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I was reminded of the following article when I read this blog posting: http://greaterseas.com/2011/05/the-future-of-innovation/ http://greaterseas.com/2011/05/

by dekayed 15y ago

I was reminded of the following article when I read this blog posting: http://greaterseas.com/2011/05/the-future-of-innovation/ http://greaterseas.com/2011/05/the-future-of-innovation/ There's a great quote by Jeff Hammerbacher (an ex-Facebooker) that is great: “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks.”

dschobel 15y ago
The ads are a means to an end. More correct: "The best minds of my generation are making huge amounts of money by solving really hard engineering problems and creating whole new industries. That's awesome". It's hard to overstate the economic impact of FB, Google + Apple. These people are building the future of the internet. Ads just pay the bills.
- wslh 15y ago
  Sorry for my Naivete, but I think that the world priorities must be peace, health and poverty.
  - dschobel 15y ago
    Which one of those isn't furthered by the internet? It's not hard to argue the fundamental merit in people working on advancing communication across the globe.
    - wslh 15y ago
      I think that there are shorter ways to accomplish it beyond Internet communication.
      - ThomPete 15y ago
        Then I guess you know what your next project is going to be.
        wslh 15y ago
        I don't think I have the talent from that. That's why the article is important, a lot of minds are spending time in lower priority items from a humanistic point of view.
        ThomPete 15y ago
        It doesn't take a clever computer scientist to set out for world peace, ending poverty and increasing health. If you really feel so strongly about it why not set up a fund that attempt to fund exactly those 3 areas. Talent has nothing to do with it.
      - bjelkeman-again 15y ago
        There are lots of projects working on peace, health and poverty where someone with your skills could could help or work.
        mfalcon 15y ago
        Do you mind telling me about some projects in those fields(health specially)?. I'm learning about data mining/machine learning and I'd love to know how this fields are applied to solve important problems and what I can do to help.
        bjelkeman-again 15y ago
        I'll email you.
        bjelkeman-again 15y ago
        don't have specific projects on a list that fits you, but I am sure there are projects out there which needs you help, both projects where you can volunteer or where you can get a job. For a start you could check out our list of health and IT projects in our system, for organisations which work in this area. http://www.akvo.org/rsr/projects/healthcare/?page=1 http://www.akvo.org/rsr/projects/healthcare/?page=1 Four years ago I was telling people in a session about water and development aid that they should use modern IT and web tools to do their work more effectively. As a result I ended up talking to Jeroen van der Sommen, now our chairman, and we decided to start Akvo.org to provide those tools. There is a huge need for IT tools in humanitarian aid and development work. You could be working on that if you are interested.
      - qq66 15y ago
        You must be joking. An Egyptian couple recently named their daughter "Facebook" due to the instrumental role that Facebook played in the overthrow of the Egyptian government. Other rebellions have used Twitter extensively. YouTube was instrumental in publicly shaming a racist senator whose loss gave the Democrats the Senate.
- bbgm 15y ago
  I had asked a related question on Quora some months ago. There is a need in many scientific fields, especially life sciences, for experts in scalable infrastructure, statistical learning, visualization, graph analysis, and good software engineering, but since hard science doesn't pay well enough, the majority of these people are going to the Facebook's of the world. Nothing wrong with that, but we have some challenges in figuring out what "value" means, how we measure it, and perhaps most importantly, how we reward it. There has to be some way of getting some fraction of the really smart computational people into other fields to figure out very hard problems. Unfortunately, the future of the internet is not the only future out there.
- scrollbar 15y ago
  I don't know, I think you have it the other way around. Content and apps are a means for generating ad revenue- the advertiser is the customer. Lots of technical value gets created in the process, but as companies like Facebook and Google have grown up, they've realized who their real masters are (not the user). See the recent $400m Admeld acquisition rumor to see this in action with Google. OTOH Apple gets paid by the consumer. They're a real product company.
strlen 15y ago
> “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks.” Said by a founder of a company (Cloudera) that commercialized an open source implementation (Hadoop) originally sponsored by Yahoo (an advertising company) of a paper (MapReduce/GFS) written by Google (an advertising company), the file system in which has been heavily improved by Facebook (an advertising company) and which is heavily used by all kinds of advertising companies, but which has been adopted (technology transfer) by companies in in biotechnology and other non-advertising spheres.
- jtheory 15y ago
  This is not a contradiction. The best minds of our generation are thinking about how to make people click ads -- and it's fortunate that along the way some of the technology they generate happens to also be useful elsewhere... But that doesn't imply that most of what they produce is valuable to more worthy projects, or even much of it. I'm trying to imagine a world in which more of those great minds were focusing their efforts directly on solving serious problems.
  - strlen 15y ago
    Go see papers at conferences like OSDI, POSP, SIGMOD. Note how some of the bravest ones are coming from ad serving and e-commerce companies (e.g., the ZooKeeper paper which is rather amazing). It isn't a mere accident: the technical problem that's being solved is hard and requires these kind of systems to built. The people who join those companies join to solve those kinds of problems, not accidentally decide to solve them. The technical challenges involved in real time auctions and high volume ad serving are a serious technical problem. The optimization and machine learning work to target the ads is another hard technical problem. For many people (myself included) the technical challenge is the most important part of my work, big reason why I want to wake up and head in to the office. When they decide to move on to another company, they'll come away with greater technical skills that could also be applied to smart meters, DNA analysis, physics, pure systems programming work and the like.
earl 15y ago
That quote is really stupid. Better would be to say something like the best minds of my generation have decided an optimal strategy is to figure out how to make people click ads or to do financial engineering. Why is that. And then do something about the why. Frankly, listening to people like Hammerbacher (who is almost certainly now rich from fb) or Alex the twitter dude who started bank simple (who essentially admitted he got rich from Twitter, see discussion surrounding his claim Conway threatened him) now whine about other engineers trying to get theirs just like Hammerbacher and Alex did is bullshit. Viz Alex dissing lifestyle businesses, etc.
wolfgangK 15y ago
Indeed. Not speaking about Facebook (no first hand experience to judge from) , but I 'm depressed by the amount of brainpower and wealth that our societies spend on zero-sum games such as high frequency trading and seo (I'm fully aware of there useful byproducts, but can't help to think that we'd be much better off with globally useful activities in the first place).

by dekayed 15y ago

dschobel 15y ago

The ads are a means to an end. More correct: "The best minds of my generation are making huge amounts of money by solving really hard engineering problems and creating whole new industries. That's awesome". It's hard to overstate the economic impact of FB, Google + Apple. These people are building the future of the internet. Ads just pay the bills.

wslh 15y ago
Sorry for my Naivete, but I think that the world priorities must be peace, health and poverty.
- dschobel 15y ago
  Which one of those isn't furthered by the internet? It's not hard to argue the fundamental merit in people working on advancing communication across the globe.
  - wslh 15y ago
    I think that there are shorter ways to accomplish it beyond Internet communication.
    - ThomPete 15y ago
      Then I guess you know what your next project is going to be.
      - wslh 15y ago
        I don't think I have the talent from that. That's why the article is important, a lot of minds are spending time in lower priority items from a humanistic point of view.
        ThomPete 15y ago
        It doesn't take a clever computer scientist to set out for world peace, ending poverty and increasing health. If you really feel so strongly about it why not set up a fund that attempt to fund exactly those 3 areas. Talent has nothing to do with it.
    - bjelkeman-again 15y ago
      There are lots of projects working on peace, health and poverty where someone with your skills could could help or work.
      - mfalcon 15y ago
        Do you mind telling me about some projects in those fields(health specially)?. I'm learning about data mining/machine learning and I'd love to know how this fields are applied to solve important problems and what I can do to help.
        bjelkeman-again 15y ago
        I'll email you.
        bjelkeman-again 15y ago
        don't have specific projects on a list that fits you, but I am sure there are projects out there which needs you help, both projects where you can volunteer or where you can get a job. For a start you could check out our list of health and IT projects in our system, for organisations which work in this area. http://www.akvo.org/rsr/projects/healthcare/?page=1 http://www.akvo.org/rsr/projects/healthcare/?page=1 Four years ago I was telling people in a session about water and development aid that they should use modern IT and web tools to do their work more effectively. As a result I ended up talking to Jeroen van der Sommen, now our chairman, and we decided to start Akvo.org to provide those tools. There is a huge need for IT tools in humanitarian aid and development work. You could be working on that if you are interested.
    - qq66 15y ago
      You must be joking. An Egyptian couple recently named their daughter "Facebook" due to the instrumental role that Facebook played in the overthrow of the Egyptian government. Other rebellions have used Twitter extensively. YouTube was instrumental in publicly shaming a racist senator whose loss gave the Democrats the Senate.
bbgm 15y ago
I had asked a related question on Quora some months ago. There is a need in many scientific fields, especially life sciences, for experts in scalable infrastructure, statistical learning, visualization, graph analysis, and good software engineering, but since hard science doesn't pay well enough, the majority of these people are going to the Facebook's of the world. Nothing wrong with that, but we have some challenges in figuring out what "value" means, how we measure it, and perhaps most importantly, how we reward it. There has to be some way of getting some fraction of the really smart computational people into other fields to figure out very hard problems. Unfortunately, the future of the internet is not the only future out there.
scrollbar 15y ago
I don't know, I think you have it the other way around. Content and apps are a means for generating ad revenue- the advertiser is the customer. Lots of technical value gets created in the process, but as companies like Facebook and Google have grown up, they've realized who their real masters are (not the user). See the recent $400m Admeld acquisition rumor to see this in action with Google. OTOH Apple gets paid by the consumer. They're a real product company.

strlen 15y ago

> “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks.” Said by a founder of a company (Cloudera) that commercialized an open source implementation (Hadoop) originally sponsored by Yahoo (an advertising company) of a paper (MapReduce/GFS) written by Google (an advertising company), the file system in which has been heavily improved by Facebook (an advertising company) and which is heavily used by all kinds of advertising companies, but which has been adopted (technology transfer) by companies in in biotechnology and other non-advertising spheres.

jtheory 15y ago
This is not a contradiction. The best minds of our generation are thinking about how to make people click ads -- and it's fortunate that along the way some of the technology they generate happens to also be useful elsewhere... But that doesn't imply that most of what they produce is valuable to more worthy projects, or even much of it. I'm trying to imagine a world in which more of those great minds were focusing their efforts directly on solving serious problems.
- strlen 15y ago
  Go see papers at conferences like OSDI, POSP, SIGMOD. Note how some of the bravest ones are coming from ad serving and e-commerce companies (e.g., the ZooKeeper paper which is rather amazing). It isn't a mere accident: the technical problem that's being solved is hard and requires these kind of systems to built. The people who join those companies join to solve those kinds of problems, not accidentally decide to solve them. The technical challenges involved in real time auctions and high volume ad serving are a serious technical problem. The optimization and machine learning work to target the ads is another hard technical problem. For many people (myself included) the technical challenge is the most important part of my work, big reason why I want to wake up and head in to the office. When they decide to move on to another company, they'll come away with greater technical skills that could also be applied to smart meters, DNA analysis, physics, pure systems programming work and the like.

earl 15y ago

That quote is really stupid. Better would be to say something like the best minds of my generation have decided an optimal strategy is to figure out how to make people click ads or to do financial engineering. Why is that. And then do something about the why. Frankly, listening to people like Hammerbacher (who is almost certainly now rich from fb) or Alex the twitter dude who started bank simple (who essentially admitted he got rich from Twitter, see discussion surrounding his claim Conway threatened him) now whine about other engineers trying to get theirs just like Hammerbacher and Alex did is bullshit. Viz Alex dissing lifestyle businesses, etc.

wolfgangK 15y ago

Indeed. Not speaking about Facebook (no first hand experience to judge from) , but I 'm depressed by the amount of brainpower and wealth that our societies spend on zero-sum games such as high frequency trading and seo (I'm fully aware of there useful byproducts, but can't help to think that we'd be much better off with globally useful activities in the first place).