3 ms·

Who's Filo? David Filo?

by gms 16y ago

PStamatiou 16y ago
That was my first thought and it would appear so. Filo was a big FreeBSDer http://zer0.org/daemons/yahoobsd.html http://zer0.org/daemons/yahoobsd.html
- spidaman 16y ago
  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.
aristus 16y ago
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.
- jcapote 16y ago
  That's awesome!
ezalor 16y ago
David Filo is the co-founder of Yahoo! if you don't know him.
strlen 16y ago
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.
zandorg 16y ago
Chief Yahoo.
sh1mmer 16y ago
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.
dauphin 16y ago
filo@yahoo.com

Who's Filo? David Filo?

by gms 16y ago

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

spidaman 16y ago
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.

aristus 16y ago

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.

jcapote 16y ago
That's awesome!

ezalor 16y ago

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

strlen 16y ago

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.

zandorg 16y ago

Chief Yahoo.

sh1mmer 16y ago

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.

dauphin 16y ago

filo@yahoo.com