Posts

Fred Wilson has a post up today defending companies that have advertising-supported business models. I’m not opposed to free services, I use and enjoy a large number of them. Unlike the majority of users, though, I usually pay when I use a service that offers a paid tier. I pay for Rdio, a Flickr Pro account, a Mlkshk account, and probably others as well. As a developer (or designer) who’s looking for a job, though, I think that working on advertising-supported products has some real downsides, because doing the right thing for your users and doing the right thing for your advertisers is often in conflict. ...

When I was younger, I was obsessed with the following maxim from George Bernard Shaw’s Maxims for Revolutionists: The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. That quote sprung to mind when I read this post by Sam Stephenson where he explains why he doesn’t invest too much effort in his dot files. Here’s the key bit: ...

Today’s New York Times has a long article about organic foods, more specifically, about how the FDA-approved “Certified Organic” designation has been co-opted almost completely by industrial food producers, diluting it to the point of meaninglessness. This does not come as a surprise to me. As soon as “organic” became an adjective that people would pay a premium for, it became inevitable that corporations in the food business would want a piece of the action. Now they’re busily diluting the definition of organic so that they can more easily adapt it to their industrial production methods. ...

Tom Ryder on shell prompts: You can tell a lot about a shell user by looking at their prompt. Most shell users will use whatever the system’s default prompt is for their entire career. Should we be asking job candidates for their dot files?

Veteran Well member Howard Rheingold has a nice piece up about the significance of The Well, which has been around for almost three decades and is looking for a new home now that Salon has put it up for sale. It’s amazing the number of features people take for granted today that were proven on The Well. More importantly, the closeness of the Well community is difficult to accurately describe. It’s amazing to see long lost members returning over the past couple of weeks to offer help or just to reacquaint themselves. For what it’s worth, I think that the two current communities that are most like the Well are Reddit and Metafilter. ...

Nelson Minar has a nice, short writeup of the Linux kernel bug that caused servers to spin out of control yesterday. Most initial write-ups blamed Java, but that was incorrect. Interestingly, Java not only accounts for leap seconds, but also mentions them prominently in the documentation for the java.util.Date class: Although the Date class is intended to reflect coordinated universal time (UTC), it may not do so exactly, depending on the host environment of the Java Virtual Machine. Nearly all modern operating systems assume that 1 day = 24 × 60 × 60 = 86400 seconds in all cases. In UTC, however, about once every year or two there is an extra second, called a “leap second.” The leap second is always added as the last second of the day, and always on December 31 or June 30. For example, the last minute of the year 1995 was 61 seconds long, thanks to an added leap second. Most computer clocks are not accurate enough to be able to reflect the leap-second distinction. ...

It’s easy to complain about PHP. Look, here’s Jeff Atwood complaining about PHP. He proposes to create something that will replace PHP. I’m all for this project – as an industry, we should constantly be working to improve and replace things, and we should be building great things in case they do wind up becoming popular. If you’re going to try to replace PHP, you need to figure out what it is about PHP that enables it to maintain its massive market share. Everybody knows about the friendly learning curve and the easy availability of inexpensive hosting. If you want to create your first Web application, PHP is the simplest way to get started. ...

In announcing that he’s moving from working on Android to working on identity at Google, Tim Bray mentions two things about identity: Usernames and passwords generally suck and obviously don’t scale to the Internet, so we need to do away with ’em soonest. The new technology coming down the pipe, OAuth 2 and friends, is way too hard for developers; there need to be better tools and services if we’re going to make this whole Internet thing smoother and safer. ...

I enjoyed this coding manual prepared by University of Chicago economics professors Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse M. Shapiro for their research assistants. It’s a great short manual on how to code for clarity and performance. Considering the vast amount of really bad code that is produced in academia, it’s nice to see a focus on this sort of thing from professors. I especially enjoyed the parts where they give professional software developers too much credit. For example, here’s an assertion: ...

Just a short list of things I’d like to be learning right now: tmux More JavaScript PostgreSQL (or their SQL variant, anyway) Scala statistics R Scalding awk Git (beyond trivial use cases)