so in the original context of my post... Zuckerberg : Harvard :: hacker : software industry. it's an analogy. I wasn't saying he's a great hacker.

But also the dude obviously is a great hacker. There are vanishingly few people who can bootstrap the infrastructure that will let a company grow to Facebook scale -- you need exceptional depth and breadth of computer knowledge, as well as great focus and an ability to prioritize and satisfice.

>There are vanishingly few people who can bootstrap the infrastructure that will let a company grow to Facebook scale

Well, he didn't do that. He just wrote a crappy basic PHP backend. The "scaling at Facebook scale" part happened later, after people were hired and VC money flew in.

Same like early Twitter was a crap Rails app that they even had to restart a few times a day because of memory leaks. It still got them through to attract users (even though it crashed all the time) and money, so they eventually were able to fix that and grow to Twitter scale.

None of those things happened because of very talented hacker founders. Those kind of apps aren't even very technical or different to the average CRUD app - not until the scale/infrastructure people come in much later: those do the actual hard work.

Cloudflare, Redis, SQLlite, Nginx, ElasticSearch etc, on the other hand, are a different story. Those are absolutely apps/platforms made from scratch by seriously talented hackers, even if others were involved to improve them later on.

> He just wrote a crappy basic PHP backend.

lol. citation needed.

Among geniuses who can build a FAANG company from scratch, I'm sure Zuck is not the strongest software engineer or hacker or whatever. Like, Jeff Dean is undoubtedly a better engineer. Craig Silverstein, too. And Bret Taylor. But if you're going to tell me Zuck is a mediocrity -- not just "a lesser light than Jeff Dean" but an actual mediocrity like us rank-and-file HN-posting losers -- then I'm gonna want to see some evidence.

I would say the fact that he had the drive to quickly learn Chinese and then went to China and actually gave a talk in Chinese suggests he has higher than average mental aptitude.

He studied Chinese daily for four years prior to giving that talk.

Studying a language daily for four years suggests determination and willpower, yes.

But I would expect most people who have studied a language daily for four years to be able to give a talk in that language if they needed to and knew ahead of time. I'm not sure that's a non-average learning time.

> citation

Citations widely available via the obvious web searches. Here are responses on Quora with some details about how the hackers hired by Facebook worked around PHP's limitations.

https://www.quora.com/Does-Facebook-still-use-PHP?share=1

If Mark was a hacker of some kind, he was a growth hacker. That's what Facebook was (in)famous for in its early days - implementing various little psychological tricks that drove adoption. A lot of that came from Mark (initially, pretty much all of it).

I'm not aware of any evidence that he was an exceptional engineer. So what? Why would he even care about being that? As long as you can hire engineers that are better than you, you don't need to be a great one to grow a social network. We're not talking about AI here.

iirc, Zuckerberg did not think up the concept for the like button - which was one of the huge drivers for engagement on the site.

Having said that, I think Zuckerberg was a hacker. He made a few small web apps and one took off. His success shouldn't mean he is not a hacker.

I don't think the definition of a hacker is "made a few small web apps" or "one of his apps took off".

That would make him an entrepreneur and a web programmer.

Not a hacker, which (in this context) is about a great relationship with programming than "making a few web apps".