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CS50 Lecture by Mark Zuckerberg - 7 December 2005

CS50

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  • Recommended by 2 people: 2 on Hacker News.
  • A classic. People kept recommending it from 2022 to 2025.
  • Presented by Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook

Beginner. No background in the topic needed.

9.5M views12 years ago2 recommendations

History and cultureCareers and interviewsHistory of computingInside tech companies

Mark Zuckerberg delivers a guest lecture to Harvard's CS50 class in 2005, discussing the early technical architecture and growth of Facebook.

On 7 December 2005, Mark Zuckerberg joined CS50 for a guest lecture about Facebook and computer science. With Professor Michael D. Smith. Shared with permission. *** HOW TO SUBSCRIBE youtube.com/subscription_center?add_user=cs50tv HOW TO TAKE CS50 edX: cs50.edx.org/ Harvard Extension School: cs50.harvard.edu/extension Harvard Summer School: cs50.harvard.edu/summer OpenCourseWare: cs50.harvard.edu/x HOW TO JOIN CS50 COMMUNITIES Discord: discord.gg/T8QZqRx Ed: cs50.harvard.edu/x/ed Facebook Group: facebook.com/groups/cs50/ Faceboook Page: facebook.com/cs50/ GitHub: github.com/cs50 Gitter: gitter.im/cs50/x Instagram: instagram.com/cs50 LinkedIn Group: linkedin.com/groups/7437240/ LinkedIn Page: linkedin.com/school/cs50/ Quora: quora.com/topic/CS50 Slack: cs50.edx.org/slack Snapchat: snapchat.com/add/cs50 Twitter: twitter.com/cs50 YouTube: youtube.com/cs50 HOW TO FOLLOW DAVID J. MALAN Facebook: facebook.com/dmalan GitHub: github.com/dmalan Instagram: instagram.com/davidjmalan/ LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/malan/ Quora: quora.com/profile/David-J-Malan Twitter: twitter.com/davidjmalan *** CS50 SHOP cs50.harvardshop.com/ *** LICENSE CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International Public License creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ David J. Malan cs.harvard.edu/malan malan@harvard.edu

Why it's here

2 people recommend this

What people say. Engineers recommend this video as a fascinating historical look at Facebook's early days, technical choices, and scaling challenges.

syspecon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Mark Zuckerberg on the Lex Fridman Podcast [video]”

It's easy to poke fun at Mark because he's mega rich and can come off a little stiff, but he's pretty interesting to listen when he's speaking without a script. Here's Mark when he was 21 giving a lecture at Harvard's CS50: link to this video
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alpine01on Hacker News • Recommends

On “Why is everything so scalable?”

There's a now famous Harvard lecture video on YouTube of Zuckerberg earlier in the Facebook days, where he walks through the issues they hit early on. link to this video I watched it ages ago, but I seem to remember one thing that I liked was that each time they changed the architecture, it was to solve a problem they had, or were beginning to have. They seemed to be staying away from pre-optimization and instead took the approach of tackling problems as they had as they appeared, rather than imagining problems long before/if they occurred. It's a bit like the "perfect is the enemy of done" concept - you could spend 2-3x the time making it much more scalable, but that might have an opportunity cost whi…
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dansoon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Angular 2 versus React”

…to develop around the Unix philosophy? Yes, I know that Google is a monolith, but it became a monolith over one very specific feature and mission, whereas Facebook had to accompany many kinds of user-interaction and behavior right from conception. When Zuckerberg guest lectured CS50 (more than 10 years ago), he didn't foresee FB doing open-source: link to this video Excerpt: "There's a lot of work that goes into making stuff open source. And it's on top of whether or not you want to lose the competitive advantage...there's a lot of support and licensing and all that stuff. We found that it's been annoying" Yes, I know FB of 10 years ago is nothing like it is today, with much different people and compon…
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zangikuon Hacker News • Mentions

On “500 Startups admits it kept Australian partner in the dark”

The ones that are good at building something (or at least focused on it) won't be wasting their time trying to "give back" (read: find other opportunities). Zuckerberg did some very minimal "giving back" while building Facebook IIRC (the biggest being an actually useful course he visited at Harvard called CS50, here: link to this video )
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dansoon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Facebook asks users for nude photos in project to combat revenge porn”

…was in private IM messages as a 19-year-old, he's no longer the sole captain of his tiny boat. Him breaking the law means that many people end up getting in legal trouble, i.e. it doesn't really much matter what he alone thinks is moral when he has dozens of people/potential whistleblowers looking over his shoulder with greater moral concerns. 0 link to this video…
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MMS21on Hacker News • Mentions

On “CS50 Lecture by Mark Zuckerberg (7 December 2005)”

link to this video Timestamp of the zucc talking about privacy "We care about it, because if people feel like their information isn't private, then that screws us in the longterm, too."
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paulsutteron Hacker News • Mentions

On “Beating the Averages (2001)”

But what happens if a company chooses truly the worst language. Like PHP? Oh, right. That was Facebook. They ALSO ran circles around their competitors and crushed them. I hear they are worth /even more/ than Viaweb! Great PHP story: > Dustin was like, 'Hey, I want to help out" > Zuckerberg told Moskovitz, "That's pretty cool. But you don't know any PHP." > "That weekend he went home, bought the book 'PERL for Dummies,' came back, and was like, 'OK, I'm ready to go,'" Zuck said, and told him, "The site's written in PHP, not PERL, dude." - link to this video
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simonhon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Bill Watterson’s refusal to license Calvin and Hobbes (2016)”

I suspect the difference is that in the past the only way to go commercial was to work with a big corporation. Going to market with something was so hugely expensive, and required extensive marketing and distribution infrastructure, which was all internal to these big concerns. The problem was these companies expected a lot of invasive creative control and long term contracts to give access to those capabilities, which to be fair were hugely expensive to build and operate. Nowadays all of that infrastructure exists as generic services on the internet you can throw together in a few days, with costs that scale with your needs. I recently watched a Q&A Mark Zuckerberg gave to the Harvard CS50…
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dustedon Hacker News • Mentions

On “My Criteria for Picking Startup Ideas”

I'd speculate that knowing/discovering/finding the answer to that question is at the very core of why he built the service. I recently watched a 2005 guest lecture1 by Zuckerberg, it hit me then, why facebook became the success it is/was. The core insight, was the "people you may know" feature, even though that's obvious when I say it, and think about it.. It never struck me before, that, facebook could have been anything (and, was indeed very different back then) and still have succeeded because solving that problem in a seemingly more efficient way at the time then nobody chocked on it. 1 link to this video
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