Facebook In Talks To Acquire Drone Maker Titan Aerospace | Hacker News Reader

Facebook In Talks To Acquire Drone Maker Titan Aerospace

techcrunch.com

78 pointsssclafani52 comments

"A machine learning researcher, a crypto-currency expert, and an Erlang programmer walk into a bar. Facebook buys the bar for $27 billion."

This made me laugh loudly out loud (LLOL?). Thank you for brightening my morning!

You could at least give credit to the author of the joke.

https://twitter.com/ML_Hipster/status/438418306769244160

Sorry for that, I found it in livejournal.com without any reference to the original author.

When I was in Tanzania, there were many places where people hadn't even heard of Facebook. Human interaction is entirely face-to-face, and the only way to Snapchat someone would be to literally stick your face through their window. Same goes for pokes.

Why they want to propagate the loneliness and technology-dependence of the modern age onto the truly free societies of the world is beyond me.

Why a company wants to make more money is beyond you?

Face to face communication is archaic and barbaric. We must spread the Holy Interwebs of Google and Facebook to these uncivilized people and show them the glory of the App. History of the world.

>Face to face communication is archaic and barbaric.

one can imagine how in say 20 years looking somebody in the face and/or speaking directly to somebody instead of "into communicator" would be a major faux pas

>Why they want to propagate the loneliness and technology-dependence of the modern age onto the truly free societies of the world is beyond me.

Because technology, and therefore it should be better.

Social modes of interaction must obey technological and business developments.

Also fatalism: you can't stop progress.

So, in general, the current way to view technology is the polar opposite of the optimist modernist way of 19th, early 20th century, were people believed they'd be in control.

Now it's all about "adapting".

Comments like this, full with a longing for a simpler time, amuse me.

No one's making anyone communicate in a "lonely" way. If you don't like it, you are free to demand your preferred means of communication. What you'll find, however, is that people generally like it. "I tweet in my dreams," someone I know one said.

The truth of the matter is, constant communication is valuable. Not in the market cap type of way but as a type of human interaction. It matters to people. It helps them organize parties, revolutions, their lives around a stream of current data.

Is it distracting and addicting? Yes, it can be. But that's not a problem with the technology. If you lack the self-discipline to live in this deluge of information, guess what - help is one Google search away.

I guess my overall point is that the bandwidth of human communication has only ever been growing. It's not gonna stop now, so there's no point in longing for a long gone idyllic past.

P.S. I understand the hatred for dopamine triggers, wrapped in HTML. Meditation helps.

P.P.S. I'm making an assumption that people willfully choose a medium as a basis for discourse. That's not the case most of the time. I believe everyone should be made aware of how the medium they're using influences their thoughts and actions. I'm all up for having more media, though.

Your comment is not internally consistent.

"I tweet in my dreams," someone I know one said.

If there is any sense remaining in the world, this was uttered in shame.

You make a very good argument, and I have to agree with you. In the end, it comes down to self-discipline and an internal desire to maintain real human contact.

> I understand the hatred for dopamine triggers, wrapped in HTML. Meditation helps.

You are quite the brilliant wordsmith, I can't wait for the next opportunity to use the phrase "dopamine triggers wrapped in HTML".

Says mister "hey check out my blog with a picture of my face on it!".

"The easy possibility to write letters must - seen theoretically - have brought a terrible disruption of the souls into the world. It is communication with ghosts, and not just with the ghost of the receiver, but with one's own ghost as well, which develops under the hand in the letter one is writing, or even in a series of letters, where on letter substantiates the other and can call on it as witness. How did the idea came up that humans can communicate with each other through letters! One can think of a person that is far away, or touch a person that is close by, everything else is above the power of humans. But writing letters means to bare oneself in front of the ghosts, which they are greedily waiting for. Written kisses don't arrive at their place, but get drunk out by the ghosts on the way. Because of this plentiful food they multiply so outrageously. Humanity is feeling that and fighting against it, it has, to disable the ghostly between humans, and to achieve the natural communication, the peace of souls, invented the train, the car, the airplane, but it's too late, apparently they are inventions made while falling, the opponent is so much calmer and stronger, and invented after mail the telegraph, the telephone, wireless telegraphy. The ghosts won't starve, but we will perish."

-- Franz Kafka, letter to Milena Jesenská (March 1922)

I think the webcomic "Toothpaste for Dinner" perfectly captured this sentiment:

http://imgur.com/qhrduxF.jpg

Are there negatives to an alway-available Internet connection? Sure.

Are they massively outweighed by the incredibly power of being able to communicate and share ideas and ideals with the entire world, and access the sum of human knowledge, for free, at a moments notice? Definitively yes.

Calling a society "truly free" simply because they do not have easy access to one of the triumphs of human ingenuity seems naive at best, and wilfully patronising at worst.

Someone described Google's foray into driverless cars, robots etc as the emergence of Google as a conglomerate. Those projects are just too many steps away from advertising revenue to claim they're all part of a common vision. The same is true for Amazon, Microsoft, etc as examples of successful technology conglomerates.

With similar capital available to it, Facebook needs to stop thinking "one trick pony" as a social network and start thinking conglomerate too.

Investing in drone technology is a good start for them.

Unlike those other companies, Facebook has a clear vision: Connect the world. If you listen to Mark Zuckerberg talk about that vision, you see that facebook.com is just a part of the over arching goal. It's really cool to see such conviction.

Rather: Google, Amazon, Microsoft - those companies just print money and have the luxury to think 10 steps ahead. Granted some of the most brilliant minds work for them, so their view of 10 steps ahead is often spot on and extremely innovative (gmail, aws, IE).

jk jk on IE. Honestly, I am not sure what Microsoft has done lately..

Age of Empires was pretty good.

PRETTY good? One time on multi-player I was decimated to a single peon and buried my way into a nook in the forest and rebuilt a mighty army and was ultimately defeated. Damnit, I was depressed after that one..

The Black Forest survivalist strategy. Also good was carving a back entrance into your enemies base.

goddamn siege onagers...

I used to build long palisades of wood; the AI would do some path-finding, and discover the gap in the fence around the back of my base. It would then send a steady stream of units to attack me, but they'd walk in single file along the wall towards the gap...

Google's (official) mission "is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful" (https://www.google.com/about/company/). Microsoft's is "to create a family of devices and services for individuals and businesses that empower people around the globe at home, at work and on the go, for the activities they value most." (http://www.microsoft.com/investor/reports/ar13/shareholder-l...).

How's Facebook different having a mission statement?

It's different in the sense their decisions that lead to becoming a'conglomerate' adhere to their mission. 3bn for Nest doesn't really help organize the world's data.

Unless you view Nest as the source of data (which many believe it is)

I guess he means in that Facebook focuses on that, and Google and MS do all kinds of incompatible shit.

> How's Facebook different having a mission statement?

Every public intervention from Mark, every decision (admittedly from my undocumented point of view) is explicitly tied to that decision. I can’t remember when any of the Google triumvirate justified anything, ads or docs with their mission statement. Even negative decisions: Facebook justified not making cellphone hardware with their statement, because an OS would be more sensical -- a convoluted distinction to most, and one they might as well regret and tip-toe around when they start building antennas in Africa, but… no one would fail to see on that is directly in line with Zuckerberg’s initial idealism of “ending the conflict between Isreal and Palestinians by making them shares their stories”.

No one is saying they are markedly different from the inside, but Google founders, especially with Glass, comes off as Borg operators with “God vision” (cf. the first description of a screen showing live queries on a global map on Wired, 15 years ago); Mark is still that (annoying) teenager just out of the Peace Corps who own nothing, and wants everyone to get alone.

> jk jk on IE. Honestly, I am not sure what Microsoft has done lately..

.Net/C# is pretty dominant on the east coast. I see far more .Net shops than Java anyway. This leads me to believe that server licensing and Azure might be even bigger profit centers in the future. It is not consumer driven, but finance, insurance, HR, accounting, etc. are serious markets with deep pockets. .Net displaced many systems that were 40+ years old (COBOL, RPG/AS400, etc.), so I am doubtful that there are many contenders that could swoop in and steal the market anytime soon.

>Facebook has a clear vision: Connect the world

to Facebook platform.

They tried making that platform more open, hired coders close to the Open Social Web to develop tools to allow you to export all your information, etc. They hit a lot of snag: negative opinion like yours challenging their sincerity, lack of significant adoption, more general ethical dilemmas on having your interactions recorded by a third-party media: who ‘owns’ what (owning being a terrible metaphor for right to access, right to erase and the absence of sensical editing).

I agree their importance and idealism should have put their goal much higher, but I believe (as in: that’s my PhD conclusion) that they are going for the most successful and fastest approach of connecting as many people as humanly possible first on a coherent platform, and will open it once the impact and feasibility of that is the greatest.

"Connect the world" isn't exactly a clear goal.

I think you are referring to the observations of John Gapper, Michael Mace & Ben Evans...

---

John Gapper @ FT: http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/e57abef0-cd0c-11e2-90e8-00144... "The best comparison for Google seems to me not Microsoft in the 1980s but General Electric in the late 19th century – the age of electrification. Like GE, Google is a multifaceted industrial enterprise riding a wave of technology with an uncanny ability not only to invent far-reaching products but also to produce them commercially.

---

Michael Mace: http://mobileopportunity.blogspot.in/2014/01/google-conglome... The idea behind the “Internet of Things” is that network connectivity is moving into almost everything. If that’s Google’s investment thesis, it could rationalize an investment in almost any industry. Appliances? Absolutely. Shipping and logistics? You bet. Phosphate mining? OK, maybe not that. But any category of products that have electronics in them is fair game, as are any services that rely on data management. That’s going to be most of the economy. If that’s the case, we’ll need to evaluate Google’s strengths and weaknesses differently. We should worry less about the overall grand plan, and more about the management structure of its businesses, the skills of its general managers, and the efficiency of the support staff behind them. In other words, will Google be more like GE or like HP?

---

Ben Evans: http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2014/2/19/ways-of-thinkin... Hence, one could argue that Nest or self-driving cars (and the next big hardware move that Google does) are not really about understanding 'information' in any sense, and certainly not about advertising, but about finding ways to deploy being very good at machine learning and, say, connected systems, just as GE's business is to be very good at making big complicated precision-engineered pieces of capital equipment.

> Those projects are just too many steps away from advertising revenue to claim they're all part of a common vision.

But are they? Driverless cars means more people on the internet and more people on the internet means more searching.

I wouldn't be surprised if there were national security issues involved as well. Putting Facebook anywhere in the world provides solid communications data on a broad cross-section of any society in the world. The data is likely to be so good that you can very effectively monitor that nation.

TBH, I don't know why companies like Facebook and Google don't manage their own hedgefunds based on aggregate data that they know before anyone else. Currency markets would be an obvious one to participate in.

I thought the article's title was a joke when I first read it! Facebook acquiring a drone maker seemed absolutely bizarre to me, as it made me think of military drones.

After reading the article, this doesn't seem any sillier than Google's Loon program. I don't have the technical knowledge to know which will likely prove to be more effective.

It actually becomes obvious after realizing that all Facebook does is copying Google.

"When you just dont know what to do, follow the leader".. facebook is sitting in a pile of bad decisions.. i wonder when their karma will start to hunt them down..

Google can make a LOT of mistakes right now (and weird bets) without hurting them much.. but this is not the reality to the majority of other players.. Trying to play Google's game will make them feel dizzy very soon

Drone aircraft are a much better option than balloons which can't be directed. You can keep a drone over an urban area, deploy, bring it down and keep it separated from other drones in a much more controlled way. Mesh networking them is also a possibility.

You can also move a drone in case of particularly large storm cells. 20km is above most weather, but a large cumulonimbus can occasionally get up there.

Good to see Vern Raburn's name there too - he did some innovative work at Eclipse before the GFC wiped them out.

Maybe I'm crazy, but this has a surprisingly high ick-factor to it. I dunno, it just strikes me as so pathetic and misguided and almost exploitative. These places that are so poor there is no internet connection need...Facebook? (Btw, you can spare me the altruistic angle, because I aint buying it.)

If, along with FB access, they are bringing internet access to a region previously without it, then it's a good thing; because internet access is a net positive (unless you feel you are worse off with internet than you'd be without). I don't have a FB account anymore and find the internet valuable on a daily basis. Just my 2 cents.

Given Facebook's predilection for collaborating with the NSA, perhaps this is a government program to civilianize the image of drones. The military industrial complex really needs someone from the commercial sector to step up and rinse out a the bad aftertaste of all those funeral and wedding attendees that were blasted limb from limb by hellfire missiles.

Jeff Bezos tried his damnedest to make them seem like santa clause just in time for christmas, but we need some real megawatt tech celebrities to work their magic. Bezos is balding, for christ's sake.

I mean Mark Zuckerberg with all his cute, cuddly animal-loving vegetarian tendencies wouldn't harm a fly.

If HE'S okay with drones, then they MUST be okay! (insert obligatory emoticon)

And, oh yeah...

  CITIZEN ALERT NOTIFICATION: WITH THE PROCURMENT OF A FLEET 
  15 PANOPTICOID DRONES MANUFACTUED BY LOCKHEED, YOUR LOCAL 
  SHERRIF'S DEPARTMENT WILL BE ENFORCING ALL EVICTIONS IN 
  YOUR COUNTY BY NON-LETHAL PEPPER-STUN DRONE STRIKE. IN THE
  EVENT THAT YOUR HOME IS FORECLOSED, YOU WILL BE ORDERED TO 
  VACATE UNDER THREAT OF NON-LETHAL FORCE. 

  ---

  CITIZEN ALERT NOTIFICATION: WITH THE PROCURMENT OF A FLEET 
  27 PROTOBEDIENT DRONES MANUFACTUED BY NORTHROP/GRUMMAN ALL
  TRAFFIC STOPS ON STATE ROAD 902 WILL NOW BE CONDUCTED 
  AUTONOMOUSLY. DO NOT TAUNT THE PROTOBEDIENT DRONE.

  ***end citizen alert notification***

I agree with you on the ick factor, but on the other hand I think there is much to be said for the idea of getting disparate and non-communicative cultures to try to understand each other, and if thats going to happen through the mechanism of kids growing up and using social networking, then I'm all for it.

Of course, I'd much prefer to see someone go to places like Tanzania and so on, with the goal to teach these people how to make their own drones and networks out of the scrap pollution fobbed off on them by the Western world, and who knows .. maybe we'll see that happening now that the idea is out there.

From my perspective, it's damned easy to make a drone out of an old DVD player, some pieces of foamboard, and so on - whats not so easy is to find an application for it that will truly help people. Put an old cell phone in the fuselage and use it to transmit bitcoin between the villages? Great f'n idea..

$60m seems so quaint, so frugal these days.

if the drones could really stay airborne for 24h at about the same altitude it would be at least 1-2 orders of magnitude more expensive. The 24h is holy grail of this industry because above clouds it is the same basically as 5 years. Once somebody develops it, it will be a game changer for many industries.

I'm wondering how this would work in practice.

Does anyone know what kind of receiver/transmitter would be needed to communicate with a drone 20km or more away? Is it feasible, in terms of device size and power consumption, to embed such a radio in a like a laptop? How about a smartphone?

Or is the idea that the drone would communicate with base stations that would use conventional wireless signalling to talk to user devices? And if so, how does using a drone improve upon the current approach linking base stations using microwave links?

Thoughts, anyone?

Access to Facebook, that's only thing they really needed in Africa.

Interesting to contrast national business strategies in Africa.

China is pursuing something like neo-neo-colonialism. See these recent China-Zimbabwe deals:

http://www.bdlive.co.za/africa/africanbusiness/2014/01/30/zi...

http://www.thezimbabwean.co/news/zimbabwe/70687/china-plans-...

Zuck which wants to fly drones so they can setup facebook accounts and see advertising.

Somehow I think it will take more development on the ground to make the ultra long ball work for facebook, unless they are hoping someone else will figure that part out. Like Gates.

This also could be nice if Comcast is intent on being the One Big Internet Chokepoint.

Once they have their fleet of Internet drones working, they could move them to other underserved areas, like California!

I guess the drone's not vaporware after all (as posited in the previous discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6528598)

Facebook needs to pivot.

Is it April 1st already?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com