nikolayav

As a Facebook engineer, I'd say the score is 10 or 11, depending on your interpretation of the tools item.

Which is why you can still also access the granular controls and choose different privacy for those items.

The same tool is available on Facebook itself. Type a query in the bar at the top of the page, click on More Results, choose Posts by Everyone from the filter on the left.

It's related to acquisitions in a different way. That was mostly an attempt to put Docs(Writely) and Spreadsheets on as much common infrastructure as possible.

You will remember that the original versions of these products were independently developed and then acquired by Google.

Still haven't seen the results, but I assume they threw in a few features on the way also. Docs had seen no interesting additions in quite a while despite the very capable team. So now it is coming out of maintenance mode and will hopefully add features and stay relatively responsive.

Simply put, I counted 6 people reporting this here (I am one). My attempt to estimate how many people read this: X HN daily actives, each looks at Y threads a day (random out of 30 they see), one in Z posts to the thread.

Quick check with Alexa gave me something on the order of 2 million for X, that seems really high to me, let's say X=100k (even this seems very generous). Y and Z are pretty tricky, using a gut guess of Y = 5 and Z = 10:

6 * Z / ((Y * X) / 30 ) = (6 * Z * 30) / (X * Y) = 6 * 10 * 30 / (100000 * 5) = 0.0036 = 0.36%

0.36% of the HN audience. Very back-of-the-envelope.

Any service that uses any sort of contact importer will need your password if you would like to get any use out of said importer.

How can anyone read your GMail contacts without your logging into your account?

If the utility of this tool is lost on you even though this password is clearly not stored anywhere, you can manually go out and find on-Facebook friends yourself.

We ran 5 miles at midnight yesterday for Facebook's 6-year anniversary :).

It clicks with my intuition.

In one particular area of programming, competitive programming, productivity is easier to measure.

One might call Tomek Czaijka the Federer of algorithmic competitions. As of 1.5 yrs ago, he had made more than $130k off of TopCoder competitions [1]. Seeing as how he is still ranked 3rd, this figure might be outdated [2].

I can assure you the average TopCoder contestant who has competed over a comparable amount of time made way less than $130k/30 ~ $4300. Easily more than 30 times the productivity.

You can argue about how coding up toy programs compares to working on products. I suspect there is a strong correlation though.

As a point of reference, please consider Steve Newman, who co-wrote Writely which was subsequently acquired by Google and is today the word processor of Google Docs [3]. He must have made some money in the process and was also successful at topcoder.com [4].

That being said, I do knew similar people with astonishingly low "product" productivity.

1. http://www.portfolio.com/careers/job-of-the-week/2008/07/06/...

2. http://www.topcoder.com/tc?module=MemberProfile&cr=14440...

3. http://www.seattlepi.com/business/262443_googlewritely10.htm...

4. http://www.topcoder.com/tc?module=SimpleStats&c=coder_ac...