How I almost killed Facebook | Hacker News Reader

How I almost killed Facebook

matt-welsh.blogspot.com

119 pointswslh16 comments

Another possible title: "How I used to know Mark Zuckerberg"

Yeah, or "Harvard Professor finds title of 'Guy who knows Mark Zuckerberg' more prestigious than title of 'Harvard Professor.'"

He is Matt Welsh, that's far more prestigious than anything else; harvard, google, etc.

He taught a generation of Linux users, then went on to invent what is essentially the bedrock architecture for decomposing complex event-drive systems.

I can just see the Onion article now...

Am I missing something, or does the almost killing facebook headline boil down to "I told him not to bother and he ignored me"?

Yes, you are missing the update at the bottom, wherein he mentioned the readers who are missing the intended irony or the article.

I'm not sure every example of saying something that's wrong can be described as "irony" :/

I did read that, to be honest it just made me slightly more confused.

I have noticed the update but I fail to understand his irony. If he did not suggest to Zuck even indirectly the idea of News Feed who would care about that post and why?

Its all tongue-in-cheek ... get it now? Everybody relax.

Fair enough, but it does seem to me that if it's entirely humerous, it's also entirely not worth writing, yet alone reading.

Previous discussion here, this is a re-run:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=495334

Tks!

good quote (the guy was Mark Z's operating systems teacher):

"It is, after all, my firmly held conviction that the goal of academia is to broadly disseminate good ideas for others to exploit."

I liked this one more:

“Zuck [...] went ahead and built Facebook, and just to prove how useless everything we teach about efficiency and careful software design in CS161 really is, he implemented it in PHP.”

That is a good one. I end up having the thought "damn, a solid implementation of this would really be worth something" when merely skimming half the research papers I come across.

Was not the NewsFeed Sean Parker's idea originally developed for Plaxo (he is cofounder)?

P.s. Its nice to see academicians finally admit that they sometimes do kill creativity and discourage students from innovation.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com