4 ms·

How My Brain Kept Me from Co-Founding YouTube

62 points by nreece 18y ago

petercooper 18y ago
In the late 90s I had a similarly bizarre "limitation" in that I didn't "trust" drives that were over 10GB in size (because.. "how can it work? It's just too much to get into a drive!"), so I just had multiple smaller drives instead of one 20~40GB one. Thankfully, like the writer, I eventually realized the stupidity of my ways, but I think many of us are susceptible to this bug at least once ;-)
- yan 18y ago
  What's funny is that I now have a similar fear of 1TB drives.. "If a lone drive fails, that is a lot of data to go at once"
  - buugs 18y ago
    Both the fears seem pretty reasonable to me, probably because I usually don't buy a main harddrive with more than 200gb usually no more than 120.
    - 10ren 18y ago
      I started coding on a ZX81 with 16K RAM. In 2 years, that will be 30 years ago. If RAM doubles every 1.5 years, then in 2 years a new machine should have 16G RAM (x1,000,000). At the moment they have about 4GB, so it's not far off.
      - ovi256 18y ago
        You can already buy MacPro's with 32GB of Ram. For about 8k$ unfortunately.
        10ren 18y ago
        You could also buy 32KB RAM for a ZX81 - but it felt a little out of reach. It was expensive, unusual, non-standard. The thing is, 16GB RAM will soon be ordinary. Every PC will have it. What things become possible that are unthinkable today? Maybe multiple virtualized OSes could become standard.
- vaksel 18y ago
  i think this is something that's inherent in most techies, you know just enough to know that something like this would be unreliable, so you don't trust it when it comes out. While a regular user would go "OMG More Space!!!"
smoody 18y ago
Was he given the opportunity to co-found YouTube? That isn't clear from the article.
- JacobAldridge 18y ago
  I don't think so. I believe he had similar thoughts (streaming video online would be great) but immediately dismissed them as requiring too much bandwidth. Had he had the foresight to avoid those limiting beliefs, he could have invented something like YouTube.
  - dood 18y ago
    Thing is, a lot of people could have invented something like YouTube, and a lot of people tried. But the YouTube people had the skills to grow and scale their site in a phenomenal way, which is why they're the ones that are remembered. YouTube exemplifies the notion that ideas are worthless, execution is everything.
    - ericb 18y ago
      Right, but the article isn't really about creating youtube, it is about realizing when you've mentally added an artificial constraint and not letting it stop you.
      - smakz 18y ago
        Yeah, but in reality the ideas in the article are really more boring then the headline suggests. He wasn't in a position to co-found youtube, not to mention there were already plenty of video sites around before and during youtube's rise to prominence. It's a classic case of "well I had that idea I could of done it" - doing it is 99.9999% of the exercise, having the idea is 0.0001%.
      - deleted 18y ago
        [deleted]
    - olefoo 18y ago
10ren 18y ago
It's Moore's Law: you're unconsciously calibrated to the past, and it doesn't make sense to your hindbrain that you'll be out by orders of magnitude: x1000 in 15 years. I mean, that increase is completely unreasonable. Isn't it? On the flip side, it also opens opportunities that people in the industry simply didn't entertain, because they were literally unthinkable and therefore unseeable just a few years ago (and I literally mean literally). I spoke to the inventor of a new method (a few decades ago) of hardware multiplication that became the standard for a while; he said it was made possible by an increase in silicon. It was theoretically possible before then, but no one looked.
stcredzero 18y ago
I created a deployment of a production Smalltalk application recently. (It's been around well over a decade.) 24 MB. I use the image compression utility. 8MB. The default VisualWorks image is 12MB. And I also worked on one production app that was 110MB deployed. Most of that was data. We pre-cached all of the queries required to populate all of the drop-downs, so that after it got done loading, users found it to be "fast." I thought of something like YouTube. "Flash video? No self-respecting techie would use Flash!"
ram1024 18y ago
but you were right not to make it. youtube doesn't make money...
tophat02 18y ago
The author's argument is a total non-sequitur. The whole "mental block" about sites like YouTube and Flickr was that DEVELOPERS couldn't imagine having to pay for such outrageous bandwidth usage (or that they'd even be able to find a place to host the site, for that matter). He then goes on to equate this to developers not wanting to have their users download 64MB runtimes or 2GB IDEs. These two things are entirely different. A developer knows that, while Joe User may have no problem waiting for a 500MB video of some chick topless to download, the same user isn't going to want to wait to download a 50MB installer for a program that makes Bingo cards.
- patio11 18y ago
  the same user isn't going to want to wait to download a 50MB installer for a program that makes Bingo cards. As something of the resident expert on this topic, let me tell you: users are certainly willing to wait for a 12MB installer for a program that makes bingo cards. It actually converts (very marginally) better than the 500kb installer which needs Java as a pre-req.
  - tophat02 18y ago
    Hehe, I actually had you in mind when I wrote that :)
mynameishere 18y ago
Flickr blew my mind when it appeared back in 2004. A mind easily blown. Stand back anytime this guy is near a website that is anything more than an aggregate of img tags.
- blasdel 18y ago
  Did you ever notice how flickr prevents you from seeing multiple high-res images at once? You can't even see links to other photos when viewing a higher res! The highest resolution you can see on a navigable page is 500px on a side. Flickr is fucking atrocious for actually viewing someone's photos. It's about as shitty as they could possibly get away with. On the other hand, it has absolutely terrific support for communities, with all sorts of little touches to encourage their formation. It also manages to simultaneously appeal to US Grandmas, Arab twentysomethings, and the requisite "self facilitating media nodes" that fuel WEB 2.0 hype.
ashr 18y ago
The point that the article makes is not a technical one. It is a philosophical one instead. The ideas of tomorrow must look beyond what is possible today into anticipating what may be possible tomorrow. The execution of such an idea would then hold the promise of innovation to break today's barriers.
psranga 18y ago
Hmm, maybe I'm too retro for this guy, but 16 bytes for an element in a linked list does sound excessive. :)
- blasdel 18y ago
  It's only two words! You need two 64 bit pointers on a 64-bit machine. A fuckton of people have come up with the idea that "hey, since a 4gb address space is really plenty, why don't we try using an n/2 address space and have a whole cons fit in one word?" I'm sure the same thing has come up plenty of times before. It turns out to be not so hot to avoid directly using the OS' VM and the hardware's MMU.

62 points by nreece 18y ago

In the late 90s I had a similarly bizarre "limitation" in that I didn't "trust" drives that were over 10GB in size (because.. "how can it work? It's just too much to get into a drive!"), so I just had multiple smaller drives instead of one 20~40GB one. Thankfully, like the writer, I eventually realized the stupidity of my ways, but I think many of us are susceptible to this bug at least once ;-)

yan 18y ago
What's funny is that I now have a similar fear of 1TB drives.. "If a lone drive fails, that is a lot of data to go at once"
- buugs 18y ago
  Both the fears seem pretty reasonable to me, probably because I usually don't buy a main harddrive with more than 200gb usually no more than 120.
  - 10ren 18y ago
    I started coding on a ZX81 with 16K RAM. In 2 years, that will be 30 years ago. If RAM doubles every 1.5 years, then in 2 years a new machine should have 16G RAM (x1,000,000). At the moment they have about 4GB, so it's not far off.
    - ovi256 18y ago
      You can already buy MacPro's with 32GB of Ram. For about 8k$ unfortunately.
      - 10ren 18y ago
        You could also buy 32KB RAM for a ZX81 - but it felt a little out of reach. It was expensive, unusual, non-standard. The thing is, 16GB RAM will soon be ordinary. Every PC will have it. What things become possible that are unthinkable today? Maybe multiple virtualized OSes could become standard.
vaksel 18y ago
i think this is something that's inherent in most techies, you know just enough to know that something like this would be unreliable, so you don't trust it when it comes out. While a regular user would go "OMG More Space!!!"

smoody 18y ago

Was he given the opportunity to co-found YouTube? That isn't clear from the article.

JacobAldridge 18y ago
I don't think so. I believe he had similar thoughts (streaming video online would be great) but immediately dismissed them as requiring too much bandwidth. Had he had the foresight to avoid those limiting beliefs, he could have invented something like YouTube.
- dood 18y ago
  Thing is, a lot of people could have invented something like YouTube, and a lot of people tried. But the YouTube people had the skills to grow and scale their site in a phenomenal way, which is why they're the ones that are remembered. YouTube exemplifies the notion that ideas are worthless, execution is everything.
  - ericb 18y ago
    Right, but the article isn't really about creating youtube, it is about realizing when you've mentally added an artificial constraint and not letting it stop you.
    - smakz 18y ago
      Yeah, but in reality the ideas in the article are really more boring then the headline suggests. He wasn't in a position to co-found youtube, not to mention there were already plenty of video sites around before and during youtube's rise to prominence. It's a classic case of "well I had that idea I could of done it" - doing it is 99.9999% of the exercise, having the idea is 0.0001%.
    - deleted 18y ago
      [deleted]
  - olefoo 18y ago

10ren 18y ago

It's Moore's Law: you're unconsciously calibrated to the past, and it doesn't make sense to your hindbrain that you'll be out by orders of magnitude: x1000 in 15 years. I mean, that increase is completely unreasonable. Isn't it? On the flip side, it also opens opportunities that people in the industry simply didn't entertain, because they were literally unthinkable and therefore unseeable just a few years ago (and I literally mean literally). I spoke to the inventor of a new method (a few decades ago) of hardware multiplication that became the standard for a while; he said it was made possible by an increase in silicon. It was theoretically possible before then, but no one looked.

stcredzero 18y ago

I created a deployment of a production Smalltalk application recently. (It's been around well over a decade.) 24 MB. I use the image compression utility. 8MB. The default VisualWorks image is 12MB. And I also worked on one production app that was 110MB deployed. Most of that was data. We pre-cached all of the queries required to populate all of the drop-downs, so that after it got done loading, users found it to be "fast." I thought of something like YouTube. "Flash video? No self-respecting techie would use Flash!"

ram1024 18y ago

but you were right not to make it. youtube doesn't make money...

tophat02 18y ago

The author's argument is a total non-sequitur. The whole "mental block" about sites like YouTube and Flickr was that DEVELOPERS couldn't imagine having to pay for such outrageous bandwidth usage (or that they'd even be able to find a place to host the site, for that matter). He then goes on to equate this to developers not wanting to have their users download 64MB runtimes or 2GB IDEs. These two things are entirely different. A developer knows that, while Joe User may have no problem waiting for a 500MB video of some chick topless to download, the same user isn't going to want to wait to download a 50MB installer for a program that makes Bingo cards.

patio11 18y ago
the same user isn't going to want to wait to download a 50MB installer for a program that makes Bingo cards. As something of the resident expert on this topic, let me tell you: users are certainly willing to wait for a 12MB installer for a program that makes bingo cards. It actually converts (very marginally) better than the 500kb installer which needs Java as a pre-req.
- tophat02 18y ago
  Hehe, I actually had you in mind when I wrote that :)

mynameishere 18y ago

Flickr blew my mind when it appeared back in 2004. A mind easily blown. Stand back anytime this guy is near a website that is anything more than an aggregate of img tags.

blasdel 18y ago
Did you ever notice how flickr prevents you from seeing multiple high-res images at once? You can't even see links to other photos when viewing a higher res! The highest resolution you can see on a navigable page is 500px on a side. Flickr is fucking atrocious for actually viewing someone's photos. It's about as shitty as they could possibly get away with. On the other hand, it has absolutely terrific support for communities, with all sorts of little touches to encourage their formation. It also manages to simultaneously appeal to US Grandmas, Arab twentysomethings, and the requisite "self facilitating media nodes" that fuel WEB 2.0 hype.

ashr 18y ago

The point that the article makes is not a technical one. It is a philosophical one instead. The ideas of tomorrow must look beyond what is possible today into anticipating what may be possible tomorrow. The execution of such an idea would then hold the promise of innovation to break today's barriers.

psranga 18y ago

Hmm, maybe I'm too retro for this guy, but 16 bytes for an element in a linked list does sound excessive. :)

blasdel 18y ago
It's only two words! You need two 64 bit pointers on a 64-bit machine. A fuckton of people have come up with the idea that "hey, since a 4gb address space is really plenty, why don't we try using an n/2 address space and have a whole cons fit in one word?" I'm sure the same thing has come up plenty of times before. It turns out to be not so hot to avoid directly using the OS' VM and the hardware's MMU.