Hacker News: ambition

New comment by ambition in "I was annoyed with sites asking for too many Facebook privileges and made this"

ambition — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 07:57:04 +0000

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

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

New comment by ambition in "Zuckerberg IPO Haul Could Top $24 Billion"

ambition — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 07:37:46 +0000

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.

New comment by ambition in "Loren Segal: Too Lazy to "Type""

ambition — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 07:07:19 +0000

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

New comment by ambition in "Lars Rasmussen, Father Of Google Maps And Google Wave, Heads To Facebook"

ambition — Sat, 30 Oct 2010 17:30:03 +0000

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.

New comment by ambition in "A blackhat social engineered me by posing as an early adopter of my startup"

ambition — Fri, 24 Sep 2010 06:04:19 +0000

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

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

New comment by ambition in "IE9 To Support CANVAS Tag (plus VIDEO, AUDIO, and SVG)"

ambition — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 04:53:13 +0000

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

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

New comment by ambition in "The Wrong Aesthetic"

ambition — Sun, 13 Jun 2010 17:41:08 +0000

What language is this?

New comment by ambition in "Facebook privacy issue: Google search reveals email addresses in Facebook"

ambition — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 21:08:23 +0000

Did you report it to Facebook before publicizing it?

New comment by ambition in "The.Monad.Reader Issue 16: Automata, Iteratees and Priority Queues"

ambition — Sat, 15 May 2010 19:30:34 +0000

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

Facebook Privacy Guide

ambition — Sat, 08 May 2010 15:08:58 +0000

Article URL: http://www.facebook.com/privacy/explanation.php

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1330264

Points: 27

# Comments: 7

New comment by ambition in "Facebook Tries to Make Violations of Terms of Use Into Criminal Violations"

ambition — Tue, 04 May 2010 22:38:01 +0000

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.

New comment by ambition in "Logarithmic calendar view"

ambition — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 22:01:47 +0000

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

New comment by ambition in "How Microsoft Bob ended up being a part of every copy of Windows XP"

ambition — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 03:51:13 +0000

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.

New comment by ambition in "NoSQL vs. RDBMS: Let the flames begin"

ambition — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 19:11:24 +0000

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

New comment by ambition in "Apple's Tribute to Jerome B. York "

ambition — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 22:39:02 +0000

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.

New comment by ambition in "Poll on Hacker News Brand Awareness"

ambition — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 22:19:09 +0000

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.

New comment by ambition in "Microsoft Job Interview Questions"

ambition — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 16:50:47 +0000

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

New comment by ambition in "Microsoft Job Interview Questions"

ambition — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 16:48:41 +0000

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.

New comment by ambition in "Microsoft Job Interview Questions"

ambition — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 15:52:20 +0000

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.

New comment by ambition in "Microsoft Job Interview Questions"

ambition — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 15:49:41 +0000

"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.