• 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.

Here is the full quote:

Zuckerberg doesn’t code much for Facebook anymore, the same way that Steve Jobs never hand-coded software for the iPhone. But, as the Groups team was adding the finishing touches to its product, Zuckerberg said he wanted to write a few lines. “Everybody was like, Ohhhh, Zuck’s gonna write code,” says Feross. Someone set up an easy bug for him to fix—adding a link to a picture, or something—and he went to work. Five minutes passed. Twenty minutes. An hour. “It took him like two hours to do something that would take one of us who’s an engineer like five minutes,” says Feross. It was like a retired slugger coming back for one last at-bat, for old time’s sake, and finding he’d lost more of his game than he’d reckoned. Still, he got props from Feross & Co. for getting his hands dirty.

It’s moments like these that growing tech companies struggle to hang on to. When Zuckerberg gets in the trenches with the grunts, it sends a message: Program­ming is the core of their world.

My intention in sharing this story was to give an example of how Facebook’s company culture is awesome. Facebook is a company where the CEO frequently sits in the same room as engineers — and even interns — to work out problems, critique designs, and discuss product issues. The company is extremely flat. Everyone can talk to everyone. Even interns regularly get to talk with Zuck. It’s an extremely fun and exhilarating environment.

Employees even make bets, joke, or play pranks on the CEO, hence the “Ohhhh, Zuck’s gonna write code” comment that someone made. Facebook is extremely fun. It’s one of the best company cultures I’ve ever seen (in my short career).

These news outlets are doing their readers a disservice by twisting this quote out of context.

Lesson learned: You need to be careful what you say. The media isn’t always on your side. Silly me, for thinking that they were.

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!

Tweet

Related posts:

1. Psh… Google Instant? I built YouTube Instant.

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.

From Richard Stallman himself:

“Free software” is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of “free” as in “free speech,” not as in “free beer.”

Free software is a matter of the users’ freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. More precisely, it means that the program’s users have the four essential freedoms:

• The freedom to run the program, for any purpose.
• The freedom to study how the program works, and change it to make it do what you wish. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
• The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor.
• The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others. By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

(from The Free Software Definition)

I recently watched an excellent documentary about early hacker culture called Hackers: Wizards of the Electronic Age which had several wonderful clips of RMS in his early years. I clipped the relevant clips out of the documentary and uploaded them to YouTube:

So, free software sounds pretty good, right? I wish all software was free software.  Nearly all computer users, however, use the opposite of free software, called proprietary software, all the time in their daily lives. Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Office, and many, many other programs are all proprietary software.

With proprietary software, we users have no way to determine what our software is doing on our computers because we can’t examine the source code. The software might be extremely insecure and exposing us to all sorts of security risks and we’d never know about it. Proprietary software may also send data about us back to the software company, or contain malware that allows the software company or even the government to gain remote access to our computers. Think these suggestions are far-fetched? Think again. This stuff has happened and continues to happen — just take a look at some of the links I’ve posted in my lifestream recently or do some research.

Another downside of non-free software is that if there’s a problem with it, a feature that’s missing, or something that we’d like to change, we’re at the mercy of the software company to implement these changes. When you take the shrink-wrap off that box of proprietary software, you’re agreeing that you will use the program as-is and won’t try to modify how the program behaves or reverse-engineer it to extract the source code. No software company that respects its users’ freedom would force such a scheme upon them.

Proprietary software also restricts sharing and copying. Users of proprietary software are legally forbidden from sharing their software with their neighbors. Users who share their proprietary software with their neighbors and friends are called “pirates,” “counterfeiters,” and “thieves” — propaganda terms used by the RIAA, MPAA, and other media conglomerates to demonize the simple act of sharing knowledge. Sharing a software program with your friend is not “piracy” — it is simply not the same as robbery and criminal violence on the sea. Not even close.

Why are these media and software companies trying to make sharing — that good thing that we learned about as children — into something bad and nasty?

Sharing is good. Sharing knowledge is better. Sharing software that empowers people to improve their lives is best.

I’ve already written about misinterpreting copyright and why copying is not theft in other blog posts — check them out if you’re interested.

These are just a few of the ethical reasons why free software is better than proprietary software. There are a whole host of technical reasons why it’s better, too. Free software source code can be scrutinized by more eyeballs, so it’s less likely to try to employ security through obscurity. Critical security bugs get patched much more quickly — often within hours — so free software is usually more secure than proprietary software.

And the list of free software benefits goes on… but I digress.

RMS is a legend. So, I decided to invite him to come to Stanford to give a talk about his ideas. He replied and let me know that he was already planning to speak at Stanford to students of the CS302: Tech Law course. I was thrilled! But, I wanted to help out in some way.

So, I got the Stanford ACM to host a public reception for RMS on the day before his talk, so that students from the Stanford community could meet him and ask questions. Some friends at Yahoo even heard about the event and offered to sponsor it and pay for all our food, which was extremely kind.

RMS is one of the most unique men I’ve ever met. Over thirty years after the decade of hackers, RMS still embodies the spirit of the 70′s hacker culture. He’s often criticized for being too extreme with his viewpoints. But, I think that’s what makes him unique.

RMS is an extremist in the cause of freedom. And there aren’t many people like that left in this world.

Odious ideas are not entitled to hide from criticism behind the human shield of their believers’ feelings. — Richard Stallman

Stallman looking for a new laptop case at Fry's Electronics in Palo Alto (his bag ripped earlier in the day, so we took him to Fry's)

Related posts:

1. Free Software Foundation is Awesome
2. Immortal Technique 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.

When a visiting Stanford graduate student contacted me with his plans to host an MC Frontalot concert at Stanford, I was ecstatic! I pledged $300 on behalf of the Stanford ACM to help pay for the concert costs (MC Frontalot’s price was very reasonable). Nerdcore culture is computer science related, right?

A bunch of other Stanford clubs also made contributions, including the IEEE, GSPB, CCRMA, Audio Engineering Society, and Hip Hop Congress.

“MC Frontalot is the nerdcorest of the core.” Just a sampling:

We deliver the hits that give the kids with the spectacles spectacular fits!
I seen one nerd foam at the mouth in his glee.
(It was me, in the mirror, rhyming, brushing my teeth.)
And now the heezy we’s off don’t babble 300 baud.
I get no error while compiling my rhyme.

Related posts:

1. Immortal Technique Comes to Stanford
2. DragonForce Concert!

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

Me with Blake Ross, Firefox cofounder, at Facebook Launch Night

Last Thursday, I got to visit Facebook and hack with some awesome engineers. Facebook Launch Night was actually an internal company Hack-A-Thon — an event that Facebook puts on every two months where employees stay up all night to work on cool projects in areas where they usually don’t work.

To celebrate Facebook’s 6th birthday, they decided to invite the public to watch as they launched their new products. This was so cool to see! Some employees rigged up a giant “launch switch” the night before the event (see pictures above). When they flipped the switch, BAM! — the new site went live to 80 million users instantly. The rest of their 400 million users, I assume, got the new design a short while later.

Then the feedback started pouring in, live on-screen. Most users were initially unhappy with the site changes, as is usually the case. But, this didn’t affect the Facebook engineers who were watching — pretty much everyone expected the initial feedback to be negative, and some engineers even laughed at the user reactions.

Users are surprisingly resistant to change, and so any large site redesign (even if it’s better than the old design) is bound to disorient users for a few minutes. Facebook engineers understand this, and so aren’t really concerned with initial user reactions so much, but rather what users think in one or two months from now.

After the launch event, I stuck around for the Hack-A-Thon. While Facebook employees hacked on their own Facebook side projects, I decided to work on my music website by building a music data web scraper. By the end of the night, I finished a relatively polished program that could scrape music artist names, album names, song titles, and song lyrics, along with their relationships (which albums belongs to a particular artist, etc.) from popular music data sites. I wrote the script in Ruby, with a splash of Rails so I could use Active Record for my database calls.

All in all, it was an awesome night. I left Facebook headquarters at 7 AM after eating a delicious breakfast and saying goodbye to the awesome engineers who hung out with me while I hacked. I was one of only two non-Facebook people who stayed for the entire duration of the Hack-A-Thon.

It was quite fun, and an awesome experience! Thanks to everyone who organized this awesome event — I really enjoyed it!

Related posts:

1. Summer @ Facebook
2. Immortal Technique Comes to Stanford

Getting Immortal Technique's autograph for my brother.

Immortal Technique

Second famous rapper I’ve met this week: Immortal Technique — most famous for his political activism and political rap music. This guys’s a real rapper (unlike Chamillionaire, who is a commercial hip-hop artist sellout).

Immortal Technique is legit — he’s turned down half-million dollar offers to sign to major music labels like Sony and Def Jam because he doesn’t want to lose control over the content of his music. He’s often been criticized for the content of his music (listen to some and you’ll see why), but there’s more than a grain of truth to what he raps about.

I don’t have time right now to write a long blog post (I have 2 CS assignments due soon, 1 test on Monday, and 20 CS assignments to grade), so I’ll leave it at that. But, I encourage you to take a look at Technique if you haven’t heard of him before — he’s quite interesting.

Related posts:

1. MC Frontalot comes to Stanford!
2. Microsoft CEO, Steve Ballmer, is coming to Stanford

Ridin' Dirty with Chamillionaire

I just saw Chamillionaire and Quincy Jones III talk about entrepreneurship at Stanford!

Chamillionaire is most famous for his single Ridin’ Dirty and the Weird Al parody that followed it. Unfortunately, he didn’t rap for us — instead, he gave us a bit of hustlin advice. Ahhhh YEEEAH…

My favorite part of the event was when Stanford president John Hennessey asked the audience “How can we change the world?” and someone in the audience yelled “By ridin’ dirty!” Anonymity for the win.

Quotes from Chamillionaire and Quincy Jones III

Here are some quotes I found amusing from the event:

“All the other rappers called me a nerd for using the Internet.” — Chamillionaire (on promoting his music online)

“I hope that someone in this room wins the Entrepreneurship Innovation Contest …so then I can steal their idea.” — Chamillionaire (when asked to give some motivational advice to the students)

“My job was a lot easier before I was a boss.” — Chamillionaire (on becoming a manager at Chamillitary Entertainment)

“Why would I want to sell something with my face? I wouldn’t even wear something with my face” — Chamillionaire (on selling merchandise)

“It’s crazy… I’m in the business of making money. But not every dollar is a good one – sometimes it’s about values & authenticity” — Chamillionaire

“eHustling is available to everybody” — Quincy Jones III (on the power of YouTube as a way to go directly to customers)

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Today, I discovered just how little talent it requires to make a modern pop song.

MacBook Pro + Built-in Mic + GarageBand + AutoTune + 1 hour =

“Amazing” by Feross

VS.

“Amazing” by Kanye West

Go ahead and click PLAY above to give my cover song a listen.

The signature vocal effect that you hear is produced by an audio processor called AutoTune (read more about it on Wikipedia). AutoTune is used by the music industry to correct pitch in vocal and instrumental performances. Essentially, it allows artists to hide their mistakes.

AutoTune works by analyzing a music track’s pitches over time. It compares every note’s pitch to the musical key of the audio track (you have to tell it what key your audio track is in). Any time AutoTune sees a note that is off-key, it corrects the note by shifting it up or down to the nearest note.

However, the plugin does much more than pitch correction. It can be also used to deliberately distort vocals. When you crank up the settings to the max, you get the famous T-Pain vocal effect.

Sidenote: T-Pain wasn’t actually the first artist to use AutoTune for all his vocals, although he is certainly the most famous. AutoTune was first used by Eiffel 65 for their 1999 hit single Blue Da-Ba-Dee. (I loved this song as a kid. )

Auto-Tune Settings in Garageband to make the Kanye West, T-Pain Audio Effect

Keep in mind: I am not a singer and I don’t claim to have any natural singing talent. Sometimes I sing in the shower, and I did karaoke one time in high school with some friends. That is the full extent of my singing experience.

Yet, I was able to produce a decent-sounding R&B vocal track. This experiment proves, to me anyway, that anyone with average singing talent can produce a passable modern R&B song.

You should also read/watch:

Auto-Tune: Why Pop Music Sounds Perfect (Time Magazine)
Auto-Tune Abuse in Pop Music – 10 Examples (Hometracked)
Smoking Lettuce: Auto Tune the News #5 (YouTube)

I hope you enjoyed my song! Leave a comment!

P.S. This is my 50th blog post! I’m honestly surprised that I’ve kept it up for this long. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to read my ramblings, leave a comment, and make this blog a fun project for me! It’s been really fun — here’s to the next 50 posts!

UPDATE (Sep 23): One of my readers (titanicfreak94) sent me this message:

It’s a very common misconception that Eiffel 65 used the Autotune to create the distorted vocals of Blue, and all their other songs. The actual process they did was called Vocoding. They used a device called a Vocoder, which takes one audio signal, and morphs it to give the effects of another. For example, if they had a clip of somebody singing, they could use the vocoder to mix the voice with a synthesized sound, and the result would be a robotic-sounding voice.

I double-checked and s/he’s most certainly right. The song’s distorted vocals were indeed composed using a vocoder. Thanks anonymous tipster!

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Shaking hands with Microsoft CEO, Steve Ballmer. Notice, he is wearing THE T-SHIRT I DESIGNED!

More info and a full story coming as soon as I have time to write a full blog post. In the meantime, enjoy this video of Steve’s speech!

Update 11/07/2009: It looks like the video of Steve’s speech has been removed from the ETL website. Next time I’ll download it and host it locally.

Update 9/24/2010: While looking through old blog posts, I realized that I never told the story of meeting Steve Ballmer. Here’s the short version:

After Steve finished his one-hour talk in Memorial Auditorium at Stanford, he went backstage to meet with some reporters and say goodbye to the people who invited him to speak at Stanford.

I wanted to say hi, so I hopped up onto the stage and walked right up to the room he was in. A guard at the door blocked me from entering, and I thought that I wasn’t going to get to say hi.

But, right then, Steve walked through the door — he was right it front of me! So, I just said “Hey Steve. I designed the shirt you’re wearing — can I get a picture?” It’s true. I designed the Stanford Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders t-shirt.

Anyway, that’s basically the story. Only a year and a half late!

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El Capitan of Microsoft

Microsoft’s CEO, Steve Ballmer, is coming to Stanford on Wednesday. He’s going to give a talk about entrepreneurship in Memorial Auditorium at 4pm. If you’re in the Palo Alto area and you want to attend, you can get free tickets online. You can find out more on the ETL website.

Also, rumor has it that the ETL coordinators are going to give Steve an ETL shirt at the end of the seminar (that’s the shirt that I designed!!). If anything like this happens, I’ll be sure to take some pictures and let you’all know about it! Wouldn’t it be awesome if my t-shirt design was on the body of someone worth $11,000,000,000 — that’s 11 billion dollars?!

In the meantime, amuse yourself with some of his past antics. This dude’s an interesting character, without a doubt.

The Microsoft Dance

I hope he does his Microsoft dance for us…

or his Developers chant…

or tries to sell us some Windows…

But seriously…

He’s a really interesting guy. There’s no doubt that he’s an important guy in the tech industry. I’m really curious to hear what he has to say, given his past history of questionably sane predictions:

Steve Ballmer Laughs at iPhone

I’ll let you’all know how the talk goes — especially if he says anything interesting.

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1. OMG, I just met Steve Ballmer!
2. Stanford Entrepreneurs Nike T-Shirt (Just Start Up)