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whirlycott1

277 karma · joined March 1, 2009

Chief Architect at PagerDuty
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whirlycott1··on Save My Life: an update (Celiac biopsy negative)
This is absolutely wrong. My father has DH, my aunt is celiac and my wife has a gluten allergy. My next door neighbor died earlier this year from problems relating to his inability to handle his celiac diet properly. I say this only to note that I have a lot of exposure to gluten related problems in my life.

In many people, my father for instance, gluten problems don't manifest themselves until much later in life, sometimes out of the blue, seemingly unprovoked.

While what you suggest may yield some cluees, only a fool would follow your advice about this being definitive (your words).

whirlycott1··on Should browsers have an expiration date?
You know, we effectively had this back in 1995 or 1996 when Netscape would release betas. Each version would expire and require you to upgrade a few months afterwards. The Web was very different back then, but I think that this could possibly work for browsers like Safari where there aren't a bunch of folks with plugins. But breaking my favorite Firefox plug because the plugin creator was on vacation for six months and missed a browser upgrade would be not so cool.
whirlycott1··on Ask HN: Who's Hiring?
I'm hiring four senior hackers at StyleFeeder and would love to hear from anybody who is interested! We're in Central Square in Cambridge, MA.
whirlycott1··on D. J. Bernstein
You mean like dnssec support? Yes, apart from that one super important feature, you may be correct.

And I bet the operators of ten of the thirteen root nameservers who are running BIND will be mighty glad to hear from you!

whirlycott1··on Spyder IDE for Python has hit 1.0
I'm using pydev right now... it seems ok. I'm mainly interested in refactoring, which it seems to have. I'm wondering if Spyder has it. I don't see a reference to that in the docs.
whirlycott1··on D. J. Bernstein
I have dealt with qmail for ten years. It is a complete joy once you have it up and running. You literally can stop thinking about it because it always works. However, getting it up and running requires adding in antispam, antivirus, virtual mailboxes, some additional protective and administrative patches, some extra stuff for SMTP-AUTH, SSL/TLS, reporting, and perhaps a few more patches for fun.

Patches, you say? Well, I'm glad you really like source code, because that's exactly what you'll be dealing with to get all of this up and running. I've done it many times before manually and it takes around ten hours to do it.

While Aaron's point is that djb's code, vision and discipline are possibly unmatched (I concur on all counts), the software (principally qmail) is antiquated in the sense that nobody needs just that one part in order to run a semi-modern email system.

So, as you start downloading the .tgz for qmail and begin studying it like good campers, remember that this wonderful code is, by itself, not up to the job that it purports to serve.

-- Lots of love,

Someone who currently runs two qmail systems and will never go to the trouble of setting one up again

whirlycott1··on "What does Googlebot see when it accesses my page?"
If you don't have a GWT account, you're missing out on a lot of information that you would either (a) not ever see or (b) have to generate yourself.
whirlycott1··on "What does Googlebot see when it accesses my page?"
Almost certainly not - that's generally not a good idea and can result in a penalty if the content differs from what a normal human would see.
whirlycott1··on "What does Googlebot see when it accesses my page?"
If you have a simple application, then, yes, it's not going to give you a whole lot of new information. However, even in the basic case, you do get the HTTP response headers. That can be helpful sometimes in debugging problems.

The other reason why this is useful is that in larger complex deployments, there may be requests that get throttled, dropped on the floor, etc. as an automatic means of shedding load. We have such a mechanism at StyleFeeder, because we have so much robot traffic. Other times, load balancers and the like will inject stuff into the HTTP request stream in a way that isn't obvious when you're working in a dev environment.

whirlycott1··on IntelliJ IDEA goes open source
Really, wow, I'm surprised. What's not to like about pydev? I haven't used it that much and would appreciate your thoughts.
whirlycott1··on Ask HN: Anyone used XtraDB from Percona (instead of InnoDB)?
Yeah, just an rpm and we were all set.
whirlycott1··on Ask HN: Anyone used XtraDB from Percona (instead of InnoDB)?
Yeah, we've used it at StyleFeeder for some stuff. Although we leaned pretty hard on it, I really didn't see a big difference either way. I was a little surprised and expected to see some real gains, but they never materialized.
whirlycott1··on IntelliJ IDEA goes open source
Does anybody know if it has any Pythonic powers along the lines of pydev http://pydev.org/ ?
whirlycott1··on IntelliJ IDEA goes open source
What do you like about it over Eclipse?

In my estimation, Eclipse has more momentum over anything else, primarily NetBeans (which is quite good, actually) and IntelliJ. And momentum counts more over the long run.

whirlycott1··on Ask HN: Tell me why a room-and-board-and-bandwidth incubator is a stupid idea
I can't imagine why anybody who is putting their heart into their work would take you up on this offer. It's easy enough to get a cheap place to live (i.e. rent a room) for a while, even in Boston, SF or NYC. Your offer of bandwidth of server space is probably worth $150/month, which is the cost of a cheap physical box somewhere. The other service you're providing is... food. You know, I just don't see any real value in what you'd be providing to people.

And, btw, there's very little that's academic about building startups. If that's how you're thinking of it, I'd suggest getting a bit of experience in this area first.

pg can suggest ideas like this because he can give real advice based on experience, star power, and access to his network. Your heart is surely in the right place, but cheap server space, food and a place to live in Richmond Indiana doesn't quite add up.

From your perspective, have you done the math on this?

whirlycott1··on Dreamhost is down. All of it.
"We have our network administrator heading to the data center now and should be there in 20 minutes or so. More updates to come."

If they host a million domains, why isn't someone on site 24x7?

whirlycott1··on Microformat standard for web analytics
This is one of the more misguided ideas I've seen in a while, if I understand it correctly. The authors seem to expect that web analytics packages are integrated primarily by javascript snippets, which certainly has some truth to it (i.e. Google Analytics, Omniture, etc.). The problem is, though, that as we look for more analytical data, we end up tossing more and more crap into our web pages and hoping that it can be parsed out and send to some remote analytics service in time before the user does something to leave the page.

But maybe I'm jumping the gun here and am missing the point. Perhaps one of the authors can explain the use cases that they have in mind?

whirlycott1··on Answers.OnStartups.com -- StackOverflow for startups
dharmesh++
whirlycott1··on RethinkDB looking for a technical cofounder
You're completely right when you say "nonsense". I'm the founder of StyleFeeder. I've worked for five startups before this. Being a founder is a unique experience characterized by a constant feeling of being angry all the time and being emotionally drained by your work. Don't get me wrong - I love what I do, the people I work with and the company is doing great, but it is fucking hard. And I feel that all the time as 'founder' whereas I never did as an 'employee.'

I've also had conversations with other founders who independently used the exact same language to describe how they feel about their companies.

My simple rule: if there's nothing there when you start, you're a founder.

whirlycott1··on Django gaining or Rails waning?
I don't think so... it seems like the centers of gravity are just shifting around a bit. Look at github:

http://trends.google.com/websites?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.djangop...

whirlycott1··on Fish - The friendly interactive shell
The programmability of a shell just isn't interesting to me. Whenever I start hacking a shell script, it either starts out as just two or three lines or it evolves to the point where I feel like I need a "real" language. At that point, I'll end up hacking it in perl or python.

In the meantime, I'm happy enough with bash.

whirlycott1··on 10 Downing Street: Treatment of Alan Turing was "appalling"
I didn't know much about his life until I read "A madman dreams of Turing machines," which is a great book about Turing and Godel. Tortured souls, both of them.
whirlycott1··on You're Killing Me, Zappos
I don't view it as derailing the thread at all. Alternate interfaces to see a collection of shoes seems quite clearly within bounds to me.
whirlycott1··on You're Killing Me, Zappos
If it's possible to build something this rich without Flash, I have yet to see how.

The logic for the scroller bar at the bottom is fairly complex. We've done many, many hours of usability testing with this and it actually hasn't posed a problem. But I know exactly what you mean. It's actually not bouncing back to the initial position, but it probably looks like that if you have tens of thousands of products displayed there. Try filtering to see the difference.

whirlycott1··on You're Killing Me, Zappos
I was wondering the same thing :)
whirlycott1··on You're Killing Me, Zappos
I don't meant to self-promote, but I'm the founder and CTO of StyleFeeder and we've recently launched some new browsing functionality... so if you're into shoes, we have the whole Zappos collection and a whole lot more available here. I'd be happy to get any feedback from y'all:

http://www.stylefeeder.com/explorer#/Shoes/m///2-10///variet...

whirlycott1··on The New Google Search
The search results load via Ajax. That's the main difference that I see. Also notice that the URL changes when you type in your search result, but that the query args are sitting behind a # anchor. Normally, those values don't get sent via referrers, which would mean that you wouldn't get that information in the referer header on the server that hosts the search result when the user clicks it. However, in this case, Google is doing HTTP redirects in order to send that information along. At the very least, we can see that the format for their URLs has changed. But they may just be in a data-gathering mode right now. If they turn off that redirect, you won't be able to deduce the search query that the user typed in based on your webserver logs.
whirlycott1··on CentOS Administrator Reappears
You panicked and started a migration because you didn't have the patience to wait a few days to see what happens?
whirlycott1··on Ask HN: Missing needed skills for startup
Most companies don't fail because of their database. Just build the damn thing and focus on the really big risk, which is that nobody will use it.
whirlycott1··on People are twice as smart as they talk, three times as smart as they write
Words of wisdom from "Figuring Shit Out."
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