Learning a lesson the hard way

The media has been good to me for the most part. But these stories are just stupid:

• Business Insider
• Gizmodo
• Huffington Post

All these news stories take a funny anecdote that I shared with New York Magazine and distort it into pageview-generating, linkbaiting, tweet fodder. I’ve come to expect bad journalism from most of the tech press, so I’m not really surprised that they would do something like this. What upsets me the most, is that the most readers will undoubtedly take away the wrong message from the story.

Read the rest of this entry »

Met Chad Hurley at YouTube HQ

430,000 visitors in four days!

YouTube Instant is clearly a hit among web users. Thanks for all the positive feedback! I look forward to supporting and improving YouTube Instant in the future. I hope to see it become a core part of the YouTube.com experience!

Visit YouTube Instant or read about the story.

Here’s a picture from my visit to YouTube HQ on Monday.

Feross Aboukhadijeh & Chad Hurley at YouTube HQ

Update: YouTube Instant received 1 million visitors in 10 days!

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Richard Stallman Comes to Stanford

Richard Stallman at Stanford University

A few weeks ago, I had the amazing opportunity to meet Richard Stallman — founder of the GNU Project and Free Software Foundation, and developer of the amazingly popular GNU Emacs, GNU compiler (gcc), and GNU debugger (gdb).

RMS, as he likes to be called, is a living legend in the computing field. He’s widely considered to be the father of the free software movement. There is no question that the free software philosophy has brought enormous amounts of good to the world. I firmly believe this. I think most programmers and computer scientists would agree, too.

GNU/Linux render farm at Dreamworks

Free software is everywhere today. The popular operating system GNU/Linux (which Stallman wrote large parts of) powers so much of our computing today, nearly everyone has used it, whether they’ve heard of it or not.

The majority of servers on the Internet are powered by Apache and GNU/Linux, major parts of the Internet and most networks in large corporations are powered by GNU/Linux, and even 95% of the desktops and servers at major Hollywood movie studios like Disney, Pixar, DreamWorks, and Sony run GNU/Linux.

Many people are confused about what the phrase “free software” means. Before I continue, let’s be clear about the definition of free software. Read the rest of this entry »

MC Frontalot comes to Stanford!

Nerdcore! Aww yeah!

Last Tuesday, I got to hang out with “the world’s 579th greatest rapper,” MC Frontalot, before and after he performed at a Stanford concert! He is best-known for coining the term nerdcore and basically defining the whole nerdcore hip-hop musical genre. As you can tell by picture above, I dressed appropriately for the occasion. Read the rest of this entry »

Facebook Launch Night

Me with Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder, at Facebook Launch Night