Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Are you a Facebook employee?

facebook.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 113 posts

Re: Are you a Facebook employee?

#51

Post by Jarred »

I think this is_fb_employee variable is to check if they should be running the internal testing version of Facebook. Facebook has a subdomain which, in their offices everyone is redirected to. It's something like 'preview.facebook.com'. It houses the latest testing build of Facebook. This way all the employees are testing Facebook just by being on it, and they have other people testing their new builds for short periods of time (~2 weeks). Chances are, the server checks if the user is at an IP of a Facebook office, and that's the only condition where this is true. This would make sense because if they just redirect users to Facebook.com in their offices to preview.facebook.com, then nearly anyone could do it. This would also help prevent leaking of new features as well, because employees wouldn't be able to access them outside of Facebook.

They mention this in the Facebook Effect (http://www.amazon.com/Facebook-Effect-Inside-Company-Connect...). Or, at least the part about an subdomain for testing their website in-house. Everything else was me analyzing that.

Re: Are you a Facebook employee?

#53

Post by mitchty »

Jarred wrote: post #51

I think this is_fb_employee variable is to check if they should be running the internal testing version of Facebook. Facebook has a subdomain which, in their offices everyone is redirected to. It's something like 'preview.facebook.com'. It houses the latest testing build of Facebook. This way all the employees are testing Facebook just by being on it, and they have other people testing their new builds for short peri…

Why not just setup a proxy.pac file and proxy all internal ip's to the test domain?

Re: Are you a Facebook employee?

#54

Post by KleinmanB »

bmm6o wrote: post #29
[deleted] wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[deleted]

We get it, you guys have seen Office Space. It doesn't contribute positively to the discussion.

The only thing that stands as a non-contribution is your need to publicly proclaim a lack of a sense of humor.

Re: Are you a Facebook employee?

#58

Post by iqster »

martingordon wrote: post #31
the_cat_kittles wrote: post #7

wow, I am the 49,200,124th user? we should see who can get the lowest score...

600,343 (343rd user at Penn) Assuming similar adoption rates at the 4 other "second wave" schools, I'm probably one of the first 5-10k users of Facebook.

May I ask how you know your join-order at your school?

Re: Are you a Facebook employee?

#59

Post by IsaacL »

the_cat_kittles wrote: post #7

wow, I am the 49,200,124th user? we should see who can get the lowest score...

My own id is quite high, however... About a year ago I wrote a script to scrape Facebook users and their friendship information. I wanted to get the social graph of my university (Warwick), so I seeded it with me and a few random friends from the same school, and coded it expand nodes already well-connected to the network. It turns out that university students form a fairly tight international network, so my script starting scraping people from other universities, including some colleges in the US. Anyway, when I only had a few thousand users in the database, I noticed there was one with FBID 7 - Mark Zuckerberg's old roommate. Pretty cool how few hops were needed to get to him (and shows how FB managed to grow so quickly amongst the uni market).

Re: Are you a Facebook employee?

#60

Post by taylorbuley »

martingordon wrote: post #31
the_cat_kittles wrote: post #7

wow, I am the 49,200,124th user? we should see who can get the lowest score...

600,343 (343rd user at Penn) Assuming similar adoption rates at the 4 other "second wave" schools, I'm probably one of the first 5-10k users of Facebook.

I'm 601804, also from Penn. Does 6xxxxx denote school?
Post reply on HN