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Comment by optymizer | Hacker News Reader

are you seriously saying a photo-sharing site is at the same level of innovation as a driverless car? EHLO!

No. I am saying that Facebook is nothing to sneeze at. It it were so easy to invent Facebook, you would've invented Facebook.

>if it were so easy to invent Facebook, you would've invented Facebook.

The only problem I have with a comment like this is that there were millions of factors and pieces to the puzzle of creating Facebook, that this is a ridiculous over simplification of how it came to be.

Luck, timing, market condition, state of competition etc...

Zuck is the luckiest person alive to have been in the place he was when he was - its not like he simply invented everything required to make Facebook from zilch. Friendster and MySpace verified the market, zuck had a great twist on that and a million other thing fell into place.

Not to say it was simple and non-trivial, but that comment just has way too much bravado and ego and is just plain stupid.

He did a great job, but there is nobody else who should be using that line in any other context.

I see that you've read this.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Drunkards-Walk-Randomness-Rules/dp...

It's not rare for people to attribute success only to them self and failure to market conditions.

You don't need to have read that book to know what should be obvious to anyone given more than a second of thought.

Pardon me for not living in the US, and not knowing its culture/social situation completely. That book has given me quite a few historical information where it seems like a chance event turns fortunes of people.

I don't see what the US has to do with this at all. I'd be extremely surprised if the US was the only country in the entire world that wasn't a near-perfect meritocracy. I'm not all that well-acquainted with a ton of foreign cultures, but I feel I can still say with some confidence that luck being a major factor of success is damn-near a universal law.

Yup. Never even heard of that book.

>zuck had a great twist on that and a million other thing fell into place.

I'm don't even know what the twist is. People seemed to leave Friendster because it was slow, then left Myspace because it made you sick, then joined Facebook which was like Friendster with active development and also initially seeded with smart people.

The only innovation I can see is that the company was run by a developer who showed that he was going to experiment with and build out the platform continuously in order to attract third-parties to invest in it.

The twist being only allowing .edu addresses at first.

that comment just has way too much bravado and ego and is just plain stupid.

I think you're reading too much into this.

It's a Sorkin quote, so of course it has bravado and ego. ;-)

Exactly!

I don't think anyone is discounting Facebook as an easy project. It has its own set of challenges to address, but, I saw many social networks before Facebook, and a few sprung up after Facebook in a short period of time, with various degrees of success. I don't see the same happening with driverless cars, so I am assuming it is more difficult to implement driverless cars than Facebook. Because, you know, if it were so easy to implement driverless cars, you would've implemented those.

I don't see why this has to be zero sum. I can be wowed by Google Glasses without calling Facebook a "glorified noticeboard."

I don't see the same happening with driverless cars, so I am assuming it is more difficult to implement driverless cars than Facebook.

There are actually multiple companies that have prototyped driverless cars, we're just much earlier in the technology cycle for it. But, I digress.

Thousands of people did invent facebook. The invention is obvious and frankly trivial. Facebook didn't become what it is because of the amazing innovation of "see stupid shit your friends post". Everything about facebook's success has nothing to do with the idea, and everything to do with execution, marketing, timing, etc.

I know this may be a totally foreign concept to people living in the valley, but a driverless car isn't very interesting to people who can just walk onto a regular, punctual bus or subway service on near every corner.

I live in New York, which has one of the best public transit systems in the US, and I think driverless cars are freaking amazing, even (or especially) in the context of a city with effective public transit. For one thing, they could solve the last-mile problem public transit has at its outer limits.

Speaking as an SF resident, we've actually got the slowest major transit system in the country (Muni; BART coverage is far from adequate for travel within the city). While this of course beats all the places with NO major transit system, it's laughable to think that widespread use of driverless cars wouldn't improve transportation significantly. I've never wanted to own a car living in the city, but with a little imagination, one can imagine most of the downsides of doing so (cost, parking, etc) significantly diminishing with widespread adoption of driverless cars. Probably more significantly, one can imagine the massive benefits gained by society at large, including those who still have no interest in getting a driverless car (safety, congestion, hell even driverless public transport).

> one can imagine the massive benefits gained by society at large

One can also imagine a massive drawback: the continuation of sedentary lifestyle status quo and all of its associated ills.

But hey, who wants to walk 10 minutes to transit, maybe you can take the driverless car to the gym.

There are so many ways to describe how wrongheaded this is that I don't even know where to start. The idea that less efficient transportation is beneficial because it would require people to be more active is absolutely insane. By that logic, we'd be better off with no transportation other than walking; I find it hard to believe that everyone would be better off if they were constrained to working somewhere within a few miles of them (or alternatively, required to spend half their day just getting to work). Rooting for a higher level of car accidents, pollution (the number of cars needed could easily be cut by as much as half), and congestion in order to force people to walk is ridiculous. Throw in the fact that sedentary lifestyles/obesity are pretty strongly correlated with lower income and education level (ignorance of health/nutrition issues, lack of time due to heavy work schedules, there are different reason for different people in this situation), and the economic benefits alone of a significantly more efficient transportation system would likely cancel out whatever possible increase in sedentary living it may cause.

Driverless vehicles have the potential to transform transportation, full stop. This obviously includes public transit (I highly doubt that a driverless bus is much of a technological leap from driverless cars). Whatever benefits public transit provides are included in the changes that driverless vehicles will bring (unless, as it seems, your only in support of inefficient public transit?).

What kind of efficiency are you discussing? What are you comparing? Roaming driverless taxis are not more energy efficient and they are not more space efficient than transit. Being an improvement on human-driven cars is not a particularly difficult achievement.

I have no idea where the car accidents or pollution sentence came from. I'm "rooting" for less cars, not the least because it will reduce pollution, and live my life accordingly. I try to minimize the disease in my life by minimizing my car use - automated or otherwise - rather than addressing the symptoms using a new wundertechnology. I don't control the number of car accidents because I can't control the choices others make.

From all the cities I've been to I can only remember 1 or 2 that approximately fit the description and then again, only at a certain time of the day. In most others, the goal of a public transit service is to get you to destination eventually.

Chicago buses are extremely punctual where I live (+/- 2 minutes) in river north. And of course in Manhattan it takes far longer to get anywhere by car than by subway, or even express bus.

Wind back the clock only 20-30 years and such a thing would have been astounding. You're making the mistake of considing current technology humdrum.

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