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Gordon Haff
Personal blog · bitmason.blogspot.comsystemsbusinessprogramming
Gordon Haff writes Connections, a personal blog at bitmason.blogspot.com about systems, business and programming. Since 2013, 5 different Hacker News readers have linked it 42 times, most often “Podcast: Was open source inevitable? (Part 3)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-07-30, and you can follow it by feed.
This blog and website is for the BitMasons LLC analyst firm and Gordon Haff. The focus is on technology matters but we'll post on other things that catch our eye as well. And just have some fun too.
Most-linked posts?
- Podcast: Was open source inevitable? (Part 3)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-05-26
- The Sinking of the Itanic: free eBook2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-02-23
What Hacker News says?
Itanium needs a lot longer discussion than can be covered in an HN comment. https://bitmason.blogspot.com/2024/02/the-sinking-of-itanic-...
Comment linking /2024/02/the-sinking-of-itanic-free-ebook.html
on “I convinced HP's board to buy Palm and watched them kill it”Submitted 50 authors, 50 science fiction stories shorter than novels as a story · 266 points
HN discussionI used CreateSpace (Amazon). I discuss it a bit here: http://bitmason.blogspot.com/2013/02/decisions-i-made-when-p... I wanted a "regular" book including a printed version--it's effectively supporting material for my day job and I needed a physical, as well as an electronic, version. It was all a bit of a learning process but I'm happy with the result. And Amazon's a good platform to be on. Leanpub's an interesting-…
Comment linking /2013/02/decisions-i-made-when-publishing-my-new.html
on “O’Reilly Media Has Lost Its Soul”Submitted Science fiction stories shorter than novels as a story · 46 points
HN discussionAnd then there's the Internet Archive. IANAL but it seems as if there's effectively this assumption that opt-out makes everything OK even if there's not much if any legal basis to it. (I wrote this piece back in 2005 and not a whole lot has changed: http://bitmason.blogspot.com/2005/07/thoughts-on-wayback-mac... ) To be clear, this is arguably the way that the Web almost has to work--but that doesn't make it all nea…
Comment linking /2005/07/thoughts-on-wayback-machine-kerfuffle.html
on “How Netflix Reverse Engineered Hollywood”Submitted Podcast: If Linux didn't exist, would we have had to invent it? as a story · 6 points
HN discussionhttps://bitmason.blogspot.com/2020/10/80-authors-80-science-... This list and the shorter prior one were also on HN at some point.
Comment linking /2020/10/80-authors-80-science-fiction-stories.html
on “The Last Question”Submitted The Sinking of the Itanic: free eBook as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSomething to be aware of the Lightroom catalog itself (which is unrelated to the OP's problem) is that it's an SQLite database. (Or it was when I ran into my problem about a decade ago bit I believe it still is.) I had hardware-related flakiness with a Windows system at the time. I swapped it out for an iMac but sometime later I discovered that there was some residual corruption of my Lightroom catalog even though I…
Comment linking /2013/01/recovering-corrupt-lightroom-catalogs.html
on “I nearly lost the Lightroom catalog with of all my photos”Submitted The Sinking of the Itanic: free [pdf] eBook as a story · 2 points
HN discussionbcantrill has opined that, had Linus gone off to pursue ice sculpture instead, at least one of the BSDs would have figured out a way forward. (Though others suggest that Windows would just have won.) I tend to agree with Bryan though. https://bitmason.blogspot.com/2020/04/podcast-if-linux-didnt...
Comment linking /2020/04/podcast-if-linux-didnt-exist-would-we.html
on “Debian GNU/Hurd 2025 released”Submitted 80 authors, 80 science fiction stories shorter than novels as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThe more interesting question to me is when prediction markets/crowdsourcing works consistently well. Because there seem to be some specific scenarios where it does. e.g. [1]. But mostly it doesn't. And while there are some intutions around this, I've never run across a lot of substantial research. [1] https://bitmason.blogspot.com/2012/04/crowdsourcing-predicti...
Comment linking /2012/04/crowdsourcing-prediction-and-other-data.html
on “Tales from Prediction Markets”Submitted 80 authors, 80 science fiction stories shorter than novels as a story · 2 points
HN discussion>People always talk about Moore's Law falling apart, and it seems like people didn't see it coming. First of all, let's be more precise. In this context, what people mean by the "end of Moore's Law" is the slowdown and, soon, probable end of CMOS process scaling. The issue is that CMOS process scaling has been such an incredible engine for performance that just getting those kinds of performance increases in other w…
Comment linking /2016/01/beyond-general-purpose-in-servers.html
on “Intel Discontinues the Intel Developer Forum; IDF17 Cancelled”Submitted Podcast: Was open source inevitable? (Part 3) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThey're really not a huge amount of work if you pay a nominal amount to have it done for you. After I edit a podcast, I get mine transcribed by CastingWords, clean it up minimally, and paste it into the blog post I do for the podcast with show notes, etc.) e.g. http://bitmason.blogspot.com/2017/07/red-hat-mark-wagner-on-... If I want to do a longer blog post based on the interview, it's also nice to just have the tr…
Comment linking /2017/07/red-hat-mark-wagner-on-hyperledger.html
on “Interview with Mr. Money Mustache”Submitted Connections: The end of cattle vs. pets as a story · 2 points
HN discussionhttps://bitmason.blogspot.com/2020/05/podcast-was-open-sourc... There's also a link to a transcript of the whole series at that link. https://grhpodcasts.s3.amazonaws.com/Opensourceinevitability... I did the series early in the pandemic as an activity until things blew over in a couple months. :-(
Comment linking /2020/05/podcast-was-open-source-inevitable-part_26.html
on “Joining Sun Microsystems – 40 years ago (2022)”Submitted Don't skeuomorph your containers as a story · 2 points
HN discussionHere's a background piece on containers that I wrote a few months back: http://bitmason.blogspot.com/2013/09/what-are-containers-any...
Comment linking /2013/09/what-are-containers-anyway.html
on “Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 Beta”Submitted Why the OS matters (even more) in a containerized world as a story · 2 points
HN discussion"Wisdom of crowds" is pretty fascinating in that it does really well under some circumstances. A friend of mine has been running an Oscar contest for years and I grabbed some data from him a few years ago. We knew that "consensus" did well but I actually did some graphs and analysis; it's pretty striking: https://bitmason.blogspot.com/2012/04/crowdsourcing-predicti... Undergrad, we were were both on the movie commit…
Comment linking /2012/04/crowdsourcing-prediction-and-other-data.html
on “Group brainstorming is a waste of time (2015)”Submitted What might the next decade bring for computing? as a story · 1 points
HN discussionI put something together for the US a couple of years back as well. I've been meaning to add some logic around deviation from the mean, etc. but haven't gotten around to it. http://wwos-bitmason.rhcloud.com/ Some discussion of the app and parsing the USGS data for those interested: https://blog.openshift.com/use-openshift-to-map-river-levels... http://bitmason.blogspot.com/2013/11/over-summer-i-wrote-pos...
Comment linking /2013/11/over-summer-i-wrote-post-about-writing.html
on “GaugeMap: Thousands of river gauges, each with a Twitter account”Submitted 80 authors, 80 science fiction stories shorter than novels as a story · 1 points
HN discussionIt's a pretty good piece. The main thing that it does skip over is what the economic implications might be to no longer declining transistor costs. Sure, Google can add a more or less arbitrarily large number of servers but what are the implications of the likely reality that those servers aren't improving in price/performance to the degree that they once were. At Hot Chips a couple of years back Robert Colwell, who…
Comment linking /2016/01/beyond-general-purpose-in-servers.html
on “The future of computing: After Moore's law”Submitted Hyperledger's Brian Behlendorf on Starting Apache, Foundations, and Blockchain as a story · 1 points
HN discussionGood points. Under the right circumstances, the "wisdom of crowds" can be really compelling. A couple of years back, I ran the data from an Oscar contest that had run over the course of about 30 years and the consensus pick each year was soundly the long-term winner. [1] However, it's an approach that doesn't seem to have been hugely generalizable. [1] http://bitmason.blogspot.com/2012/04/crowdsourcing-predictio...
Comment linking /2012/04/crowdsourcing-prediction-and-other-data.html
on “How wise are crowds?”Submitted The cloud vs. open source redux as a story · 1 points
HN discussion