I'm the 'Glen' from the Chromium UI team referred to in the bug report; we actually do torture ourselves over questions like this - it comes down to painful decisions about keeping Chrome lightweight.

Sure, a single small context menu item might not make a lot of difference, but there are thousands of features like this, each servicing a different small set of people. In addition to the interface overhead of having all of those features, the engineering (don't forget cross platform, keeping it up to date, translation into 40 languages, and support) is never as small as you think it is.

It's painful because taken individually, we know we could fix an issue and make a set of people happy, but there are never ending piles of these issues, and we none of us want to let Chrome become a never-ending pile of menu items and buttons and extra leading to cruft and bugs.

Now I have made myself sad.

I get the impression that patio11 is doing exactly what he wants to do.

I couldn't agree more. This article was extremely uncomfortable to read; if it was me being written about I would be embarrassed and probably more than a little angry.

Hi, I'm the guy who came up with the splice idea. It's based on what I learned doing this:

www.connectathon.org/talks96/bds.pdf

which was for the EIS (Earth Imaging System) project, a government effort to image the earth about 15 years ago. That project eventually had 200Mhz MIPS SMP boxes moving data through NFS at close to 1Gbyte/sec 24x7. So far as I know, nobody else has ever come close to that even with 10x faster CPUs.

Most of the people in this thread pretty clearly don't understand the issues involved, Rob included (sorry, Rob, go talk to Greg). Moving lots and lots of data very quickly precludes looking at each byte by the CPU. The only thing that should look at each byte is a DMA engine.

Sendfile(2) is a hack, that's true. It is a subset of what I imagined splice(2) could be (actually splice(3), the syscalls are pull(2) and push(2)). But it's a necessary hack.

Jens' splice() implementation was a start but wasn't really what I imagined for splice(), to really go there you need to rethink how the OS thinks about moving data. Unless the buyin is pervasive splice() is sort of a wart.

Relax. A month from now this will be forgotten. What am I saying, a month? A few days from now it will be forgotten.

What scrolls off the front page scrolls out of the present into ancient history.

> That was 11 years ago.

The problem is, these kids are from college. They don't teach you stuff like "writing a secure web application" in college, or even try to.

(Not that this is unreasonable, though perhaps I'm suggesting that there should be different career paths for CS majors and people who intend to be professional programmers. (I say as a CS-educated professional programmer))

I think it's a function of there being too many items submitted every day, and not enough people checking the "new" page. During busy times of the day, if you don't get 5-10 votes within the first 10-15 mins, you're on the 2nd page of the "new" posts area, and you're never going to make it. I'm afraid the end result is that the only posts that will end up on the front-page are:

  1. Where the author (domain) is well-known
  2. Where the title is link-bait
  3. Where the submitter tries to game the system

All of these are bad for the future of HN. I really like the way reddit handles this, of putting a few new items at the top of the homepage and rotating them, so that more people see them and have the chance to upvote. The way things are going, HN is destined to have a front-page full of only linkbait, spam, and/or posts by rockstars.

I agree, but would add this.

Microsoft's (development) tools have never had any underlying principles other than: enabling people with minimal knowledge to get stuff done.

Thinking back through MFC, COM, VB v1-6, Access, SharePoint, WebForms and ADO.NET, none of them were characterised by any particular architectural purity or design aesthetic. But they enabled a generation of corporate developers to hack stuff together quickly (I know MFC and COM aren't all that easy but they were easier than just using the WinAPI). Which is why businesses liked the Microsoft stack and hence 9-5 developers flock to them.

What's interesting is that in recent years Microsoft has been infiltrated by other schools of thought. It's like there's a three way war going on. On the one hand there are VB.NET people using WebForms, EntityFramework, VSS and SharePoint to hack together stuff that will be thrown away in 2 years. The TFS, SQL Server, BizTalk and Dynamics people want to bring in some enterprise style rigour to the whole thing. While the C#, Linq, MVC crowd are trying to keep everything loose and open.

I doubt this is any kind of conspiracy to retain mindshare. It's just that Microsoft got big and Bill Gates started stepping back, so it lost much of it's direction.

I sense a real but rarely articulated confusion among the 9-5 developers about all this new stuff. There are 3x the number of frameworks and tools coming out of Microsoft these days, which ones will all the enterprise recruiters be looking for in 2 years? Nobody knows.

Just tell them the lunch was so good you've decided to stay.

This is an extremely important point, germane to the conversation.. The $120mm was not a funding round -- it was liquidity for founders. Huge difference, and it invalidates much of dhh's original analysis.

I think "black and white" is a problem here... I see no reason why Arrington can't be right while McClure can honestly believe that there was nothing wrong with the meeting.

Conspiracy theories grow on the basis of black and white, good vs. evil, etc. Outside of programming, aren't we all used to varying shades of gray?

I'll admit, when people came down hard on them vis a vis security, I figured it was just a bit sloppy as a preview release.

I was wrong.. these aren't really security "holes" as that's not strong enough a word. I think the best way to put it is they accidentally created the first social network wiki.

How is what lionhearted wrote different from the commentary we place on "superstars" like DHH, Spolsky, and Zed Shaw? It was personal, yeah, but nothing was taken from something that Patrick didn't publish publicly.

I'm not really sure what to think about the article. Running it by Patrick first may have been a better move.

That's a lot more of a response than you owed to anyone, and also a lot more graceful than the one that would have come from me had I been the object of this debacle.

It should be immediately obvious that they're comparing intrinsic value vs market valuation, so no, it's not tautological at all.

Everyone who invests should know that market value does not necessarily predict intrinsic value, and it becomes more problematic when there's illiquidity, and when only a small fraction of the company is being bought and sold. These are basics, going back to Ben Graham's famous book on value investing, and probably much further back than that.

Even if liquidity and size didn't matter, it's still a basic error to go by last share traded and claim that that represents the actual value of the company.

1. The company has supposedly taken just under a billion dollars in venture capital and small secondary-market sales of stock. So the actual money that has changed hands is just 3% of the total evaluation of the company!"

Not true. Sure they have raised $1B themselves, but a lot of stock has changed hands on the secondary market. Facebook sanctioned employees being able to sell stock up to a certain amount, in lieu of going public (employee pressure was part of what prompted Google to go public).

2. "In other words, the evaluation is resting on the flawed assumption that Facebook could actually ever get 33 times as much money to change hands if they wanted to. There’s just no way, no how that’s happening right now. If it could, they’d IPO tomorrow."

Again not true. When you IPO you don't float 100% of your shares. In the case of Facebook, an IPO may not even see 10% of the company listed - ie. not a lot more than what is already being traded in secondary markets.

Most listed companies do not exchange 100% of their stock - not even close. By this reckoning then, no company in the world has a real valuation because at no time is all of their stock available for purchase. The author needs to go to Google Finance and lookup any of the Fortune 100 and see for himself that most have a lot of stock outstanding or not listed.

3. "If the supposed billion dollars Facebook is allegedly pulling in this year was happening at anywhere a decent margin, they wouldn’t have needed a series E round of $120 million from Elevation Partners just three months ago."

You should have read the link you posted, because the story is that Elevation bought $120M of stock from private holders. ie. Facebook didn't raise that money. The last money they raised was $200M (on $10B) from Digital Sky in May of 09[2]

(btw if you did read the story at the link you referenced, the 4th paragraph mentions that Facebook revenue for '09 was $700-800M, not the 200 'best guess, being generous' that you work on).

But anyway, the recent (cheap) money they raised went into CAPEX (building datacenters to lower your overheads) and cashing out some stock holders for a very high valuation for non-voting stock.

Facebook is still at the growth stage so every dollar is (wisely) re-invested in the company in ways that will improve the bottom line. $100M is a drop compared to the cost of building datacenters (the new Google datacenter in Iceland cost 250M - without servers).

Having their own datacenters will reduce their infrastructure costs over time. While it is a lot of money - it will pay itself off within a few years because atm they are leasing space and bandwidth. Not a bad use of what is 1% of their company.

4. "But let’s be charitable. Let’s imagine that Facebook miraculously made $200 million this year — a 20% margin. (I don’t think that’s true, otherwise why take another $120 million from Elevation Partners, but hey, let your imagination roam). That would put Facebook’s P/E at some 165."

How about we Get Real(tm) and say $1.1B this year[1], and that is before they start booking platform revenue from Facebook credits, which will be 30% of everything Zynga et al make (and Zynga made over $500M+ in '09). $700+ in 99, $1.1B+ this year, and at least an extra billion in the first year of Facebook credits. Not bad.

Each time they double revenue you can halve the PE - which is why it is so high atm.

"No outrageous profits after seven years and half a billion users"

They are profitable, and on a trajectory that will see them reach ridiculous numbers. See the more sane and informed discussion about Facebook revenue projetions and the business model here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1718512

(if you are actually interested in learning why Facebook is valued so highly, what the business model is and where it is going - check this link, the conversation took place earlier today and it will save me re-hashing a lot of the points here)

Facebook has reached every corner of the world in short time. We can all agree that their ads suck - yet even with this shitty advertising, which is mostly for Russian brides, they have managed to hit a cool $1B - without even trying. Imagine if they had some real ad technology behind that site. They will do something that Google has failed to do, that is, have two sources of revenue. 1. the ads. 2. the platform - both of these are billion dollar businesses.

What is more depressing than just how mis-informed and terrible this article is? The number of fans in the comments who eat up every word and cheer them on.

(Edit: updated)

[1] http://techcrunch.com/2010/06/22/facebook-revenues/

[2] http://www.crunchbase.com/company/facebook

Point of order... It wasn't a series E, it was $120 million in purchases on the secondary market

http://techcrunch.com/2010/06/28/elevation-invests-another-1...