Really? Kind of surprised, having lived in both cities. I guess Staten Island and parts of Queens really brings the NYC average down... - Jennie Lin via Bookmarklet
Reading comments on the site, love when New Yorkers get pissy about San Francisco. - Hutch Carpenter
I currently work in SF and lived in NYC for a year. NYC has much better mass transit which conversely makes the walking easier. Some parts of SF proper are cut off from the Bart (only thing comparable to the NYC subway) and the MUNI is a joke. Then there's the hills. SF is walkable but I'd put both NYC and Portland Oregon above it, personally - Jason Kaneshiro
True Jason. If you commute from the city down the Peninsula, driving is really the only option. Takes so long to get to BART/Caltrain otherwise. - Hutch Carpenter
Depends on the criteria. NYC (and it should really just be Manhattan) has much better mass transit, but that's not really what this article is about. Although I like NYC, I think San Francisco is prettier and has milder weather, so from an aesthetic point-of-view, I agree. Also, people can be super intense in NYC, which sometimes makes walking unpleasant, even though I do enjoy a pedestrian vs taxi driver fight once in a while. MUNI does kill a lot of pedestrians though. :( - Chris White
having worked in both this seems wrong - nyc much more walkable than sf imho - mike "glemak" dunn
Part of the difference of opinion might be based on whether you are visiting or living/working in the cities. NYC is probably a far easier walking place to live/work, but just because of the sheer size, it's harder to get around just by walking as a visitor. Also, in the Bay Area, so much work is in Silicon Valley, that it's not really a fair comparison. This is about SF, not the Bay Area. - Chris White
So what I don't understand, is why the website considered Brooklyn, and other outer boroughs in with Manhattan? Did they include Marin, Oakland, and Daly City in with SF? That would drag SF down considerably. - Jason Kaneshiro
Jason, Oakland and San Jose are like adding in Boston and Newark. You have to draw the line, and since NYC is basically one city, that's probably the criteria. I think Boston has won these contests in the past. The core of the city is pretty walkable, although nothing's that walkable on the east coast in the dead of winter. - Chris White
This conversation reminds me of Rome vs Paris walkability discussions. Paris has great mass transit, but the core of Rome is more walkable, with sites closer together, and more to see between sites. - Chris White
I didn't add San Jose, Oakland is across one bridge (or BART) and is equivalent to crossing the Brooklyn Bridge. Oakland isn't as far away from SF as NYC is Boston, by any means. - Jason Kaneshiro
City comparisons - walkability, density, size, income - are always screwed up by the way some cities draw their city limits much more tightly than others. So whenever there's a list of cities sorted by any attribute that's going to vary depending on how many suburbs you include, the precise ranking is pretty much always bogus. Walk Score ratings are also arbitrary in about 10 other ways that make arguing about the scores of NYC vs. SF kind of pointless. - ⓞnor
@Nor yep, I agree, and I think a more fair comparison would be: Manhattan Island proper to SF proper. And in that comparison, IMHO SF loses. - Jason Kaneshiro
I think everyone should sell their SF places and move to Manhattan soon. :) - Chris White
New York's weather and crowds keep it from being enjoyable to walk. SF is a lot more walkable most days of the year. - Robert Scoble
SF weather and the crowds keep it from being enjoyable to walk. NYC is a lot more walkable most days of the year. :P - Andrew Baron
I wish I lived in a walkable city. Dallas is distinctly not walkable :-( - JP Landry
@ Hutch: its' true, NYCers do get pissy about SF. I am a NYC-transplant in SF that sometimes gets pissy about SF ;) Anecdotally, I feel safer walking on most streets in Manhattan at night by myself than I do in SF. Maybe it's something to do with the number of people, or that I get a little creeped out by the quiet SF streets. - Jennie Lin
I've lived in NY and Boston. In NYC I walked some but mostly to the subway but In Boston I walked everywhere. It's just a prettier city to walk around in. I imagine SF is the same way. One neat thing about Manhattan: 20 city blocks = 1 mile. - Peter Simard
the nice thing about this thread is that the focus is on walking in a city, which in this gas price crazy time is a very positive thing - another very walkable city is chicago - probably the least walkable city i've ever lived in is la - no one walks in la ;) - mike "glemak" dunn
NYC and SF are very walkable, thats why they got #1 and #2. I find though that SF is dirtier than NYC. - Sam Pullara
I lived in SF for 8+ years, and find NYC, Boston, and Seattle more walkable. - Adam Lasnik
It's great how everyone says "Google missed this quarter's consensus numbers, so better throw out 20% time, no more free food, quit hiring, and focus immediately on short term profitability, who's crying now smartypants". Which part of the prospectus did they not understand? - ⓞnor
Yeah, these articles are really dumb. Google is still super profitable, it's just that some analysts (not google) made a prediction that didn't match actual profits. If they were losing money or even shrinking that might be a story -- this is not. - Paul Buchheit
"Google: Just Like Every Other Company." Everyone wants to write that headline. Heck, everyone wants to read that headline. Same as "Obama: Just Like Every Other Politician." Rules like that help people understand the worlds they live in without expending too much effort. - Daniel Dulitz
"Since most of the content on FriendFeed comes from Twitter anyway, Frienderati is really is pretty much the same thing, with a few different names." -- reminding me once again how little I like seeing twitter content on FF. I'm pleased to see at the moment there's none of it on my first page. Kawasiki's thingamajig, however, is still interesting. - j1m via Bookmarklet
So much for the a-list and all that stuff being dead... - ana
"This dork, James, however, is someone neither of us speak to. Why bother? Look at him. Lights are on, but no one is home, as our friend Ethan says." - Jim Norris via Bookmarklet
I tried to order one of these this afternoon, only a few hours after receiving a message from O2 that they were available. No luck, all sold out :-( - Allen Hutchison
These iPhones might be sleek and all, but I feel that they are inferior to say, Treos or BlackBerries in terms of helping you getting stuff done. Speaking as an iPod Touch and Treo user. :-) - ana
I got the SMS but decided not to order it because I suspected that there would be a catch of some kind. I'll get mine from the Apple Store after it's been out for a week or so. - Adewale Oshineye
Interesting guidelines. On a related note, I'm not sure if it's acknowledged or not, but most modern webapps use a lot of queuing. Dopplr does it heavily, for instance, and I do it increasingly in Expectnation. Obvious to somebody like you, but I wonder if it's accepted best practice yet? - Edd Dumbill via twhirl
I thought something like this was becoming increasingly obvious, but it's even occasionally controversial in my experience. Queues are hard (they can be); or the processing can be made fast enough with a bit more work (it won't be); or simultaneity and consistency are paramount (not usually true). - l.m.orchard
This is cool... it's obvious to me when it becomes a problem. I've never worked on twitter-sized issues, but the idea of queuing writes makes sense and can be done elegantly. Flickr does a nice job, I think wrt tag renames - Dave Dash via Alert Thingy
A brilliant article. Many Siebel users spend their life complaining about performance. The truth is they are actually waiting in a Web based application for an operation that could (and undoubtedly should) provide immediate feedback to the user coupled with an asynchronous message to update the employee record in the payroll system. - Andy C
My friends who work in banking IT are always amused as web2.0/LAMP gradually rediscover the various tools they've been using for enterprise integration. I eagerly await the point when people re-discover topics and tuple spaces. - Adewale Oshineye
Also, green-screen 3270 terminals. Those are going to hit the web in a big way any day now. - ⓞnor
I think it shows how *non* mainstream queuing is that Google's AppEngine has no ability to run background processes. It's all request/response with a maximum of 9 seconds. If this sort of thinking was even somewhat the norm, there would have been screams from people missing such a vital feature. :-) - Russell Beattie
That's an ActiveX plugin? A pure JS 3270 emulator would be just too awesome. - ⓞnor
Looooong, but great read. I often felt at Google, on the sales side of things, we were so smart that we were stupid. I can't tell you how many meetings I sat through where simple solutions (and, probably, the right solutions!) were ignored because they sounded too simple. And we'd spend a full hour coming up with complicated, convoluted, confusing solutions because that's what smart people do, right? Come up with arcane stuff? Agh. It was all gas. Not throwing anyone under the bus -- I was as guilty as anyone else. - Ginger Makela
100-word version: "You're not as smart as you think you are. You need to find people way smarter and more effective than you. You can't find them with normal interviews. A six-month trial period might work, but what super smart person will stand for that? Your only real hope is that you've bumped into them some time in the past, or maybe you can find them by asking around. Good luck, and also I made up this weird phrase which doesn't help." - ⓞnor
Ginger, thanks for sharing your experience at Google. - Mike Reynolds
First page down, giving a Like for that. Continuing to read... - Hutch Carpenter
Really great read, and a true take on the types of "smart" out there. Also, I liked this little add-on Steve had in the comments section: "The Dunning-Kruger Effect has a fourth principle that I didn't mention, which is that as your competence increases, your self-evaluation diminishes. The most competent people apparently tend to rate themselves below their skill level.
" Interesting thought. - Hutch Carpenter
The core of any good engineering culture is deeply allergic to unnecessary complexity. "Fancy" is a bad word; "complicated" is a really, really bad word. Design doc templates have a section asking you to explain why a simpler solution would work. Half my interviewers (having convinced themselves that I could code) were making sure that I wasn't the type to build giant rickety abominations. But a company like Google is too big for any single generalization to apply. - ⓞnor
ⓞnor: "and also I made up this weird phrase which doesn't help" Ha! :) - Bret Taylor
@nor if you do that for every Steve Yegge post you might have a high-traffic blog on your hands - Jeremy Raines
@Ginger: I see that everywhere, not only in Sales… :( - Amit Patel
very cool...that is probably why friendfeed is ramping so smoothly and getting intelligent new features vs. another nameless service that is having severe growing pains. - Pokai
That's excellent hiring criteria -- would you hire them for your start-up. I know from experience that you can't really understand how important it is to work with A-players until you work at a company with mainly B-players. - Todd Nemet
I really prefer to work with @-players and ideally ?-players - ⓞnor
cos-players tend to be irrational unless you get exactly the right angle. - ⓞnor
Question: Why would one of these super-heroic programmers want to work for you rather than launching their own thing? - Adewale Oshineye
Dan should publish a blog with 100-word versions of all of Stevey's posts. I don't have the patience for the long versions. - Jeremy Hylton
I want high quality generic collaborative summarization in general. Not sure how it would work, it's really easy to warp and distort things when boiling them down, and way too easy to take cheap shots at the author (as I did above). - ⓞnor
Nothing like some totally unsupported stereotypes to really contribute to the gender dialog. I'd like to test her out on that claim that she can tell a coder's gender. - ⓞnor
ⓞnor, you just say that because you are jealous. The woman is clearly a genius and a hero: she made her company institute docstrings and changelogs! - ana
Why should I be jealous of your touchy feely comments! Hmph. - ⓞnor
I think by the stereotype she probably could. I'm sure there are reverses, but I know I wrote a LOT of comments. ;) - Cyndy
Women write better birthday cards and letters. I don't think gender has influence on the ability to write better code. - Mo Jawhari
I get a different answer: three different blocks of results, the first for Ross Miller and Ross J. Miller, the second block for Danny Tarkanian, and then a third block for hits of Miller on the web, including rossmiller.net. It looks like Ross Miller and Danny Tarkanian are closely related terms in Google's mind, I suppose because of the Nevada secretary of state election? - ana
I guess you're just not interesting enough to the Google :) - Paul Buchheit
That is the exact opposite of a vanity search, no? - Cyndy
Is there a relation between the two names? - Philipp Lenssen
Odd. I'll invite some colleagues to dig into this. EDITED TO ADD: Ah ha, I think I found out what may be triggering this situation. Do a search on the two names, and you'll see that there was a big (political) race between -- you guessed it -- Ross Miller and Danny Tarkanian. And, contrary to the screenshot above, I'm unable to replicate a search results page without [ross miller] results at the top. Hmm. - Adam Lasnik
I did cut out the two top results to make it more compact... which is why it says "See result for:" instead of "Did you mean:"... That said... I still don't want to see results for Danny Terkanian when I search for my name... Just seems kind of weird... Even if he did run against that other *me* in Nevada... - Ross Miller
Ross, I'll mention this to folks here, but Google returns Ross Miller's Nevada Sec. of State website at #1, and our algorithms currently think that people interested in Ross Miller might also be interested in Danny Tarkanian. If you're not named Ross Miller, this would be a pretty helpful set of search results. :) - Matt Cutts
Most of the programmers I know who've been in the business for 10+ years follow these rules organically. It's really the only way to get along with fellow developers. - Tad Donaghe
Yeah, he's not expressing 4/9 very well, and I can't either. There's value in interacting with your cocoders often and in a broad range of ways, not just by passing code reviews back and forth. But I don't know how to express that as a commandment. - j1m
For these commandments to be accepted, or better said, followed spontaneously by brains and guts, one needs authentic and enthusiastic developers. Regarding #9 and #4 - communication among developers (sometimes called "evangelization") is crucial as it reinforces the religion that these commandments represent. - Nenad Nikolic
I like them all, and also I'll add: use a pencil and a sheet of paper. design first, then code - directeur
I have seen #9 many times before, and I don't think it is valid anymore due to the availability of IM, e-mail, cell phones. You are able to communicate even if you are locked in a dark room... - Jon Keating
its all about openess ... Developer 2.0 anyone ? - martin english
"[...] programmers do not want to write code out in the open. Programmers don’t want their peers to see mistakes or failures. They want to work privately, in a cave, then spring “perfect” code on their community, as if no mistakes had ever been made. I don’t think it’s hubris so much as fear of embarrassment. Rather than think of programming as an inherently social activity, most coders seem to treat it as an arena for personal heroics, and will do anything to protect that myth." Very good. - Mustafa K. Isik
"During his first week, he started emailing friendly code reviews to each of his coworkers, receiving strange stares in turn. Eventually his boss called him into his office:
“You know, you really need to stop with the negative energy. Your peers say that you’re constantly criticizing everything they do.”
Moral: not only is code review not the norm in corporate environments, most programmers are unable to separate their fragile egos from the code they write. Repeat after me: you are not your code!" - Mustafa K. Isik
I agree with the basis of this post, but that anecdote is not great evidence IMHO. Doing things is always more valuable than feedback, in companies or in open source projects. Feedback is often obvious (yah, we all knew that piece of code blows, but it works, and now we are on to the other 20 things we need to do). It seems like the dude above should have established a little credibility by writing some code before starting "friendly code reviews." It doesn't surprise me he annoyed his new coworkers. - Bret Taylor
@Bret I agree with you on "doing rather than complaining". But I also believe in communicating and teaching each other. Leaving the exact context of the story aside, my personal experience with similar situations is that there are developers who don't know when they are writing bad code (happens to us all) and worse, don't necessarily want to. This seems to be especially true, if the illusion of code mastery is the foundation for an individual's self-esteem. - Mustafa K. Isik
IMHO the bane of our craft, science and art is that there is no meaningful set of metrics to distinguish from good and utterly mediocre developers. After all anybody who can get his/her programs to compile can call him-/herself a software developer and sometimes I get the impression that that is exactly what serves as predominant classification method. - Mustafa K. Isik
If a new developer started emailing me code reviews then they had better be (a) right, and (b) sensible. By that I mean that a lot of the time things that look to be stupid aren't, because there are restrictions and/or history which isn't obvious when you see the code in isolation. I would think he'd have been better off emailing to ask WHY things were done the way they were, rather than suggesting alternatives in his first week - Nick Lothian
@Nick Lothian In open source a code review doesn't have to be about making sure your code is right, it's about sharing. You might be a hugely better coder than me but if I review your code on a public list, suggesting alternatives, and you convince me that you're right, the code and the community has won. - Michael C. Harris
@Michael - to me the article read like the person had joined a company and was doing internal code reviews. The social norms for that are different to most open source projects I've worked on. - Nick Lothian
@Nick You're absolutely right, the social norms are definitely different. I know which I prefer, and I know which I think leads to better code. Though I grant that the dev in the article sounds like they might have been a bit insensitive. - Michael C. Harris
"Japan, a country not known for its overweight people, has undertaken one of the most ambitious campaigns ever by a nation to slim down its citizenry." - Jess Lee
I can vouch that all the japanese ppl that I've ever met aren't overweight! - Jason
I love going back into history and comparing what people said then with their present beliefs. - Adewale Oshineye
"But the fact that this is coming from Odeo makes me wonder - what is this company doing to make their core offering compelling? How do their shareholders feel about side projects like Twttr when their primary product line is, besides the excellent design, a total snoozer?" I guess the shareholders are feeling just fine... :-) - ana
I love that by April last year they'd abandoned all their other plans in favour of Twitter: http://blog.obvious.com/2007/0... On the other hand if they'd listened to Arrington they would have focussed on Odeo and dropped Twitter. I wonder if there's room in the market for a blog which looks at TechCrunch's predictions for new startups and compares them to what actually happens? It could tell us if TechCrunch is really worth paying attention to. - Adewale Oshineye
I've never put much stock in TechCrunch's or other blogs' startup predictions. Hell, we can't make reliable weather predictions yet, how can anyone expect to be able to make reliable startup predictions? If it were that easy, Arrington would be founding startups instead of ranting on a blog... - ana
Yeah, I want a blog/service/whatever that looks at pundit predictions in general and compares them to what actually happens. Like "what were people in general predicting a year ago, and how did that turn out" and "how is the track record of Arrington|Cringely|Krugman|Brecher|etc. over time". - ⓞnor
We should also add Gartner and friends to the list - Adewale Oshineye
They sure got one thing right: throwing out that awful green logo. - Earle Martin
"Pet boys are real guys that put themselves up for "adoption" by South Korean women... The idea came from a Japanese anime story that was popular about 5 years ago. It was about a business woman who always had bad luck in relationships. One day, she decided to take home a young man off the street to live with her as her pet... Huh? Apparently Pet Boy services are popping up around Korea, and recently a TV show had over 2,200 applicants after advertising Pet Boy positions... Ha, good luck guys -- too bad there's a universal taboo against having sex with pets." - Bret Taylor
@Bret - In America, if this takes off, I am sure the "taboo" wouldn't last a whole 5 minutes - Susan Beebe
Bret, I think there's a syntax error in your code. My FireFox goes into an infinite loop if I don't hide your comment. - Dewald Pretorius
Examines and formats nicely your slow queries log, ignoring commented lines? Perl, man. Heavy. - Mark Trapp
It's a series of perl one-liners to selectively report "interesting" entries from the mysql log file. Probably can be rewritten to be faster. Comment here if you'd like me to take a stab at it? - Prolific Programmer
@Prolific: don't worry about it :) It was a one time thing. I ask Jim a question, he comes back with that command. We have trouble convincing him to use English sometimes. You should try figuring out where to go to lunch - it can involve four programming languages instead of just Perl and sed/awk. - Bret Taylor
I'm pretty sure you just need Hutch and Yuvi to compute a "likes" compatibility index for all the eating establishments within 10 minutes drive/walk from Friendfeed HQ. :) - Mark Trapp
It takes a log, reverses it and passes it to a perl program (here an inline one) which analyzes every line, sorts and and shows slow queries? :) - directeur
3 things: 1) You use mysql :) 2) you have smart "old sysadmin monkeys" :) and 3) why not python and generators? :) - directeur
@directeur - I like python as much (more?) than the next guy, but I still use perl for my shell one-liners (that are too complex for simple pipes, sed, grep, cut, and awk) because python can't really do one-liners. - DeWitt Clinton
The format of the slow query log sucks so bad - Michael
thats why i hate perl and love python :) but yeah its fast - krz9000
Sean: we are all Python for our frontend, and Java for our backend. We have some C++ modules for Python, but very little of it. - Bret Taylor
@Bret, you guys use Java on the backend? Is that why you don't have any performance issues? - Rob Diana
Bret: By backend you mean the DB ? (You once told me that the feeds parsing was done by a python program using cElementTree) - directeur
Great to learn that you are using Java on the backend. - Mustafa K. Isik
Our infrastructure will soon be fairly unique (and not a traditional DB). I can't really say more now, but I am hoping Tudor, Jim, and Sanjeev will do a blog post about it when it is fully deployed. - Bret Taylor
Does not matter what language is used to extract the data. It is the architechture that matter. BigTable, MonetDB, LucidDB are column-oriented databases whereas traditional databases are row-based. - Shafi Ahmed
Bret: thanks for the interesting info. I guessed that Python might loom large here, since I've been told that it's a key component of the Google culture, from which Friendfeed (to some degree) emerged. In any case, the look and feel and operation of this site is amazingly slick, fast and brilliant -- a tribute more to the programmers than to the programming languages. - Sean McBride
Simply awesome. SmugMug are at the forefront of all this cloud business, and Don is a guru at explaining it. Great post. - Mike Cannon-Brookes
"Thanks to Amazon, the software and hardware that processes all of your high-resolution photos and high-definition video is totally scalable without any human intervention." - I think the employees at Amazon would disagree. Just because you can't see behind the curtain doesn't mean we live in an age without one... yet.. - Brandon Werner
@Brandon. Thank you for striking a blow for all of us oppressed workers in the cloud - Adewale Oshineye
![Walk it Off: NYC second most walkable city, SF is #1 [gothamist.com]](http://friendfeed.s3.amazonaws.com/ecb55df461c45e31f2ce2dcf497ef8d80212330c "Walk it Off: NYC second most walkable city, SF is #1 [gothamist.com]")
