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> “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

by 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.

by strlen 15y ago

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.