Why HN was slow and how Rtm fixed it

Who's Filo? David Filo?

That was my first thought and it would appear so. Filo was a big FreeBSDer

http://zer0.org/daemons/yahoobsd.html

Yep. He's still a mensch. Yahoo did some incredible stuff on Apache & FreeBSD back in the day. I remember a hack that added hardcoded HTTP headers to the image files on disk, to squeeze that extra nilth percent out of the server.

David Filo is the co-founder of Yahoo! if you don't know him.

Filo was a total hacker, reportedly still is. At least into the late 90's, he was active on the FreeBSD mailing lists with encyclopedic knowledge of SCSI card and NIC drivers and assorted other hardware and FreeBSD stuff. He was oft found sitting on the hallway floor in the first colo I used (ISI in Mountain View), screwdrivering the chassis' of Yahoo's early servers.

Yes. Having worked at Yahoo, this isn't even a bit surprising. rtm's capitalization of 'filo' as 'Filo' -- everybody spelled it lowercase i.e., as an /etc/passwd entry not a lastname -- is the surprising part.

Regardless of what you think of Yahoo's current situation, somebody who could easily retire wealthy but still hacks and flies economy class on Southwest to meetings in remote offices is worthy of respect.

Chief Yahoo.

That's awesome!

Yahoo's entire BSD kernel team report to filo still.

Last time I had lunch with him we talked about the minutia of DNS server implementations because I was working on some optimization tricks and he was really interested in seeing them get implemented.

filo is a really amazing guy. He's the most down to earth billionaire I know. He talks way more about his family and hacking more than 'stuff'. If he isn't hacking on code as much as he used to it's because he cares about his company and is doing an important job looking after technical stuff that needs doing, even if it isn't interesting.