5 ms·

Au contraire, i think, just like really great art, it's easy for an average person like me to identify genius when we see it.

bmelton 15y ago
Except that generally, the average person knows little about the inner workings of things. It is easy for the average person to believe that building Twitter was hard, though surely it was. Our ability to understand things decidedly maps to things we can already understand. To give a completely made up scenario about how this might have gone: Stupid person: "Wow. Building twitter is hard. You type on a website and something comes to my phone. AMAZING." Average person: "Eh. They probably just use some sort of service. I mean, if I can send a text, why is it amazing that somebody else can?" Smarter-than-average person: "Twitter is down again? WTH? How hard is it to keep a website up? My Wordpress blog has never crashed, and all the posts in it are WAY more than 140 characters." Smart person: "Yeah, I can see how scaling to x-thousand reads and x-hundred writes per second IS a big task. I guess you have to put in a really beefy database server to handle the writes and distribute the reads out to slaves, then do all your queries from there." Smarter person: "If we get rid of relational database stores altogether, we can scale these records much better, and our only upper limit is memory." etc. Yes, it's a completely contrived example and I'm sure I probably insulted everyone who's ever done any Twitter-based naval-gazing, but that's what it is. In short though, the average person is more easily fooled into thinking things are brilliant when in reality, they're made by equally average people who have studied in that particular field more than they have.
- zerostar07 15y ago
  Twitter s not genius, it's great incremental technology. Wolfram alpha is genius
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]

bmelton 15y ago

Except that generally, the average person knows little about the inner workings of things. It is easy for the average person to believe that building Twitter was hard, though surely it was. Our ability to understand things decidedly maps to things we can already understand. To give a completely made up scenario about how this might have gone: Stupid person: "Wow. Building twitter is hard. You type on a website and something comes to my phone. AMAZING." Average person: "Eh. They probably just use some sort of service. I mean, if I can send a text, why is it amazing that somebody else can?" Smarter-than-average person: "Twitter is down again? WTH? How hard is it to keep a website up? My Wordpress blog has never crashed, and all the posts in it are WAY more than 140 characters." Smart person: "Yeah, I can see how scaling to x-thousand reads and x-hundred writes per second IS a big task. I guess you have to put in a really beefy database server to handle the writes and distribute the reads out to slaves, then do all your queries from there." Smarter person: "If we get rid of relational database stores altogether, we can scale these records much better, and our only upper limit is memory." etc. Yes, it's a completely contrived example and I'm sure I probably insulted everyone who's ever done any Twitter-based naval-gazing, but that's what it is. In short though, the average person is more easily fooled into thinking things are brilliant when in reality, they're made by equally average people who have studied in that particular field more than they have.

zerostar07 15y ago
Twitter s not genius, it's great incremental technology. Wolfram alpha is genius
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]