I just use the translation of Hafez that comes on the back of the bag of chips.
A very different kind of perfect chocolate chip cookie to geek out about (or mock).
Perfect should be empirically specified. Otherwise the project is of no use.
Twitter has some pretty intense R&D going on, which isn't super-surprising; it's an incredibly high volume service with some interesting technical challenges. (Netflix seems to have about 2000 employees, just as a comparison.)
Mr. Lopez-Alt and I have different tastes in chocolate chip cookies. I do not want shavings from the chopped chocolate to blend with the dough. I like a high contrast between chocolate bite and cookie bite.
I thought bootstrap was basically a side-project of a couple of twitter employees?
So don't put the shavings in. He is a tolerant man.
Snarkout, don't those links (well, one of them) prove my point? Bootstrap was built by two guys, according to the page you linked. Say it took five guys, or even ten guys, to build the other two, and say there are five more projects we haven't heart about. We're still nowhere in the ballpark of 2300.
I thought the Atrios question was one of the stupidest fucking things he ever came up with.
Don't forget the 1500 hookers, Ogged. You always forget the 1500 hookers.
My favorite part of that Twitter thread is all the people saying "Twitter's gotta have 100% uptime, if it only had 99% people would stop using it". Somewhere the failwhale sheds a single tear.
The cookie article is pretty phenomenal, and I've spent a lot of time over the past month or so thinking about it. I agree with Megan that the swirled-in shavings seem suboptimal -- I like the melty pockets. But the tip about resting the dough worked like a charm.
10. Jack Dorsey has 700 wives and 300 concubines.
Oh yeah, and if you want to get a sense of what Twitter's working on, the Engineering feed is a good place to start.
9: I thought it was an honest question, one I have as well, chiefly because I do not understand how technology corporations work: it often sounds to me as though there are a lot of people spending time in useless meetings, 'brainstorming' and chowing down free food and whatnot. I have the impression that a great deal of money goes into salaries and benefits and perqs.
That said, sure, you'll need a decent amount of staff keeping on top of backups and redundancy and looking toward future needs in that department, and some proactively sussing out competitors and looking for ways to be new again, others looking for ways to bring in users who've been resistant -- tech needs always to freshen itself (like fashion, that way) and check its own status. It sounds ultimately hideous as a life endeavor, to me. OR maybe they have a bunch of legal and international relations types working on expanding access worldwide.
I guess I could get to 2300 that way.
I have the impression that a great deal of money goes into salaries and benefits and perqs.
This is not specific to tech companies.
Stormcrow seems to know why they need 2300 people, but I still don't. I mean, if you tell me that they do a crazy amount of r&d, such that 1500 people are working on that, ok.
Yes, perhaps I was overly harsh; the question of how many employees a company like Twitter might have is an interesting one. But upon close reading you see him being a presumptive asshole in the way he asked it.
And from a "company fact sheet":
2,700 employees in offices around the world
50% of employees are engineers
At Twitter HQ we consume 1440 hard boiled eggs weekly.
We also drink 585 gallons of coffee per week.
17: My question is why do they only have 2700 employees?
Sales, internationalization, tons and tons and tons of IT. Development teams for dozens of platforms. Business development. Dev teams for new products. I haven't even put anybody in marketing yet! 2300 is big, but twitter is a huuuuuuge enterprise, just from a userbase and user heterogeneity standpoint.
you see him being a presumptive asshole in the way he asked it
Like when he says "I'm sure this is a stupid question, but"? You're a grumpus, but you knew that. Anyway, thanks to Josh's link (and their engineering has it's own site) it seems that the answer is, indeed, they do a ton of research, and have a lot of engineers for that purpose. Ok!
Speaking of IT stuff, it looks like they are suspecting the Target breach may have originated via someone hacking the credentials of a small HVAC contracting company (who had a Target account with what must have been inappropriately broad remote access, or at least enough to get to some other poorly-secured resource on their network) that is about 1/2 mile from my house. But don't recognize the names of any of the principals there.
21: Sure I'm being a grumpus, but something about the way it came up smacked me as a question that would be asked in that manner by a woolly-headed tech utopian dreamer who is wrongly-confident that he has a handle on how the actual world of companies and whatnot work. You could see some libertarian competency-worshipping meritocracy-promoting bullshit behind it all and felt it needed to be called out for the injurious claptrap that it is.
I may be extrapolating a bit.
Anyway, thanks to Josh's link
Goofus goes off on tangential rants that impugn the character of the FPPs; Gallant provides helpful links that provide relevant information about the matter at hand.
You understand too, but in a nice helpful way; I read Sifu's comment as having an implied ", jerk" at the end that yours did not.
Aren't most Google employees on the advertising side? That's something else that gets labor-intensive: sales (as mentioned above), but also approving ads and so forth.
27: You give me more credit than you should.
Comment ending insults are either always or never implied, I'm not sure which.
To make the perfect chocolate chip cookie you need to have toddler-age grandchildren.
Just use the recipe on the Nestle chocolate chips bag. It doesn't matter. For their whole lives, the grandchildren will remember the cookies as the best ever, and search in vain for their equal.
All my comments should be read as having an implied "Fuck you, you suck, I'm the greatest [drops mic, walks off stage]" at the end.
|| Lori Gottlieb is trolling the nation again! ||>
32: That was the plot of a Friends episode.
I'm giggling so hard at the Goofus and Gallant comment that I had to get up and walk away from the computer and even that barely helped. I'm going to mentally sort everyone here along those lines from now on!
33 is not going to be great until someone links to the Smearcase pants comment as a counterpart.
The whole blog should bend to my will, clearly.
I like to think of myself as the person who picks the mic up again, checks to make sure it's still plugged in and functioning, and puts it back in the stand.
28: Google is about half engineering; given that there are functions other than sales and engineering, sales is somewhat less than half, though even if I had detailed numbers I probably couldn't share them.
(I'm assuming you meant sales when you said "advertising side", and not, say, engineers who work on ad ranking and things like that).
35: I like how baffled she seems that people with happy relationships aren't coming to her for couples counseling!
39: I'm assuming you meant sales when you said "advertising side", and not, say, engineers who work on ad ranking
Engineers who work on ad ranking count as sales (or advertising) in my book.
41: Right, because the other engineers aren't working on anything that supports the present or future revenue stream.
Parsimon of Unfogged: Human Resources Director.
I'm pretty sure all those engineers are mostly spending time in useless meetings, 'brainstorming' and chowing down free food and whatnot.
21 gives me the warm fuzzies for the early days of unfogged. Why do I have that feeling? It's not hard to guess at its origin, I suspect.
I would guess a fair number of people are required simply to police the twitter universe. I've been thrown in twitter jail a bunch of times, and then eventually I get set free, and I imagine that the entire process isn't automated.
As far as I'm concerned, if you aren't driving a train, you aren't an engineer.
42: you talk like Google as a company is somehow driven by ad sales.
The beauty of understanding how ingredients interact with each other is that even if my definition of the "best" chocolate cookie isn't in line with yours, if you've come along this far, then you know what you need to do to adjust my recipe to suit your own tastes.
This is fundamentally why I've always liked the Cook's approach. It's also why I'm probably going to mostly ignore Kenji's recipe, because most of what he's going for are things I'm not that concerned about (is it just me, or are half of his lessons about increasing cragginess/textural contrast?). The 2009 Cook's recipe, OTOH, is the only one I'm willing to make. Not only do I prefer the end result to traditional Tollhouse style, but I also find it less hassle. Browning butter is easier to me than getting butter the right temp for creaming, and the recipe makes 16 (largish) cookies vs. 4 or 5 dozen for most Tollhouse recipes, which is just an intolerable amount of spoon-dropping for me (if you just make them much bigger, it screws up the edge/center ratio).
WRT the OP's comment about diminishing returns, it's worth noting that Cook's version of Tollhouse is barely distinguishable from the back of the chip bag recipe: there's like a teaspoon of water, and maybe a slight change in some of the ratios. It's a better cookie, but only just.
Even without internationalization and platforms to consider, the engineering to support that much data is considerable. Tasks that are easy with a million data elements are less easy with tens of billions. Interesting that they build on MapReduce.
I was just on a conference call, during which a number of people belonging to a very boring profession (guess) in a very boring sector (also easy) spent rather a lot of time boasting about their numbers of Twitter followers.
I have also recently become a subscriber to the Economist.
I can't even look my reflection in the eye anymore.
Also: I suspect that for Twitter, Google, Facebook, the engineering challenges are made more complicated precisely because of the need for monetizing through advertising. If the data only needed to be processed for the user's own purposes, their systems wouldn't need to be nearly so efficient, but they're constantly analyzing everything in order to better sell you stuff, and that means they need to be able to analyze it better, faster, cheaper. Whereas Craigslist has something like 150 employees, I believe. Surely a huge part of that is because they don't even try to do any analytics. (Right?)
Not sure I buy that. Lots of the projects we run, like the one I work on, aren't really monetized at all (which is one of the very weird things about working here), or are monetized only as a vague afterthought.
I make these cookies - http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/chocolatechipcookies_72335 - and we generally cook one log as described, and just slice the other one and eat it raw.
That's some porn fodder right there.
Raw Logging: Asilon's Kitchen
Raw Logging: Uncooked Has Never Been So Hot
Raw Log Slice: The Lorena Bobbit Story
Not sure I buy that. Lots of the projects we run, like the one I work on, aren't really monetized at all (which is one of the very weird things about working here), or are monetized only as a vague afterthought.
Or are shut down because they make no money? Or is it only user-facing projects that are shut down for that reason?
Well, we tried urple's idea, but this seemed better.
Somebody is still upset out Google Reader.
New Buzzfeed quiz: Grumpus, Goofus, or Gallant?
See, 61 is very Gallant. But I'm decidedly Grumpus today. Fuck.
Grumpus, Goofus, Gallant, or Gladiator
What twitter employees do all day, while eating free sandwiches: http://conferencecall.biz/
Grumpus, Goofus, Gallant, Gladiator, Gruffalo, or Gamera?
It is pretty eery how there have purportedly been thousands of employees brought to mid-Market by Twitter and others but there is really no evidence of them on the street. Supports the endless meetings and snack guzzling hypothesis!
Once a company reaches a certain size, doesn't it have to put a lot more into operations and HR? Although I guess cafeterias and stuff are often contracted out so those jobs aren't counted as company employees.
How many piano tuners does Twitter employ?
69: Goofus takes a victory lap for discovery after-the-fact comment numbering relevance.
I also like how if you leave off the dot after the @ in your fake email address, the unfogged posting software is ON IT!
Don't get the "after his date" part, and lost my link to the joke-explaining blog.
68: OTOH, there aren't that many places for them to go in the immediate neighborhood. Although I would hope that Little Griddle would be doing crazy coffee and donut business in the mornings.
The new down-to-Earth pope tunes his own piano.
73: Can't find a clip, but from the opening scene of The Deer Hunter.
I think Denver is going to pull this one out in the end.
77:
Thanks, I didn't remember that, although I remember a great deal from that movie.
You know you've made it when there's a life-size chocolate sculpture of you. Provide one for me now, internet!
What the world needs is 3D chocolate printers.
And, yes! they anticipated your needs.
Hey where did that ! come from oh well!
I love it when a plan comes together.
I've been doing the melted butter in the cookies thing. On the most recent batch I discovered that if you put a pinch of baking soda in with the butter, it browns a lot quicker.
If we're talking chocolate simulacra, how about chocolate shawarma?
What the world needs now
Is a chocolate folk singer
88: Have you tried making a life-sized cookie replica of Halford?
Thanks for all the Gladiator-Gamera stuff. It made me so happy and feeling happy helped a lot.
and feeling happy helped a lot.
I think it's the increased blood flow.
||
I guess the audience I'm writing this film review for won't think, as I do, that the highlight of the film is seeing one of Prin/cet/on's most notable professors ordering a sandwich at the Wawa.
|>
Since we've already derailed the thread despite a front page post never having been made in such detail or with such care, here are some awesome maps of where people run in various cities around the world. (actually, where people say they run in the app Runkeeper.)
Looks about right for Chicago. People run between these lines of course, just not in numbers. It's partly about what people describe, I'm sure.
Didn't see Columbus.
Found it. Along the Olentangy; figures. Iuka rivine would be nice.
||
Hey, neat, when you own a house with a basement you can just go down in that basement and make all kinds of DJ noise for hours and it doesn't bug anybody. Who knew, right?
|>
98: Just wait until Zardoz figures out her noise equivalent! I almost said something in LB's urban planning thread, but the days of screaming violent tantrums made me so happy we're in our own house.
I bet I can drown her out. Or... are you saying I need more speakers? Message received.
I'm saying count your blessing and please ask Blume not to blame me!
More speakers, got it. And amps.
//I have the impression that a great deal of money goes into salaries and benefits and perqs.//
This is not specific to tech companies.
We want more companies to do this! Like, we should be throwing them a parade or something!
That'd be taking away money from the job creators.
Here's Allen's reply (NYT)
This is worth looking at for the family tree