ambition

In the new Auth Dialog, extended permissions have this behaviour built in.

https://developers.facebook.com/docs/beta/authentication/

This particular number counts monthly active users. Your friends with three accounts would have to be active on the site at least once a month in each account for them to be counted in this total.

Solving this problem in general is a major area of research. Look up "Partial Evaluation."

I can't and won't say anything about Google, but I will say that your implication that we Facebook employees are greedy, un-hacker-like and unable to get into Google is inaccurate and unfair.

I can't argue on any objective basis on the financial motivation point. (How would I measure that? How did -you- measure that?) I will say that in my experience my coworkers are primarily motivated by the ability to have a outsized impact and the ability to work with great independence.

Facebook has a crazy-passionate hacker culture. Tons of engineers have really neat side projects, and plenty of these ship. Every six weeks or so we have (voluntary) all night hackathons, where there is plenty of food and drink, and the agreed task is simply to build something cool not related to our usual work.

Finally, P(Could work at Google | Works at Facebook) is really high. As evidenced by a recent news article, hundreds of Facebook people are actually Google alumni. I know many of my coworkers turned down Google offers to come here, and it's practically routine for new grad hires to have a Google offer as leverage in coming to FB.

Check out U of T's Snowflock. Very fast VM cloning and destruction.

http://sysweb.cs.toronto.edu/snowflock

The latest nightlies conform to the latest draft. And Safari 5 supports WebSockets.

But yes, it's an annoyingly volatile standard-in-progress.

What language is this?

Did you report it to Facebook before publicizing it?

If HN members have any questions or comments about the Automata article, I'd like to hear them.

I'm going to work at Facebook soon, and I'm paying very close attention to what's going on. I'm looking forward to seeing the other side of the story as it were.

So obvious, but only in retrospect. This is insight at its best.

Raymond Chen (the author of this article), Larry Osterman and others have been writing great historical MS stuff for years. There's lots of great stuff if you've got the time to read it.

There's no SQL behind Hacker News, the persistence code is custom and straight-to-files.

By your logic all witnessable acts of good must be viewed with suspicion. I don't disagree, but it's a hard way to approach the world.

I'm not sure that the brand awareness of these cases is related to the company naming. For example, I think Bingo Card Creator is well-known mostly because everyone here loves patio11.

Could you give some concrete examples of the sorts of programs you mean?

I think by and large we agree: It's wrong to expect memorized answers or to ask questions that are so narrow that they only test whether a candidate spent time studying. I'd even go so far as to say that algorithmic questions are probably not good indicators for skill at many kinds of work we would call "programming"---i.e. Programming skill is more heterogeneous than many interviewers admit. We shouldn't expect a jQuery wiz to nail low-level data structure questions, and we shouldn't expect a bit-twiddling video codec developer to really grok method chaining in 30 minutes.

The trouble with "Be reasonable" is that's it's the advice equivalent of a tautology. Of course we should be reasonable when interviewing. But I don't think there's widespread agreement about how to operationalize that. I'd be curious for more detail about how you would do it---you seem to have strong, well-informed feelings on this issue.

To my knowledge, there's basically no publicly-available research on tech interview factors and how they correlate with on-the-job performance. The good big employers do this research internally and keep it to themselves. The rest of us are stuck with assumptions, intuitions, logic and argument. So unfortunately I don't think we'll be able to get the debate into the realm of interpreting real data anytime soon.

It's a good idea, and I think it would make an excellent supplement to current interview practices. There would be some difficult logistical issues: Unfamiliar dev environment, etc. It wouldn't replace whiteboard coding, since you lose the ability to test for culture fit, give hints, examine thought process, ask about small decisions, get a gut check and other aspects of whiteboard coding that have nothing to do with the specific question asked.

Some companies ask for a small code sample "that you're proud of" in advance of onsite interviews, I think that's another good practice.

"Gets-things-done" people prepare for technical interviews, such that they don't flub simple questions. The danger for the employer is that lots of Computer Science PhDs end up not writing much code during their research, and may not be a good fit at many tech employers.

"Interview for Smart and Gets Things Done" is an accurate explanatory abstraction over what good interviewers do, but it's not prescriptive enough to tell people what questions to ask and how to judge the results.

That's disingenuous. When they say "no built-in functions", they really only mean "don't use a library function that makes this task trivial." Which eliminates 'strlen' in C, 'length' in Haskell, 'len' in Python, etc.

I've been asked some of those questions at other top-tier tech companies (that the author isn't criticizing).

Conducting good interviews is hard. Watching someone attack a problem or write some whiteboard code is a not-bad system. Pick a problem that's too small or familiar and you're not filtering enough. Pick problems that are too hard or long and nobody will succeed. It's a balancing act.

It is here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1164338

I would love to see posts like this from other companies, since I'm very interested in how people decide on what to build for their startups.

It depends on if you use the American or British pronunciation of "pasta."

You really want to write code only once, and compile it to two targets: One for the server, one for the client. This is really hard to do in all current mainstream languages.

To illustrate: You have some piece of state y, and you have x = f(y) that means "x is always the value of f(y), when y changes, update x." Furthermore x is shared state across many users. On the server side you want that statement to generate code for synchronizing values of x and y across users. On the client side you want to generate code for pushing and pulling Ajax/Comet updates from the others.

What do you mean by "discredited"? People don't really need food, shelter, and self-fulfillment? What has replaced it?

I'm interested in exactly the sort of application framework they seem to be talking about. This is really how web apps (or all apps) should be built.

The Wikipedia link isn't terribly informative, but there's a ton of more relevant literature tied in with functional reactive programming. (That's the FRP in their to-do list). In particular, there's a research project called Flapjax that you can play with right now that drives home how nice it could be to program in this paradigm.

I have two worries about Luna, though. It doesn't look like they're using a nice type system, which will be a pain for larger apps. And I can't say I like that "Finish patent documentation for incremental computing framework" to-do item.

My money is on "Put up a cheap site before building anything" customer development.

The majority of voters don't think that copyright reform is big enough issue to change a vote over.

A minority of voters (you and I included) think copyright should be changed. But we're not big enough to make the change happen. You might think this is a bug worth fixing. "can't vote directly" implies that you think more direct democracy would solve the problem, but I claim the cure would be worse than the disease. There are major unsolved problems with allowing small highly interested groups to influence policy too much, since the system can't tell whether they're (we're) right or not.

By contrast, even if censorship were a major issue on the minds of non-free citizens, they would be powerless to change it. Furthermore, censorship is an auto-immune disease: It harms the system's ability to fix itself and permits many more severe problems. Broken copyright isn't the same. (Corporate sponsorship of politicians, however, is an auto-immune disease too, and broken copyright is a symptom.)

An attack from first principles:

Among the various kinds of power, force is special, because force is the only power that involves active harm. As political scientists see things, the fundamental role of government is to maintain a monopoly on the use of force.

We distinguish liberal democracies from other governments based on how they distribute the authority to use force. Liberal democracies are systems designed to treat each citizen as equal. We treat factors that oppose this equality as bugs[1]. We build subsystems that permit transfer of this authority without the use of force.

Both democracies and other governments use force to maintain their monopoly on force. (Though democracies tend not to need to use it as much.) The difference is that democracies use this force with authority that was freely given to them.

Copyright was created in the belief that it would increase the wealth of a society. It is enforced with authority. If a majority of the population felt strongly that it wasn't working properly, there is a mechanism for changing it that does not involve the use of force. We treat factors that interfere with this mechanism, such as corporate sponsorship of politicians, as bugs.

Censorship by government is a kind of force designed to preserve the monopoly on force. Copyright is not an exercise of power, censorship is. The use of power involved in enforcing copyright isn't designed to preserve the power itself. (Disney doesn't run the police yet.) Finally, if the citizens of a liberal democracy doesn't like censorship, they can elect a new government that does away with it. Citizens under other forms of government have no such recourse.

Moral relativism gets my heckles up.

[1]: Newspapers are our bug tracker, and an unsolved problem is to figure out how to build a new bug tracker.