sequence a whole bunch of animals, and will also do a high res CT scan of each specimen. He plans to make a comprehensive site where scientists and school children can access the data they are interested and learn more.

He even has money for a dev position for 4 years, I'm just worried that he gets someone who slaps together a proprietary and incompatible site when this would be a perfect chance to experiment with implementing some standard data access APIs.

I've heard bioinformatics people complain about the lack of standards and fragmented nature that comes from various small groups of scientists doing it on their own.

If anyone is interested pm me and I'll put you in touch, he is in South Carolina so he can't offer the salary and other perks of the Bay, but it's a real chance to put good development energy into science.

boredandroid
He didn't quit Google. He just quit the project he was working on at Google. I talked to him the day before and am quite sure that is what he meant.
abijlani
Let's stop focusing on the fact that he quit. And focus on WHY he quit. I'm sure we all can relate with what he's saying at some level. He's talking about tackling hard problems and not just low hanging fruit that might (emphasis on might) make a buck. And most of all he's leading by example. I haven't seen this much bravado from anyone in our industry in a long time.
david927
Let's organize this: http://digitalauteur.wikispaces.com

- We will work on projects that make the world better, not to get rich.

- We will study different subjects to better tackle existing, important problems.

- We will work as a community, sharing our findings, learning from each other

dpark
not only to get rich

Pretty sure Yegge's 'auteurs' are getting rich.

AndrewTerry
While I applaud his motives for change, we should also focus on HOW he quit, too.

IMHO, his boss deserves the professional courtesy of being told personally (be it face to face, or by letter of resignation), rather than finding out via a YouTube clip...

cpeterso
How do you know he didn't tell his boss before the conference and just announce his resignation publicly during his talk?
michaelfeathers
I'm trying to put myself in his boss's shoes. I think I would only be upset if I took it personally.
kenjackson
I think the fact that he did it at a conference made it personal. See the other post that is a peer of yours on this thread.

Basically Steve Yegge said that his boss doesn't deserve the respect to know this ahead of time. In fact its quite possible that 1000 people will know this before his boss does, including his boss's boss.

In many regards the only person this was disrespectful to was his boss -- and that makes it personal when you single out someone in this manner.

Create
downvote freely (but then don't laugh when watching Office Space).

If you have enough life experience, or read enough of Matt Groening, worst case watch enough Office movies/series, then you could suspect that bosses can be manipulative sociopaths, who do not deserve any professional courtesy.

BTW: most bosses don't fire f2f (Office Space), but with an indirection, through Human Resources Services (or hire scumbags, likeUp in the Air) [and then good luck, with your file].

I guess Steve had a reason to do this, and I respect him for having the guts to stand up in such a public way against dirty careerist office background politics, management decision support and calendaring theory.

Maybe this case doesn't fit, I have no clue (in my experience, it can be the "right thing to do" in large organisations detached from true ethics). But if Steve felt it this way, then it was this way (see Schopenhauer's most influential work, The World as Will and Representation)

myth_drannon
What's "calendaring theory" ?
absconditus
Doing something for someone even though you believe that they do not deserve it is part of being a better person.
Create
Try to explain the meaning of your sentence to a manipulative sociopath.
david927
Please change the title to:

Stevey gives up the being part of the chase for the superfluous (in money), and calls for us to do something about the necessary

No one needs a million dollars. No one. Why are we chasing it and dying of heart disease -- heart disease we can cure if we start chasing that instead?

Our priorities are absolutely messed up and it's time we start realigning them. This isn't a speech; this isn't a funny resignation. This is a clarion call to join in. We can do so much better. We can achieve something valuable, if we start to realize where true value lies.

Steve's in. I'm in. Who else around here is in?

camillionaire
'No one needs a million dollars. No one.'

Yeah, but it helps.

I think it should be noted that Steve is probably fairly wealthy by most any standard from GOOG & AMZN stock.

And with that wealth comes more freedom...to work on 'big' projects.

I think it's a bit disingenuous to ask people to work on non-lolcat projects when you are wealthy and set for the rest of your life. It's admirable to devote your life to working on big ideas, but I would argue most people who are doing so (even those mentioned in his talk - Gates, O'Reilly, etc) aren't really worried about money.

Most people are simply worrying about how to pay next month's rent or handle their family expenses. Sorry, but these people are not 'in' when it comes to working on big ideas.

In my case, if it came down to working for Facebook and making $10+ Million on the IPO or working to cure cancer - Facebook wins. Maybe after that I'll work to cure cancer.

david927
Your argument is specious to the point of being crazy: - Millionaires can work on important things. (Yes they can, but they usually just end up working on their tan.)

- Everyone else is just making ends meet. (Huh? Everyone?)

- If you have the chance, join FB early so you can be a millionaire and work on important things.

Look at the startup Color. It has brilliant people and they are all working on ways to make sharing pictures with people you don't know.

We're saying, "Stop It!" Maybe you'll get a hit and get rich but that's a stupid goal.

No one needs better ways to share pictures of your cats. There are important things to do instead, and our brightest minds, instead of engaging in ways to humanity forward, are writing PHP to get themselves forward.

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wmat
I beg you not to organize this on Facebook. Start a wiki.
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david927
Let's organize this: http://digitalauteur.wikispaces.com

Join in

wmat
Thanks!
VladRussian
>No one needs a million dollars. No one.

food, roof (with internet connection reaching under it), freedom. In Bay Area, if you have a mortgage, it is half a mil bare minimum and even a million may not take you far enough. There have been experiments to build societies with decreased degree of connection between food, roof, freedom and money - somehow it always went like this one http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/dprk/dprk-dark....

And you can't build SpaceX without a bucket of millions (Copenhagen Orbitals are beyond wonderful, yet they are in Virgin Galactic league at best, even in their furthest plans. They show the possibilities for the future and at the same time how far yet that future is)

david927
You're missing my point, Vlad. We're chasing superfluous amounts of money, instead of doing more important things.
wccrawford
Am I the only one that fails to be inspired by this? I think I'm not inspired because it's something I've already thought about. We've always had the option to go make money, or go try to fix the world... And whatever that brings us.

I am very clear on my chances of making big changes to the world: Almost nil. Instead, I decided long ago that I'd do my best to make money and improve my own life.

I'm not saying I don't do little things to help the environment, but there's no chance that I'm going to be on the team that cures cancer. There are too many people out there that are both smarter than me and more learned in the topics needed. The best I could do would be to get in their way.

adw
Making the world better is a complex problem which depends on a hell of a lot of systems.

Having worked in academia, you rapidly appreciate that the people who keep the lights on - administrators, lab techs, librarians - are about the most important people there.

And that system? Depends on taxpayer funding. If you're doing things which are ethical, and you're doing them well, then you're helping cure cancer and all the rest, even if only indirectly. Maybe you could do something more direct; that's your call to make. But don't minimize the impact of doing good work.

espeed
I don't think he is trying to minimize the work of others. Steve is saying if you see a meaningful problem that you know how to attack, it's up to you to make it a priority rather than putting it off because you can't be bothered.

He's talking about working toward your potential and possibly making short-term sacrifices in exchange for the greater good.

Because if you have a unique perspective on a problem, you may be the only one in the world right now with the vision to solve it. Don't waste your time working on mundane shit when you know you could be doing something more.

adw
Thanks, and I totally agree.

What I was really aiming for was "don't do yourself down" - and "don't underestimate the impact a well-placed tool can have".

enjalot
I just recently decided to not pursue a PhD in scientific computing, so I'll be finishing my Master's and working at a startup starting in September.

One of the biggest reasons I decided to not do further research is that I have noticed that there are an unfathomable amount of people hobbling about on ancient and primitive tools when there are existing implementations and papers available that would make their lives orders of magnitude more efficient. So I've made a personal choice to not pursue the latest, fastest and most cutting edge algorithms and rather bring my knowledge, experience and problem solving abilities to people who are trying to solve real problems right now.

My point is that even though you think you can't compete with these guys who read, study and do 'real' science they could use a lot of help from the likes of you. Sure learning some linear algebra and bayesian statistics can help in directly implementing the algorithm, but usually the biggest problem I've seen is a complete lack of software engineering and hard coding specific to certain data sets.

I think the scientists can gain a lot from the software engineering field, especially open source practices. They will be resistant to it, as others have pointed out the incentives don't always line up, on the other hand there is a lot of low-hanging fruit in terms of improvements a decent programmer can pluck.

nkassis
"My point is that even though you think you can't compete with these guys who read, study and do 'real' science they could use a lot of help from the likes of you. Sure learning some linear algebra and bayesian statistics can help in directly implementing the algorithm, but usually the biggest problem I've seen is a complete lack of software engineering and hard coding specific to certain data sets."

Yup you said it exactly right. More programmers to assist the scientist. The scientist know the science part but they need help with the informatics part (lots of it). If not they do it themselves and you end up with some software that becomes critical but with no one being able to maintain it.

Plus working with the scientist means you have access to expert in their field and usually they like to talk about it so you'll learn overtime the science and whys behind the stuff you work on.

Good luck with the startup.

rdouble
No, you're not the only one. He's a bit naive if he thinks he's going to cure cancer by quitting his job and reading some undergraduate math textbooks. However misguided his plan may be, it's heartwarming that his wife agreed to be his study buddy, instead of divorcing him.
georgemcbay
His dog also seems to be all-in on the concept as well. Godspeed, Yegge family!
jshen
"He's a bit naive if he thinks he's going to cure cancer by quitting his job and reading some undergraduate math textbooks."

This is a rather obnoxious strawman.

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aridiculous
This is cynical past the point of healthy. There are plenty of sectors that would be revolutionized if smart people focused their attention on them.

You don't have to cure cancer; that's absurdly binary and based on fame. You can do less sensational things like invent a device that improves patients' lives using modern robotics and sensors. You can design a system for Alzheimer's patients that incorporates your knowledge of big data sets. I can't dream of all the things to improve, but your domain knowledge is probably tremendously useful in all kinds of fields.

huckfinnaafb
In addition, even "cat picture project" technology can sometimes be used to implement "world changing" technology. I think "do what you love doing and always challenge yourself" still generally applies here.
cpeterso
e.g. YouTube.
david927
That's the rationalization that smart people tell themselves so that they can sleep at night.

Accidents can always happen but if you're writing PHP to tag cat pictures, no, it's not going to do anything. But keep telling yourself that if it helps you sleep.

mad44
while listening to the talk, I took notes. (Not exact notes, I probably reworded several things, hopefully not twisting the meaning too much.) Here they are, if you don't have time to watch the talk.

----- Google, "where I work right now", they are doing great work to attempt to change the work. At least more than other companies.

I work on compilers. I like to work on big data, learn about data mining. Because even for compilers work I need to do large data analysis, and face tremendous scaling problems.

Hollywood blockbusters summer 2011: why is this slide here? These summer movies are all crap, because corporates are greedy, they are incremental, not trying to shoot for real quality, real game changers. They chase money.

Except for "auteurs": people making money while keeping principle. E.g, Pixar. They show their passion, make every one look bad, but make money as well. Apple is also a great example.

Social networks; this is what I work on at Google :-( (lolcatz pictures on the slide). Is this principled? This is fun, and making money. But not principled? Is there anyone in this crowd not working on social networks? This is a hype. Why is everyone working on this? This is money chasing.

You are interested in social networks but when you are 60 you will be interested in your health. But then it is too late. You will wish we had solved these fundamental health problems when you are 60. These are hard problems that require math statistics and big data.

Human genome project: This will be an inflection point in human history. It is also a data-mining project. Reverse engineer the source code (genome) with respect to how treatments work/are-effective. The people who can solve it, data mining people, are working on crap problems, lolcatz social networks :-(

We need to change this culture. In this new culture: everyone is a mathematician. But how do we learn math and science? challeng to O'reilly publish books on math for developers. But, they already do. They have severeal stat and bioinformatics books. These books aren't selling. :-( They are trying to change the world, but we are not helping. Developer popular topics are javascript ipad, php, etc. :-(

Let's affect a culture change. short-term: infrastructure and scaling medium-term: math, data mining, bioinformatics long-term: important problems

I had a midlife crisis instantly after rehearshing this speech once. I am not following my own advice. I had started work on math every evening. And I am officially quitting that social network job at Google. (Is he also quitting Google?)

This way I will be ready when we are in a position to face those important problems in five years.

jacoblyles
It feels hard to get into Bioinformatics without a PHD. I would love to tackle problems in genetics, medicine, and etc. But I'm not going to commit 7 years of my life to breaking into a highly regulated sector before I get to "Hello World!".

Is there a hacker scene in Bioinformatics?

jianshen
My father is in the hospital right now and I feel the same frustration. A family friend who is a professor of radiology mentioned that a major driver of research in medical imaging comes from video game graphics work. He even submitted a paper to siggraph around interpolating 3d space from 2d CT scans. There are direct and indirect applications from the techie scene, it just doesn't get the kind of press like consumer tech and the hacker scene tends to be at universities and learning hospitals.
Create
http://www.ted.com/talks/anders_ynnerman_visualizing_the_med...
dukeleto
There are a few Github orgs that you may want to look at:

https://github.com/GMOD https://github.com/solgenomics

Also, #bioinformatics on freenode is a good place to meet people.

VladRussian
it is hard to be hired there. That creates relatively closed system where software is in the state that can significantly benefit even from short professional generic programmer involvement - at least it was on few occasions i or my friends happened to touch it.

With respect to open source work - the field is wide open. For example, as "data mining/big data" was mentioned, the interesting recent development synthesizing advances in general availability of cheap server farms (hardware and software -wise, in particular cloud/hadoop) and a new approach - "meta/shotgun sequencing" - enabled by such advances can be found here http://bowtie-bio.sourceforge.net/crossbow/index.shtml

Also may be interesting to look at http://www.jcvi.org/cms/research/projects/jcvi-cloud-biolinu...

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jergason
I work in a bioinformatics/proteomics lab that does all open-source work. I am sure we are not alone. https://github.com/princelab is where our code lives. OpenWetWare is a wiki for biology labs that several bioinformatics people use as well. http://openwetware.org/wiki/Main_Page
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georgemcbay
The problem with calling out specific companies for quality is things can change -- eg, Pixar, who would have clearly belonged on his list a couple of years ago, but post-Disney, post-Cars 2, post Newt being cancelled for Monsters Inc 2, post the Canadian branch being formed to shit out TV specials... well... things can change (including for the worse) quickly.
paulrademacher
Meh. Since the 2006 acquisition: Ratatouille, Wall-E, Up, Toy Story 3.
nowarninglabel
This is a very important lesson, and one that I would argue that books such as "Built to Last" completely failed to foresee that many of the companies they thought were made of gold, turned out to be duds merely a couple years later when the late 90s stock market bubble burst.
dstein
More importantly he has revealed that Google will be adding cat picture features to Google Plus. Facebook is in trouble.
orangecat
I'll watch this tonight, from the summaries I generally agree with him. I feel the same way about brilliant math and physics people doing HFT for Goldman Sachs. But I'd also point out that from a comparative advantage perspective, it may be optimal to earn lots of money in a "useless" area and then donate where it makes a difference. If you can earn $500k/year at a hedge fund and give half of that to SENS, that's probably better than quitting your job to learn molecular biology from scratch.
barrybe
Maybe, maybe not. It's a real challenge to hire the good software engineers, but a good engineer can be extremely productive (the old 10x efficiency thing). So, if you are one of the good ones, you can probably do a lot more good with your skills than with money.

Put it another way, anybody can throw money at the problem (and a lot of people do). But not many can write algorithms that efficiently work on terabyte data sets.

wmat
Watch the whole talk. It's fantastic. And as a 40 year old, I completely concur.

But what to do about it? Hmmmm.....time to go shopping for books, or search for online courses.

kodisha
What we all can do is to donate our CPU cycles to folding@home or WCG projects. How many of you have your PS3 siting idle? Do you know that you have folding@home built in your PS3, you just need to tour it on :)
kodisha
http://folding.stanford.edu/English/FAQ-PS3#ntoc3
Create
I hate to say this, but protein folding projects aren't good for any practical purposes (or show me a breakthrough). It is good for PR (public participation, awareness of the topic), but like SETI (FFT on essentially CBR noise from space) it is quite futile: while in theory it could work, it is really not a reasonable way to use scarce resources.

It is literally burning electricity (oil, coal, Fukushima) for no real reason (MS wants to patent computational heating?)

We have no clue how proteins work/interact (this is why epigenetics is hyped these days). We have some "educated guess", but it is mostly data harvesting from public databases and then doing some simple Bayes or correlation analysis, without much scrutiny on the harvested data itself (ie. was it made up using multiple imputation?)

wmat
MIT's OpenCourseware:

http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mathematics/

http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/biology/

http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/health-sciences-and-technology/

david927
And to decide what to study, let's put it together here:

http://digitalauteur.wikispaces.com

conorh
At around 14:10 in the speech - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKmQW_Nkfk8&feature=playe...

Also I'm not sure if he quit Google, or if he just quit the project he was working on.

gdulli
He said he's "quitting that job", which doesn't sound ambiguous to me. It's not the way I'd let someone know I was getting off a project.
kodisha
Well I don't think that Google has anything similar to human genome project, so I think he quit Google. But yes, it is a but unclear.
Create
They had something, I think it was a protein database search goog labs project. It wasn't very popular, so I guess it didn't stick. btw 23me is close enough, and is also misleading enough (in scientific value)...
beambot
How is 23andMe misleading in scientific value? They just published "Web-based genome-wide association study identifies two novel loci and a substantial genetic component for Parkinson’s disease" in PLOS Genetics:

http://spittoon.23andme.com/2011/06/23/plos-genetics-parkins...

http://www.plosgenetics.org/doi/pgen.1002141

Create
correct me if I am wrong, but the debate which started at about and around [1] didn't quite finish.

Would you trust the output of this chip, as it has been presented/used in the paper [2]?

1.Katsanis, S.H., Javitt, G. & Hudson, K. A Case Study of Personalized Medicine. Science 320, 53 -54 (2008).

2.Konstantinopoulos, P.A. et al. Integrated Analysis of Multiple Microarray Datasets Identifies a Reproducible Survival Predictor in Ovarian Cancer. PLoS ONE 6, e18202 (2011).

beambot
My robotics training hardly qualifies me to asses the output of their academic research. However, I applaud their commitment to publishing results it top-tier academic journals.

Off-handed comments (in a thread about Google) calling 23andMe's scientific research "misleading" seems a bit snarky. Educated discussion has a place -- eg. in HN threads related to the company [1] or (especially) in the peer-review process.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2813270 (currently on HNs frontpage)

orangecat
18 months ago I didn't think they had anything similar to self-driving cars, so it wouldn't surprise me if they did. The human genome project is pretty Google-y, with massive amounts of data and clever algorithms.
ZackOfAllTrades
Normally I lurk and don't vote. But this is worth people's time to watch.
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kodisha
It is on the front page now :)
david927
:-) Finally.
ZackOfAllTrades
I took a look into Hacker News hotness algorithm a month or two ago, and it is way more complicated than just points and time. Youtube videos probably don't rank that high compared to other websites. People could be colluding, but I think it is more likely there is more to ranking than we can understand from what we see.

[Edit: This was in response to someone asking why it wasn't on the front page.]

david927
It got 20 to 30 votes in the first hour but was buried at around 50. Whatever algorithm they use, I'm not impressed. Maybe Arc just can't handle complex expressions. :-)
kbutler
tl;dr Work on data mining and bioionformatics to change the world, rather than just seeking money by doing trivial things.

Plus publicity stunt of quitting so you'll listen [at 14:15, sounded like quitting a cat-photo-sharing project, rather than quitting Google].

Plus implication that bio is the only domain that is world-changing.

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almightygod
I never heard him say "bio is only domain that is world-changing". But unlocking the genome would have unequivocal implications on quality of life and longevity for all of humanity, what is more important then improving someone's life?
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polyfractal
sigh

People thought we were "unlocking the genome" ten years ago with the Human Genome Project. If that taught us anything, it is that biology is a lot more complicated than simply parsing data. Biology is messy, complicated and breaks every single one of its own rules. Repeatedly.

I'm not saying bioinformatics is unimportant or unnecessary, because it truly is important. I'm simply tired of people (particularly famous people who are grandstanding) boasting that XYZ will "cure cancer".

angrycoder
As someone who was originally a science major, then switched to comp sci, I always get a romantic tingle when I hear about bioinformatics. Most of the science I've learned is gone by now, but I am sure it still there somewhere.

What are the good starting points for learning about bioinformatics?

queensnake
amazon.com and university courses; what did you think? That there was an inside, easy track that you could find by asking HN?
angrycoder
Yeah, that is what I was looking for, an 'easy track'. Not a recommendation from someone in the field based on the fact that I am a programmer with a science background.

Thanks.

bartonfink
I'm not sure I agree with his premise that, in order to change the world you must work on a problem with "big data." I can't see how the energy crisis is fundamentally data-driven, for example, and it's hard to say that you couldn't change the world by working on that.

Regardless, best of luck to him wherever he winds up (within Google or elsewhere)! And I hope he keeps writing!

loup-vaillant
"Big data" wasn't really the point. However, it happens to be Google's comparative advantage if the goal is to change/save the world.
pavpanchekha
I think he's implying that it requires the same basic computer science hacking that is required for all of the "cat pictures" projects he points out. The point isn't that we should choose between data-driven and not data-driven; it's that we should choose between cat pictures and the human genome.
jganetsk
I have just talked to Steve. I have confirmed that he has not quit Google.
btrask
This past week, I decided to start working on a project to build a new type of speech synthesizer. Did I know anything about acoustics or linguistics? No, but I've been reading what I can find about them since then.

I used to have a philosophy of intentionally choosing easy, "overlooked" problems. I figured I wasn't that smart, so I should just stick to the simple stuff. The software I built was good and useful, but a lot of it is already becoming obsolete. I want to make software that will last 50 years, not just 5.

This talk came at a great time for me, and it's strengthened my resolve. I'm going to keep learning about speech synthesis and acoustics (which means a lot of math and physics that I slept through in school), and hopefully I can push the field forward a little bit.

cpeterso
I am reminded of Richard "Hamming code" Hamming's quote:

"What are the most important problems in your field? Are you working on one of them? Why not?"

spinchange
Watch it for the talk, not the sensationalism. It's a good talk.
p_h
I've had multiple math professors tell me to study as much math as I can while I'm young, because once you're over 30 it's a lot harder to learn math. I'm in my 20's so I'm not sure if this is true.

It also seems to me that the math you would learn in an O'Reilly book isn't in depth enough to contribute to research.

contextfree
I think a lot of "it's much harder to learn X when you're older" (languages for example) is more about not caring as much or not having as much time than it is about having less ability to learn given those things. At least I hope so, since I'm rapidly approaching 30 and there are vast and deep realms of knowledge I'd like to explore but am just getting started now. =)
Estragon
My research concerns the genetic epidemiology of heart disease. The mathematics involved is not that deep.
b_emery
Im in my 40s and still learning plenty of math. I think it's more a function of focused practice than age. I've also seen several profs doing good work well into their 80's so I dont know what your profs are talking about!
thornad
Everyone should work on the problems that are close to their heart, that they have a passion for. He says something similar in the begining but then he confesses he's gonna do exactly the opposite. this is major bulshit and I would not take this guy advice even if he payed me a million. Because he himself is not following it. And even if he did, it is bullshit. You should work on what YOU find important. Not on what someone else decided somewhere else. YOU have intuitive intelligence that knows what's important and what you and ONLY YOU have a UNIQUE talent for (because you are unique).
kenjackson
You want to change the world for the better? Be respectful of others you interact with on a day to day basis as a start. Steve should have given his boss heads up on this.
thom
c.f. http://boingboing.net/2011/07/14/far.html, which tempers some of my optimism for seeing really big problems solved with really big computers and datasets.
T_S_
Can anybody see the books on his dining room table (at 13:49)? I think I spotted Concrete Mathematics at the bottom, Duda and Hart, and Hastie, Tibshirani and Friedman. Good places to start.

What would your list be for Steve?

hollerith
Anyone care to post a summary of the OP (a 15-minute video)?
bartonfink
tl; dw -

Over the past 20 years, we've gone from writing software that runs on a single desktop with a very limited set of data to systems like Amazon and Google that accumulate large sets of data and needed to solve scalability problems. Now that we have all this data available, and the scalability problems are FAR more in hand than they were previously, the ? is what do we do with this data.

There are lots of ways we can use big data to solve real-world problems, but to solve real-world problems requires a degree of fluency in the language of the problem you're trying to solve. Most data-mining knowledge is being used to sell ads or to make it easier to share and find pictures of cats on social networking site, when with a little bit of domain knowledge you could literally change the world by solving a big, data-driven problem. Go do that. Learn on your own time and do something worth doing instead of finding new ways to earn a buck by sharing pictures of cats.

I'm Steve Yegge and I quit.

jm4
I normally don't like video links, but this one is worth watching.

Anyway...

He starts by talking about how he joined Google because he believed they really wanted to change the world. They are basically the only ones fighting for Net Neutrality, etc. He said Amazon had a similar culture when he was there. He goes on to talk about scaling and how it might be the biggest problem for a lot of companies. Basically, everyone is working on some kind of scaling problem and it's usually for a stupid "cat picture project" (social networking). Later in life, you realize there are more important things (specifically, health related in the video), but it's too late because these tasks require math, stats and domain-specific knowledge. We are mostly lacking the domain-specific knowledge. He talks about how you may wish you could go back in time to tell your younger self to do something more meaningful. He challenges everyone to learn something new and make a difference. With about a minute to go he's puts his money where his mouth is and quits his job.

avgarrison
After we solve all of the hard problems in the world, can we go back to looking at cat pictures?
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rektide
He looks so different than OSCON 2007: http://blip.tv/oreilly-open-source-convention/oscon-2007-ste...
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ryan-allen
Wow, he really did. How this isn't on the front page, I don't know. It should be!
absconditus
This is actually far less important than geeks believe that it is.
david927
This video is purposely being kept off the front page. Number 8 has 7 points, 1 hour ago. This has 20 points for the same time frame and is now 40 and dropping.
peregrine
Yea I wonder why its not on the FP. This is a fantastic talk...
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kodisha
Wth? It's now going down. I guess that ultra-thin laptops are more important :(
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cletus
There is definitely something weird going on.

7. MS-DOS is 30 years old today (extremetech.com)

44 points by ukdm 3 hours ago | flag | 11 comments

8. Bring your half-baked idea to the Half-Bakery (halfbakery.com)

54 points by rfreytag 4 hours ago | flag | 11 comments

And this...

22. Steve Yegge quits Google in the middle of his speech [OSCON Data 2011] (youtube.com)

162 points by kodisha 3 hours ago | flag | 35 comments

WTH?

EDIT: 323 votes in 5 hours... highest I've seen it as a #21, currently #22.

espeed
It may be that managers don't want their employees seeing this and being inspired to quit to work on more meaningful stuff -- it would be like a run on the banks in the tech world.
jarek
Clearly, said employees need a video of Steve Yegge saying this in 2011 to realize they're working on meaningless stuff. xkcd #137 five years ago came close to marking the point, but it took Steve on Youtube to really drive it home.
Timothee
I would think that people flagging the story is weighing it down. If the talk is good, why would it be flagged? Maybe because the title of the submission is kind of sensationalistic relative to the talk. The talk is about working more on solving important problems, less on making cat picture sharing easy and fun, and it's not so much about him leaving his job, though it does illustrate his intentions.
david927
It would have to have been a huge number of flag votes -- too many to be a reasonable explanatoin. My guess is that it was moderated down. Which leaves the big question of why?

Is it because the YC portfolio is heavy on cat picture startups and light on startups that do something important?

yanw
Bad hive-mind; Hacker News fires Steve Yegge: http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2011/07/hacker-news-fires-st...
blahedo
tl;dr: He didn't quit Google (just his current project, sort of).
yanw
He only quit the 'cat picture' project he is still on the GOOG's payroll.

It's an inspiring notion if you're into that sort of thing, a bit unfair to his would be colleagues though.

shareme
Folks he has not quit Google..post Title is incorrect
jsavimbi
While we debate the merits of Mr. Yegge's principled talk at OSCON Data 2011 and the potential ramifications that a sudden shift in priorities would cause in the developer universe, #imisswhen is trending from my local cat-picture dissemination outfit.

Personally, I believe we've done enough for humanity already.

zavulon
What an ass.
zavulon
I will take those downvotes with pride. I bet none of you ever managed any people.
rkalla
That talk had a really inspiring energy to it.

When it started I thought Yegge sounded nervous and jittery and seemed a little intense, like he had a chip on his shoulder and I thought "Oh boy, I hope he doesn't do a melt-down".

Then as the talk progressed, I realized he was just excited/nervous and that's how he talks.

He gradually hit his stride and the message that his talk was meant to convey slowly started to take shape for me... and it's a hell of a positive message.

It is a call-to-arms to give a damn and use our powers for the advancement of everyone. To stop spending out free time working on icanhascheezeburger SMS alert apps and pickup a book on mathematics, bioinfomatics, data mining and other hard topics and start learning.

It is a call to arms to send yourself back to school (in a sense) that don't be afraid to start learning about other topics that have always seemed interesting to you but maybe you figured were outside of your area of effect, e.g. "I'm a server guy, I'll never do anything interesting in 3D visualization!"

It is also a call to arms to make money and effect change with principle; like a Google or an Amazon.

You don't need to scrape every last piece of skin off of your customers hide in order to post big quarterly profits to be successful. You can develop positive relationships with your customers, employees and the world around you and STILL make the money necessary to continue growing an innovating.

The "quitting" part of the talk is unimportant, it was just his way of illuminating his point. The value is in his message.

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