ambition

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.

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.