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Does the web gold rush constitute a brain drain?
1 point by lucifer on Aug 16, 2009 | hide | past | favorite | 1 comment
A while back I was reading up on Dr. Eric Brewer's CAP theorem. That lead to watching his talk on the Computer History Museum [1]. From there, the trail led to the various computer scientists mentioned by Dr. Brewer in that lecture. The trail stopped at Paul Gauthier and diddit.com.

So I am asking HN (and perhaps this is the wrong place to ask this!), but does the web constitute a brain sink, and, what will be the long term consequences of diverting top end brain cells down the web drain?



Yes, the Web is a brain drain. There will always be some people advancing the state of the art while others productize previous innovations; I'm not particularly concerned about the exact ratio at any given time. At some point the low-hanging fruit will be mined out and people will shift back to research.




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