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And many more work with enabling people's social lives online. The truth of the matter is, while popular an useful, social apps are quite plain vanilla in term

And many more work with enabling people's social lives online. The truth of the matter is, while popular an useful, social apps are quite plain vanilla in terms of the science and technology behind them. The endorphic rewards one gets from creating social apps is derived mostly from popularity rather than some internal sense of achievement, beauty or genius.

kmavm 15y ago
You're factually wrong about social sites running on vanilla technology. I bummed more cache misses out of tight paths, and invented more data structures in one year working on Facebook's search backend than I did in any of my nine years working on VMware's virtual machine monitor. Being a mediocre guitarist is probably easier than being a mediocre violinist; and writing a Facebook clone that works for a few million users is easier than writing a web search engine that supports comparable traffic. But when you are trying to expand the boundaries of what is possible, everything is hard, even things that seem easy when tried in their simplest form.
- ignifero 15y ago
  Facebook is an exception due to its huge scale, i was thinking of the medium size social apps space. Surely scaling problems are hard, but maybe not fundamentally new to the web? It would be interesting to hear some unconventional solutions employed in the facebook scale.
jshen 15y ago
I think you over value "science and technology" and under value interface design, ux, social behavior, etc. Well, you're at least biased towards one set of problems over another. I've gained far more value from twitter, hacker news, facebook, etc than I have from most academic research that's been done on ... pick a topic.
- ignifero 15y ago
  i assume from your comment you are a computer scientist. this does not hold for most of other sciences.
  - jshen 15y ago
    This is true, and I don't know about other fields. My assumption is that they aren't that different. Most researchers are mediocre, and they find some "in" topic and poke at the periphery and get published. Maybe I misread you, but you seemed to imply that good minds were being wasted working on social sites. I think this undervalues the ability to do things we know how to do, but to do it well and better than the rest. Apple is inventing new shit, but they make things better than everyone else. this adds enormous value to the world. Many hours of my life are saved because they paid attention and got a lot of details right. It's not science, but it's highly valuable.
    - jshen 15y ago
      er, typo, should have read "apple ISN'T inventing"
- danking00 15y ago
  The audacity to make that comment using a Von Neumann machine.
- kluge 15y ago
  I suspect all of the mentioned services rely on a lot of academic research on many "science and technology" topics.
  - jshen 15y ago
    Sure, and they rely on many other things. Why act like one is more important than the other?

kmavm 15y ago

You're factually wrong about social sites running on vanilla technology. I bummed more cache misses out of tight paths, and invented more data structures in one year working on Facebook's search backend than I did in any of my nine years working on VMware's virtual machine monitor. Being a mediocre guitarist is probably easier than being a mediocre violinist; and writing a Facebook clone that works for a few million users is easier than writing a web search engine that supports comparable traffic. But when you are trying to expand the boundaries of what is possible, everything is hard, even things that seem easy when tried in their simplest form.

ignifero 15y ago
Facebook is an exception due to its huge scale, i was thinking of the medium size social apps space. Surely scaling problems are hard, but maybe not fundamentally new to the web? It would be interesting to hear some unconventional solutions employed in the facebook scale.

jshen 15y ago

I think you over value "science and technology" and under value interface design, ux, social behavior, etc. Well, you're at least biased towards one set of problems over another. I've gained far more value from twitter, hacker news, facebook, etc than I have from most academic research that's been done on ... pick a topic.

ignifero 15y ago
i assume from your comment you are a computer scientist. this does not hold for most of other sciences.
- jshen 15y ago
  This is true, and I don't know about other fields. My assumption is that they aren't that different. Most researchers are mediocre, and they find some "in" topic and poke at the periphery and get published. Maybe I misread you, but you seemed to imply that good minds were being wasted working on social sites. I think this undervalues the ability to do things we know how to do, but to do it well and better than the rest. Apple is inventing new shit, but they make things better than everyone else. this adds enormous value to the world. Many hours of my life are saved because they paid attention and got a lot of details right. It's not science, but it's highly valuable.
  - jshen 15y ago
    er, typo, should have read "apple ISN'T inventing"
danking00 15y ago
The audacity to make that comment using a Von Neumann machine.
kluge 15y ago
I suspect all of the mentioned services rely on a lot of academic research on many "science and technology" topics.
- jshen 15y ago
  Sure, and they rely on many other things. Why act like one is more important than the other?