[twic]

> [It was the best of times; it was the worst of times.] It was a good time to be an American and it was a bad time. My brother, I thought, was the worst. He was the kind of person who would go to work and he wouldn't come home.

Kind of Hemingwayesque? Or:

> [One of the most common types of advice we give at Y Combinator is to do things that don't scale.] We tell people to do things on a smaller scale. This is often the hardest to do, but it is absolutely crucial to get right. If you don't do this, you 're missing out on the real benefits of scale and you'll lose out on opportunities. One of the things we've been doing to help people with this is to give them a very simple challenge, which is to make something that can scale to a very large scale, like Facebook's site.

pg, consider yourself replaced!

[gwern]

You know, you could write a decent essay with that as a prompt. Suppose you did sketch out a CRUD social network site which can auto-scale on AWS. Would anyone want to use it? Of course not. All those people at Facebook are doing something, adding value some way. Think about all the things they are doing which your auto-scaling prototype completely omits. (...And so on from there covering all the stuff like network effects and spam-filtering and cost-engineering and language support and per-country customizations which do not scale but make Facebook what it is.)

[twic]

A CRUD social network site which can auto-scale on AWS or on your own server in no time. Get the code here and you can test it for yourself and see what happens. This is just the first prototype. I don't know how long it will last and how many times it will be updated, but for now I am happy with what it has turned out.