nbm

28 ms·

211.
by nbm 15y ago
XHP is orthogonal to HipHop, since XHP is available as a module for Zend PHP - https://github.com/facebook/xhp .
212.
by nbm 15y ago
I would disagree here - every percent CPU saved for the same workload is a 1% reduction in the number of machines needed. The number of web machines is sufficiently large that savings of even 1% are praiseworthy. Quite a bit of effort is
213.
by nbm 15y ago
It is "Push karma", so generally only applies to the push process. It isn't visible to anyone but the pushers and yourself (at least, I can't see anyone else's push karma in the expected places). It isn't a complex rating system - there ar
214.
by nbm 15y ago
There is pretty much no way 4 to 5 guys could rewrite "www" in another language in parallel to continuing development from a hundred developers, no matter how long they had. However, 4 to 5 guys could write HipHop. What real-world problems
215.
by nbm 15y ago
We do make extensive use of Facebook messages (many people, including me, make good use of Facebook Messenger on mobile and/or desktop) and of Facebook groups. IRC's ability to quickly create temporary groups, temporary membership (essentia
216.
by nbm 15y ago
Push karma primarily affects how likely the release engineering team will accept any breaking of the standard rules of getting your code into the push. It generally doesn't drop if you are responsive and responsible for any problems your c
217.
by nbm 15y ago
Ignoring technical ways to work around the thundering herd problem, the slow rollout (employees first for several days, then a subset of servers, then a larger subset) also mitigates the problem.
218.
by nbm 15y ago
This deployment of what's called "www" ("dub-dub-dub") is somewhat monolithic in the sense that it is large, but it is not really an "all-or-nothing" deployment. It is tested internally (for at least 2-3 days) by employees (engineers and n
219.
by nbm 15y ago
Wow, I've never heard of anyone in South Africa with a non-government job being asked to have their fingerprints taken. Admittedly, my background is mostly tech startups, but even friends who worked at big-ish companies (Didata, CS Holding
220.
by nbm 15y ago
Send an email to your friend if they are a Facebook employee, or to me (email in HN profile) with your name (or possibly another unique identifier). One of us will forward it to a recruiter to try get it sorted out.
221.
by nbm 15y ago
I don't know the specific amount of data (as a percentage or bytes) accessed, but I think there are two main reasons you might want to know: If you're wondering whether it affected the privacy of data created by people who use Facebook, the
222.
by nbm 15y ago
In general, the time to fix an identified security hole is dwarfed by the time to investigate a breech. You have to identify the actions taken by the attacker and correlate events between systems to understand the extent of stolen, destroye
223.
by nbm 15y ago
Facebook does not ban breastfeeding photos in general - https://www.facebook.com/help/?faq=340974655932193#Does-Face... ?
224.
by nbm 15y ago
Facebook doesn't sell any data to advertisers. It allows advertisers to display an advert to a group of users based on broad demographic and interest information, without divulging information about the user. In some ways, this is similar
225.
by nbm 15y ago
I realise you might be using Facebook as an example in a theoretical sense (i.e., that Apple believes protecting your location is more important than protecting your contact database), but in case you weren't, Facebook's "find friends" feat
226.
by nbm 15y ago
In Facebook's case, this is to protect the user from potentially giving away information about themselves in their Referer header and from potentially malicious links that we didn't have enough information on at display (or email) time, but
227.
by nbm 15y ago
Write throughtput/latency on RAID10 remains consistent with previous numbers (latency perhaps milliseconds faster), but read latency and overall-throughput (as opposed to individual requests) will suffer on the mirror with the bad disk. Rec
228.
by nbm 15y ago
RAID-5 and RAID-6 suffer tremendously in their degraded state - instead of being able to read individual blocks from a single disk, you need to read all the disks (or all by 1 in RAID-6) for any blocks stored on the down drive.
229.
by nbm 15y ago
I've had two bad experiences with open plan offices, two good, and one excellent. The first bad experience was shortlived - I was temporarily in a large room with half-height desk dividers with people doing sales and support calls. I asked
230.
by nbm 15y ago
Keys probably don't have to become unmanageable at scale - you can try use SSH certificate authentication. Sign your keys with a CA, and encode the "principals" that the user has (so, be able to log into some machines as themself, some mach
231.
by nbm 15y ago
Keep in mind that the talk in question is talking about the web site (and some other stuff) going into production, and as is mentioned in the talk, it is done more than once a week, and the whole shebang can be pushed in some number of minu
232.
by nbm 15y ago
Ah, I see. Yes, that might make some of those operations better. Other operations that are common in our workflow might still need to look through the whole super-repo - for example getting a list of all changes (staged or unstaged) in th
233.
by nbm 15y ago
Just a minor clarification - some of the repositories use Subversion (as mentioned in the "Push" tech talk), and some are pure git.
234.
by nbm 15y ago
It doesn't live in a single repository. The commenter I was replying to mentioned "Facebook and all its peripheral development" and a number of lines of code. I wanted to give him a little insight into what sort of things all the peripher
235.
by nbm 15y ago
The example is synthetic, so don't worry too much about the implications. It is useful to keep in mind that Facebook isn't just the front-end (and isn't just code, also images, configuration, and so forth). Just talking about open source st
236.
by nbm 15y ago
I'm not sure this would work - if an operation needs you to stat() a file for every file in the repo (for example), whether it is 10k files in 1 repo or 1k files each in 10 repos will probably just as bad?
237.
by nbm 15y ago
I wouldn't say that a large repository implies that the code is highly-coupled. There are advantages for keeping certain code together in a single repo. Being able to easily discover users of functions of a library, being able to "transac
238.
by nbm 15y ago
Keep in mind that your average repository doesn't only contain code that is compiled and executed (or interpreted), there is also documentation, static assets such as images (that may be processed), configuration, computed files (that may m
239.
by nbm 15y ago
For that and other info, check out the "Push" Tech Talk given last year by the Facebook release engineering team's leader, Chuck Rossi: https://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=10100259101684977
240.
by nbm 15y ago
TechCrunch has no idea who you are when you visit it logged into Facebook. The comments box is served by Facebook, and doesn't provide any information to the hosting site. (I work at Facebook.)

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