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MIT Fellow Says Facebook ‘Lifted’ His Ideas for Libra Cryptocurrency
- vitno 7y agoI know people who were working on, what is now called, Libra at FB more than a year ago though. The paper was published a year ago. This just looks like a case of multiple people having the same idea.
- RobLach 7y agoYou can also be working on something and a paper comes along that fills in some gaps in your concept you may or may not have been aware of.
- yodaml 7y agoIt may just be another case of the "adjacent possible" principle at work.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago"Adjacent possible" is the case of one of the weirdest possible definition for a very simple concept. I see people quoting this: "The adjacent possible is a kind of shadow future, hovering on the edges of the present state of things, a map of all the ways in which the present can reinvent itself." (Whatever the hell that means.) Even though the concept is much simpler: "adjacent possible" is the set of things within reach. Or: all the things on the border between what we have, and what we could have.
- doctorpangloss 7y agoFacebook's faithful copying is the large tech corp standard operating procedure. Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Apple will start product lines based on accurate rumors about what the others are doing, and then cancel them as soon as their competitors do. This form of "copy thy neighbor" just happened with something like three major R&D products/features, one of which was cancelled and another leaked in the tech press. Sandy Pentland cares a lot about these things and it's too bad Facebook just ripped this stuff off. But he will have the last laugh: People already don't want to work at Facebook. It didn't matter so much that all those supposedly smart people aren't really capable of meaningful innovation. There will be a lot fewer of those smart people now.
- skybrian 7y agoWhich products/features do you mean?
- petre 7y agoGoogle+? Personal assistants? Self driving vehicles? Cargo drones?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- dymk 7y ago> But he will have the last laugh: People already don't want to work at Facebook. This is one of the most HN-bubbled statements I’ve ever seen
- sincerely 7y ago>This form of "copy thy neighbor" just happened with something like three major R&D products/features, one of which was cancelled and another leaked in the tech press. I don't keep up with tech press leaks. What products/features were they?
- cameldrv 7y agoPlease. Even I had this idea in 2012 and I got it from being a user of Chaum’s digicash in the nineties and understanding parts of how the IMF works, etc. I even helped (not successfully) launch it in 2013. These ideas have been around for a good while by many people, it’s just that crypto is mainstream enough and facebook has enough clout now to take it seriously. If facebook ripped off anyone it was John Maynard Keynes. That’s not to say that it is even that good of an idea or that facebook will be successful with it.
- paulsutter 7y agoOh come on, neither a basket of commodities nor a basket of currencies are original ideas. During the security token craze of 2017/2018 many similar ideas were proposed and we don’t see those folks whining about Libra. One example was a local currency based on a basket of goods such as real estate so that employers could pay a salary that adjusted as rents and other costs changed locally. Hundreds of these ideas were discussed freely in telegram groups. The article is just outrage porn.
- blhack 7y agoHey that’s actually a great idea.
- anbop 7y agoMIT is supposed to create ideas that are “lifted” by others. Produce your patent or shut up.
- malicioususer11 7y agomark zuckerberg stole something? call the Police! :3
- xwdv 7y agoNo sympathy for this guy at all. Think just because you’re an “MIT fellow” your claims to an idea carry more weight than people from other institutions or organizations? Get out of here with this entitlement, tons of people come up with exactly the same ideas all the time.
- gibba999 7y agoPlus, 9 times out of 10, it's the MIT types who lift ideas from others and promote them with MIT's increasingly well-polished hype machine. Within MIT, Media Lab is central to this problem.
- ejwessel 7y agoIn science, the credit goes to the man who convinces the world, not to whom the idea first occurs. - Francis Darwin.
- h3ckr 7y agoPretty disappointing to see such a poor article making it to the top of HN. I’m sure a company with 10k amazing engineers and infinite money cannot come up with the Libra ideas, but it needs to steal it from a random Joe
- BubRoss 7y agoThis is just like when Google stole my idea to run fiber optic internet to people's houses. I totally had that idea a long time ago when I was trying to download a gif with a 28.8 modem. I'm not sure which of the neighborhood kids told Google about my idea but they sure screwed me over.
- jboles 7y agoYeah, I once had an idea for auto-scrolling based off tracking eye gaze through the webcam. I never told Microsoft or Samsung about it, but they totally stole my idea!!1eleventyone
- dmihal 7y agoEven worse: Google stole my idea for self driving cars. I was like " it would be cool if cars drove themselves" and sure enough, Google copies me. Do you think I have grounds for a lawsuit?
- quotemstr 7y agoNobody owns ideas.
- csallen 7y agoIf only more people understood this. Not only does nobody own an idea, but we really don't want to live in a world where the opposite is true.
- allana 7y agoRight to Read is a good piece on this topic: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
- Causality1 7y agoTo quote Thomas Jefferson, "If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it."
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- rdl 7y agoThe idea of a market-basket currency goes back to at least 1976 and Hayek. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Denationalization_of_Money https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Denationalization_of_Money
- m-i-l 7y agoThe idea of a supranational currency goes back to at least 1940 and Keynes - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bancor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bancor .
- Aperocky 7y agoDisgraceful, where is your code?
- codegladiator 7y ago> this paper was published as part of this free-for-all part of the Free Science part of the Royal Society effort But but ... can facebook not "lift for free" ?
- Animats 7y agoIt's certainly not a novel idea. Arguably, it's "E-Gold 2.0".[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-gold https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-gold
- 0xC0FFEE 7y agoThe paper was published 18 July 2018. The public inital commit of libra was on 18 June 2019 and had 1,063 changed files. That could be a coincidence or not. Fact is, only one has realized the idea.
- compsciphd 7y agocry me a river. It happens Docker did the same thing to me. Compare these two papers (published in 2010 and 2011 in conferences that docker and everyone else in the space are regular participants at, for reference Docker was announced in March 2013) https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/atc10/tech/full_papers/Potter.pdf https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/atc10/tech/full_papers/P... https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/lisa11/tech/full_papers/Potter.pdf https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/lisa11/tech/full_papers... It was then patented (patent filed in 2011, issued in November 2013) https://patents.google.com/patent/US8589947B2/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US8589947B2/en This was also my "job talk" to IBM Research and it got me a post doc, but didn't get much traction in support of continuing to pursue / refine the ideas within IBM Research (which I find sort of ironic in retrospect with their recent strategic moves)