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Is Facebook profitable? I heard they were cash flow positive but that doesn't mean they are profitable (see GoDaddy). Besides, all we can do is speculate about Facebook revenue at this point - they aren't public and don't publish legally binding financial reports.

Besides, the whole independent division comparison to a whole entity is a little ridiculous. Every company, including Facebook, spends a certain amount of cash flow on R&D, it's a competitive necessity. The fact that Microsoft structures a large part of their R&D into a division shouldn't necessarily be the fault of the division when they don't immediately turn a profit.

As long as they are meeting their internal (revenue/profit/growth) goals, I don't see the problem with giving out bonuses and rewarding the players involved.

Time will tell either way. I suspect the end result of this will be different then either of you have envisioned. All that can be said today is that the experiment is by any measure reasonably successful and there is potential there to go bigger in some capacity.

Unrelated, but it's also kind of frustrating to put time and thought into a comment and then to be drive by down voted.

If you disagree with my comment (which in and of itself is not really a good reason to down vote), then please reply with words. I am happy to have a discussion and talk about it. We both might learn something.

Any company culture is going to have it's controversies. Personally I think too many companies hang on to ineffectual employees for too long.

I read the Netflix slide deck and didn't see anything I didn't immediately agree with. I would not hold their culture against them when looking for a job there.

The one thing I thought was a bit off was "you should ask your manager if they would fight for you to stay". IMO - if the employee is having a performance issue, the manager should bring it up not the employee.

The Honda CR-Z is a great car, it's too bad so much focus is paid to 0-60 times.

I think it's a really innovative blend of driver involvement, education about efficient driving, and sporty driving dynamics. A really cool "hack" of a car.

Should have quantified my statement, mobile software wasn't hot 10 years ago.

Well there's money everywhere - groceries is a 100 billion dollar industry too, I don't think it's the "epitome of zealotry" for MS to ignore groceries.

Mobile wasn't exactly a hot industry 10 years ago. It's the job of a hundred billion dollar company like MS to make big investments in billion dollar markets, sure, but I don't think there's any denying Xbox was a miscalculation on MS's part.

See the market caps of Apple and MS now for lessons learned.

If anything MS mis-calculated with XBOX, thinking Sony was the threat in 2000, but the real threat was Apple. Now it's 2010 and the money is not in the living room (and it never was really), it's in mobile.

Sounds like the AWS architecture caused Netflix to write better code ( read: more durable, more fault tolerant ). Less assumptions baked in the code, and it will be easier to port it to a new data center/cloud architecture if AWS doesn't meet their needs.

As Netflix continues to scale, these changes will make managing that growth much easier.

A lot of you seem to take this post as being negative against AWS architecture. I take it more as a good collection of common things that you need to watch out for in distributed environments, specifically the dangers of assumptions within your current infrastructure which may change dramatically as you scale.

It's a good question, and I should say I know Java very well, but I also know plenty of other languages too. I used C++ before the rise of the web, and I also took the time to learn Python, Ruby, and other languages as they came in and out of the fad zone.

My conclusion is based on my experience with learning these languages. I'll pick on ruby since that is the one brought up the most. I built several web sites using Ruby (mainly CRUD stuff) and my conclusion after having built around 5 web sites with Ruby (versus 7-8 at the time with Java) was that Ruby wasn't any faster or better at solving problems then Java. In fact, usually it was worse, multitudes of libraries with poor documentation and in many cases no clear standard. The language syntax was novel, but language syntax isn't a step function in productivity, at least not for me.

So I continued using Java as my main language, and didn't feel like I was missing anything by not using it. I learned a few philosophies which helped my efficiency a bit, including the "convention over configuration" ethos from Ruby/Rails (my Java code generally has zero XML files), but the niche features each language was selling wasn't enough to counterbalance the deficiencies in productivity which came from using them.

And I should say Java may not always be the best tool for every job, but I've worked on a wide variety of problems (scalable web services, high traffic content sites, ecommerce) and in each case Java, the language and the platform, in my opinion - delivers the goods.

People get too hung up on languages. I want to solve problems, and I'll use the best tool for the job. I know Java, I know how to use Java to solve innumerable problems very effectively and efficiently, so I'll use Java.

I actually lost some respect for Paul after reading this collection of thoughts.

"The wrong people like Java"

"No one loves it"

"The language was made for people dumber then the creators"

etc.

Ruby was made to be as elegant as possible. There is nothing wrong with that.

And I don't "love" any language, I "love" solving problems. My passion is not coding, it's delivering, and Java has never let me down yet.

Groupon also turned them down, so what does that mean?

I guess we'll just have to wait and see, huh?

Secondary markets don't mean anything, let's see if the big investment banks, pension funds, and the real market movers are going to appreciate Facebook's tiny margins and slowing growth.

Again, I don't have the numbers, and no one outside of direct involvement with Facebook (or Groupon) does either, but with the numbers being thrown around, Groupon has so far demonstrated much more capability for running a fast growing, profitable, high margin business.

You could probably take your pick of overvalued companies from the 1997-1999 dot com era. Even if we are in another boom period, Groupon has the revenue, growth, P/E, and market potential to justify the high price tag, unlike it's boom counterparts Twitter and Facebook.

If Facebook and Groupon both IPO'd tomorrow, something tells me Groupon would have the higher market cap, and without looking at numbers, my hunch is it would be the better long term investment too.

Remember, Facebook is already over the uncanny valley - they have 500 million users, and starting to enter a saturated market. Groupon is still relatively small and has a long way to grow.

I see a similar sentiment in this comment section that I saw around the time Facebook rejected the 2 billion acquisition offer from Yahoo.

The fact is, this company has executed well enough to reach a large revenue number very quickly. It's easy to say if you don't work there that they should have sold, but putting myself in this company's shoes, I think their growth potential is actually much higher not being a Google subsidiary.

There's nothing wrong with a bit of honesty.

You need to be mentality prepared for the difficulties inherent in starting a business all by yourself. It is a different set of challenges then corporate life and the more you understand that ahead of time the better off you'll be.

I appreciate advice like that over a superfluous "good luck", "you made the right choice"< etc.

The lack of an official response from Amazon is telling. I wonder if DHS just gave Amazon an ultimatum along the lines of host wikileaks and we'll raid your servers. (Also the DHS/Amazon communication, if there was any, is probably classified so Amazon can't even mention it).

Our government has come a long way since 2000.

I find overall HR/recruiting at big organizations are totally out of hand lately, not sure if they have always been. They ask a bunch of probing personal questions, such as salary, if they offer you a job you have less then 24 hours to decide, even though the whole interview process took several weeks, and the job might involve packing up and relocating across the country, etc.

I've trained myself to start each conversation with the recruiter with the following: I will not divulge my salary information, and I will need at least 14 days from the time I get the job offer to decide. If you are up front it usually isn't a problem. Also it is best to get the hiring manager's contact information so you can potentially go over the recruiter's head. At the end of the day, the HM will care much more then the recruiter.

Don't forget one of the side functions of hacker news is advertising for YC. There's a reason hacker news is news.ycombinator.com and not it's own separate domain.

The President controls the military, can veto bills that congress/the senate passes, and appoints supreme court justices.

Anything else the media claims Obama is responsible for is a disingenuous attempt to garner views by name dropping the President and is actually doing a disservice to all it's readers by misrepresenting how the American political system works.

I think it's probably real. Having played with similar concepts which skirt the copyright issue in similar ways, there are plenty of people out there who send out templated C&D letters to stop similar competition.

I can see from your other comments today that you might be getting frustrated with this topic and I understand. It's not my intention to draw out some asinine debate over the use of the work hacker and hack.

That said, I can definitely understand why the original poster was assuming you use the word hacker in non-conventional ways. Claiming "one who hacks" is a metaphor for a person who implements innovative and disruptive ideas and then claiming "one who hacks" does not equate to a "hacker" is a bit of a semantic train wreck.

For the record, I've never heard of some one who uses "hacks" in that way to describe anything outside of the traditional "hacker" sense. I personally think it is a clever and interesting way to think of the word, and I also don't understand why anyone would be particular upset about it enough to post a comment.

Please tell us about the time you most successfully hacked some (non-computer) system to your advantage.