101–110 of 113 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
504731 - 4731st at Dartmouth. They opened it during exam week when everyone was in the library and nearly the entire school registered on one day.
{"is_fb_employee":"maybe soon? https://www.facebook.com/careers/department.php?dept=enginee... }
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…
I don't understand. If they're proxying requests, what would this variable ever be used for? This is at an endpoint for a client or their javascript to consume (or just as a recruiting-marketing tool). That would be redundant if they're proxying requests and insanely silly if it's the only way (instead of proxying) that they flex new features on... as they'd be visible in the javascript and it would be trivial to spo…
{"is_fb_employee":"maybe soon? https://www.facebook.com/careers/department.php?dept=enginee... }
$ curl 'https://www.facebook.com/ajax/flash/user_info.php'
{"user":0,"is_fb_employee":false}
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't understand. If they're proxying requests, what would this variable ever be used for? This is at an endpoint for a client or their javascript to consume (or just as a recruiting-marketing tool). That would be redundant if they're proxying requests and insanely silly if it's the only way (instead of proxying) that they flex new features on... as they'd be visible in the javascript and it would be trivial to spo…
Perhaps an iphone / ipad / android client that makes this request to decide what skin to wear. Just sayin'
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…
We also maintain a robust employee list that is cached in APC on every web host that you can always call an is_employee style function for any user ID on. The careers site in particular has some employee only functionality that this endpoint is probably checking.
According to Facebook, I might be soon an employee. {"is_fb_employee":"maybe soon? https://www.facebook.com/careers/department.php?dept=engineering"}
They changed it since this hit the top of Hacker News, I'm REALLY impressed with the speed of rolling something like that out on the fly.
Now, if you were to browse Facebook through a proxy that always tampered with this result in transit to say you were an employee... might some stray client-side code do anything interesting because it trusted that response?
Even so, "text/html" is still wrong. Since the content actually isn't intended for a JSON parser, but, a human, "text/plain" would be the most conservative (and not wrong).