Like some dude who had no idea with 19, got the proper idea by chance / zeitgeist, gathered a lot of good people around him who build all of it and now he is unbelievable rich, boss of a way to influencel company and has no clue about it.
He doesn't feel like a Bill Gates or Buffet or any other rich known person.
/shrug
Makes me wonder if he or someone else came up with/suggested original The Facebook name.
I don't think Mark's developed the open pathways for deep critical thinking, say that Elon Musk's thoughts all stem from - foundational principles being something he's commonly referred to.
While uncharitably stated, in my opinion this demonstrates a lot of technical ability and business savvy.
I also think we (as in Hacker News) need to consider the extent to which useful discussion about Facebook's legitimate failings is getting drowned out by the noise of hyperbole and outrage.
I haven't seen much hyperbole and outrage re: Facebook on here. The scale of Facebook and the issue, how Trump and others got elected into power because of what Cambridge Analytica did -- the gravity (hmm, how grave it is..) and scale, how serious this situation is, would be fairly hard to exaggerate - it should warrant strong anger as well, if looking at the holistic impact, even though individual users may not realize the malice through purposeful ignorance.
Not exactly an insult but since they're not his ideas he doesn't have the ideology to back it up or an end goal. He never wanted to connect people. Vs someone like Musk who lives and breathes his ideas and has an end goal.
Who would you jump to referencing if wanting to include an example of holistic thinking, empathetic person, who is known to work/think/make decisions from founding principles?
It was a tradition on Harvard campus that academic Houses published their own facebooks. The people Zuck stole the idea from were making a digital version. Here's a piece about it from Harvard's newspaper in 2004:
http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2004/2/9/hundreds-register...
>Lisa H. Feigenbaum ’04 said that she joined thefacebook.com because it provided an open alternative to the password-protected House facebooks.
Harvard was also trying to make their own before students did it:
>“There is a project internally with computer services to create a facebook,” Davis said. “We’ve been in touch with the Undergraduate Council, and this is a very high priority for the College. We have every intention of completing the facebook by the end of the spring semester.”
This is one of the most telling parts of the whole story:
>Davis said that the principle complication with the creation of an official facebook was figuring out how to design an interface so that directory information could not easily be compiled without authorization.
Everything was really lined up well for him to take advantage of, eh? The student population was excited and waiting for such a platform -- with the same name too.
Mark's right though from his quote: “I can do it better than they can, and I can do it in a week.” - you can certainly launch things much more quickly if you don't take into account any concerns that others worry about/want to take into account -- like the privacy and security of people's information.
It's no surprise this is where we are today: people who think ahead and want to be careful because of ethics, all the way to him taking the idea, implementing it - while deceiving/leading on the brothers who hired him vs. the foundation of Facebook and the Cambridge Analytica happenings.
I wonder if he'll ever understand this himself, and how grave this all is.
Talk to anyone who actually knows Zuck. He's a compassionate liberal that gets a bit intense at times, but he's both incredibly intelligent and fully aware of whats riding on his decisions.
Bill Gates has a different personality, but he also grew wealthy in a different time. The world was unipolar under American leadership, and Microsoft was a key element to American power. Gates could focus his energy on fighting malaria and studying flu epidemics. The world Zuck lives in is far different. Machine learning is taking off, China is ascendant, and America / the liberal order is asymmetrically exposed.
He has enough money to grow as well.
Bill Gates is/was an guy who build Microsoft. Zuckerberg got lucky with facebook. There is not much to build because the whole it world already exists.
He as a human being brought more distress to this world as anything he is doing with his money to help, can't fix.
Tx to his luck with the Zeitgeist, he is facebook and because of his incompetence, facebook hurts us all.
Don't underestimate a guy who built a billion dollar empire and sits on the biggest potential dictatorship tool in human history.
Now the funny thing is that his presidential ambitions seem to be dead for now. It's interesting...
From a technical standpoint and from a political standpoint. Facebook feels like the small brother of all those big impressive companies who did things, invented things and formed technology like i know it. Google, Microsoft etc. Facebook on the other hand feels strange.
Political speaking: they are reacting and not acting.
This hearing made it more obvious than ever.
[Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?
Zuck: People just submitted it.
Zuck: I don't know why.
Zuck: They "trust me"
Zuck: Dumb fucks.
He's still doing the same thing.
On the other hand, I also repeat things about a person I know who stole from me many years ago. That person happens to be in jail for, among other things, theft.
The problem here is that he was and is rewarded for the bad behavior, so he keeps repeating it.