nancyhua

My experiences were from the Roadster I had for a month while in the Bay area. I had been considering buying one until this experience with the battery. Your battery must be way better than mine and/or you're much better at driving- neither of which is that unlikely. Based on the mileage stats the car would display, there is NO WAY we could've gone from MV to SF 2x on one charge. Even once was seriously pushing it despite speeding down the 101 or the 280 in the carpool zone.

I read about this charging issue being addressed in Israel with a company called Better Place that does battery swapping. The reasoning was Israel is small enough to roll out something like this on a large scale. Battery swapping sounds great because they were saying it'd only take a few minutes, which is comparable to fueling up with gas.

30 minutes is already a vast improvement over the old technology which took hours, maybe 6 hours if you weren't on the fast connection, or I heard days if you were stuck using a normal outlet.

Charging was definitely the biggest problem with the Roadster. If you want to drive from Berkeley to Mountain View and then back, the car has to charge for a good 3 hours on the fast connection while you're in Mountain View or you risk going dead. The Roadster nominally drives 200 miles on one charge but it was more like 140 unless you're going downhill the whole time.

I'd heard rumors of Stanford letting you charge without plugging in while driving past the campus- that would be awesome.

I feel sorry for everyone involved in this complex industry, no arena of which is aligned with the goal of people's long term health.

The common sense suggestions in this article are a good step towards improving things by increasing transparency and accountability via documentation but may not address the root problems.

Agreed. He's entertaining and probably smarter and more focused than 99% of people but his poor arguments make me think he's not a precise thinker and isn't mentally flexible. I wonder if he'd be able to answer this question: What would he have to be persuaded of to change his mind on this topic? (I wonder what everyone including myself would answer to this question.)

I wonder what his motivation is. Is he upset by poor performance in his personal account and wants to blame someone? Does he buy the shockingly confused media hype? Is he threatened by something he incompletely understands? Is he doing it to get even more attention? Is he trying to seem intelligent or gain even more status by jumping on a bandwagon to criticize a popular scapegoat?

His point is startups suck if they wait too long to get customer feedback to see if people actually want or care about their solutions.

Does this advice apply mainly to startups that aren't particularly new technology? While people like small improvements they often don't imagine changing their lives a tremendous amount. I guess most startups aren't that innovative either- maybe that's another reason most startups might suck.

I think I agree with your points assuming Mark is evil.

I am not convinced Zuckerberg's lacking "human warmth." It didn't strike me that Mark thought he was actually friends with Aaron or thought he was betraying anything- that's Aaron's perspective, which was understandable but we can't be really nice to everyone who considers themselves our friends or disagrees with us on who owns an idea.

Facebook so far hasn't done anything I really disagree with. But my feelings on privacy etc aren't that strong yet, maybe a failure of my imagination because nothing bad has really happened to me yet (knocking on wood).

I'm not an economist or a lawyer so wondering:

1) Should there be a penalty for people who file patents that obviously have a ton of prior art to incentivize people not to do this or to do more research?

2) Should there be a reward for people who discover prior art invalidating patent applications/ claims? The reward could come from a) people who are using the idea without holding the patent and thus don't want to get sued over the patent and are benefiting from the research, and b) the frivolous filers from 1).

I don't know Zuckerberg but want to play devil's advocate to give him the benefit of the doubt until he actually gets convicted of something.

> 2) It is absolutely possible to treat your fellow human beings well and find richly-deserved success - Mark Zuckerberg however does not seem capable of this.

From Aaron's account, it looks like Mark does not believe that these software ideas were original or IP. If you buy that perspective, he wasn't wrong to execute far better on the same ideas that have appeared repeatedly in the history of social networks- he was simply a sucky friend, which is unlikeable but not illegal.

He's made a bunch of people very rich with Facebook. Do you think D'Angelo, the Winklevosses, and Saverin would rather have never met Zuckerberg or would rather he never created Facebook?

>3) Even though our society might tolerate and even reward (in the short-term at least) this sort of behaviour, should we be happy that a master-exploiter of this unfairness is the guardian of social relationships on the internet?

The sin Mark's accused of is stealing people's ideas, assuming ideas are steal-able, and thereby breaching the trust of people who considered themselves his friends or coworkers. If he's guilty, I guess the question is whether someone who is immoral/amoral in one respect is able to be ethical in other areas.

Since the movie makes a good case that Zuckerberg betrayed some of his close friends, I don't trust him (or any random person) not to betray me, a random stranger / Facebook user. But I do trust Zuckerberg to want to do whatever is good for Facebook. Are people scared he's going to somehow blackmail them into staying on Facebook by threatening to release their private data to everyone? I'll be scared of that scenario if that ever seems like the best plan for Facebook.

Who else could run Facebook? Most people are less intelligent or less competent or less interested in Facebook's future. Almost anyone in Mark's situation would cash out and grow indifferent but Zuckerberg persuades me he's not doing it for the money. So I guess I'm happy he's running it because regardless of his moral judgment or human loyalty at least I feel like he cares about Facebook.

I think many problems with corporations arise from leaders' interests not being aligned with those of the company. Facebook is one of the few examples where I don't believe that's the case. It might seem psychopathic to care more about Facebook than your best friend and/or cofounder, but is that really a big problem? Maybe from the corporation's perspective (or from the user and shareholder perspective), it's actually a virtue.

Larry and Sergey are different from other star founders who've been accused of evil (Jobs, Gates, Zuckerberg) in that they were older so maybe more mature and also relatively less entrepreneurial- their goal was academia, unlike all the young dropouts. Maybe many extremely entrepreneurial people don't respect the law. In Zuckerberg's case it does seem like he doesn't care about patents at all whereas Aaron is still mad about the IP and hates that Zuckerberg ignored the rules (re: patents, Facemash, dropping out, and everything else) and got rewarded for it.

Reading the logs I don't get the sense Zuckerberg is being dishonest or that he even considers Aaron to be a friend. The main conflict seems to be the accusation that Zuckerberg stole ideas, which is a big question for software in general: ideas want to spread so the concept of IP is arguably against the nature of ideas. At the same time, we want people to be able to get rich off a great idea even if they don't implement it successfully. This question re: IP and copyrights is something we're still resolving as a society. Until it gets resolved, if ever, lots of people are going to have lots of unfair things happen to them and it's understandable to be mad about that.

But that's what life is: unfair. Just like we can't go through life feeling guilty about how lucky we are to have survived infancy unlike some absurd percentage of humans in poor countries, we can't constantly hate on other people who are even luckier than we are re: how they don't deserve their success. No one deserves anything. Life is unfair.

People don't trace the dirty bits to the miners?

Withdrawal is anonymous?

I read the transcripts, all very fascinating. Aaron's focus is on building stuff whereas Mark's is human interaction- Aaron focuses on products and consulting whereas Mark was already thinking big picture about social. Aaron seems more ambitious than almost anyone and Mark seems 10x even more ambitious than that.

Even if Aaron is the superior engineer, Mark is the superior psychologist. Vision and navigation of systems constructed by humans turns out to be more important than building a lot of stuff no matter how cool or new it is.

Also seems like mark argues there aren't any ideas to steal and admits facebook's been done before- just this time he's going to execute it better.

How do you launder bitcoins?

Crowdfunding as it stands is a form of charity or maybe status because there's no guarantee anyone will even attempt to follow through with anything. That's why I only use it for charity or art. Are they attempting to change this in any way?

Has anyone here had a positive educational experience?

The article brings up the USA and china and although I had to supplement my usa education (we used the same textbook for 4 years in my elementary school) and saw that my cousins in china were learning calculus while my class was still on extremely basic algebra, I never envied them their Chinese education steeped in rote memorization.

My impression is other countries might test better but they have their own problems. My cousins in China had the curiosity beaten out of them and had no time to really understand what they were studying or pursue what really interested them. The cutthroat testing environment really harmed them psychologically as well. I consider myself really lucky. The first rule of education should be "do no harm" and often that just means being more hands off.

Many of my friends learn better on their own and at least the USA lets smart kids do that more than many other countries do.

I have a bias in that I tend to think most problems can be solved by technology. Maybe this whole conversation is on a problem fast becoming obsolete due to the great equalizer: the Internet. That's my hope, anyway. (btw the best open courseware stuff comes out of USA universities.)