ccheever

Sweet! Thanks. Just replied on GitHub.

Hi- thanks! I open sourced the code so that no one is locked into the service. You can run your own instance if you like very easily.

If it becomes very expensive for me, I'll try to just operate it at close to cost. I don't think this is a huge market, and I just made this as a weekend project because I needed something like it and thought others might find it useful.

Also, the site says you get up to 30,000 verifications for free, so that puts some cap on how expensive this could be.

Does this help you trust it?

If it really helps some cool new services get off the ground, I'm happy to spend a little money on it and in the FAQ it says that if you verify more than 30,000 numbers, we'll ask you to help defray the cost. I don't expect lots of people to verify exactly 30,000 numbers.

i think this is actually reasonable advice because in most systems, the application layer is pretty stateless and can easy be scaled out to more machines whereas the db is usually a central bottleneck.

I think an acqui-hire here is a just a kind of fire sale, and he is just saying that fire sales (including acqui-hires) are preferable to shut downs (get some money for the assets, feels more like a win for everyone involved, employees have continuous employment, etc.)

the status quo is essentially that everyone is 100% leech and downloading from the origin, so even if the ratio is worse than bittorrent, any peering would be a win.

XFBML is different from FBML

Quora is hiring in Palo Alto, CA.

Quora is a question and answer site focused on really high quality, authoritative content. The service has a lot of traction and is growing very quickly, especially recently. We are hiring software engineers and product designers.

http://www.quora.com/about/jobs

For software engineers, we are mostly looking for generalists--who will work on scaling the service as we grow, including work on our real time web framework LiveNode, building and improving rich web application itself, and building new tools and features.

Product designers design and implement the interactions and visuals for the site.

We are also planning on building out our mobile experience more, so anyone interested in iOS or Android should apply.

The company is well funded by Benchmark.

E-mail jobs@quora.com or if you want to get in touch with me directly ccheever@quora.com

We (Quora) have been using PagerDuty for a few weeks and so far, it is working pretty well.

Palo Alto, CA - Quora

http://www.quora.com/jobs

We're looking for designers and engineers.

- Codebase is mostly Python, JS, and C++

- Real continuous deployment (every git push deploys the new version of the code if all the test pass)

- Product w/ traction that is growing quickly

- Hard problems to work hard on

- Smart people to work with and learn from ( http://www.quora.com/about/team )

jobs@quora.com or e-mail me directly at ccheever@quora.com

You can view content on the site without an account, but you need to use Twitter or Facebook to create an account right now and edit anything. We might change this later.

Quora in Palo Alto is hiring software engineers and product designers.

http://www.quora.com/jobs

We're working on a high quality question and answer site.

Some of the tools we are using include Python, Pylons, nginx, memcached, Thrift, and git. We're using continuous deployment and EC2, so all code you write will go live to production within minutes no matter what time it is.

You can see more about our team so far here: http://www.quora.com/about/team

Quora is hiring programmers and designers. Located in Palo Alto. http://www.quora.com/jobs

We're building a really high quality question and answer site designed to be continually improving.

The team is 4 people right now but are growing to 7 by the end of April. We recently raised a Series A from Benchmark.

One of the interesting things we've built is a system for automatically keeping webpages up to date (views are always in sync with the model) without writing any special application code to do that.

You can try out our beta by signing up at http://www.quora.com/hackernews

Basically, at 21:30 "What killed Smalltalk is that in Smalltalk, it was just too easy to make a mess."

+1

i think this is fixed now, but if anyone sees any 500s again, you can e-mail in a bug report to bugs@quora.com . thanks and sorry for the trouble.

Can you send the e-mail address you tried to use to bugs@quora.com? Our validator allows for domains that start with numbers so I think it was rejecting the e-mail based on something else.

Thanks for the thoughtful feedback. One thing we do need to work on for sure is making the good content that is already on the site get surfaced better.

Try looking at these: http://www.quora.com/q/What_s_my_incentive_to_post_answers_o... http://www.quora.com/q/What_s_the_strongest_incentive_on_Quo...

It's true that this doesn't guarantee anything but it does help set the norms for how the site should work.

Yeah. We don't post anything to any service right now, and we'll never do that except when you want it to happen, but I think you're right that people are worried about that since there are so many apps that do that kind of stuff.

Signup from it is a little tricky but we do have an iPhone (+ Android, Palm, etc.) site that works pretty well.

- re: profile pics. pic_square pics are only 50x50 (iirc?), and we needed square pics that were bigger than that.

- re: thumbnails not loading. i've never seen that before. it might be a problem with S3. If you e-mail a link to your profile to bugs@quora.com, I can look through our logs and try to debug more.

- re: feed.

We're making a lot of changes to the feed all the time. Thanks for the feedback.

- re: buttons.

All @artypapers.

We have our own login system. We just use Facebook to connect you to people you know and get your photo. Having real identities for people and having people connected to other people who know them are important for the system to work, and we found that the best way to get those things was to require Facebook to sign up.

We might add other ways to sign up later.

Thanks!

Your photo was probably small enough that different croppings didn't matter, or at least weren't different enough for you to notice. Thanks for the feedback.

Quora (Palo Alto) would hire someone if we found the right person.

Quora is a continually improving collection of questions and answers. We're a startup based in Palo Alto, CA founded by Adam D'Angelo, who was previously CTO and VP of engineering at Facebook, and Charlie Cheever, who led Facebook Platform and Facebook Connect.

http://www.quora.com/about/index

http://www.quora.com/about/jobs

http://www.quora.com/about/challenges

Some of the challenges are highly algorithmic, such as coming up with ways to organize and categorize the information effectively so that users can efficiently find what they need; others are very technical, such as working to make a web application that is complex while still being very fast; and many of the challenges are in product design, such as figuring out a way to set up and grow a healthy community and constructing intuitive interfaces for users.

We are committed to building a cutting-edge technology company that develops software the right way and is a place where engineers love to work. Some of the tools we are using include Python, Pylons, nginx, memcached, Thrift, and git. We're using continuous deployment and EC2, so all code you write will go live to production within minutes no matter what time it is. Both founders are developers. We want to build a fantastically strong engineering team and the first engineers that join us should set the tone for that.

hi.

when i left in march, facebook had about 100 engineers writing primarily PHP code. the engineering team has continued to grow rapidly over the past few months so the number is probably close to 200 now.

Yeah, I wish this were an OS-level toggle.

I wrote a blog post a while back talking about the motivations behind writing bunny1 and the benefits of using it. http://www.ccheever.com/blog/?p=74

Some quick points:

@EAMiller: Cool. One note is that bunny1 doesn't need to run as a standalone server and works fine as a CGI. The instance on bunny1.org is actually running as a CGI. You do need to install some Python modules though, so your version is probably easier to setup for people who have a setup with PHP hosting already in place and not much else.

@rarestblog: bunny1 is inspired on YubNub and it actually falls back to it. Ex. If you do "php array_merge" in bunny1, it figures out it doesn't know what to do with "php" and redirects you to http://yubnub.org/parser/parse?command=php%20array_merge (or something close to that.)

The main reasons it made sense to write a new version and not just use YubNub for what I wanted to do are:

1. Bookmarks/commands written in a real programming language. A few of the most useful ones that are in use at Facebook are pretty complicated and do some things on the server side like talking to databases that would be a mess to try to do with YubNub's macros.

2. Bookmarks/commands version controlled using SCM.

3. Private bookmarks. I didn't want to pollute the YubNub namespace with tens or hundreds of Facebook internal URLs, and since the tool is to boost efficiency, its important that the most common commands be short. Also, even though everything internal at Facebook is behind a VPN, it would make a lot of people uncomfortable if sensitive internal pagess even had their URLs findable by looking through the list of YubNub commands.

Also, if you use Firefox > 90% of the time, check out Ubiquity. It's kind of a similar tool but way fancier. I prefer the portability and lighter weight of bunny1 myself but Ubiquity is more powerful and more user friendly in a lot of ways.

Kind of a funny coincidence... Someone posted this just a few hours after we set up an instance of bunny1 at Quora (where we've found it to be useful even though we're only a group of 4 and don't have a ton of pages to navigate to yet.)