frognibble

Here's the discussion on the original Rumpetroll: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1741260

The server is running on EC2. As far as I can tell, EC2 does not have a virtual console interface or any other way to rescue a server that blocks all network connections with a firewall.

There's something to be said for relatively simple tool like make. It can be a lot easier to understand what's going on with Make because it eliminates the layers of stuff between the build script and the actual commands that are run. That's not to say that it's possible to write inscrutable Makefiles.

I recommend the book "Parasite Rex" by Carl Zimmer for those who are fascinated by this sort of thing. The book discusses several interesting and creepy parasites.

I heard that acquisitions often involve a merger with a shell company because of a tax or liability advantage. I searched for info on this, but couldn't find anything. Can somebody please comment on how this works?

What part of lzw's logic is twisted?

It is not obvious that the bulk of the resources come from the idled workers. Resources are needed to pay the workers. Resources are needed to buy the steel, concreate and other materials used in the projects.

It is also an error to assume that disallowing GET for updates adds any security. I recommend reading about cross site request forgery. CSRF is the type of attack used on Twitter today.

Seriously. Search the web for documents on "cross site request forgery". Most of the documents discuss the POST issue. Some documents don't mention GET because GET should not be used when the request has side effects.

The resources used in the stimulus come from someplace in the economy. The resources do not magically appear out of thin air when the Fed buys government debt.

No, it's not entirely the fault of GET. The browser does not prevent script from triggering POSTs to third party sites.

It might be that there is a simple and straightforward model, but there are incentives for politicians, academics and other actors in the system to reject this model. For example, politicians will prefer models that defer pain to the future over models that take the pain now. If the simple and straightforward model says that we should take the pain now, then politicians will prefer a different model.

Your analysis of the situation is incomplete because it does not consider the source of the resources used in the government stimulus. The resources need to come from someplace in economy. For the stimulus to be a net positive, the government's allocation of resources must be more efficient than where the resources were taken from.

The Krugman detractors seem to be of the opinion that Krugman is clueless, not that he advocated a recession or cheered on the disaster.

In this article, Krugman says that consumers need to spend more and that a housing bubble is one way to increase consumer spending. Perhaps he was not advocating a housing bubble, but he clearly didn't see a housing bubble as the terrible thing that it turned out to be. If he thought the policy was bad, he wouldn't have offered it as a solution.

"To fight this recession the Fed needs more than a snapback; it needs soaring household spending to offset moribund business investment. And to do that, as Paul McCulley of Pimco put it, Alan Greenspan needs to create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble." http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/02/opinion/dubya-s-double-dip...

I'd want to know where the company is located before applying, but I cannot find any mention of the location the website. Perhaps that's a test and I failed.

The Tornado philosophy is to use blocking for fast operations and async for the occasional long operation. Tornado applications compensate for blocking by running several instances of the application.

Twisted is theoretically better than Tornado because everything is async in Twisted, but Tornado is more practical because it's easier to write straight-line code than chains of callbacks. The cost of Tornado is that you need more memory on the frontend because you run more instances of the application.

In my previous comment, I listed some real life comet applications that use Tornado. What real life comet applications use Twisted?

Tornado solves the problem of building web frontends, particularly those with comet features. This problem is not specific to FriendFeed. A number of other services use Tornado including Brizzly, Quora and Hipmunk.

Twisted has support for many network protocols while Tornado only has support for HTTP (client and server). If you are doing something other than HTTP, than Twisted might be the better choice.

Facebook stood their ground for a few changes that users didn't like. For example, users hated the newsfeed when it was introduced. The newsfeed is now one of the most important features on Facebook.

The only big feature that I can think of where Facebook backed down is Beacon.

It's important to listen to users, but Facebook has shown that it's also important to ignore them at times.

I am a 50-something engineer who recently worked at a well known startup. I am planning a new startup now. I reviewed my contemporary connections on LinkedIn to see how many I'd consider for my startup. I did not find many.

Many of my contemporaries have climbed the management or technical ladders to the point where they have not practiced the skills needed in a startup for years. They are managing fifty or more people. They are architects at large corporations. They are not designing products and writing code.

A smaller group of my contemporaries are set for life financially. They are no longer working or are only pretending to work.

Of those that are still actively working, I know that some of them have ratcheted up their lifestyle to match their high compensation. It would be a major adjustment for them to live on a startup salary.

There might be ageism in the startup world, but I think it's definitely the case that the pool of eligible and interested 50-somethings is small.

I personally have not experienced ageism. I was 20 years older than everybody else at my last startup.

I immediately thought "no hire" after reading the author's comment about Javascript and C. The rest of the paragraph strengthened my opinion. Age is not the issue here.

There are many fundamental errors about Go in the article: the := operator distinguishes declare and assign from pure assignment, not assignment from equality as the author states. Pointers in Go do not make the language unsafe. Pointers in Go do not relegate automatic memory management to a "supposed" feature. Goroutines are not the same thing as threads. The lack of implicit "this" in methods does not make methods a low value add feature over static functions.

There are several more errors in the article. Read it with caution.

The RIAA's goal is to scare people away from sharing. The goal is not to make money from lawsuits.

It's interesting to compare this example with the somewhat similar example written with node.js: http://jeffkreeftmeijer.com/2010/experimenting-with-node-js/

The reasons for not using exceptions are covered here: http://golang.org/doc/go_lang_faq.html#exceptions

At most, you need to track a couple of booleans per socket, one for read and one for write.

Depending on what you are doing, you might not even need to track these booleans. For example, on the read side you can ignore read events when you are not interested in reading. When you switch back to read interest, you can read the socket to see if data arrived while you ignored events. A similar strategy can be used on the write side.

The blog post does not say if the epoll code uses level triggering or edge triggering. It would be interesting to see the results for both modes. The smaller number of system calls required for edge triggering might make a difference in performance.

Software engineer is the generic title for a number of levels: software engineer II, software engineer III, senior software engineer, staff software engineer, senior staff software engineer, and so on.

I heard that the job titles for engineers above a certain level are shared publicly with in the company.

Econtalk is my favorite podcast. For those who might be put off by economics, here are a couple of interviews that readers here on HN might find interesting:

Paul Graham on Start-ups, Innovation, and Creativity http://www.econtalk.org/archives/_featuring/paul_graham/

Paul Buchheit on Google, Friendfeed, and Start-ups http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2009/09/buchheit_on_goo.htm...

I find it odd that one of the core businesses is a type of user (business users) while the other seven are products.