Bret Taylor

"I am nervous and it is hard to put my thoughts together. Sometimes you don’t know what to say." "I have come here today to die, not make speeches." - Bret Taylor

reactions are mixed always - testbeta

i know it is not good to comment on it, but it is like i am in that death chamber listening them say those words, :( i don't know what to say - testbeta

:)) - Nesimi

Cal has already won. USC has lost. Oregon won. The Pac-10 should be fun this year. - Louis Gray

Best TV show ever. Season 4 soon ! - fwed

The third season was not that good. Hope the best for the fourth - Thomas RICARD

"They are now cash flow positive. Yes, from this point forward, Facebook is making money." - Bret Taylor

Haystack looks cool. Maybe if FB could connect with third party oauth'ed photo hosting, they could leave the photos on those services shouldering them with the costs, while having the eyeballs of the users on their site. :) - Ray Cromwell

Inspired by Ben: http://www.benjamingolub.com/e... - Bret Taylor

Thanks Ken and Brett! - Jason Williams

NOOOO!!!! Damn it, why are all my favorite sites being bought up?! - Alex Scrivener

Alex: i echo your sentiment. and yet, i'm happy for the folks who poured blood/sweat/tears into their work and had it pay off. but selfishly, "NOOOO!" pretty much sums it up. - Felicia Yue

"It was supposed to have been Annie Le’s wedding night. But hours after the missing Yale graduate student was to have been married, investigators found a body stuffed inside a wall of the lab building where she was last seen alive on Tuesday." - Bret Taylor

feel bad for family though - john kline

On SportsCenter they made it seem like Nadal had done it the match before though. I dunno if they were messing with the timeline. - Casey Muller

awesome match. I've seen federer put a few of these winners in before, so awesome. - Art

Wow, looks and feels more like FriendFeed. - Mike Doeff

I already gave my feedback to the Lite team. "Just make it even more like FriendFeed." - Justin Whittaker

+1 Justin. It's already a pretty good step forward, though. I'm actually using it now without wanting to blow my brains out. Sounds like faint praise, but honestly that's a huge step forward :) - Joel Webber

Very cool. - Brian Johns

"Real-time updates have become an important aspect of the social Web that make it easier to share with friends. In March, we introduced a real-time News Feed to make the stream as relevant and engaging as possible for users. Similarly, FriendFeed, which we recently acquired, built their entire site to support real-time updates. It hasn't been easy to build and scale these features, so today we're open-sourcing a core piece of infrastructure called Tornado, which was originally developed by the FriendFeed team." - Bret Taylor

Congrats! - Edwin Khodabakchian

the friendfeed style realtime search is great, hope these features can be brought to facebook soon - Mike Chelen

Leo Walkin compared plain Tornado (without nginx) and Erlang on high request rate: http://lionet.livejournal.com/42016... - [email protected]

We have open sourced our web server. Download it at http://www.tornadoweb.org/. Check out the Facebook announcement at http://developers.facebook.com/news... - Bret Taylor

nginx has a configuration option to turn off buffering. - Tristan Seligmann

"Once upon a time, three things held true. Copyrights were relatively short. You had to renew them (most people did not.) You didn’t get one unless you asked. Now none of those hold true. Copyright can last for more than 100 years. The result is that the world’s libraries are full of books that are still under copyright, commercially unavailable and, in many cases, “orphan works” with no known copyright holder. Copyright has exhausted its function, yet the works remain trapped in the cultural black hole." - Bret Taylor

A fine piece. Copyright represents the darker side of capitalism; this notion that individuals have perpetual ownership over their works is quixotic. In fact, there is a larger social contract involved between Artists and society. Artists benefit from access to all the works of the world and society benefits with progress and beauty. Oppressive copyright perverts this contract. - dkb

In other countries it's even worse. Some countries have "artistic rights" where an artist can decide what you're allowed to do with a work after you've bought it; some countries don't even allow you to give up your copyright (you can only give out licenses), so figuring out who owns copyright on a composite work could be a nightmare. - Gabe

Thanks :) - Shannon Jiménez

Happy anniversary! - Ross Miller

Happy Anniversary, Shanon & Erick!! We send you our love! ~Skye & Rob - Skye Miller

up the memory alocation in the browser safari or firefox to to 500 mb - A.Karriem A. Khan

if you just updated the thing then forget it. I had such an issue with the upgrade. Once I did a clean wipe / install... BOOM completely awesome - Braden Douglass

I use it for all my family members on Facebook so I don't miss their updates - Jesse Stay

Alp, hope there is a local # for FFSMS from S'pore :-) - Vic Ted

Amazing level of transparency and detail about their custom storage servers. HN discussion at http://news.ycombinator.com/item... (discusses why this is appropriate for backup, but perhaps not generic storage needs) - Bret Taylor

IMO RAID6 is not that great. Granted, it's highly unlikely to lose 3 drives at the same time, but there's still possibility. Besides, for write-intensive app, parity calculation is quite time-consuming. I personally prefer RAID 10 (striped array of RAID1 pairs). Yes the effective usable space is less than half total capacity, but for backups -- which will sooner or later be used to restore something -- I prefer data integrity over usage efficiency. - Pandu ● IT Optimizer

I had no idea they forced him to get chemically castrated after he admitted he was gay. Disgusting. I hope the government officially apologizes for killing one of the great minds of that generation. - Bret Taylor

ACM Statement Regarding British Prime Minister Gordon Brown's Apology on the Treatment of Alan Turing ACM (09/11/09) Hall, Wendy ACM applauds Prime Minister Brown's statement on the treatment of Alan Turing, writes Dame Professor Wendy Hall, ACM President. ACM has long celebrated the fundamental contributions of Alan M. Turing not only for his instrumental role in British code-breaking efforts that hastened the end of World War II, but for his insights to the mathematical underpinnings of computing and computer science, which continue to drive innovation and produce unimaginable advances in science and technology that have made the world a better place. As a consequence, the most prestigious award in computing and computer science, the A.M. Turing Award, was established by ACM in 1966, and named after Alan Turing. ACM looks forward to joining with other organizations to celebrate the centenary of Turing's birth in 2012. - eugenio

Fun feature on the stories behind Apple and Microsoft's ad campaigns. "Apple’s ads put Microsoft in a bind. One of Madison Avenue’s rules is that a market leader never acknowledges a smaller competitor in its advertising. What’s more, if Microsoft responded with ads that backfired, it would look just like Mr. Hodgman’s character. Maybe it was better to grin and bear it." - Bret Taylor

I think Microsoft can take huge advantage of the door Apple opened, but will they, who knows. The have taken baby steps, there is a whole runway ahead of them if they want to pursue, just flip the coin, how many presenatations have you witnessed where the Mac wasn't compatible, I'm talking 2009 here not 2005. - Louis Moynihan

lol... maybe: “You are not so embarrassed to take your PC out of the bag on a plane anymore,” said Mr. Reilly at the ad agency. “It’s actually kind of cool that you do. I know this is working.” - Christopher Chung

Yum! - April Buchheit

If you are impatient AND like thick sauce like me, you can always strain regular tomatoes through a screen. - Clare Dibble

"We are excited to announce the limited beta of Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), a secure and seamless bridge between your existing IT infrastructure and the AWS cloud. Amazon VPC enables you to connect your existing infrastructure to a set of isolated AWS compute resources via a Virtual Private Network (VPN) connection, and to extend your existing management capabilities such as security services, firewalls, and intrusion detection systems to include your AWS resources. Amazon VPC integrates today with Amazon EC2 compute resources, and we will integrate Amazon VPC with other AWS services in the future." - Bret Taylor

Will this be enough for the pharma companies to start using the cloud too? - Egon Willighagen

Egon, to start using? What do you think keeps me so busy :). But yes, it will definitely accelerate usage for certain workloads - Deepak Singh

About Craigslist: "I do not believe we should criticize a company that operates like this. We should learn from it. Of all the Internet companies out there, the one that serves as the most iconic for our firm is craigslist, not Google. We dream of funding a company that can be worth a billion dollars with only 30 employees. We've never done it and I don't know if we ever will. But we are going to try again and again and again." - Bret Taylor

Isn't that kind of like saying they want everything for nothing? Or they want a grand slam with a tiny-tiny investment? And that they are going to keep trying for that over and over again? I understand the desire to learn from Craigslist but what exactly are they expecting to replicate? Timing? - Hayes Haugen

Well, I just read the quote, not the whole post. And from that, I'll say that craigslist is the model company for a vc firm. High income, low cost, simple organizational structure. Who wouldn't want that? - Zach Landes

I don't follow: "Only programmers, customer service reps, and accounting staff work at craigslist. There is no business development, no human resources, no sales. As a result, there are no meetings." - Doug Beeferman

I'd send it to my mom but I'd face the same problem in the alt-text. - EricaJoy

I wondered how Jim diagnosed and fixed our computer problems. - Anne Bouey

Hahaha... the alt text is amazing! How is XKCD so consistently awesome? - Ross Miller

Great TechCrunch article tearing apart Apple's BS response to the FCC. - Bret Taylor

"Despite publicly breaking with an American private security company in Iraq, the State Department continues to award the company, formerly known as Blackwater, more than $400 million in contracts to fly its diplomats around Iraq, guard them in Afghanistan, and train security forces in antiterrorism tactics at its remote camp in North Carolina." - Bret Taylor

@LANjackal: I don't think anyone here seriously thinks things are all rosy "over there", or that we're going to have polite officers reading terrorists their Miranda rights. But you're conflating that with the wholly unrelated issue of whether we, as a nation, should be outsourcing assassination to private entities that exist in a legal gray area. The problem with companies like Blackwater is that they are acting on our behalf, but with very uncertain legal accountability. And events in Iraq have shown them to be, at times, less sensible than our own well-trained soldiers. - Joel Webber