Facebook's "code problem" is what really does happen in the real world with such humongous business enterprises.
But does it have to be this way?
Nasa, budget is $19 billion. I can't find a public official record of their code size, but the IIS is approx 6 mil lines of code, and i don't think the other missions they did (all 33 unmanned space missions in total) are too far off, so lets give each an average of 5mil per mission. That's 165 million lines of code. And arguably, probably more difficult code than facebook's domain.
You might not think it, but you'd be wrong. Facebook was for several first years just a set of PHP crud pages and heaps of servers to run them well.
Since then they added their own compiler and such, but the core of what they do is serving web pages at scale.
All known problems, solved by tens of teams all over the world, even at larger scales (Google for one).
NASA's problem on the other hand is quite unique, any errors can cost lives, and their tasks frequently include totally novel solutions for totally novel problems related to space travel, guidance, simulations, materials science, and so on.
Not the same difficulty at all.
Personally, I think we've all got a piece of the elephant here. It is true that there are no known methodologies that could build Facebook at the speed it has been built without producing a globally-incoherent design. Anything that could produce a globally-coherent design would have slowed them down so much that they wouldn't have been such big winners in the first place. (So "globally incoherent" isn't much of a criticism here, really.)
On the other hand, there are options other than "a big set of PHP CRUD pages and heaps of servers" available to us now, too, and I expect those options to continue to advance in usability. Even the various projects that improve on PHP would bring more benefit if you could use them from day one instead of a retrofit.
The other social networks were open season. Facebook made some good design choices with the simple looking UI, and didn't offer the customisations MySpace had. But that's a design choice, not software engineering choice.
HN tends to be rather myopic in that programmers exist to program. Nope. Programmers exist to use a tool to solve a real world problem. The best way to do that is with the minimal amount of design and time required to accomplish the task at the desired level of reliability. Very few projects require anything resembling the "code quality" talked about on HN - in most cases I would say trying to enforce such principles generally result in worse outcomes and folks would have been better off spending 1/10th the money on a 16 year old off elance.com and simply fixed problems as they came up.
Typically the thing that is done the quickest wins, even if the implementation would make you cry. The fact is from a business standpoint - it truly rarely matters. Very little is as critical as people think.
I've noticed the industry becoming vastly disconnected with this fact recently.
Probably true, but it's also important that they did not lose because of the software. There are lot of great ideas that have gone in the drain because of sloppy software.
Twitter was crap at the start, most software in electronics was beyond unusable until recently (in some systems) etc.
You can of course lose because of sloppy software, but if your marketing is done well, I don't see why that would happen. There is an enormous overestimation how much people care about that kind of thing here on HN. From the first decade of the Windows versions to tons of Twitter outages after the launch to getting their computers hacked, passwords stolen, CCs stolen, privacy taken, slow as molasses systems, forced reboots, many crashes, bodged updates, forced updates, virus/malware scanners taking up 50%+ of your /still too expensive/ resources too much of the time, really bad iteration of the Facebook app at the moment (at least on Android), broken airplane booking forms, 404 support pages etc etc etc and yet no-one goes away because most people curse and move on to whatever. Unless your marketing is bad aka no-one uses it, it usually won't fail because of sloppy software.
Here's a great article on how NASA did development on the space shuttles code and the importance of process and quality: http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs162/sp13/hand-outs/They-Wri...
Not an attack or support for your position, just thought it was an amusing choice of words.
In the sense that they gave us React and couple JS tools? What are their other "industry leading open source innovations"?
That's hardly a major "open source innovation". Heck, Google itself has produces 2-3 similar JS pieces (Angular, GWT, Closure compiler, Dart, etc).
OpenCompute (http://opencompute.org), Hack (http://hacklang.org), Phabricator (now spun off, still OSS, https://secure.phabricator.com), GraphQL (http://graphql.org)...none of these are JS tools, all have had major industry impact. GitHub's entire API, for example, is now GraphQL based. And that's just a small sampling.
I can't quite decide if you're being deliberately provocative or just misinformed.
Or maybe I genuinely disagree in your assessment that any of those technologies (apart from GraphQL, and that is still nowhere near major league) had any major "industry impact".
Appeal to authority usually takes the form of skipping making an actual argument for something and instead resting upon "X said so" and not explaining further. This is also not valid but is sometimes a shorthand for saying "X made argument Y," which can be valid if argument Y is valid (in which case the fact that X made the argument is purely incidental trivia).
Criticism of the government from someone who has experience running a large bureaucracy, negotiating, balancing groups with competing interests et cetera will rightly, other things equal, be taken more seriously than from someone whose experience of politics doesn't extend past ranting on Twitter.
Of course, other things may not be equal. If the latter person has sufficiently convincing arguments, can back them up with reference to sufficiently solid evidence, then these things may carry the point on their own merit.
You did not demonstrated enough of knowledge/expeciance for me to take your criticism seriously is valid answer.
If, on the other hand, you say "Al Gore said Global Warming is happening, Al Gore's argument is premise A and B, therefore C" that's not fallacious because your argument doesn't actually rest on the identity of the authority, but the argument they made.
But all of this is irrelevant because it's not an appeal to authority. It's an ad hominem. The author is being attacked for not-being-an-authority.