Facebook is buying WhatsApp for nineteen billion dollars. Fifty-five employees. That’s $345 million per employee. The engineers run the whole thing on Erlang, with a legendary “no ads, no games, no gimmicks” sticky note on the founder’s desk. Every engineer I know had the same two reactions in the same order: “that’s insane” and “what’s Erlang?”
Darker crypto news: Mt. Gox, the exchange holding most of the world’s Bitcoin trading, has gone dark and reportedly lost 850,000 bitcoins. Possibly years of quiet theft. My coworker’s stash was thankfully elsewhere, but people lost life savings to what amounts to a single point of failure everyone chose voluntarily. “Not your keys, not your coins” is the phrase going around.
Also: Sam Altman is taking over as president of Y Combinator from Paul Graham. He’s 28. Twenty-eight.
Sochi closed. My moment of the Games was quieter: India’s athletes started them under the neutral Olympic flag (federation suspended), and after the IOA cleaned house mid-Games, finished under the tricolour. A governance incident with a happy rollback.
TIL: Erlang’s whole philosophy is “let it crash.” Processes fail fast and supervisors restart them. Failure as a design feature, not an exception. That’s going in the Proverbs file.