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He stole the idea from the twin brothers who hired him and used the leading metric of @university email addresses to create contextual-relational importance for

by loceng 9y ago

He stole the idea from the twin brothers who hired him and used the leading metric of @university email addresses to create contextual-relational importance for viral growth, so it's not surprising. Makes me wonder if he or someone else came up with/suggested original The Facebook name. I don't think Mark's developed the open pathways for deep critical thinking, say that Elon Musk's thoughts all stem from - foundational principles being something he's commonly referred to.

dsacco 9y ago
> He stole the idea from the twin brothers who hired him and used the leading metric of @university email addresses to create contextual-relational importance for viral growth, so it's not surprising. While uncharitably stated, in my opinion this demonstrates a lot of technical ability and business savvy.
- loceng 9y ago
  Sure, intelligence can exist and people can function and be very successful psychopaths - disconnected from emotion, empathy and the like - disconnected from holistic understanding and having your logic to include how feelings should influence decisions. It's really a difference of understanding right and wrong vs. if you react to the feelings of right or wrong. If you're able to suppress/repress feelings, right and wrong and other, through use of control (usually formed as a coping mechanism of ego mind) then you'll be able to do what others would find more unethical than not; I suppose people will may do a risk/reward analysis. It's heavily why many people find Mark's facial expressions to be quite muted, robotic - giving birth to the Data from Star Trek meme. I don't think he's a lost cause, however he's certainly still controlling and calculating, I think he likely has deep healing that needs to happen, however his ego mind having full control got him this far and so he'll have a lot to process, self-forgiveness and such. This controlling thought and behaviour certainly floods into Facebook's ecosystem of a closed-system; I wrote blog post many years ago relating to controlled vs. managed ecosystems.
  - dsacco 9y ago
    To be clear I don't think Mark Zuckerberg is sociopathic, and I don't think it's productive or fair to speculate about him like this. My comment about his technical and business capabilities was intended in good faith, not as a springboard to rehash a discussion of "psychopaths in suits." I also think we (as in Hacker News) need to consider the extent to which useful discussion about Facebook's legitimate failings is getting drowned out by the noise of hyperbole and outrage.
    - loceng 9y ago
      I don't think anyone should have assumed that from your reply - I wasn't stating he is a psychopath either, simply wanted to tie into the idea that there are a lot of successful people in powerful positions ("psychopaths in suits") - they're intelligent yet because they don't factor in the people element, they make decisions that increase profits at the expense of others. I haven't seen much hyperbole and outrage re: Facebook on here. The scale of Facebook and the issue, how Trump and others got elected into power because of what Cambridge Analytica did -- the gravity (hmm, how grave it is..) and scale, how serious this situation is, would be fairly hard to exaggerate - it should warrant strong anger as well, if looking at the holistic impact, even though individual users may not realize the malice through purposeful ignorance.
homero 9y ago
Mark has never had an original idea. He stole Facebook then bought everything else like Instagram, Whatsapp and many many more. Not exactly an insult but since they're not his ideas he doesn't have the ideology to back it up or an end goal. He never wanted to connect people. Vs someone like Musk who lives and breathes his ideas and has an end goal.
- loceng 9y ago
  I agree with everything you said - except "Mark has never had an original idea" is a bit of an unfair statement, however it's perhaps true he's blocked from creativity.
  - homero 9y ago
    It wasn't an insult, only referring to anything widely used. I'm sure he's thought of things.
- eaenki 9y ago
  I like Elon Musk. A lot. But it's sick how it just became the new standard when referring to "genius" or worse "perfect being". He did not start Tesla. Ditto Solar City. Actually, I'd say he intentionally pushed out the former founder and CEO of Tesla. Read the story :-). He "only" started Space X.
  - homero 9y ago
    Didn't he confound PayPal.
    - common_ 9y ago
      He started X.com. The founders of PayPal were forced by their VCs to merge the two companies, because X.com had a massive cash position, and a banking license.
  - loceng 9y ago
    He's an easy reference, shouldn't be surprising that he's used - he's fresh on people's minds, recency effect and all that. When I reference Elon and the companies he's leading, it's not stating an assumption he's doing it alone - I'm simply referencing his thinking style based on the videos I've seen of him speaking. They're big industries too he's disrupting, forcing change and innovation from others/competitors - so that makes him even more prevalent in my mind as well. Who would you jump to referencing if wanting to include an example of holistic thinking, empathetic person, who is known to work/think/make decisions from founding principles?
chillingeffect 9y ago
> someone else came up with/suggested original The Facebook name. It was a tradition on Harvard campus that academic Houses published their own facebooks. The people Zuck stole the idea from were making a digital version. Here's a piece about it from Harvard's newspaper in 2004: http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2004/2/9/hundreds-register-for-new-facebook-website/ http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2004/2/9/hundreds-register... >Lisa H. Feigenbaum ’04 said that she joined thefacebook.com because it provided an open alternative to the password-protected House facebooks. Harvard was also trying to make their own before students did it: >“There is a project internally with computer services to create a facebook,” Davis said. “We’ve been in touch with the Undergraduate Council, and this is a very high priority for the College. We have every intention of completing the facebook by the end of the spring semester.” This is one of the most telling parts of the whole story: >Davis said that the principle complication with the creation of an official facebook was figuring out how to design an interface so that directory information could not easily be compiled without authorization.
- loceng 9y ago
  Wow -- stunning. Thanks for sharing. Everything was really lined up well for him to take advantage of, eh? The student population was excited and waiting for such a platform -- with the same name too. Mark's right though from his quote: “I can do it better than they can, and I can do it in a week.” - you can certainly launch things much more quickly if you don't take into account any concerns that others worry about/want to take into account -- like the privacy and security of people's information. It's no surprise this is where we are today: people who think ahead and want to be careful because of ethics, all the way to him taking the idea, implementing it - while deceiving/leading on the brothers who hired him vs. the foundation of Facebook and the Cambridge Analytica happenings. I wonder if he'll ever understand this himself, and how grave this all is.

by loceng 9y ago

dsacco 9y ago

> He stole the idea from the twin brothers who hired him and used the leading metric of @university email addresses to create contextual-relational importance for viral growth, so it's not surprising. While uncharitably stated, in my opinion this demonstrates a lot of technical ability and business savvy.

loceng 9y ago
Sure, intelligence can exist and people can function and be very successful psychopaths - disconnected from emotion, empathy and the like - disconnected from holistic understanding and having your logic to include how feelings should influence decisions. It's really a difference of understanding right and wrong vs. if you react to the feelings of right or wrong. If you're able to suppress/repress feelings, right and wrong and other, through use of control (usually formed as a coping mechanism of ego mind) then you'll be able to do what others would find more unethical than not; I suppose people will may do a risk/reward analysis. It's heavily why many people find Mark's facial expressions to be quite muted, robotic - giving birth to the Data from Star Trek meme. I don't think he's a lost cause, however he's certainly still controlling and calculating, I think he likely has deep healing that needs to happen, however his ego mind having full control got him this far and so he'll have a lot to process, self-forgiveness and such. This controlling thought and behaviour certainly floods into Facebook's ecosystem of a closed-system; I wrote blog post many years ago relating to controlled vs. managed ecosystems.
- dsacco 9y ago
  To be clear I don't think Mark Zuckerberg is sociopathic, and I don't think it's productive or fair to speculate about him like this. My comment about his technical and business capabilities was intended in good faith, not as a springboard to rehash a discussion of "psychopaths in suits." I also think we (as in Hacker News) need to consider the extent to which useful discussion about Facebook's legitimate failings is getting drowned out by the noise of hyperbole and outrage.
  - loceng 9y ago
    I don't think anyone should have assumed that from your reply - I wasn't stating he is a psychopath either, simply wanted to tie into the idea that there are a lot of successful people in powerful positions ("psychopaths in suits") - they're intelligent yet because they don't factor in the people element, they make decisions that increase profits at the expense of others. I haven't seen much hyperbole and outrage re: Facebook on here. The scale of Facebook and the issue, how Trump and others got elected into power because of what Cambridge Analytica did -- the gravity (hmm, how grave it is..) and scale, how serious this situation is, would be fairly hard to exaggerate - it should warrant strong anger as well, if looking at the holistic impact, even though individual users may not realize the malice through purposeful ignorance.

homero 9y ago

Mark has never had an original idea. He stole Facebook then bought everything else like Instagram, Whatsapp and many many more. Not exactly an insult but since they're not his ideas he doesn't have the ideology to back it up or an end goal. He never wanted to connect people. Vs someone like Musk who lives and breathes his ideas and has an end goal.

loceng 9y ago
I agree with everything you said - except "Mark has never had an original idea" is a bit of an unfair statement, however it's perhaps true he's blocked from creativity.
- homero 9y ago
  It wasn't an insult, only referring to anything widely used. I'm sure he's thought of things.
eaenki 9y ago
I like Elon Musk. A lot. But it's sick how it just became the new standard when referring to "genius" or worse "perfect being". He did not start Tesla. Ditto Solar City. Actually, I'd say he intentionally pushed out the former founder and CEO of Tesla. Read the story :-). He "only" started Space X.
- homero 9y ago
  Didn't he confound PayPal.
  - common_ 9y ago
    He started X.com. The founders of PayPal were forced by their VCs to merge the two companies, because X.com had a massive cash position, and a banking license.
- loceng 9y ago
  He's an easy reference, shouldn't be surprising that he's used - he's fresh on people's minds, recency effect and all that. When I reference Elon and the companies he's leading, it's not stating an assumption he's doing it alone - I'm simply referencing his thinking style based on the videos I've seen of him speaking. They're big industries too he's disrupting, forcing change and innovation from others/competitors - so that makes him even more prevalent in my mind as well. Who would you jump to referencing if wanting to include an example of holistic thinking, empathetic person, who is known to work/think/make decisions from founding principles?

chillingeffect 9y ago

> someone else came up with/suggested original The Facebook name. It was a tradition on Harvard campus that academic Houses published their own facebooks. The people Zuck stole the idea from were making a digital version. Here's a piece about it from Harvard's newspaper in 2004: http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2004/2/9/hundreds-register-for-new-facebook-website/ http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2004/2/9/hundreds-register... >Lisa H. Feigenbaum ’04 said that she joined thefacebook.com because it provided an open alternative to the password-protected House facebooks. Harvard was also trying to make their own before students did it: >“There is a project internally with computer services to create a facebook,” Davis said. “We’ve been in touch with the Undergraduate Council, and this is a very high priority for the College. We have every intention of completing the facebook by the end of the spring semester.” This is one of the most telling parts of the whole story: >Davis said that the principle complication with the creation of an official facebook was figuring out how to design an interface so that directory information could not easily be compiled without authorization.

loceng 9y ago
Wow -- stunning. Thanks for sharing. Everything was really lined up well for him to take advantage of, eh? The student population was excited and waiting for such a platform -- with the same name too. Mark's right though from his quote: “I can do it better than they can, and I can do it in a week.” - you can certainly launch things much more quickly if you don't take into account any concerns that others worry about/want to take into account -- like the privacy and security of people's information. It's no surprise this is where we are today: people who think ahead and want to be careful because of ethics, all the way to him taking the idea, implementing it - while deceiving/leading on the brothers who hired him vs. the foundation of Facebook and the Cambridge Analytica happenings. I wonder if he'll ever understand this himself, and how grave this all is.