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Comment by jasonlbaptiste | Hacker News Reader

Would you put Hadoop under scaleable to billions?

Yeah, Hadoop is parallelizable by design, so it's just a matter of renting out EC2 clusters. In any case, I'm not talking about competing with Cloudera, but using Hadoop in some new specific vertical. For instance, an ad network that uses Hadoop could mine user/user-clickstream data better and get more clicks. That would be using Hadoop as a building block. You could also use Hadoop to power awesome analytics on, say, an e-commerce platform.

It is off topic and my (irrelevant) personal preference, but please, pretty pretty please, find something more beneficial to humanity than convincing people to purchase things that they don't need. Innovation is exciting when it is about ending a war, or reducing pollution, or creating cheaper energy, or making it easier to find information. Every time people talk about "mining the clickstream to increase ad revenue" I have the temporary urge to abandon computing become a farmer.

kthxbye

You could also use Hadoop to analyze data from, say, a global network of distributed pollution sensors to find factories that are polluting. Anyway, the point I was trying to make is that Hadoop is a nice building block. You could use Hadoop to mine any large data set, my examples were arbitrary.

Greed has done more to improve humanity's standard of living than philanthropy ever will.

Greed has done more to improve humanity's standard of living than philanthropy ever will.

Standard of living, sure. Quality of life... not so much.

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