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bbuffoneon Ask HN: Who Is Hiring? (October 2010 Edition)

Yottaa - Boston, MA - http://www.yottaa.com/about/jobs

We are looking for a motivated individual with passion for web technology and community engagement to join the team as the company's marketing leader.

Someone here must be a marketing guru.

bbuffoneon [dead]

My wife says I shouldn't give advise like this but I will anyways (she doesn't read hackernews).

I would keep it simple and ask her to go somewhere non-datish, like starbucks and get her an email. If you want to give a reason it could even to be to continue a topic of conversation you have started..

You should be thinking about making her your friend and working up to dating. This is an easier transition. Everyone needs friends and friends that are girls have many more friends that are girls; so it increases the possibility of other relationships if there is no mutual connection.

bbuffoneon Slow Down to Go Faster

I am always amazed how few developers document their code.

I always hear:

"I write code that is easy to read" - Great but well written code can't... tell you why it was done this way, what it is actually supposed to do, how people should use it, how people shouldn't use it.

"I don't have time" - When is a developers time constrained by typing? Unless you type one word a minute you have time type create documentation.

Documentation is even helpful when creating the code. As ideas or thoughts change medium... from brain to paper or to sentence form. I see the problem differently, which gives them better understanding before wasting time creating something that isn't going to work.

Documentation is also helpful for two other people: Those who are not you and your slightly older self.

bbuffoneon Facebook Down, Like Buttons Vanish, Internet Implodes

In researching web performance DNS configurations issues are common problem. It is usually related to www.foo.com and foo.com being configured differently. This seems to be at a high level the issue with facebook.com. if you go to "facebook.com" the DNS will resolve correctly, but it will redirect you to www.facebook.com. I guess they could stop the redirection and fix the problem immediately, or wait till the sorry.ak.facebook.com.edgesuite.net is fixed.

=====www.facebook.com

new-host-3:dpu2 robertbuffone$ dig -trace www.facebook.com ;; Warning, ignoring invalid type race

; <<>> DiG 9.6.0-APPLE-P2 <<>> -trace www.facebook.com ;; global options: +cmd ;; Got answer: ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 19626 ;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 4, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION: ;www.facebook.com. IN A

;; ANSWER SECTION: www.facebook.com. 0 IN CNAME sorry.ak.facebook.com.edgesuite.net. sorry.ak.facebook.com.edgesuite.net. 0 IN CNAME a1030.g.akamai.net. a1030.g.akamai.net. 4 IN A 63.84.59.59 a1030.g.akamai.net. 4 IN A 63.84.59.10

;; Query time: 10 msec ;; SERVER: 198.6.1.142#53(198.6.1.142) ;; WHEN: Thu Sep 23 16:57:29 2010 ;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 144

========facebook.com

new-host-3:dpu2 robertbuffone$ dig -trace facebook.com ;; Warning, ignoring invalid type race

; <<>> DiG 9.6.0-APPLE-P2 <<>> -trace facebook.com ;; global options: +cmd ;; Got answer: ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 19984 ;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 3, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION: ;facebook.com. IN A

;; ANSWER SECTION: facebook.com. 352 IN A 69.63.181.12 facebook.com. 352 IN A 69.63.189.16 facebook.com. 352 IN A 69.63.189.11

;; Query time: 13 msec ;; SERVER: 198.6.1.142#53(198.6.1.142) ;; WHEN: Thu Sep 23 16:57:44 2010 ;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 78

bbuffoneon Tumblr wins because it's twice as fast

http://www.yuiblog.com/blog/2007/01/04/performance-research-...

Towards the end of the article

>> Suprising Results

40-60% of Yahoo!’s users have an empty cache experience and ~20% of all page views are done with an empty cache. To my knowledge, there’s no other research that shows this kind of information...

bbuffoneon Why most people don’t succeed – How you can be the exception

Maintenance is just development without innovation; even new projects are boring when they lack innovation. Turning something that already exists into something that is 10 times better can be just a rewarding as building something from scratch.

bbuffoneon The Short-Sighted Campaign against Craigslist

One reason for making it illegal - it's one of those things that no one wants in their town. No one wants coal burning power plants in their town but that is easily to regulate. In today's internet area having the transaction be online and the transgression to take place in private would be fine. The question i how do you ensure that.

bbuffoneon How important is YSlow Score?

They way the system work is that it will collect all the data in the order it arrives. Today we had a bunch of people enter new URLs so some of the requests for data were queued up. We were also experience some latency in getting the data back into the database for a couple reasons (badly timed database backups...)

Sorry for the inconvenience in getting your score promptly. On a good note 92 is a really great score. Our score incorporates the following items:

- Time it takes to download the HTML - Time it takes to display the title - Time it takes to paint the page - Time to Interactivity - YSlow! score

We take all these measurements from different locations so if you get a 92; it means that no matter where in the world you user is - they will have a great initial experience with our site.

bbuffoneon Demystifying the TechCrunch effect

We recently got our company posted on techcrunch and the numbers line up almost exactly only off by 4% and our traffic has fallen off exactly the same way.

Our post went up on a Monday so day mattered little in at least these two instances.

bbuffoneon Why the iPhone will fail (2007)

>As I expound in great detail in my book Why Software Sucks (Addison-Wesley, 2006, http://www.whysoftwaresucks.com/) your user is not you.

Seems that the author was really looking for a promotion vehicle for his book and looked to take a big product launch like the iphone and use it to his advantage.

Everyone that bought the book based on this ridiculous article should get their money back like everyone that bought a mini vanilli album (I might be dating myself).

bbuffoneon Sony beat the Apple TV without Google TV

My Sony TV is just a TV, and that is the way I like it, no apps, no internet; just channel buttons. Currently I am watching "Starwars II: Attack of the clones" in high def and commenting on this post at the same time.

Two screens are a far better experience than trying to both large video and interactive apps in one device. This is one of the reasons that interactive TV has never taken off. It just isn't feasible for general consumption.

bbuffoneon An update on JavaOne

Then maybe its time to use:

3. Grant of Patent License. Subject to the terms and conditions of this License, each Contributor hereby grants to You a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable (except as stated in this section) patent license to make, have made, use, offer to sell, sell, import, and otherwise transfer the Work, where such license applies only to those patent claims licensable by such Contributor that are necessarily infringed by their Contribution(s) alone or by combination of their Contribution(s) with the Work to which such Contribution(s) was submitted. If You institute patent litigation against any entity (including a cross-claim or counterclaim in a lawsuit) alleging that the Work or a Contribution incorporated within the Work constitutes direct or contributory patent infringement, then any patent licenses granted to You under this License for that Work shall terminate as of the date such litigation is filed.

I always wanted to see what would happen if this was ever invoked.

bbuffoneon Apple Looking To Slice Up Cable 99 Cents At A Time

I'm sure they don't travel with me, but at $13 a month it is worth it. they will still cost $1000 and I have only to pay $140 (year). So if I need to move and want all the music which I won't not at $1000. I would have paid a 14% premium. the subtract all the music that I am either done with or didn't really like, I am sure that I will come out a head.

Hey, maybe that is a good business model, get a two month subscription service where you can access all the music and train the system to understand what you like so you can pay as little as possible for DRM free music. Best of both world.

Or we can all just enjoy Justin Beiber and the Youtube way of picking music.

bbuffoneon Apple Looking To Slice Up Cable 99 Cents At A Time

I stopped using my iPod and went to a zune because I was tired of getting 99c to death. It was the best move, I would rather just pay my music "tax" and have access to all the music I want. Currently, there is about $1000 dollars of music on the device, when I had my iPod I never spent more than $100 dollars a year.

I am one of the few that actually want to pay for the things I like, as it will ensure that more of those things will be available.

bbuffoneon "the sexy job in the next 10 years will be statisticians"

We need most of the things defined in this web book - http://www.statsoft.com/textbook.

bbuffoneon "the sexy job in the next 10 years will be statisticians"

Completely agree - Currently my company is doing a lot in analytics and data analysis. Having a background in statistics is something highly desired but I find my of the computer engineers lack a lot of the math skills to take on the analytics problems alone.

At least the ones that have applied.

bbuffoneon This is the best "we're hiring" image ever drawn

There are lots of things that "makes life more fun". I find that not having to work nights and weekends, but loving so much what you do and the problems you work on and the people you work with; makes life even more fun.

bbuffoneon This is the best "we're hiring" image ever drawn

Love the musical culture: Every night around 7, I turn up the music in the office. Then I have to explain to the beijing office why ICP, G&R, 2-Pac or any other thing I put on is a good choice. The Killer or Fleetwood Mac seems goes over better.

I find that music at night and on the weekends makes all the work even more fun.

bbuffoneon JITB: A Java based Flash player capable of running up to 30x faster than Adobe's

Flash isn't popular because of its runtime speed. The startup speed is most important. The flash player starts instantly something that java can't do.

bbuffoneon China Passes Japan as Second-Largest Economy

Not unless they someone invents a way that can fit all 2000+ chinese characters easily qwerty keyboard.

bbuffoneon Ask PG: Why do you think Africa cannot produce global scale start ups?

I don't think africa is alone in being behind the 8-ball in the creating a global scale company (which I take it you mean world-wide adoption and not just huge locally). Even with the greatest talent and product, it would still be hard.

No one is looking to africa for the next big thing - this is a huge problem for any company - how can you get to critical mass if no one is paying attention to you.

I am sitting in a beijing starbucks writing this and thinking about the global brands; there aren't that many of them.

bbuffoneon Welcome to the new decade

You list one thing that happens to you that doesn't make the OS or windowing bad.

OSX has the following UI issues:

Scrollbars are hard to use

Window Max & Min buttons randomly work depending on the application

file dialog can't do any of the things the window file can do (Create folders, manage files)

Finders is pretty basic

I won't mention right clicking

accelerator keys are not as easy

*System monitor is pretty non-helpful most times

OSX shell is good, Windows 7 is the far better operating system. The hardware is also better but microsoft can force people to build awesome hardware

bbuffoneon Protesters Gather At Google; 600 Employees Sign Petition, Organizers Claim

One good thing about this - its nice to see that this generation can put down their tweeters and actually try to make something happen!

bbuffoneon Welcome to the new decade

I completely agree, Windows 7 is amazing. After being forced to use OSX for the last two months, I can't wait to get back. The windowing system is better in Windows 7, multi-monitor is easier (Windows have their own menus), task bar works better, battery life is better, look and feel is better.

I will throw in Zune as the best portable media player as well. After having an iphone and using itunes. Zune is far better then the lastest generation ipods. Super slick and easy ui, better integrated store, also the zune desktop app is better. Subscription service is definitely the way to go. I pay my $13 a month music tax and can have any song I want, I haven't listened to this much music ever.

bbuffoneon Confirmed: HOPA Dry Erase Girl Is A Hoax, Identity Revealed

I assume everything on the web is a hoax. especially the things that have as little meaning as this

bbuffoneon Rob Pike frustrated by Java, C++ complexity

are you arguing that lisps are easier than c?

bbuffoneon Rob Pike frustrated by Java, C++ complexity

Every time I read one these "Java, C++..." articles, I wonder, is the world getting dumber or the problems we need to solve simpler?

bbuffoneon Tweet Less, Kiss More

Over the last six months, I have been traveling back and forth to beijing for 2.5 months at a time. When in beijing, I don't have a phone, let-a-lone a smart phone. The one thing I have noticed is that I used to go to my phone anytime there was a millisecond of downtime, in line, waiting for a check...

Now, I just sit and watch the world that is around me, and I find the real-world local to me is way more interesting than what is happening on techcrunch, perezhilton...

There is some much information being created and consumed that whether intended to be or not it's really just become entertainment.

bbuffoneon Ask PG: What's the deal with search on HN?

Good content is exactly why hacker news needs search. There is a ton of info that would be useful to people after one day. Which is about as long as it stays on the homepage. If content is your number one priority giving people a search box would create more good content.

bbuffoneon A Note to Google Users on Net Neutrality, by Eric Schmidt (2006)

The network would the least of a startups problem challenging google. This has been one of the arguments for net neutrality and it doesn't make sense.

1.) No one has this issue now and I don't see much competition from any other than microsoft. Eventually some one will find a way but isn't going to because of or inspite net neutrality.

2.) Google can't act in an any competitive manner using the network just has microsoft found out it couldn't do with the computer manufactures. As soon as some one thought they were using their network contract to impede competition they would be bust quicker than a "Gizmodo Editor with a 'lost' Prototype"

3.) Google would have more problems going this route and it would cost them a lots of time, money and energy to manage, then add the fact they would be held hostage by the network providers. Contract up? Ok, pay us even more, new service even more. It would be road I think they avoid if not then why not. With the proper network deals and content licenses: youtube could become a new cable company. Google voice a new telephone network...

They could more easily expand beyond search into different revenue steams with these deals if there wasn't big issues with them.