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finiteloop

1,123 karma · joined March 26, 2008

Bret Taylor.

Co-Founder of Sierra and Chairman of OpenAI.

Previously, Co-CEO of Salesforce, co-founder and CEO of Quip, CTO of Facebook, co-founder and CEO of FriendFeed, co-creator of Google Maps.

btaylor@gmail.com

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finiteloop··on Ask HN: Can Salesforce be a long term career?
Excited to work with you!
finiteloop··on Ask HN: Can Salesforce be a long term career?
I am the COO of Salesforce. Two of the top ten jobs on Indeed are Salesforce Admin and Salesforce Developer, and the jobs are distributed around the world. We have a ton of stories of folks transitioning into the ecosystem and developing an extremely successful career.

Notably, our certifications are freely available at https://www.trailhead.com/. You can get started, learn, and get credentials for free. It is a great place to start, and we purposely made our learning and credentialing free so we could make it as easy as possible for folks pivoting mid-career into Salesforce.

I would be happy to point you in the right direction. My email is bret.taylor@salesforce.com.

finiteloop··on ECC matters
One of the best quotes in the Google quotes file an early Googler maintained (I am sure I am screwing it up):

“I’ve heard of defensive programming, but never adversarial memory.” — Ben Gomes

finiteloop··on A Complete Guide to LLVM for Programming Language Creators
Everyone says that but I have not experienced it. In practice, I think this impacts backend extension developers more than people targeting LLVM IR. My experience covers version 7-11, but perhaps it used to be worse?
finiteloop··on A Complete Guide to LLVM for Programming Language Creators
As someone who writes a lot of toy languages, I made this scaffolding for a LLVM-based compiler: https://github.com/finiteloop/compiler

It uses Bison and Flex for parsing and lexing unlike this post, but may be a useful starting point for those building their own toy languages.

finiteloop··on Stupid solutions: Live server push without JS
At FriendFeed, when we first introduced real-time comments and likes (pretty sure we were the first social network to do this), we did it with long-polling via an iFrame because web sockets did not exist. It actually worked pretty well!

https://www.ft.com/content/87b8107e-9c6d-3d3f-a60d-3e4f6315d...

finiteloop··on Spotify files for its IPO
People file lawsuits when companies have filed for IPO because generally that leads to companies being in a "quiet period" in which they cannot effectively respond publicly, which increases the likelihood of settlement, etc. It is also extremely common for competitors to seed the press with negative story lines, taking advantage of the legally mandated quiet period to remove the filing company's ability to counter these stories.
finiteloop··on Quip launches Live Apps, a collaboration development platform
Developer documentation is here: https://quip.com/dev/

The APIs to build Live Apps enable real-time coediting and online / offline syncing with no special code; you get a ton for "free," and we are super proud of the technology.

We open sourced all the apps we wrote, like Calendar, Kanban board, and more. Available at https://github.com/quip/quip-apps

finiteloop··on Security concerns with minified JavaScript code
Minifying alone is "kind of" important, and the benefits are hard to measure precisely with the combination of gzip, http/2, and the plethora of other network optimizations. However, the more sophisticated JavaScript compilers, like Google's Closure Compiler (https://developers.google.com/closure/compiler/) also do a lot of other compiler optimizations, like inlining functions, eliminating dead code, etc.

When you are working on a large engineering team with lots of JavaScript volume written by a lot of different people, the dead code elimination alone is worth it; it means you can use one function from a library with millions of lines and your compiled JavaScript will only contain that individual function rather than many megabytes of unused code.

finiteloop··on React with C++: Building the Quip Mac and Windows Apps
Our documents are broken into lots of smaller components we call sections. So, in a billeted lost, each list item is its own section.

Sections have a GUID and can be modified without touching any of the other parts of the document. This is useful in that it minimizes most common merge conflicts - they only happen of people edit the same sentence or spreadsheet cell while offline, but simultaneous edits of the same doc generally don't result in the need for any merge algorithm.

For offline edits of the same section, we use a fairly standard three way merge algorithm. Then, we show the edits we chose in the left hand side of the doc with the conversation along with a "Revert" button so you (the end user) can revert if our algorithm was wrong.

finiteloop··on Nate Silver: What I need from statisticians
In general, if the subject includes "science" in the name, it probably isn't actually science. Political, data, social, etc. No chemist needs to say they study "chemical science."
finiteloop··on Introducing Quip
Any and all
finiteloop··on Introducing Quip
1. Works exceptionally on mobile.

2. Works offline. Whether spotty 3G connection or completely offline, our mobile apps work and sync whenever you come back online, even when multiple people are collaborating on the same document. The tech behind this is really cool. And everything is available offline automatically, not just stuff you "mark for offline"

3. Diffs, presence, notifications

More details at https://quip.com/about/features

finiteloop··on Introducing Quip
It's always surreal to read Hacker News threads about the stuff you make. Harsh, but realistic. Anyway, I am Bret Taylor, co-founder of Quip. I am here if you have any questions, etc. (Also posted responses on the existing thread already).

Just to clarify a couple of points I have read:

1. We do support desktops. We have a really nice web app. It is Chrome/Firefox only right now.

2. We have an Android app. It is a "preview release" because it is not feature complete. We released it because it is pretty close, and you can download it at https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.quip.quip. It is early, but it exists.

finiteloop··on Introducing Quip
We don't save your contacts. We use it to find existing contacts on Quip. Sorry it isn't an option.

-- Bret

finiteloop··on Introducing Quip
We run in the browser. Well, only Chrome and Firefox right now, but all soon :)
finiteloop··on Quip - Beautiful Documents on Any Device
We just opened up the file at launch... Maybe caching or latency?
finiteloop··on Introducing Quip
The best part of Quip is portrait on the iPad - just a blank sheet of paper with no toolbars. It is a really nice writing (and reading) experience.
finiteloop··on Introducing Quip
Right now, we natively support PDF export.

We also support "high fidelity" copy and paste, i.e., if you paste a doc from Quip into Word or similar products, it preserves all the formatting correctly. Not awesome and we will improve in subsequent updates, but it actually does most of what you'd need in the meantime.

finiteloop··on Introducing Quip
We support external keyboards and keyboard covers for tablets, both of which are a big step up over screen keyboards. Works really well - I actually have grown to really love it.
finiteloop··on Social Cookbook: an open source Open Graph app
Yah, this will turn into the preview of what it will look like in your timeline once Open Graph officially launches.
finiteloop··on Germany vs. Facebook: Like Button Declared Illegal, Sites Threatened With Fine
The purpose of the Like button is to enable you to share stuff back to Facebook when you click on it. We anonymize all logging data collected as a byproduct of serving the Like button and other social plugins within 90 days of their collection. See https://www.facebook.com/help/?faq=186325668085084.

Bret Taylor CTO, Facebook

finiteloop··on 24in60.com: The last 24 hours in 60-second, unbiased news bites.
The best version of this concept is The Week magazine in my opinion (see http://theweek.com/, though I the print version is really higher quality than the site). It includes all the major stories of the week with references and then covers all the columnists and editorials from both sides of the aisle and from around the world. For me, it is the perfect balance of brevity and comprehensiveness without feeling superficial.

AFAIK, it started in the UK and was "ported" to a US edition a few of years ago.

It is pretty easy to read in an hour or so and fills in all the gaps I missed from my sporadic news reading the previous week.

finiteloop··on You won't find FSF on Facebook
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2283036
finiteloop··on You won't find FSF on Facebook
We delete the logs from social plugins (including the Like button) after 90 days:

https://www.facebook.com/help/?faq=17512

The purpose of social plugins is to enable you to share things to your Facebook profile easily - not tracking.

Bret Taylor CTO, Facebook

finiteloop··on Facebook Acquires Beluga
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2277570
finiteloop··on Facebook Acquires Beluga
We bought Beluga because we love it, too. We bought it because we love the functionality and the team.

So I wouldn't stress too much :)

finiteloop··on RethinkDB internals: making coroutines fast
This looks really cool. I have been messing around with coroutines a lot lately as well, testing libtask (http://swtch.com/libtask/) as well as libcoroutine. Is the source for the changes to libcoroutine available? I didn't see a link from the article.
finiteloop··on Make Facebook Angry, And They’ll Censor You Into Oblivion
We use it to block spam and malware, typically to block mentions of URLs that are, e.g, links to malware downloads.
finiteloop··on Make Facebook Angry, And They’ll Censor You Into Oblivion
This is Bret Taylor, CTO of Facebook. I responded on the other thread (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1932259), but cross-posting here since it is largely about the same issue.

This was a mistake on our part. In the process of dealing with a routine trademark violation issue regarding some links posted to Facebook, we inadvertently blocked all mentions of the phrase "lamebook" on Facebook. We are committed to promoting free expression on Facebook. We apologize for our mistake in this case, and we are working to fix the process that led to this happening.

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