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How Precision Time Protocol is being deployed at Meta

(engineering.fb.com)
221 points mfiguiere | 1 comments | 21 Nov 22 15:41 UTC | HN request time: 0.209s | source
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CapmCrackaWaka ◴[21 Nov 22 18:45 UTC] No.33696266[source]▶
Why do so many tech companies seem to be releasing “secret sauce” for free lately? I see a lot of posts lately detailing how inner production systems work at large companies, and while I’m grateful, I’m curious why the higher ups think it’s worthwhile to release this information.
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throw0101a ◴[21 Nov 22 18:55 UTC] No.33696357[source]▶
> Why do so many tech companies seem to be releasing “secret sauce” for free lately?

Is it really their "special sauce" though? Do these types of releases actually give away how these companies make money?

In this particular case, telling the world how to get to nanosecond levels of timekeeping doesn't really help any competitors take away Metabook's revenues or profits.

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1. benlivengood ◴[21 Nov 22 20:15 UTC] No.33697340[source]▶
How FB and Google make money isn't secret either. They have a lot of people looking at their web pages and apps, they record a lot of prior interactions with the ads these people see, they train giant models in near-realtime to predict ad quality, serve the ads that maximize expected profits in an ad auction, and record the subsequent clicks, views, and attributed conversions to convince advertisers to keep spending.