Steve Yegge, "What Would You Do With Your Own Google?" - OSCON Data 2011

What Hacker News said

Recommends shoeless · 2011-10 · on “BioCurious, a hackerspace for bio now open to public”

I recommend watching Steve Yegge's excellent presentation at O'Reilly's OSCON Data. He points out a number of books in the video, but in general this is an excellent talk about preparing to solve hard problems in bio. [this video]

Cites conorh · 2011-07 · on “Steve Yegge quits Google in the middle of his speech [OSCON Data 2011]”

At around 14:10 in the speech - [this video] Also I'm not sure if he quit Google, or if he just quit the project he was working on.

Cites espeed · 2011-10 · on “Steve's Google Platform rant”

Is Steve Yegge Google's new secret recruiter agent? :) A few weeks ago he publicly quit his "cat pictures" project ( [this video] ) to pursue more noble a quest in data mining. I loved what he said, and at first glance this seemed like a jab at the newly released Google+. But it's actually a bigger knock on Facebook since the "cat pictures" app is Facebook's primary gig, and so far it's only a side gig at Google. I wonder how many FB peeps started to wonder if there really is any meaning in cat pictures. Now it's Amazon -- "Amazon does everything wrong, and Google does everything right", except for 3 things, one being "platforms." But his Amazon jabs are not as subtle as the cat pictures one -- "

Cites readme · 2012-02 · on “Machine Learning for Hackers”

I think these books are not really meant to be a PhD education but more of a tutorial introduction to the field. What O'Reilly is doing right now is really important. As Steve Yegge said, they are "trying to provoke a culture change." Would-be brogrammers will find these books, read them, and graduate from cat-picture projects into more sophisticated applications that can solve real computer science problems. It matters less whether the readers of these books actually get a comprehensive understanding of the theoretical knowledge behind them, then it does that they enrich readers and spread the desire to learn and attain true understanding of the field. Steve Yegge reference: [this video]

Cites cletus · 2012-04 · on “Instagram”

Congratulations on the investment. The return is nothing short of spectacular. It's a truly excellent example of execution and timing . But the point that keeps resurfacing in my mind is SpaceX. SpaceX, from nothing, created a low-earth orbit delivery system that is revolutionizing satellite launches and (soon) the cost of getting men into space... for less than the price that a bunch of people can send photos to each other with cheesy filters [1]. It would be difficult to overstate the impact Elon Musk has had, is having and will have on humanity (and no this isn't hyperbole) through SpaceX (and maybe even Tesla). And it didn't even require, relate to or is connected with some bullshit soci

Cites cletus · 2012-05 · on “All the oxygen trapped in a bubble”

I've called the kneejerk "bubble" reactions "boring" [1] and I stand by that. That doesn't mean I disagree (or agree for that matter). It just means that banal perjoratives with nothing to back them up are boring . To call this a bubble, one must first describe what one means by a bubble. A bubble in my mind is a period of rapid growth in valuations followed by a massive devaluation on such a scale that it hinders investment and innovation. The subprime collapse was a bubble. Many people were left underwater on their mortgages. Building in many places stopped for years. This has a knock-on effect on jobs, related industries and so on. That's a bubble. The dotcom collapse was also a bubble. B

Cites eshvk · 2012-07 · on “The Instagram Effect: Causing Silicon Valley to fund the wrong companies?”

I think there is this (from my limited experience rather naive) belief that if a bunch of smart computer people get together, they can solve problems that have flummoxed biologists for long. This is something pervasive which afflicts even the smartest ones (See Steve Yegge's talk [this video] on how The Data Mining needs to be used more to solve problems in biology). Having spent some time in grad school foolishly believing that all biology needed was a sprinkle of math and a generous dollop of python skills, I think the problem is that in Computer Science we have problems that are sometimes insanely hard but due to the several layers of abstraction, are inherently rather deterministic and much l

Cites jsolson · 2013-07 · on “Ask HN: What happened to Steve Yegge after 'quitting'”

That may have been some people's expectation, but as his public G+ page says[0], he still works at Google. Sergey called his piece a 'night-time aid'[1]. Also Steve's take on it [2]. That said, the OP was talking about his OSCON talk (check out from ~minute 13 onward): [this video] [0]: [LINK] [1]: [LINK] [2]: [LINK]