It's a bird, it's a plane, it's

Everything here is my opinion. I do not speak for your employer.
September 2016
November 2016

2016-10-06 »

"I believe we've addressed all but one of the comments in the doc, by adding a second set of experiment results on a separate day from the first. The remaining comment is a smiley, which we interpret as sympathetic and not something to address."
– Denton

2016-10-10 »

Back in university, a wise professor once told me: an entrepreneur isn't someone who likes to take risks. Rather, an entrepreneur is someone who knows when to do the things other people think are risky."

2016-10-12 »

Okay, so this thread is the usual level of dumb, and normally I wouldn't bother to think about it. But... there's a weirdly large number of people who think nobody should be expected to know the length of a MAC address. Have we fallen so far?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12701272

2016-10-13 »

On the up side, gtalk-in-gmail can still do multi-way chats. As long as you're chatting with other people who use gtalk. Which is just me, as far as I can tell.

It's quiet, I like it.

2016-10-23 »

#TIL that "dot -Tx11 filename.dot" nowadays auto-updates its window instantly whenever you re-save filename.dot. What a timesaver! I don't think it used to do this, but maybe I've been living under a rock.

2016-10-24 »

A pretty good list of pretty insightful comments. Admittedly they are not the average case :)

http://danluu.com/hn-comments/

2016-10-25 »

Saw dogfood bug titled "mysterious reboot" but I read "mysterious robot." The truth didn't hold up to my expectations.

2016-10-26 »

Woo hoo, gigabit RCN!

http://www.multichannel.com/news/distribution/rcn-rolls-1-gig-nyc/408684

...upload speeds "up to 20 Mbps." Sigh, DOCSIS 3.1. Guess you're still not fiber.

2016-10-27 »

From the "data so boring it wrapped all the way around to surprising" department: it turns out that in any given second, any given customer is probably either uploading or downloading or neither, but not both. Who knew, right?

Here's a plot of (hand waving badly), average downstream packet size for a given customer during a given second on the x axis, and upstream packet size on the y axis, where darkness indicates frequency of occurrence of that combination.

The black smear in the bottom right is downloads (and the tiny TCP ACK packets going the other way). The upper left is uploads. There's a dim pattern in the bottom left, along x ~= y, that's maybe pings or VoIP or something. (It's kinda interesting that the tx size seems correlated with the rx size for those packets.)

The most surprising thing for me was how uninteresting it is. What about 1000-byte packets? 576-byte packets? Sorry, but no. Alas.

2016-10-31 »

Via a co-worker, a proposal for what could have been IPv6 instead of the monstrosity of Second System Effect we ended up with: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1710

September 2016
November 2016

I'm CEO at Tailscale, where we make network problems disappear.

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