O'Reilly
1 HN recommender · recommended in 11 months, 2011–2016
15:05 · 66K views · Jul 26, 2011
Steve Yegge's OSCON Data 2011 talk imagines what you could do with Google-scale storage and compute a decade later. He argues smart people should work on hard problems such as biology rather than cat pictures, and the talk ends with a moment many took as him quitting Google.
Cited for its critique of talent wasted on social media and for the data-mining-for-biology argument, plus the around-14-minute quitting moment.
12 comments from Hacker News
I recommend watching Steve Yegge's excellent presentation at O'Reilly's OSCON Data. He points out a number of books in the video, but in general this is an excellent talk about preparing to solve hard problems in bio. this video
I think there is this (from my limited experience rather naive) belief that if a bunch of smart computer people get together, they can solve problems that have flummoxed biologists for long. This is something pervasive which afflicts even the smartest ones (See Steve Yegge's talk this video on how The Data Mining needs to be used more to solve problems in biology). Having spent some time in grad school foolishly believing that all biology needed was a sprinkle of math and a generous dollop of python skills, I think the problem is that in Computer Science we have problems that are sometimes insanely hard but due to the several layers of abstraction, are inherently rather deterministic and much less noisy than real-world systems. I think the best comprehensible example comes from the physical layer of most electronics where several of the modeling equations are naive approximations designed to work under specific conditions. The complexity becomes even more overwhelming when you look at biological systems: The nonlinearity especially in say genetic hacking becomes apparent when you realize that each tiny modification has so many unintended effects (making modeling in a computer environment especially difficult) which is why biologist go through the grind of running all those "boring" real world experiments in labs. I think there are quite a few research labs that are using data mining and machine learning techniques to try to solve problems but we are at most quality places well b
I've called the kneejerk "bubble" reactions "boring" [1] and I stand by that. That doesn't mean I disagree (or agree for that matter). It just means that banal perjoratives with nothing to back them up are boring . To call this a bubble, one must first describe what one means by a bubble. A bubble in my mind is a period of rapid growth in valuations followed by a massive devaluation on such a scale that it hinders investment and innovation. The subprime collapse was a bubble. Many people were left underwater on their mortgages. Building in many places stopped for years. This has a knock-on effect on jobs, related industries and so on. That's a bubble. The dotcom collapse was also a bubble. But there are several differences this time around: 1. Startup costs now, for most Internet startups, are essentially zero. 10+ years ago you had to spend $5-10M to do anything (once you paid for Sun servers, Oracle licenses and so on); 2. Lax listing requirements, particularly on the NASDAQ, helped perpetuate fraud; 3. There was no experience to draw on (from living memory at least). Now we hopefully know a little better; 4. Sarbanes-Oxley, clusterfuck that it is, has at least kept the number of Internet companies IPOing relatively low. This has some negative consequences too but it means that retail investors and mutual funds have largely been excluded from the startup scene, which honestly is a Good Thing [tm]; and 5. Now, as opposed to then, there are real businesses operating in the te
Congratulations on the investment. The return is nothing short of spectacular. It's a truly excellent example of execution and timing . But the point that keeps resurfacing in my mind is SpaceX. SpaceX, from nothing, created a low-earth orbit delivery system that is revolutionizing satellite launches and (soon) the cost of getting men into space... for less than the price that a bunch of people can send photos to each other with cheesy filters [1]. It would be difficult to overstate the impact Elon Musk has had, is having and will have on humanity (and no this isn't hyperbole) through SpaceX (and maybe even Tesla). And it didn't even require, relate to or is connected with some bullshit social network. I'm also reminded of Steve Yegge's OSCON talk [2] from some months back. The computer power we have available now is stunning. used for the right purposes it could fundamentally change humanity for the good, whether that be in bioinformatics or whatever, is hard to overstate. Yet we're using all this power and the brightest minds on the planet... to send cat pictures. It's actually reached the point that when I get unsolicited recruitment email or read about some new startup on HN that I tune out as soon as I see the word "social". There's something astoundingly depressing about all this. EDIt: I should add that my issue isn't that the founders and investors sought wealth. I don't begrudge them that at all. Not by any means am I anti-capitalist. Bill Gates, as one example, is d
Is Steve Yegge Google's new secret recruiter agent? :) A few weeks ago he publicly quit his "cat pictures" project ( this video ) to pursue more noble a quest in data mining. I loved what he said, and at first glance this seemed like a jab at the newly released Google+. But it's actually a bigger knock on Facebook since the "cat pictures" app is Facebook's primary gig, and so far it's only a side gig at Google. I wonder how many FB peeps started to wonder if there really is any meaning in cat pictures. Now it's Amazon -- "Amazon does everything wrong, and Google does everything right", except for 3 things, one being "platforms." But his Amazon jabs are not as subtle as the cat pictures one -- "Their pay and benefits suck, although much less so lately due to local competition from Google and Facebook. But they don't have any of our perks or extras." Maybe Steve is Google's new unofficial recruiting agent. He makes reference to it here, "I actually did a spreadsheet at one point but Legal wouldn't let me show it to anyone, even though recruiting loved it." When you think about it, he's the perfect person to have run a psyop designed to get the Facebookers and Amazonians to lay down their cat pictures and join the Googlers building the next generation platform, while partaking in all of their perks. Google can just play it off as, "oh, that's just crazy uncle Steve on one of his rants again". I don't know what it is, but I think it's great on multiple levels :)