Mark Zuckerberg Talks With Atlantic Editor James Bennet | Hacker News Reader

Mark Zuckerberg Talks With Atlantic Editor James Bennet

theatlantic.com

55 pointspg50 comments

I suppose he's gotten slightly better at talking. He seems nervous, but isn't a complete wreck (see interviews from 2 years ago, he has improved a lot since then). As I understand it the markets responded well to Zuck's talk with Arrington and now with Bennet -- fb stock shot up after each of the interviews. But that doesn't excuse the fact he is a cartoonishly twisted guy and entrepreneurs and consumers alike should be leery of his every move. Does he seriously expect people to buy his latest spiel about immigration? This is the guy who created a political movement that went so far as to fund ads for oil drilling in arctic national wildlife refuge and putting down Keystone XL pipelines, so, sorry, I'm not buying that he's in this cause because he met someone who couldn't attend college because they were illegal immigrants. Having talked at length with people who knew him in his Harvard days, he's ruthless, relentless, and rapacious -- he has determined he's going to approach the immigration issue in the public arena with stories about illegal immigrants not getting accepted into colleges, and this seems to be the way he's going at it. Pity. He's the face of a serious issue that warrants genuine people looking at it with sincerity and good faith, instead we're stuck with Zuck.

This is the guy who literally called the users of his site "dumb fucks", and was literally willing -- no, eager to hand over private details of his site's users to his friends. I ran forums that garnered about 12k users per month when I was 16, I took the responsibility of safeguarding my users' private information very seriously.

The only thing that's changed about Zuck is he's learned to not say these things out loud, play a nice PR game, and meet people and convince them that he's a nice fella who wants best for everybody and "connect the world!" through Facebook (no matter if you want to be connected to it or not).

I'm pretty sure I said worse things to my friends in private when I was that age. I shudder to think what it would feel like to have it disclosed publicly.

I strongly disagree with your characterization of him as 'cartoonishly twisted' and think that if you're going to write someone off for being overly glib in a private conversation while they're in college, then you're casting an incredibly wide net.

> The only thing that's changed about Zuck is he's learned to not say these things out loud

I am not a fan of Zuckerberg, but I don't think you have any right to claim such a thing. People can change.

It's good to hear you were so responsible at age 16, but not everyone matures so quickly. My own personality has basically done a complete 180 since my high school and uni days, from the biggest prick you ever met to someone who genuinely tries to show compassion and consider others' points of view. Is it all a façade to conceal the inner asshole? I'm sure you could make that case, but in the end it's outcomes that matter. They say the road to hell is paved with good intentions, but the flip-side of that is that sometimes people who might still be assholes internally can do a lot of good.

Track record is important, yes. But giving sincere people second chances is also important, and that goes for Zuck, too.

The road to heaven is paved with assholes.

People can, he hasn't.

He's also very normal on a human level if you just step back for a moment.

He's a programmer, so being awkward in interviews makes sense when he's starting out. He's young and arrogant, and therefore there's probably records of dumb comments he's made. He's also getting older and more mature, so I'm sure he's changed his mind on a few things.

All of this strikes me as a normal, reasonably honest person, and really that's about as much as you can ask for.

I can't understand this comment at all. Do you think Zuckerberg secretly agrees with ~50% of America about building a new oil pipeline through Canada? Or do you think he's ambivalent about oil pipelines and happy to quid pro quo them for immigration law support? Or is it something else?

This isn't worth your time.

If you look at who the ads are for, it's pretty clearly a quid pro quo.

The only thing that's changed about Zuck is ...

Pure projection. You can't possibly know such a thing.

To be a public figure is to be a cartoon character in a lot of imaginary dramas. Elsewhere on the front page right now is a story about successful companies with founders no one has heard of. It's easy to see why they'd prefer to keep it that way.

I'm confident that if you or most people existed under as much scrutiny as Zuck, they'd find something equally damaging you'd said somewhere in the past.

There are other people saying the same thing about immigration law's effect on high school students [1]. So don't discount this particular argument just because it comes from someone you don't trust.

[1] http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/09/the-surp...

This comment seemed to me a perfect specimen of the type that drags down forums: vitriolic and ill-informed. I've hypothesized before that the problem is not that people make such comments (which seems inevitable if you have open, anonymous signups) but that others upvote them. So I analyzed the votes to see if there was a pattern, and indeed there is. The median karma of upvoters was 644, and the median karma of downvoters was 1814, almost 3x as high. If this pattern holds up it could be very useful.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but if that pattern is sustainably observed, then it almost certainly means the upvote/downvote privileges should be changed, correct?

Elsewise, the pattern will continue like entropy, until the majority of comments are like that.

There already are certain privileges to karma: you need a certain threshold to downvote comments at all, and I suspect that thresholds to get onto the front page are based on the karma of who upvotes your story. (There've been times where my upvote alone, going from 2 to 3 votes, is enough to get something on the front page, while many times I've seen new stories with 4-5 points that don't make it.) I suspect PG is thinking of tweaking the weights, automatically, until there's enough of a weight to high-karma downvotes to kill bad comments. You could easily train an SVM or other classifier on some set good/bad comments and then pull out the coefficients to figure out what signals should go into weighting point totals.

One thing I've never understood about forums of this type: Why assume all votes should be equal?

In any knowledge community, some voices mean more than others (e.g., experts and novices). Why shouldn't a similar distinction translate to votes?

Karma doesn't necessarily translate to expertise. Most of my highest-karma comments have been utter nonsense. High karma can mean people have agreed with you, or that you've been here longer than not, and it probably is a good measure that you can conform to the norms of the community, but it doesn't necessarily mean you know what you're talking about.

I mean, people will listen when tptacek talks about cryptography, but that doesn't mean his opinion on design should necessarily matter more than that of a designer with less karma just because tptacek has the bigger integer attached to his name. It's not really more 'fair' for votes by high karma users to outweigh votes by lower karma users.

Unless it already works that way in which case it's the best thing ever and clearly pg is going God's work.

I've worked on content-based Bayesian voting schemes. They work well weighting votes by content words. tptacek + cryptography should matter more.

Here, though, it seems as if HN experts and novices may be representative. pg used to run the front page based on karma. Comments seems like a place where that simplistic approach could work well.

How about the 'age' (since registration) of both? And btw why not just do the simple thing and disenfranchise newer users, anyway?

What does the ratio look like on a "neutrally controversial" comment look like? That is, a comment that isn't toxic, but merely dividing the community.

pg, I'd love to hear what you found interesting about this interview, because I never seem to gain much insight by listening to Mark Zuckerberg. He's kind of like Bill Gates, that way. They're both brilliant guys, but they don't ever seem to publicly say anything that leaves me with any new knowledge, any spark of inspiration, or a new perspective on the world.

I have a lot of respect for both of them, and I'm usually very dismissive of the idea that they don't deserve their success, but this interview really gives me the impression of a man who got lucky to be where he is, and doesn't care for much beyond being keeping Facebook secure in its position (and dipping his toe into humanitarian issues).

Good counterexamples are Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Steve Jobs, or yourself, who have often surprised and delighted me with whole new ways of looking at things, and who frequently leave me excited and motivated to go out and strive to make my work count for more.

Did I miss something important in this video?

Mark is younger than everyone on that list, so I'll suggest that it has more to do with age. Everyone has insight in their respective fields, but I think a certain level of adversity and time is necessary for one to turn a lot of that insight into wisdom. Tesla and Spacex almost didn't make it out alive during the 2008 financial crisis, and I recall Musk mentioning that when it looked like his two companies would be a failure, he'd wake up with tears on his pillow.

I think at the moment, Mark is definitely trying to not upset his share price by saying something that doesn't need to be said. We don't know how he is internalizing things right now. Hopefully we will get more wisdom from him in the future, that stuff doesn't just grow on trees.

Gates is pretty interesting from whatever talks/interviews I can remember.

I think it's unfortunate that this guy has so much power over technology and, maybe to a greater extent, society as a whole. I don't know his true intentions and ethics, but he just seems so disingenuous.

That's a pretty hard judgment based on, well, nothing.

It's based on how many years the person heard or read about zuckerberg, and how many years he's spent on earth learning about life. The statement is an opinion (and is phrased accordingly), and it's based on his or hers unique perspective of life, in other words - the personality. Don't dismiss that, it's your biggest asset.

I always find it oddly comforting to see how nervous, and frankly awkward, Mark Zuckerberg can be on stage. I have a fine stage presence but it's somehow very encouraging that someone so successful can still sport such discomfort with important skills like public speaking.

Being able to be comfortable in front of people is a completely different skill set. There are 8 year olds that can be comfortable in front of crowds. There are people that are surgeons that can't get up the nerve to ask for an upgrade to first class at the airline counter. Or who wouldn't be able to negotiate down the price of a car. Has nothing to do with their ability to use a scalpel though.

Right, I've just always found it hard to believe the same of an executive. But your point -- and mine, really -- still stands. Not everything needs to be perfect. Just the important stuff.

I feel same as you but don't make this mistake: He is nervous but he still chooses his words very carefully, and connects his points. He is just physically nervous, but his brains works just fine.

"There are a lot of problems to debug"

Is that normal English or just programmer English?

I am not native speaker so I really don't know. Is "debug" a known word for public?

No, it's not commonly used by non-hackers. I'd guess most people can figure out what it means given the context, but it's probably not entirely clear.

I was pleasantly surprised by this, with the exception of the question about the Social Mobile Cloud's ability to Disrupt. Blech.

"11 million people are a lot of people who are being treated unfairly" (Speaking of illegal aliens)

Unfairly? Most of these people or their parents snuck into this country, breaking the law. They knew full well the down side. How is this unfair? Isn't it more unfair that taxpayers have to pay their medical and education bills? and no they don't save the average person enough money on produce and services to make up the difference - this is a lie propagated by the handful of wealthy persons who actually benefit from their presence.

How can people be so blind?

"If you poll the majority of Americans, they want to get something done" (speaking on the illegal immigration situation)

Yeah Mark, you know darn well that most Americans want the borders secure, illegals deported. In other words - The public largely wants the laws of the country actually enforced (wow what a notion).

Easy karma, pg.

I mean, you've posted a topic that is guaranteed to provoke the kind of flamewar you seem to think is counterproductive.

> Easy karma, pg.

Considering pg can likely award himself arbitrary karma points with a single SQL statement, I think your assumption of his motives is probably mistaken.

HN uses text files for persistence :-).

You have got to be kidding me. The machine this server runs on must have a lot of RAM!

I think he has to open it up and shake it out every week or so or it gets clogged.

I'm guessing that you could get by with some pretty simple caching. Judging by the timestamps of the new comments, there don't seem to be more than say 2 comments per minute. I'm guessing that there are even fewer new posts and probably more upvotes. But I still feel like you could get by with very little in terms of HW.

Fair enough. I suppose the entire HN corpus would probably not be that large compared to modern HW capabilities.

Still seems to be a bit fragile, though. I am assuming persistence is a periodic thing, making the system vulnerable to eg. power failure between persist events, ie writing the text files. To be balanced against the simplicity gains of only having to deal with in-program data structures, though, I guess.

Then again it's worked flawlessly for 5+ years so what do I know!

You mistake my attack. pg is hiding from the fact that the people that made him rich hate him.

I'm all for contrarian viewpoints, but what are you actually adding to this discussion?

If you want to discuss your fascinating ideas about pg and his motives, why not start your own discussion thread and see how popular it is, rather than trying to hijack this one?

Because I'm taking pot shots, not engaging in full discourse.

People who had Yahoo! shares in the late nineties hate PG? When did that happen?

Just really curious, I don't know anyone who hates PG... Who would hate him, and aside from envy, why?

He became an investment banker. He became a capitalist.

He is in the trade of making percentages off of real work.

Envy? No, I would never be a person that depended, even in the slightest, on fictional gains based on spreadsheets.

He is a creature of greed. And yes, pg, I'm somewhat confident you'll read this.

Oh, for fuck's sake.

Comrade, I look forward to reading your riveting manifesto .. elsewhere.

Sure thing, friend.

I can afford to withdraw.

You're not disagreeing with me on any particular point.

>"He became an investment banker."

I'm not sure you actually understand what an investment banker is.

>"He became a capitalist."

Implying that somehow, after he sold his company and co-founded YC with his friends, he suddenly realized: "Holy shit. I think capitalism might be on to something!"

>"He is in the trade of making percentages off of real work."

Are you implying that YC provides zero value and merely siphons a percentage of founders' rightful gains?

>"He is a creature of greed."

Surely, he is a creature-- and a greedy one! You know, not a person with a family, friends, and interests outside of your one dimensional perception of him.

Take a break.

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