How My Brain Kept Me from Co-Founding YouTube

http://prog21.dadgum.com/39.html

by nreece • 17 years ago

62 29 17 years ago

prog21.dadgum.com

In the late 90s I had a similarly bizarre "limitation" in that I didn't "trust" drives that were over 10GB in size (because.. "how can it work? It's just too much to get into a drive!"), so I just had multiple smaller drives instead of one 20~40GB one.

Thankfully, like the writer, I eventually realized the stupidity of my ways, but I think many of us are susceptible to this bug at least once ;-)

yan• 17 years ago

What's funny is that I now have a similar fear of 1TB drives.. "If a lone drive fails, that is a lot of data to go at once"

buugs• 17 years ago

Both the fears seem pretty reasonable to me, probably because I usually don't buy a main harddrive with more than 200gb usually no more than 120.

vaksel• 17 years ago

i think this is something that's inherent in most techies, you know just enough to know that something like this would be unreliable, so you don't trust it when it comes out. While a regular user would go "OMG More Space!!!"

smoody• 17 years ago

Was he given the opportunity to co-found YouTube? That isn't clear from the article.

JacobAldridge• 17 years ago

I don't think so. I believe he had similar thoughts (streaming video online would be great) but immediately dismissed them as requiring too much bandwidth.

Had he had the foresight to avoid those limiting beliefs, he could have invented something like YouTube.

dood• 17 years ago

Thing is, a lot of people could have invented something like YouTube, and a lot of people tried. But the YouTube people had the skills to grow and scale their site in a phenomenal way, which is why they're the ones that are remembered. YouTube exemplifies the notion that ideas are worthless, execution is everything.

tjmc• 17 years ago

I'm still to be convinced that the bandwidth and storage costs of YouTube are economically viable. If he (and many others) had 'limiting beliefs', they were in overlooking that hugely popular businesses often attract buyers even when they're haemorraging red ink.

The only people who've made money off YouTube are the founders. I'm glad Google are kindly subsidising it for us, but then I'm not a shareholder or a recently laid-off employee. As a business it's a dog.

10ren3• 17 years ago

It's Moore's Law: you're unconsciously calibrated to the past, and it doesn't make sense to your hindbrain that you'll be out by orders of magnitude: x1000 in 15 years. I mean, that increase is completely unreasonable. Isn't it?

On the flip side, it also opens opportunities that people in the industry simply didn't entertain, because they were literally unthinkable and therefore unseeable just a few years ago (and I literally mean literally). I spoke to the inventor of a new method (a few decades ago) of hardware multiplication that became the standard for a while; he said it was made possible by an increase in silicon. It was theoretically possible before then, but no one looked.

stcredzero• 17 years ago

I created a deployment of a production Smalltalk application recently. (It's been around well over a decade.) 24 MB. I use the image compression utility. 8MB.

The default VisualWorks image is 12MB. And I also worked on one production app that was 110MB deployed. Most of that was data. We pre-cached all of the queries required to populate all of the drop-downs, so that after it got done loading, users found it to be "fast."

I thought of something like YouTube. "Flash video? No self-respecting techie would use Flash!"

tophat022• 17 years ago

The author's argument is a total non-sequitur. The whole "mental block" about sites like YouTube and Flickr was that DEVELOPERS couldn't imagine having to pay for such outrageous bandwidth usage (or that they'd even be able to find a place to host the site, for that matter).

He then goes on to equate this to developers not wanting to have their users download 64MB runtimes or 2GB IDEs. These two things are entirely different.

A developer knows that, while Joe User may have no problem waiting for a 500MB video of some chick topless to download, the same user isn't going to want to wait to download a 50MB installer for a program that makes Bingo cards.

patio11• 17 years ago

the same user isn't going to want to wait to download a 50MB installer for a program that makes Bingo cards.

As something of the resident expert on this topic, let me tell you: users are certainly willing to wait for a 12MB installer for a program that makes bingo cards. It actually converts (very marginally) better than the 500kb installer which needs Java as a pre-req.

tophat022• 17 years ago

Hehe, I actually had you in mind when I wrote that :)

mynameishere• 17 years ago

Flickr blew my mind when it appeared back in 2004.

A mind easily blown. Stand back anytime this guy is near a website that is anything more than an aggregate of img tags.

blasdel2• 17 years ago

Did you ever notice how flickr prevents you from seeing multiple high-res images at once? You can't even see links to other photos when viewing a higher res! The highest resolution you can see on a navigable page is 500px on a side.

Flickr is fucking atrocious for actually viewing someone's photos. It's about as shitty as they could possibly get away with.

On the other hand, it has absolutely terrific support for communities, with all sorts of little touches to encourage their formation. It also manages to simultaneously appeal to US Grandmas, Arab twentysomethings, and the requisite "self facilitating media nodes" that fuel WEB 2.0 hype.

ashr• 17 years ago

The point that the article makes is not a technical one.

It is a philosophical one instead. The ideas of tomorrow must look beyond what is possible today into anticipating what may be possible tomorrow.

The execution of such an idea would then hold the promise of innovation to break today's barriers.

psranga• 17 years ago

Hmm, maybe I'm too retro for this guy, but 16 bytes for an element in a linked list does sound excessive. :)

blasdel2• 17 years ago

It's only two words! You need two 64 bit pointers on a 64-bit machine.

A fuckton of people have come up with the idea that "hey, since a 4gb address space is really plenty, why don't we try using an n/2 address space and have a whole cons fit in one word?" I'm sure the same thing has come up plenty of times before.

It turns out to be not so hot to avoid directly using the OS' VM and the hardware's MMU.

How My Brain Kept Me from Co-Founding YouTube

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