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Why think the man who does not exist exists? why not assume pando made him up, and made the whole story up? The story isn't so implausible that people would doubt it. If anything,the story is toogood - count the number of times the man comes across as a bad guy. Randian of the worst kind? tick. Used to work in wall street? tick. In HFT? tick. Why did he grant an interview if he was trying to keep his business secret? I don't know if the story is made up, but its ringing bells in my head...

That being said, there are countries attempting to control the flow of money. Argentina wants to enforce its price for the dollar. Cyprus wants to prevent everyone taking their money and running. and so on. However, most of these countries see attempts to circumvent their controls as illegal. I feel its unwise to get my hopes up about bitcoin for this sort of transaction for that reason.

Sorry if you take the huff.

They didn't use a binary on-disk format by accident, nor was it a mistake. The folks who wrote word knew that what users would want to open and save files as fast as possible, on hardware thats weak and tiny by today's standards. Going for a format that resulted in the smallest possible files and the fastest possible reads and writes makes sense in those conditions.

* I'm in no position to verify anything Snowden leaks.

A few clear examples: one of my grandparents passed away, and the company was as supportive as possible. I asked if I could work from my parents house to be with my grandmother, and I got back "You can work from another country for an open ended period. If you aren't getting anything done, let me know, and we'll call it compassionate leave". There are people who go out socializing, but I've never felt pressured to go along. There are people who work long hours or the weekend, but again, I've never felt pressured to do that either.

Edit: When the company was newer, the employees worked very long hours and weekends. They worked, mind you. Everyone I know from that era is remarkably well off. The vast majority of the early employees have retired to spend more time with their wealth. I'm much more concerned, as a person, about either the big companies that do massive crunches (see ea spouse) or the startups that fails despite everyone working really hard, the employees don't get the 100 million dollar payday.

"continually reduced its nuclear stockpile, or that we've been at the forefront of promoting non-proliferation."

I'm amused. Its easy to promote other people not having weapons :). Its worth noting that the US is still the world's largest nuclear power. The RRW program would have featured replacing every existing weapon, probably the US resuming tests, and it was pretty expenvise - are you really surprised it got cancelled?

Perhaps I'm an optimist.

Churchhill's post second world war writings also cover this, but don't make the full claim the OP makes.

Second thing you might be missing: computers have marched forward in spec, yet most of us don't need tons of power in any dimension of the spec. My cheap chromebook ($200 or so) has 2G of ram. I went though uni with about of order of magnitude less ram, and was happy. The 16G ssd it ships with is sufficient for anything that isn't movies, music or photos. The ssd probably has more iops than 2005 era hard drives :). So the chromebook is low powered compared to the desktops of today, but its pretty powerful compared, to, for example, the computers google or facebook used to get off the ground.

Third thing: cloud compute. If I find myself needing thousands of hours of cpu time, I can get that on EC2 or similar. And its cheaper for everyone to rent cpu time when needed on a server in a well cooled warehouse somewhere where power is cheap, rather than have idle cpus connected up to city power grids.

I own a cheap chromebook (and I'm amused by you saying cheap in a negative way :)), and its fine for what it is. Its slim. Its not as sexy* as your mother, but hey. It has a debian chroot with all the normal tools on it. I don't worry about it being damaged or lost as much as I would if it was 5x as expensive. If I spent the money on a macbook air, I'd be buying a machine to run chrome and a terminal window, and all I'd be getting for my extra 800 dollars would be a nicer screen and track pad.

* I do wonder about people who describe computers as sexy.

[1] Lets ignore the risk to flight safety caused by letting passengers use electronics. Because that risk is so small one needs the LHC to find it.

I would prefer it if the article had more information on how to reproduce their tests. For example, they claim a faulty hashmap implementation. This seems like it would be possible to benchmark. Instructions on reproducing the 100ms delay between button click and network traffic would be cool too - as would data on how much worse that makes facebook's latency. Also, is their cache backed by ssds or spinning disk?

I'm also impressed that the speed of context switches matters on websites.

The jump to claiming that chrome caching is tied to ads is interesting. Perhaps the author could fill in more details.

- The data based approach to cheating detection. Random runners can look up, in seconds, stats for any other runner. Not just their times and placings, but checkpoint by checkpoint timings. Its then easy to profile the normal runner and then the cheat.

- The photo aspect. disqualifing a guy because he didn't appear in any photos shows how far we've come in having 100s of photos of every event.

- The lack of on-the-ground cheating detection. This guy presumably left and entered the route of the race, with no one noticing. Runners noticed themselves going from position X to X-1, but not ll of them complained.

- The issues of internet anonimity. We see yet another internet comminity with pseudonyms. This doesn't prevent it being a commumity. it doesn't prevent people spotting strawman accounts.

and less hackerish reasons: - The lack of clear motivation. Why did he do it?

- the weird overreach. Why did he aim for a high ranking? If he'd come 50th no one would have cared. Why did he talk to someone from the new yorker? Why did he make up a whole event?

working hours: I average 40h a week. Which is what all the studies say is optimal. The key perk here is picking your hours. If I'm feeling hungover, I work less. If I'm on a roll, I work more. If I have to wait at home for half a day to let in my landlord or something, thats fine. As long as work get done, no one cares. no one clock-watches. I do think there is a correlation between working hard and getting promoted, but its not that strong a correlation - my last promotion came at the end of working 40h weeks... I can't imagine people feeling like they have to leave because they aren't putting in stupid hours.

boozing: there is a certain amount of company paid for drink. there is a certain amount of people bringing in booze. However, the line has been drawn about having a drink and then working. And really, on the scale of drinking, google is kinda lame. At tgif I think the most I've managed is a couple of beers.

Another twist on the "smart people" thing: its not about everyone being smart, its about no one being stupid. I don't have to spend tons of my time explaining stuff to people. I don't have any co-workers where it would be faster to do their work for them.

grades etc: I do run into people who name drop uni or test results or whatever, but most of the time, no one cares. I work with people who studied a subject completely different to computers at uni. I work with people who never bothered with uni. I do think there a bits of the company where going to mit over random uni still matters, but I don't work with those bits.

My big dislike is that its a big company - there is lots of existing code and systems, some of which is showing its age, its hard to change company policy on the big issues, you do feel like one in X cogs, and there is a lot of internal bikeshedding.

In a normal tunnel setup, one tunnels at the IP layer, and dumps all IP packets into the tunnel. At the far end of the tunnel, packets are sent onwards based on the far end's routing table. Things like DNS "just work" because everything happens at a layer below TCP and UDP. In this system, he's making it work for each non-tcp using layer 4 protocol separately, leading to weirdness like rewriting /etc/hosts.

For tcp, he's nating all traffic locally to a local server, which then multiplexes all incoming traffic into the ssh connection. The remote side then unmultiplexes the data. I don't fully understand how this avoids tcp over tcp. Maybe I'm dumb. [edit: yeah, I'm dumb. the tcp connection is terminated at the local server, the contents are pumped over the ssh connection, and the remote side opens a new tcp connection]

I wrote this mostly because I read the readme and went "but how does it work?".

Tell me when you've done as much as the author. His point - thats we're giving money to companies that for services that they can't provide for themselves - is valid.

I agree that its sucky, and would much prefer a system in which wikileaks had the resources to leak more stuff and were not picking and choosing what to release. However, I understand why wikileaks does what it does.