I'm an Engineer for Facebook and am helping build a Facebook office in NYC. AMA | Hacker News Reader

I'm an Engineer for Facebook and am helping build a Facebook office in NYC. AMA

reddit.com

44 pointstaylorbuley23 comments

"i probably shouldn't talk for that team too much, but generally we think of ads the same way we think of other communication on fb. if it's starbucks talking to their fans it's not fundamentally different than me talking to my friends. so we're not trying to shove ads on the side and pray people click on them - we're trying to integrate them more with the other naturally social stuff on the site. I think sponsored stories are going to be huge, for instance"

Looks like some kool-aid over there about advertising. A brand advertising to its customers is the same thing as someone talking to their friend? Since when? They are not trying to shove ads on the side and pray people click on them because they know people increasingly will ignore them. Instead, they've opted for tricking you into clicking them by putting them in your feed with your friends' avatars slapped on top.

I do like following the updates of the businesses I "like" on Facebook. I would be accepting of Facebook taking payment for businesses you "like" having their latest postings at the top of your news feed. That's not disruptive to the site, and they already know you like that company. I also wouldn't be disappointed if Facebook took payment for businesses your friends "like" putting their updates at the top of your page, as long as you can click the dropdown and say "don't show me posts from $company" until you "like" them as well.

Product placement isn't disruptive as long as it makes sense. I feel Facebook should know enough about their users to make the call on if the user would like to see that post. Notice I say "post", not "ad". I want to see companies the way they are, not the way their ad firms want me to see them.

I love my friends, but I don't take purchasing cues from them, and certainly not because they 'like' it on Facebook.

Sure, there are edge cases. But generally, 99.999% of the time I don't want product updates from companies whose products I use.

Likes are a pretty useless signal, IMO. So many businesses offer contest entries or coupons for "Liking" them, that many users (if most of my friends on FB are any indication) have Liked tons of businesses they've never had any interaction with.

This is part of the reason I think FB's advertising value is overrated - a Like is so noisy that it is almost useless, whereas other entities may have actual purchase data, which is far more useful than a "Like".

Not sure there is much better out there for pushing continuous engagement. I want to keep people interested in my business, I don't want to overdo the mailing list though, especially not for little things that work much better as a small Facebook post.

Facebook's view of ads is that it's a conversation.

Google's view of ads is that it's information.

Either way you're going to find we're entering a world where ads are naturally integrated into everything and sometimes you do want it.

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/we565/im_an_engineer_f...

now that we've done that we can change the language (we've added a ton of stuff like yield, type hints for primitives, new scoping rules, native HTML elements as real classes etc.) and we're building our own VM and JIT for it. so it's only php kind of.

[...]

b) generally php has only two scopes - function scope and global scope. you can get into trouble with this since something that looks like it should be out of scope is, surprise, still the same variable later. we made it have real scope, like in most other languages

For me, my neews feed is getting more and more noisy , less valuable and diffuclt to consume.

I block all apps, have few likes, and have silenced my chatty aunties... not too bad now.

I spent the time to properly curate my feed. In recent time it got to the point where I completely ignore it.

You can silence people without unfriending them? TIL

You can also tell Facebook if you specifically want more or less updates from specific friends, without completely unsubscribing from them. When hovering over a story, a "down arrow bookmark thing" appears in the top-right of the story, and gives you many options for controlling your experience with that user/page/app.

I would rather it present me with more status update noise than keep missing heap. Given the option I would prefer more statuses from people I have added as friends than more page/ "100,000 people have liked this picture" spam

I imagine the episode of the Dilbert TV series where Dilbert had to design the new office.

His/her ARP anecdote actually sounds like an STP problem, rather than ARP.

Can you elaborate?

Sure, STP is described at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanning_Tree_Protocol

When an 802.1D capable bridge appears on a network with STP, the other bridges will all drop their forwarding table and learn again from scratch.

Failure mode sounds spookily like the one described.

I, for one, was surprised by the lack of PHP related vitriol.

Having read the article I have to conclude that his email address is broken as "go ahead and email me at hiremeserkan@gmail.com and I'll go through it this week"

Does not have @facebook.com anywere!!! Or is this a perk of working for facebook?

Our email addresses are actually @fb.com -- as for the rest of your comment, wat?

No that was the only part of my comment - I was asking as the mass conversion of alot of peoples emails(1) and contacts due to `bugs` to facebook.com(2) recently to all the facebook users.

This and given he is using a gmail account, how do we know he works for facebook? So do people who work at facebook have a @fb.com email address only? Why did he not use that email address?

References in case your oblivious to the user interaction aspect of facebook transpiring recently.

(1) http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-18590929 (2) http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-18687044

Sorry, I didn't grasp that context from your comment.

Since employees are "normal" Facebook users like everyone else, we were also subject to having vanity@facebook.com added to our profiles, and I for one immediately replaced it with my personal email address, just like anyone else can do.

By contrast, our @fb.com address is our "official" account that goes to a standard email client, and has no relation to our actual Facebook profile. Some of us (including me) still prefer to use our personal email address for anything not directly related to work topics.

And for what it's worth, I can vouch for the authenticity of the FBSerkan account on Reddit.

Thank you for confirming that @fb.com is only for employee's and also for vouching for the authenticity of FBSerkan. Good enough for me and thank you.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com