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Comment by yid | Hacker News Reader

> They (Oculus) now have many many more times the resources at their disposal than before to make countless imaginative projects.

An acquisition into a company like Facebook is not quite carte blanche to chase "countless imaginative projects". There are VPs and PMs, budgets and headcount, inter-departmental politics and of course final approval from Sheryl Sandberg, David Ebersman and Zuck. No matter what the press releases say, autonomy will be lost to a degree, progress will be slower and more considered, and your imagination will have limits.

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Hmmm that's not quite how Facebook works -- not everything needs final approval from the C-level suite (hell, that's their selling point to new hires.) And having some structure isn't always a bad thing - as long as it's the right kind. And I think it is in this case.

> not everything needs final approval from the C-level suite (hell, that's their selling point to new hires.)

Would you care to back that up with anything (not the part in parentheses)?

Why does everything on this site need to be backed up? Am I supposed to take a personal interest in your epistemic state as a matter of charity?

If you said you had your wallet in your pocket no one would ask you to back it up. If you said you had invented a perpetual motion machine, people would.

Claiming that the C-level executives of a company don't have final say in or control of projects and budgets falls into the second category.

Except that's not what he said. He didn't say that the C-levels didn't have control, just that they don't have to approve everything that you want to do.

"Nullius in verba"

Pretty awesome policy for a discussion board. I know I'm looking forward to the next 10,000 "citation needed" comments!

Call me out of touch, but why do Facebook employ so many people? After the main structure of the site that permits you to have a wall and a feed, what else needs writing?

I don't get it.

Scaling that infrastructure to literally billions of simultaneous users, spread over the whole planet, is something that needs constant innovation and maintenance.

Just one example for "what needs writing".

Pedantic point: it's unlikely to be billions of simultaneous active users. They have ~757m daily active users, so that's around 32m per hour. Even with external requests from sites using FB services (which the daily active number may include - they don't seem to specify at http://newsroom.fb.com/company-info/ ) and several connections per page load, I'd be surprised if it was even close to multiple billions of simultaneous connections, nevermind users.

However, they are still dealing with damn impressive numbers :)

Most "daily active users" are likely to be logged in more than one hour (especially those using FBs Messenger) and on multiple devices (e.g. cellphone with the app and messenger, and on the desktop the "normal" website), so I'd estimate the simultaneous peak count at something like 200-500m connections.

Also, there's a bazillion requests coming in from every website which has FB Share/Recommend buttons or FB Login active...

But they just employ two DB administrators, as they outsource the rest of the MySQL maintenance to Oracle, as far as I knew? Do they really keep adding vast swathes of site content that needs an army of developers?

The rumour was the Sandberg wasn't consulted when Instagram was acquired. I wonder if she was consulted for these recent acquisitions.

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